My
dear Friends:
The
terrible catastrophe of last New Year's Eve, the
destruction by fire of the Goetheanum, which will remain
as a painful memory for the many who loved it, may provide
occasion to connect today's thoughts about the
anthroposophical knowledge and conception of the world with
this Goetheanum. But a connection is all I have in view; for
the lecture itself that I am to present to you is not to be
essentially different in kind from those I have been permitted
to give here in Basel, in this same hall, for many years past.
That dreadful calamity was just the occasion to bring to light
what fantastic notions there are in the world linked with all
that this Goetheanum in Dornach intended to do and all that was
done in it. It is said that the most frightful superstitions
were disseminated there, that all sorts of things
inimical to religion were being practiced; and there is even
talk of all kinds of spiritistic seances, of nebulous mystic
performances, and so on.
In
respect to all this, I should like today to answer, at least
sketchily, the question: What is this Anthroposophy to which
the Goetheanum was dedicated?
Many people were scandalized at the very name,
“Goetheanum,” because they failed to consider the
fundamental reason for this name, and how it is connected with
all that is cultivated there as Anthroposophy.
For
me, my dear friends, this Anthroposophy is the
spontaneous result of my devotion for more than four
decades to Goethe's world-conception, and to his whole
activity. Of course if anyone studies Goethe's world-conception
and what he did by considering only what is actually written in
Goethe's works, and from that deduces logically, as it were,
what may now be called Goethean, he will not find what gave
occasion to call the Dornach Building the
“Goetheanum,” But there is, I might say, a logic of
thinking and a logic of life. And anyone who immerses himself
in Goethe, not merely with a logic of thinking, but who takes
up actively his impulse-filled suggestions, and tries to gain
from them what can be gained — after so many decades have
passed over humanity's evolution since Goethe's death —
he will believe — no matter what he may think of the true
value of Anthroposophy — that by means of the living
stimuli of Goetheanism, if I may use the expression, this very
Anthroposophy has been able to come into being through a logic
of life, by experiencing what is in Goethe, and by
developing his conclusions, in a modest way.
Now
this Goetheanum was first called “Johannesbau” by
those friends of the anthroposophical world-conception who made
it possible to erect such a building. The name was in no way
connected with the Evangelist, St, John; but the building was
named — not by me but by others — for Johannes
Thomasius, one of the figures in my Mystery Drama; because,
above all, this Goetheanum was to be dedicated to the
presentation of these Mystery Plays, besides the cultivation of
all the rest of the anthroposophical world-view. But of course
it was inevitable that this name, “Johannesbau,”
should lead to the misunderstanding that it was meant for the
author of St. John's Gospel.
Hence, I often said, I think even here in this place, in the
course of the years in which the Goetheanum was being built,
that for me this building is a Goetheanum; for I derived my
world-view in a living way from Goethe. And then this name was
officially given to the Building by friends of the cause. I
have always regarded this as a sort of token of gratitude for
what can be gained from Goethe, an act of homage to the
towering personality of Goethe; not because it was supposed
that what was originally given by Goethe would be cultivated in
the best and most beautiful way in the Dornach Goetheanum, but
because the anthroposophical world-view feels the deepest
gratitude for what has come into the world through Goethe.
If,
then, the name “Goetheanum” is taken as resulting
from an act of homage, an act of gratitude, then no one, as I
believe, can take exception to it. For the rest, it is quite
comprehensible that anyone unacquainted with the
anthroposophical world-view, when approaching the
building on the Dornach hill, would be at first peculiarly
affected by the two dove-tailed dome-structures, by the strange
forms without and within, and so forth. But this building
proceeded as an inner artistic consequence, from the
anthroposophical world-view. Therefore, I shall be able to form
the best connecting link with what the Building stood for, if I
try first — today in a somewhat different way from the
one I have employed here for many years — to answer the
question: What is Anthroposophy?
To
start with, Anthroposophy claims to be a knowledge of the
spiritual world, which can fully take its place beside the
magnificent natural science of our time. It aims to rank
with natural science, not only as regards scientific
conscientiousness, but it also requires that anyone who wishes,
not merely to receive Anthroposophy into his mind, but
to build it up, must, before all else, have gone through
all the rigid and serious methods used today by natural science.
In
all this the purpose of Anthroposophy is the complete opposite
of what I have cited as the opinions of the world about it.
With regard to these opinions, which I have given only in part,
we can only be astonished that it is possible for ideas about
anything to become fixed in the minds of the public,
which are the exact opposite of what is really intended. For it
can be flatly said that all I have mentioned as opinions
of the world is not Anthroposophy, but that Anthroposophy
purposes to be a serious knowledge of the spiritual world.
You
well know, my dear friends, that today anything claiming
to be knowledge of the spiritual world is regarded somewhat
contemptuously, or at least with great doubt. The
scientific education that mankind has enjoyed for the past
three or four hundred years was of such a nature that in the
19th century and the beginning of the 20th, the opinion came
gradually to be held that, by means of the strict methods
employed today by natural science, man can know what is
presented to the senses in his environment, and also what
the human intellect can deduce from sense-perception,
with the help of its methods of experiment and observation. But
on the other hand, knowledge of the spiritual is declined, by
those very people who are firmly convinced that they stand on
the strict basis of this natural-scientific world-view. For it
is said, whether with a certain arrogance or with a certain
despondency, that with regard to the spiritual there are
barriers to man's knowledge, that with regard to the spirit man
must be satisfied with concepts of belief.
Because of this there results a serious inner soul-discord for
very many people who get their education from the natural
science that is everywhere popularized today. The concepts of
belief are handed down from ancient times. It is not known that
they also correspond to concepts of knowledge which humanity
attained at earlier stages, and that' these are still contained
in the traditions, in what has been handed down. If they are
accepted just as concepts of belief, then the soul is brought
into contradiction with everything it takes in when it accepts
what in our day is won for humanity and for practical life in
such a rigorous way by the methods of natural science.
What is won in this way cannot really be called the possession
of a small group of educated people; rather, this special mode
of thought derived from natural science has already penetrated
the instruction of the primary grades of school. And we might
even say that the condition of soul that results from natural
science, if not natural science itself, has been spread
everywhere, ever farther and farther, even into the most
primitive, outermost human settlements. This brings it about
that many people do not know that their soul-longing is for
concepts about the spiritual world similar to those they have
about the natural world; but this causes in many of them,
nevertheless, a discord of soul which is expressed in all kinds
of dissatisfactions with life. People feel a certain
inner unrest and perplexity. With the concepts and feelings
they have, they do not rightly know how to take their place in
life. They ascribe the trouble to all sorts of things,
but the real cause lies in what I have said.
People today long for real knowledge-concepts about the
spiritual world, not for concepts of belief. Such
knowledge-concepts are what Anthroposophy strives for; but in
doing so it must, of course, vindicate an entirely
different concept of knowledge from the one we are accustomed
to today. And if I am to characterize this concept, I should
like to do it by means of a sort of comparison, which is,
however, more than a mere comparison, and is to lead directly
to the way in which Anthroposophy strives to know the
super-sensible-spiritual.
Let
us think first of the strange world which each of you knows as
the other side of human existence, as it were, the other side
of human consciousness — let us think of the dream-world.
Each of you can remember the variegated, diverse, colorful
pictures that appear out of the dark depths of sleep. If you
observe dreams from the waking state, you will find that these
are connected in some way with what one is or does while awake.
Even when at times they are prophetic dreams, which is by no
means to be denied, they are nevertheless connected with what
the dreamer has experienced — only a natural formative
fantasy acts in the most extravagant way to metamorphose these
experiences. In a different way such dreams are connected with
the human bodily conditions; difficulty in breathing, rapid
heart-action, disturbances in the organism, are
experienced symbolically in dreams in many ways.
Let
us imagine for a moment, merely to develop the thought that is
needed here, that a person lived in this dream-world, that he
had no other world; he would never be able to emerge from this
world, but' would regard it as his reality. If through some
kind of outer forces, the human life took its course exactly as
it does now, that we went about in the cities and did our work,
but did not consciously see this work, just always dreamed,
then we human beings would regard the dream-world as the only
reality, just as the dreamer in the moment of the dream regards
his variously decked-out dream-world as his reality» Only
when we wake up can we truly form a judgment, from the waking
point of view, by means of the way we are then related to the
world of our environment, about the real value and significance
of the dream, While remaining in the dream, we can come to no
such judgment. It is only possible from the point of view of
the waking life to judge to what extent the dream is related to
life-reminiscences, or to bodily conditions. To form a judgment
about the dream, one must first wake up.
Now
the human being lives also in his will, for it is
particularly the will that, upon waking, is projected
into the events of the outer sense-world; man lives now in the
pictures which this sense-world transmits to his soul. We have
no judgment whatever about the reality, except the feeling of
being in the sense-world, the feeling of union with this
sense-world; and from this point of view — I might say of
insertion of the whole soul-being into this world by
means of the body — we at first regard it as
reality, and the deceptive pictures of the dream as not
belonging to this reality.
But
now, especially when anyone surveys all that the pictures of
the outer sense-reality give to him, certainly at some time the
question will appear: How is what he himself experiences within
him as his soul-spirit-being related to the transformations and
the variability of the outer sense-world?
The
great questions of existence present themselves when a man
compares what he sees in the outer sense-world with what he
feels as his own being, in his thinking and feeling, his
sensing and his willing, rising out of the depths of his
humanness, — those great questions of existence
which may perhaps be comprised in the one question: What value,
as reality, has that which pertains to the soul? This then
expands to questions of soul-immortality, of human freedom, and
numberless others that spring up. For one will soon feel how
entirely different the experience is when looking outward
and receiving sense-impressions, from that of looking inward
and having soul-experiences. And from such experiences the
question must of necessity arises Is it perhaps possible,
through some kind of second awakening, a higher awakening, to
attain from a higher standpoint knowledge about sense-reality
itself, in the same way that a man acquires from the
sense-reality a judgment about the dream-world, when, as a
matter of course, he awakes in the morning?
When a man is convinced that the imagination of the dream can
be judged with regard to its value as reality, only from the
standpoint of waking life, then he must strive to gain a
point of view which can in turn reveal something about the
value as reality, of the higher value, of sense-experience itself.
And
now the great question concerning a knowledge of spirit may be
put this way: Can we perhaps wake up in a higher sense from our
everyday waking consciousness? and does' there result from such
second waking a knowledge about the sense-world, just as from
the sense-world comes knowledge about the dream?
Now
we can, of course, have a feeling about it, but exact
observation gives us certainty about how the dream works. When
dreaming we feel that our whole soul-life is laid hold of by
vague powers. At the moment of waking, we feel that we now have
control of our physical body. We feel that the extravagant
concepts of the dream are disciplined by the physical body. And
the reason we feel that these dream-concepts are
extravagant is that, when waking up or going to sleep,
there is a moment ' when we do not have the physical body
completely in hand. Can a higher, a second awakening, be
brought about by conscious soul-activity, in the same way that
we are wrenched out of the dream, out of sleep, by the forces
of the organism itself?
This question can only be answered when we test, I might say in
a higher sense, whether the soul finds forces within itself for
such a higher awakening; and only by finding the answer to this
can a different form of knowledge-concept be produced from that
to which we are accustomed today, and which leads only to one's
saying with regard to the spiritual world,
“Ignorabimus,” “We shall not know.”
Now
we shall have to turn first of all — and Anthroposophy
proceeds in this way — to those soul-forces that we
already have, and ask: Can something higher, still stronger, be
developed out of these soul-forces, just as the waking
soul-life is stronger than the dreaming life? We may reason
that even this waking soul-life of the adult person has been
gradually developed from the dreamy soul-life that we had at
the beginning as very little children. If we had stopped with
the soul-life that was ours during the first three years on
earth, we should see the world in a sort of dream-form. We have
grown out of this dream-form.
This may give courage, to begin with, to seek certain
soul-forces which can be developed still further than the
development achieved since earliest childhood. And anyone who
deals with such a problem seriously will turn first to a
soul-force concerning which even significant philosophers of
the present admit, as a result of purely philosophic
deliberation, that it points to a spiritual activity of
man which is more or less independent of the body. This is our
power of recollection, residing in the memory.
Let
us picture to ourselves what exists in our ordinary memory. Of
course this memory is not a force with which immediately to
penetrate into the super-sensible, spiritual worlds. Above all,
we know that this memory is only in perfect order when we can
bring to expression in the corporeal what is in the soul. But
nevertheless, there is something peculiar here. Among our
recollections appear pictures of experiences which were perhaps
decades in the past. Something experienced in our
relation to the sense-world and to ordinary people
appears in varying pictures — according to one's
organization — which are really very similar to
dream-pictures, only more disciplined. And if our memory is
good, there comes today from the soul-depths a living knowledge
of what occurred years ago, and is not now before us in
sense-reality. This is expressed in a very popular way, of
course; but we must start from a definite point of view. So we
may say: There are images in the memory which portray
inwardly something which was, indeed, once present,
something experienced, which is not now present.
And
so the question may arise which is still vague at first, and
naturally acquires significance only when one can answer it
— but we shall see that it can be answered. It is this:
Is it possible for anyone, by soul-spiritual work, to
acquire a further soul-force, a transformation as it were
of the memory-force, whereby he pictures not only what is no
longer present, though it once was, but whereby he depicts
something which does not exist in the earth-life at all, either
through sense-perceptions or any intellectual combinations?
This can be decided only by serious inner soul-work; and this
soul-work consists of an inner education of the essential
element of memory; namely, the capacity for imagining.
How, then, do representations come about? and how is the
activity of representation accomplished in ordinary life? Well,
outer things make an impression upon us. First, we have
sense-perceptions; then from these sense-perceptions we form
our concepts, which we carry in the memory. And we know that a
certain force is required when we wish to call up a
memory-concept of something witnessed in earlier years in which
we were involved. But we know too that man surrenders passively
to the outer world, in order to have true concepts of this
outer world, to bring nothing fantastic into the pictures of
it. And this passive self-surrender, assisted besides by all
possible experimental methods, is right for natural science.
But we can do something more than this with the conceptual
life. We can try to take up with inner activity concepts of any
content whatsoever — only their content must be easily
survey-able, so as not to work suggestively; an idea that is
difficult to survey, such as one brought up from the depths of
the soul, may easily work suggestively, We now try to ponder
with inner activity upon such a concept, so that we surrender
ourselves again and again with our whole soul-life to this thought,
I
have minutely described what I might call the technique of such
surrender to an active living in representation, in my books,
“Knowledge of the Higher Worlds” and “Occult
Science;” here I want to sketch the principle involved.
If anyone devotes himself again and again to the content of an
idea, quite independently of the outer meaning of the concepts
he employs inwardly, upon which he inwardly rests, with which
he unites himself, to which he allows his whole being to open
— if anyone surrenders himself in this way to such an
idea, he will gradually notice that in this inner work, in the
thinking and representation, a notable aliveness is developed,
an aliveness which one must first come to know before an
opinion can be formed about it. But when anyone does come to
know it, he begins to think somewhat as follows: A muscle we
continue to use becomes stronger; in exactly the same way the
thinking force of our soul-life is strengthened, if we do not
surrender passively to the impressions of the outer world, but
work inwardly; if in this way we again and again bring the
soul-life inwardly and livingly into a certain condition
with regard to an idea.
In
this way we finally reach the point where the thinking —
which otherwise appears shadowy, even in memory-pictures, and
exhausts itself just in the mere presentation of pictures
— is filled with a soul-spiritual content, just as in
life we feel that we are filled with the breath, with the
circulating blood. Life-force, if I may speak in this
way, streams into thinking that has thus become active.
Truly, real Anthroposophy, as spirit-knowledge, is based upon
intimate, inner methods of the soul, not upon any sort of
necromancy? it is based upon the changing of the soul-forces of
knowledge by the soul itself, making them into something
different. And anyone who strengthens his thinking more and
more in this way comes at last — it may be even years
later — to a very special experience, an experience that
may be described as follows: When we call to mind only
outer objects or outer actions, we dive down to a certain depth
of the soul-life, and from this depth we must then draw up the
recollections. But when we actively work on our thinking in the
way I have described, we finally come to the point where we
know that with this thinking life we go farther down than the
power of recollection reaches.
It
is an important experience when we have reached the point of
observing the recollections as at a certain level to which we
dive down in the ordinary consciousness, and from which we
bring up memory-concepts; and then when we glimpse that deeper
down in the soul-life there is another level to which we have
now penetrated, and from which, with our strengthened thinking,
we can draw up concepts that are not the same as those to which
we first submitted ourselves, but are entirely different. And
while we can represent in recollections what was once present
in the human life, but is no longer present, so we now learn
that when we draw from this deeper level, we come to concepts
that are beyond anything one otherwise ever has in life.
Through this gate of knowledge we have now penetrated into the
spiritual world; and the first experience that results is this:
we get a really tableau-like retrospect of our whole earth-life
up to the present. We might say that in a flash — that is
a somewhat extreme statement, but it is almost so — our
earth-life up to this moment lies spread out in mighty pictures
before the consciousness, with time changed into space, as it
were. But these pictures are truly different from those we
should get if we were to sit down and draw forth in
recollection all that can be drawn out of our life, and should
get continuous pictures of this earth-life almost to the time
of our birth. This tableau is intrinsically different
from the one described before. You see, in ordinary
recollections the concepts are passively formed, and contain
altogether not much more than our impressions from the outer
world. For example, in recollections we call to mind how we met
some one, the effect someone had upon us, how a friendship was
formed; or again, we experience the effect upon us of some
natural occurrence, what we experienced of pleasure or suffering
from it, or from the influence of some one, and so on.
The
content of the tableau, as I have described it, attained by
strengthened, invigorated thinking, is this: A man sees himself
— the way he approached another person, as a result of
his temperamental qualities, or of his own character, or
the desire, or the love, he had. While mere recollection gives
to a man what is brought to him from outside, this
memory-tableau brings to the fore what he himself has
contributed to the experience, what has come out of himself. In
the ordinary recollection, let us say of a natural occurrence,
he has before him what this occurrence brought of pain or
pleasure, that is, the effect upon him of the outer world. In
the memory-tableau it would be rather his longing to be in
whatever region of the earth he had this experience. The part a
man himself has taken in an occurrence is what he experiences
in the memory-tableau, In short, I might say that this total
impression a man has of his life is diverted from the outer
world, and that it contains all his activity during life. One
really sees himself as a second person. When anyone has this
memory-tableau, he has little impression of his physical
space-body; but he feels himself within all that he has
experienced, and he feels at the same time that it is all a
flowing, etheric world, so to speak. And with this flowing,
etheric world, which contains his own life in mighty pictures
as in an onward-flowing stream, one learns at the same time
that the moving etheric world of his own existence is connected
with the universal etheric world. When as physical human being
with his physical senses, a man confronts the outer world, he
feels that he is enclosed within his skin. He feels other things
as outer things. He feels a strong contrast between subject and
object, to express it philosophically. This is not the case when,
with strengthened thinking, one enters into what I may call the
fluctuating world of the second man, of the time-man, in contrast
to the corporeal, physical space-man.
We
can really speak of a time-body, for a man becomes aware
simultaneously of his whole previous life, and he feels this
previous earth-life as moving in a universal world, like unto
itself. He can say, that to the solid, dense, physical world is
added a more rarified world, in which one has spent his life in
flowing movement. Only now does he come to know what an etheric
world is, and what man himself is as second man, as second
human being in this etheric world. But with all this one has
reached only the first stage of super-sensible knowledge.
It
is only because one feels himself to be a spirit-soul being in
a spirit-soul world that he knows from direct perception, as it
were, that the whole world is interpenetrated and interwoven by
a spirit-soul substantiality, which man also holds within
himself, But as yet he knows no more than this. And most of
all, he does not yet know of another spirit-soul world besides
that one which unites him as earth-man with the surrounding
etheric world.
But
now we can go farther. If a man has acquired this ability to
experience himself in the etheric realm, to experience the
etheric world along with himself, then he can rise to another
kind of development of the soul-forces.
This consists in bringing about in the soul what I might call
the opposite process to the one first characterized. First we
try to make the thinking inwardly very active, very much alive,
so that, instead of passive thinking, we have within an active
flow of forces, surging and weaving. Now we must try with the
same inner force of free will to suppress again the
freely soaring thought that we have put into the soul.
In
the soul-exercises to which I am alluding, everything that I
describe for you must be done in the same way that the
mathematician works out his problems; so that it is all carried
out with complete self-possession, with nothing whatever in it
of false mysticism, of fantasy, even of suggestion, or anything
of the kind. The exercises must be performed in the soul
with the same objective coldness with which a geometric problem
is solved — for the warmth and enthusiasm come not from
the method, but from the results. Nevertheless, we experience
the following: that when we acquire this strengthened thinking,
it is difficult to dispel the representations we get by
it, especially those of the previous life, with which we can be
completely engrossed if we want to dwell on them. But we must
develop in us the strength to disperse the images again, just
as we can call them forth, by our own activity. In other words,
we must acquire the faculty to extinguish in our consciousness
all thinking and imagining, after having first most actively
kindled it. Even extinguishing of ordinary concepts is very
difficult, but this is relatively easy in comparison with the
obliterating of those concepts that have been set up in the
soul by spiritual activity.
Therefore this obliteration means something entirely
different. And if one succeeds, again through long
practice — but these exercises can be done along
with the others, so that both capacities appear simultaneously
— if one succeeds in producing these strong, active
processes of thought in his consciousness, and then in
obliterating them again, something comes over the soul that I
might call the inner silence of the soul — for we must
have expressions for these things you know. There is no
knowledge whatever of this inner silence in the consciousness
of the ordinary life.
Of
the two things needed by the spiritual researcher who wants to
make research in the anthroposophical way, the first is the
strengthened conceptual life, the strengthened
thought-life, by means of which he comes to self-knowledge in
the way indicated; the other is that he must cultivate a
completely empty consciousness; in which all the thinking,
feeling and willing, otherwise in the soul, is silenced —
but silenced only after this soul-activity has been enhanced to
the highest degree. Then this silence of soul is something
quite special. It represents the second stage, as it were, of
spirit-knowledge; and I can describe it somewhat as follows:
Let
us imagine that we are in a great city where there is a
terrific uproar, and we become quite deafened by it. We leave
the city, and when we have walked for some time, we still hear
the roar behind us, but the noise has already become somewhat
less, and the farther we go the quieter it becomes. If we
finally reach the stillness of the forest, it may be that all
about us will be quiet. We have experienced the whole range
from raging noise to outer silence. But now I can go farther.
This will not take place in outer reality, of course, but the
concept is an entirely real one, when we come to what I have
just designated as silence of the soul, I will for once use a
very trivial comparison: We may have a certain wealth and keep
spending it; we have less and less and finally nothing at all.
Then our wealth is zero. But we can go still farther; we can go
into debt; then we have less than nothing. We know from
mathematics that one can have less than nothing.
Well, it can be the same with quiet, with silence. From the
noise of the world complete silence can be restored, equal to
zero. This can even become less; it can become more silent than
the silence that equals zero, more and more silent, negative
silence, negative quiet. And that is really the case when the
strengthened soul-life is blotted out, when the silence in the
soul becomes deeper than zero silence, if I may express it so.
A quiet is established in the soul-life that tends toward the
minus side, a stillness that is deeper than the mere silence of
the ordinary consciousness.
And
when we have penetrated to this silence, when the soul feels
that it is removed from the world — not only when the
world around it is still, but when the soul feels that the
world-quiet can only equal zero, but that the soul itself is in
a deeper silence than the silence of the world — then,
when this negative silence sets in, the spiritual world begins
to speak, really to speak, from the other side of existence.
Ordinarily, we ourselves as human beings interrupt the quiet of
the world with our words projected into the air, When we have
established in ourselves this quiet that is deeper than
zero-quiet, this silence that is deeper than mere silence, the
spiritual world begins to speak; but it is a language to which
we must first become accustomed, a language utterly different
from the language of words, a language formed in such a way
that we gradually become accustomed to it by drawing upon our
knowledge of the sense-world, of colors, of tones, in short,
all that we know of the sense-world. We use this to describe
the special impressions of the spiritual world according to our
experiences of the sense-world,
I
want to call attention to a few details. Suppose that in this
inner silence of soul we get the impression of the presence of
something out of the depths of spirit which attacks us
aggressively, as it were, and excites us in a certain way. We
know first of all that it is a spiritual experience, that the
spiritual world is revealing itself. We compare this with an
experience we have had in the sense-world, and learn that in
the sense-world this experience has about the same effect upon
us as the color yellow. In exactly the same way that we coin a
word to express something in the sense-world, so now we take
the yellow color to express this spiritual experience; or in
another case we might take a tone to express it. As we use
speech to talk about the things of the sense-world, so now we
make use of sense-qualities and sense-impressions in speaking
about what is spiritually received from the spiritual world
in the silence of the soul.
This is the way to describe the spiritual world. I have
described it in this way in my book “Theosophy” and
in “Occult Science,” and the descriptions need only
to be rightly understood. We must understand that for the
silence of the soul there is a new language. While we have
articulated speech for outward expression as human beings,
something comes to us from the spiritual world which we must
put into appropriate words, but it can be apprehended only in a
subtle way, and must be translated into human speech by
using words formed from sense-perception.
And
when you have these experiences in the silence of the soul, you
come to know that the world of invigorated thinking that you
had at first is really only a picture, — a picture of
what you see only now, for which you only now have a language,
a picture by which you penetrated into the silence of the
soul. The spiritual world now speaks to you through the silence
of the soul. And now you are able also to efface this whole
life-tableau, which you yourself have formed, which has brought
the earth-life etherically before you, as by magic. This inner
quiet of the soul appears now also in the personal life as you
live it here on earth. The illusion of that ego which exists
only in the physical body now ceases.
Anyone who holds too firmly to his ego, through a theoretical
or a practical egotism, does not succeed in establishing this
silence of soul in the presence of his own life-tableau. A man
who combats theoretical and practical egotism comes to
see that he first has this ego to enable him to make use of his
body in the physical life, that the body gives him the
possibility of saying “I” to himself. If he then
passes from this corporeal sense of the ego into what I have
described as the etheric world, where one flows together with
the world, where the world is etherically united with one's own
etheric being, he will no longer hold firmly to this ego. He
will experience that of which this life-tableau, to which he
has lifted himself, is a picture. He will experience his
pre-earthly existence, in a spiritual world, before he descended
through conception and birth into a physical human body,
Anthroposophy does not speak from philosophical speculations
about the immortality, the eternity of the human' soul, but it
tells how, through a special development of the soul-forces,
one may struggle through to the vision of the soul-being before
it descended to the earth. There actually appears now to the
silenced soul a direct view of the soul as it dwells eternally
in the world of spirit. As we look in recollection at
what we have experienced on earth, as the past earth-life
awakes in memory, so now, after we have learned in the
soul-silence the language of the world of spirit, as I have
described it, events appear that have not existed in the
earth-life at all, events by which we have been prepared for
this earth-life before we descended to it,
And
now one looks upon what he was before he came down to the
earth-life. As long as he was still beholding the life-tableau,
he knew that he himself and the world are permeated and
interpenetrated by moving, weaving spirit — though finer
and more etheric, it is still a sort of nature-spirit, which he
finds in the world and experiences as akin to himself.
But now, when he looks into the pre-earthly existence, being
united with what father and mother give at birth, he sees the
unity of the moral world-order and the physical world-order. In
this pre-earthly existence are all the forces that are
prototypes of the forms produced during the physical
earth-life. Here one sees that the spiritual forces reign and
weave in the human body even in the physical earth-life. One
marvels at the structure of the human brain as it gradually
takes shape. One notices how undifferentiated this brain was
when the child was born, what it became with the seventh
year of life, about the time of the change of teeth. One turns
his gaze upon the inner, plastic, formative forces; and does
not stop short with the indefinite dictum about heredity.
We
know that what the child works out in the first years of' life
alone, in the plastic formation of the brain and the whole
organism, is the after-effect, the imitation, of the
far-reaching, universal events experienced in the spiritual
world, where the soul was among spiritual beings, in just the
same way that we live among the creatures of nature and human
beings on earth. And one now comes to know that the spiritual
world works into the physical earth-world, and that the
after-effects of this pre-earthly existence are contained in
all that is active in the inner organization of our being; one
knows that he himself is a soul-spirit-being within the
physical corporeal.
As
we go farther, a third experience must be added to what I have
already described, I have called attention to the necessity of
first overcoming the illusion of the ego; one must overcome the
ordinary, everyday, theoretical or practical egotism; and
one must understand that this ego of our earth-life is bound up
with the physical body, and comes to consciousness first of all
in the sensations of the physical body. But there is something
in the physical earth-life which, when I name it, may perhaps
cause a little disturbance here and there in one's theory of
knowledge, because it is usually not counted at all among
the forces of knowledge, and it may be found distasteful
to place it there. But it must be done nevertheless. And anyone
who has come in the way described first to the invigoration of
thought and then to soul-silence, will understand that it must
be done. There must be added to these, as a third, a higher
development, a more intensive development, of what exists in
the ordinary life as love: love for people, love of
nature, love of all our work, love for what we do. All the love
that already exists in the usual life can be increased by doing
away with theoretical and practical egotism in the way
described. Love must be intensified, And when this love is
increased, when the expanded love-force is joined to the
strengthened thinking and the silence of soul, one comes to a
third experience, Man comes now to the conscious laying hold of
the true form of the ego, when he comes to know not only the
pre-earthly existence, but when he now learns by means of this
that an augmented love-force further energizes the other
developed, strengthened forces of knowledge. He comes to
an exact experience: All that has been won has nothing to do
with the physical body; you experience yourself outside the
physical body; you experience the world as it cannot be
experienced through the body. Instead of natural
phenomena you experience spiritual beings. You experience
yourself, not as a natural being between birth and death, but
as a spiritual being in a pre-earthly existence.
If
a man has won this, and there is added to it a heightened,
increased capacity of love, the possibility of dedicating
himself, of surrendering himself with his whole body-free
existence, to what he sees here, then there comes to him the
knowledge of what exists within man in the immediate present,
independent of the physical and even of the etheric body. He
gets a direct view of what rests within him and goes through
the gate of death into the post-earthly existence, when we
enter again into a spiritual world. Because he comes to know
what he is in a body-free state, he learns also of that which
continues to exist, free of the body, when the physical body is
laid aside at death.
You
see the purpose of it all is to come to the perception of the
eternity of the human soul. But in particular, one attains by
means of it to the perception of the true ego, that ego which
goes through birth and death, of which one cannot say that it
dwells in the body, but that it rests in the
body. One learns at the same time of the movement and activity
of this ego in the pre-earthly existence in the spiritual
world. One comes to know it in the same way that we know the
human being here in the sense-physical existence through the
sense of sight. Just as a man goes about here among the things
of nature, among natural phenomena, among other people, so one
learns to know, I might say, how the soul moves about in the
pre-earthly existence in the spiritual world. But one learns
also that the soul's movement and its relations there are
dependent upon an earlier earth-life. I said that one learns of
the oneness of the moral and the natural; one learns that in
the pre-earthly existence man is permeated not only by
spiritual but also by moral impulses, While one merely
perceives, during the continuance of the etheric life-tableau,
that spirit streams through the whole world, one now learns
that in the pre-earthly existence there pulsated through our
soul-spirit-being the moral impulses which appear in the memory
during the physical life, and especially in the moral
predispositions» One has now come to know the oneness of
the moral and the physical world.
But
now, in this moral-physical world (physical only in the
pictures shining up into the spirit from the physical
existence) — in this world experienced by the soul in the
spiritual realm, one comes to know how the soul, as man's real
ego, lives in the spiritual world in conformity with the
previous existence. Truly when we come to spiritual vision and
escape from the illusion of the ordinary ego, then we come to
know how the ego has already passed through the spiritual world
between death and a new birth; we learn how it comported
itself, in conformity with its former earth-life, in this world
endowed with moral impulses; and we learn that it is all
carried into this earth-life as an inner determination of
destiny. We see this expressed in the tendencies of a person,
or in the special coloring of the desire which drives a man to
one thing or another in the earth-life.
This does not encroach upon freedom. Freedom exists within
certain limits, in just the same way that we are free, when we
have built us a house, to occupy it or not; but we will occupy
it because we have built it for ourselves for a certain reason.
In the same way we are still free, even though we may know that
there are impelling forces in our physical body which cause us
to turn this way or that in life, or to live in one way or
another. On the one hand we can regard this as a destiny that
we have woven for ourselves out of earlier earth-lives, out of
the world through which we have passed that contains not only
spiritual but also moral laws. These have permeated what
we were in a former life with definite spiritual impulses, and
out of these have formed the destiny for our earth-life. But we
notice also, when we look at what comes from the former
earth-life, in the way described, that it is the eternal in the
soul that has determined our earthly destiny» After we
have passed through the gate of death, and have united what is
of moral or soul-nature with our soul-being, in order to bring
greater harmony into our relation with the demands of the moral
world — we carry this into the world and come down again
into a new earth-life, with what I might call the resulting
total from what we were in life and what the spiritual world
has made of us between death and a new birth.
So
you see the really important thing is first to develop a
certain perceptive faculty, with which one can look up into the
spiritual world.
You
must bear in mind, my dear friends, that not everyone has the
gifts of a mathematician. It is very difficult for most people
even to have these geometrical concepts, that are really to be
formed only in the imagination. Geometry is not a spontaneous
element of nature, but we understand nature by means of it. We
must first produce geometry within ourselves, and by means of
geometry we create the forms which will lead us into the
structure of the lifeless world. With just such inner rigor do
we produce inner vision, by developing strengthened thinking,
silence of soul, and love which has become a force of
knowledge, so that we may apprehend the living, the
sentient, the self-conscious. In the same way that we apprehend
the lifeless through mathematics, we come to an understanding
apprehension of the living, the feeling, the self-conscious,
when we proceed in a purely mathematical way, and develop a
certain kind of vision with vigor and exactness.
So
we may say that anyone who is serious about Anthroposophy
pursues it as if he were required to give account of the use he
makes of his forces of knowledge to the strictest
mathematician. The forming of mathematical concepts is
elementary Anthroposophy, if I may speak thus. And when anyone
has learned to develop this self-creativeness of
mathematics in order to apply it to the lifeless things
of the world, he gets the impulse to develop further the kinds
of knowledge which will lead to the vision I have described to
you. We come to know that the lifeless world has a different
content when we know it mathematically —
mathematics is elementary Anthroposophy — and we
know the living, sentient, self-conscious world when we study
it with complete anthroposophical understanding.
Therefore, what in ordinary life is called clairvoyance, or
anything of the kind, must not be confused with what we have in
Anthroposophy for obtaining knowledge of the spiritual world.
When we call this clairvoyance — and of course we can do
so — we must mean exact clairvoyance, just as we
speak of exact mathematics, in contrast with the mystical,
confused clairvoyance, which is usually what anyone has in mind
when this word is used.
Now
you will perhaps have received the impression from my
description that this is difficult. Yes, it is difficult] it is
not easy. Hence, many people who presume to have an opinion
about what goes on in Dornach do not try to understand what
appears so difficult to them, but judge according to the
trivial, confused clairvoyance. And then the result is all that
I mentioned at the beginning of my lecture» But the
Anthroposophy with which we are concerned is an exact
kind of knowledge, which can actually be understood by anyone
with sound human intelligence, just as anyone can understand a
picture without himself being a painter. To get
Anthroposophy one must be an anthroposophical researcher; to
paint a picture one must be a painter; but everything I have
described can be understood by anyone with good common
sense, if only he does not himself put hindrances and
obstructions in the way.
To
paint a picture one must be a painter; to judge it one must
rely upon sound human nature. To build up Anthroposophy one
must be a spiritual researcher; to understand Anthroposophy one
need only meet the more or less well-given descriptions of it
with his healthy, free human spirit, undisturbed by
natural-scientific and other prejudices. But
Anthroposophy is only in its beginning, and what I have perhaps
not described very well today will be described better and
better as time goes on; and then the time will come which has
always arrived ultimately for anything new in humanity. How
long it was before the Copernican world-view was
accepted! It has nevertheless upset all concepts previously
held. Today it is accepted as a matter of course, and is taught
in the schools. What is considered by people today the
quintessence of fantasy, of nonsense, perhaps madness, will
later be a matter of course — just as it was with the
Copernican world-theory. Anthroposophy can wait until it is a
matter of course.
This Anthroposophy, above all else, was to be cultivated at the
Dornach Goetheanum. Therefore — permit me to say this in
conclusion — more than ten years ago friends of our cause
conceived a plan to build an abode for this Anthroposophy, and
commissioned me to carry out the plan — I was only the
one to execute it — and this abode is the Goetheanum. If
Anthroposophy were a theoretical world-conception, or even a
mere idea of reform, what would have happened the moment the
idea appeared to build a home for Anthroposophy? An architect
would have been consulted who would simply have erected a
building in antique, or Renaissance, in Gothic or rococo style,
or something of the sort. But Anthroposophy does not work merely
theoretically, merely as scientific knowledge; it passes over into
the whole human being, lays claim to the whole human being. This
is very soon noticed by the anthroposophical researcher.
You
see when a man wants to think about outer nature, he needs his
head, and if he wants to indulge in philosophic speculations,
he needs it even more. What appears before the silent soul, as
pertaining to the spiritual world, in the way I have
described it to you, is something that appears more fleetingly.
One needs presence of mind in order to take it in quickly; but
one needs for it also his whole human being. The head is
not enough. The whole human organization must be placed in the
service of the spirit, in order to bring into the memory, into
the recollection, what one sees spiritually without the body.
To illustrate this, let me give a personal experience.
I
have never been accustomed to prepare any lecture in just the
way lectures are usually prepared; but it is my custom to
experience spiritually the thoughts that appear necessary for a
lecture, as one must also experience spiritually what one
wishes to hold as the result of spiritual research. What is
experienced in strengthened thinking and in the human soul must
be conveyed into thought and for this mere head-thinking will
not suffice. One must be united more intimately with the whole
human being, if one wishes to express what has been experienced
in the realm of spirit. There are various methods by which such
experience can really be brought into the ordinary
consciousness, so that it can be put into words. It is my
custom, with pencil in hand, to write down, to formulate,
either in words or in some kind of signs, all that comes to me
from the spiritual world. Hence I have many cartloads of
note-books, but I never look at them again. They exist, but
their only purpose is to unite with the whole human being what
is discovered in spirit, so that it is grasped not only with
the head, so as to be communicated in words, but is experienced
by the whole human being.
Anthroposophy does indeed lay hold of the whole human being,
therefore it is in still another regard an expression of the
Goethean world-conception. It is, to begin with, an expression
of the Goethean world-conception, in that it was induced by
Goethe's method of observing the metamorphoses, the
transformations of life in the plant and animal world. In this
Goethean mode of observation the thought is so alive that one
can then try to strengthen it in the way I have described. But
Goethe is also that personality who built the bridge from
knowledge to art.
Out
of his artistic conviction Goethe voiced this beautiful
expression: Art is a manifestation of secret laws of nature
which without art would never be revealed. This means that
Goethe knew one lays hold in real knowledge of the ruling and
weaving of spirit, and then implants this into substance, be it
as sculptor or musician or painter. Goethe knew that artistic
fantasy is a kind of arbitrary projection of what man can
experience in its pure form in the spirit.
Any
knowledge which, like Anthroposophy, is rooted thus in the life
of the spirit, flows of itself into artistic creativeness. It
comes into artistic activity, when one knows the human being in
the way I have described, and sees how the pre-earthly forces
work into the earthly-corporeal existence. Then one has the
feeling that the human being cannot be comprehended with the
mere intellect, merely in concepts. At a certain point abstract
concepts must be allowed to pass over into artistic seeing, so
that you feel: Man is created by nature as a work of art.
Of
course this can easily be ridiculed, for nothing seems more
dreadful to people nowadays than to hear anyone say that to
know something it must be comprehended artistically. But people
may declaim as long as they please about the need to be logical
rather than artistic when something is to be understood —
if nature works artistically, then man simply does not find out
about it by logic. He must pass over to artistic seeing to
learn the real secrets of nature.
This is what Goethe meant when he said: “Art is a
manifestation of secret laws of nature which without art
would never be revealed.” And this is what Goethe meant
also when, after years of longing, he reached Italy and
believed he had attained his ideal of art. He said: “When
I behold these works of art, I have the notion that the Greeks
in the creation of their works of art proceeded by the same
laws according to which nature creates, and I am on the track
of those laws.”
Goethe was a personality who always aimed to transpose into a
work of art whatever was comprehended as knowledge in the soul.
Because Anthroposophy is of this same conviction, it was not
possible simply to go to an architect and say: Build us a
dwelling-place for Anthroposophy — and it would then have
been built in Renaissance or antique or rococo style; our
building has to be based on an entirely different conception of
life and of art.
I
have often compared the basic necessity here in a
somewhat banal way with the relation of the nut-shell to
the nut-kernel. The kernel of the nut, which we eat, is
fashioned according to definite laws of form, but the shell is
also made in accordance with the same laws. You cannot imagine
a shell being fitted to the nut from the outside; the
shell arises from the same laws of form as the kernel. So the
forms of the outer visible building, what was painted in the
domes, the sculpture placed in it, had to be fashioned as the
shell, so to speak, of what was proclaimed within through the
word, through art, spoken or sung. As the nut-shell to the nut,
so this building had to be related to what was fostered within
it. This was really the result not only of my
conviction, but of that of many others. We have had
eurythmy performances, the presentation of an art which
has a special language in movement, in which the
stage-picture consists of moving persons or moving groups? and
the movements are not dance-movements, and not imitative
movements, but an actual visible speech. We have developed here
on the stage of the Goetheanum an expressive art of movement.
The lines in which the human soul expresses itself harmonize in
a beautiful way with the lines of the architraves, the lines of
the capitals, the columns, with the whole form of the building,
and with the paintings in it. What was cultivated within and
the covering were one. When something was said from the
platform, when what was learned in spiritual vision was put
into words and sounded out into the audience-room, then what
was spoken from the podium was the kernel which lived within.
The artistic form had to correspond with the kernel. The style
of the building in all its details had to come from the same
impulse, from the same source as Anthroposophy itself. For
Anthroposophy is not abstract, theoretical knowledge, but a
comprehension of life, of the whole life. And therefore it
becomes art quite spontaneously. It fulfils what Goethe said
again: He who possesses science and art has also religion] he
who possesses neither should have religion.
I
might say, all that lived in the forms, all that may ever have
been said or artistically presented in the Goetheanum, was
intended to be comprised in a wood-carved group about 30 feet
high, in which Christ, as the Representative of mankind, is
portrayed in the Temptation by Ahriman and Lucifer.
This does not mean that Anthroposophy has anything to do with
the forming of any kind of sect. Anthroposophy is far removed
from hostile opposition to any religious conviction, or
from any wish whatsoever to found a new religion. But
Anthroposophy can show that real spiritual knowledge leads to
the climax of religious development, to the
Representative of humanity, Christ, to the incorporation
of the Christ-God in the body of Jesus of Nazareth. It shows
also how spirit-knowledge needs the picture of this central
point of all earth-evolution, the picture of the Mystery of
Golgotha. Quite certainly a man becomes religiously inclined
through Anthroposophy, but Anthroposophy is not the
founding of a religion.
What Anthroposophy wanted to offer artistically in the
Goetheanum had to come from the same impulses from which the
spoken word and the song proceed. It can even be said that when
anyone stepped on the platform — I want to say this in
all modesty — the forms of the columns, the whole form of
the inner architecture, the inside sculpture and painting
— all this was like an admonition to speak in a manner
that would really approach the inner being of the listeners. It
was like a continuous challenge to the speaker to put his
word into this building in a worthy way.
To
sum up: The building was to be an outer garment for
Anthroposophy, which came wholly from the spirit of
Anthroposophy, but was there for physical eyes to see»
There was nothing symbolic, nothing allegorical. The whole
building was created in its architecture, in its sculpture, in
its painting, in everything connected with it, in such a way
that what was livingly grasped in spirit-vision expressed
itself, not in intellectual, symbolic forms; but living ideas
and mobile thoughts about the spiritual world come to artistic
expression in such a way as to be directly felt and seen. There
was no symbol in the whole building, and if anyone maintains
that the building had a symbolic meaning, he speaks as one who
knows nothing about Anthroposophy.
And
so the building was for the eye what Anthroposophy is to be for
the soul of man. Anthroposophy has to be that kind of spirit
which knows that a longing for the unveiling of the
super-sensible vibrates and quivers through present humanity;
that this humanity — made what it is by its scientific
education, which intends to be generally popular, and already
is to a certain extent — can no longer be satisfied with
traditional concepts of belief; that concepts of knowledge must
come, which tend upward to the spiritual world; and that unrest
and dissatisfaction of soul result from the lack of such
concepts of knowledge.
Anthroposophy wants to serve the present by providing in the
right way what men need to take from this present into the near
future. What Anthroposophy wants to be, invisibly, for human
souls, the Goetheanum wanted to be, visibly, as vestment, as
home. Had the Goetheanum been only a symbolic building, the
pain at its loss would not have been so great, for then one
could always bring it alive again in recollection. But the
Goetheanum was not for mere remembrance. It was something
intended to bring tidings from the spirit to the sense-world,
and like any work of art, wanted to be manifested directly to
the sense-world. Therefore with the burning of the Goetheanum,
all that the Goetheanum wanted to be is lost.
But
it has perhaps shown that Anthroposophy wants to be nothing
one-sidedly theoretical, mere knowledge; it can be and must be
a life-content in all realms. Hence, it had to build its abode
in a style of its own. The Spirit, which Anthroposophy places
before the soul, the Goetheanum wanted to place before the
eyes. And Anthroposophy must place before the human soul
what this soul really demands as the innermost need of the
modern time; namely, a view, a knowledge, an artistic
comprehension, of the spiritual world. Souls demand this
because they feel more and more that only by experiencing the
whole human destiny can they discover the complete human worth.
The
Goetheanum could burn down. A catastrophe has swept it away.
The pain of those who loved it is so great that it cannot be
described. That structure which came from the same sources as
Anthroposophy, and through it willed to serve mankind,
had to be built for the sense-eye, had to be made of physical
material. And as the human body itself, according to my
description today, is the sense-image and the material effect
of the eternal spiritual, but in death falls away, so that the
spiritual can be developed in other forms, so also could that
— permit me to close by comparing the Dornach misfortune
with what happens in the usual course of the world — so
could that be destroyed by flames which had to be made out of
physical substance, in order to be seen by physical eyes. But
Anthroposophy is built out of spirit, and only flames of spirit
can touch this. Just as the human soul and spirit are victor
over the physical when this is destroyed in death, so
Anthroposophy feels alive, even though it has lost its Dornach
home, the Goetheanum. It may be said that physical flames could
destroy what had to be built of outer physical substance for
the eye; but what Anthroposophy is to be for the further
development of humanity is built of spirit. This will not be
destroyed by the flames of the spiritual life, for these
flames are not destroying flames; they are strengthening
flames, flames that give more life than ever. And all that life
which is to be revealed through Anthroposophy as life
of knowledge of the higher world, must be tempered by the
flames of the highest inspiration of the human being, his soul
and his spirit. Then Anthroposophy will continuously evolve.
He
who lives in this way in the spirit feels no less the pain
caused by the passing away of the earthly, but he knows at the
same time that surmounting all this depends upon the
realization that the spirit will ever be victorious over
matter, and in matter will be transformed ever anew.
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