Man
and his relationship to the cosmos
Volume VI — Part 2
Part
of an 11 lecture series given between
22 July to 20 August 1921:
Human development, World soul and World Spirit
Lecture entitled:
Development of the child up to puberty.
Lecture by Rudolf Steiner
Dornach, 7 August 1921
If
we want to fathom the meaning of the materialistic age we need
to research how the combination of important fundamental forces
add up to the development of mankind. Next we need consider
human evolution from a specific angle today. I will link these
to various things I have already mentioned recently and reach a
clear outcome.
I
have often referred to the importance of the time period in an
individual's development which co-insides with the change of
teeth around the seventh year of life. The change of teeth
indicates that certain forces present and active in the
organism up to this time no longer exercise their actions as is
the case up to the seventh year. From the moment the stage of
dentition begins or is taking place the human being goes into a
state of metamorphosis. What appears with the pushing out of
the second set of teeth is something which had been working in
the human body already. When they appear as if freed out of the
body then the appearance is by contrast more like a soul force.
We discover by researching this appearance, that up to the
seventh year a soul force is active within the human being and
to a certain extend finds its conclusive work done with the
change of teeth. When we develop the inclination and ability to
observe such things we will come to see how the child's entire
soul constitution is metamorphosed, how precisely from this
moment in life the ability arises to construct defined concepts
similar to the way other soul abilities occur. Where had these
soul qualities been before the change of teeth? They were in
the body and were active there. That which later would become
spiritual was working in the body.
Here we arrive at quite a different observation regarding the
cooperation between the soul-spiritual and the bodily aspects
in contrast to how they are depicted by abstract psychological
representations, which refers to a psycho-physical parallelism
or to an alternate interaction between soul and body. We arrive
at a true observation of what works in an important way during
the first seven years of the human organism. We gradually see
something which is hidden up to the moment it becomes freed to
work as a soul force. We only need to develop an ability to
observe such things to become aware how a certain process of
power gradually works into the bodily aspect during the first
seven years of life and how from this moment onwards reappear
as something soul-spiritual. Then we also realise what the
actual activity within the human body, at least in part, is
during the first seven years of life.
When we find ourselves in the condition in life which takes
place between falling asleep and waking, something happens
which I have just described, in two conditions following upon
one another in a meaningful way. We can also observe that a
child sleeps in a certain way which is different to the one he
or she will become after the change of teeth. It is as if the
difference is not apparent, but it is there. The child up to
his seventh year is in a state of sleep — a state in
which its soul is intrinsically within the state of falling
asleep and waking — unable to transmit the same forces
which he later sends as soul forces because these forces are
related to the physical, to the corporeal organism. As a result
the child doesn't send sharply outlined concepts into his state
of sleep. It sends very few sharply defined concepts and even
less outlined imaginations but these indistinct representations
have the peculiar ability to encompass the soul spiritual
reality in a better way than through sharply defined
representations.
This is something important, the sharper the outlines of our
concepts in daily life, the less these concepts are able to
enter our sleep condition, understanding realities from there.
As a result of this the child often in fact brings a particular
knowledge of spiritual reality out of its sleeping condition.
This ceases in the same way as I described in the forces being
freed during the change of teeth, sharply outlined concepts now
come to the fore and can influence sleep life. These sharply
outlined concepts subdue to a certain extent the view on
spiritual realities as we live between falling asleep and
waking.
What I have just said can be proved through supersensible sight
which develops the power I have often described which can be
found in my “Occult Science” and in my book
“Knowledge of the Higher Worlds.” When clairvoyant
sight attains the power of imagination, when each image
appears, as we know, as having a spiritual reality as
foundation, then we gradually come to behold spiritual
realities amidst the condition of sleeping and waking, and then
we can evaluate the difference between a child's sleep before
his seventh year and its sleep after turning seven. We can see
how to some extent insight is eased regarding what in our
imagination we have clarified regarding observation of
spiritual realities in whose proximity we are between falling
asleep and waking up.
When the change of teeth has come about, the development of
puberty starts within the soul element, which can be grasped to
a certain degree through imagination. Through simply
experiencing our imagination we can see what is forming in the
soul.
Man
acquires simply through the imaginative experience that which
is formed in the soul. The experience I have mentioned
regarding the conditions between falling asleep and waking is
only one of the experiences which can be made through
imaginative knowledge. Under these interesting conditions which
take place in the child between dentition and puberty, we see
how there is actually a strong struggle taking place in the
becoming of the human being. The fight to a certain extent in
this period of life is between the ether body and the astral
body which undergoes a particular transformation towards
puberty. When we consider the physical correlation
corresponding to this condition of a struggle, then we can say
that it's during this period of the child's life when there is
a struggle between growing forces and those forces which appear
through physical inspiration, through breathing. This is a very
important process in inner development, a process which has to
be studied time and again. A part of what becomes freed up for
the soul during dentition, are growing forces. Of course a
considerable part of these growing forces remain in the body
and see to growth, while a part of this is freed during
dentition and come to the fore as soul forces.
The
growing forces working on in the child resists against what
appears essentially in the respiratory process. What now
appears in the breathing process could not essentially appear
before. The respiratory process is certainly present in the
child but as long as it has the forces rising from dentition,
so long will nothing in the child happen which is actually as
striking, as meaningful as what later takes place between
breathing and the physical body. The greatest part of our
development depends upon the breathing process. As a result
Oriental exercises focus particularly on the breathing process
while the human beings who live into the breathing exercises
actually come into contact with their inner organisation,
brings physicality into an inner movement which is related to
perception of the spiritual world.
As
we said, before the start of dentition, what breathing actually
wants to affect in us fails to become active in the body. Now
the battle starts between the growing forces retained in the
body against the forces penetrating through the breathing
processes. The first meaningful process appearing as a result
of the physical breathing processes is puberty.
This connection between breathing and puberty is not yet being
examined by science. It is, however, definitely present. We
actually breathe in what brings on puberty, which also gives us
the further opportunity to step into a relationship in the
widest sense between the world and loving surroundings. We
actually breathe this in. In every process of nature there's
also a spiritual process. In the breathing process exists not
only the spiritual but also the soul spiritual. This soul
spiritual process permeates us through breathing. It can only
penetrate when the forces have become ensouled, forces which
formerly worked up to the change of teeth and stopped at this
point. What wanted to stream in through the breathing process
can now take place.
However, again they come into opposition — a war —
of what comes out of the growing processes and what is still a
growth process, coming from ether forces in other words. This
war is evident between the ether forces rising from the ether
body and their correlation found in the material, in the
metabolism and blood circulation as astral forces. Here the
metabolic system plays into the rhythmic system. We can
schematically say: we have our metabolic system but this plays
into our blood rhythm; the metabolic system I depict here in
white (weiß) and the circulation system playing
into it: red (rot) in the drawing. This is what streams
from the ether body upwards between the ages of seven to
fourteen.
The
astral body works against it. We have the inward streaming of
the rhythmical in the physical correlation which comes from
breathing and the war takes place between the blood circulation
and the breathing rhythms in blue (blau). This is what
is happening in that period of life.
To
speak somewhat vividly in perhaps a radical image: between
about the ninth and the tenth year in the life of every child,
what had been planned before and appeared as skirmishes before
the actual main battle, now goes over into the main battle. The
astral and ether bodies direct their chief attack during the
ninth and tenth year of life.
As
a result this period in time is so important for educators to
observe. It is simply so, that teachers, educators and
instructors need to give their full attention to something
— which may appear differently in nearly each person
— taking place in this moment in time.
Here something exceptional can be seen in each child. Some
temperamental qualities move into an evident metamorphosis.
Marked ideas appear. Above all this is the moment in time where
one could start — while before it had been good to not
let the child distinguish between the Ego (Ich) and the outer
world — allowing this distinction between the Ego and the
outer world to come to the fore. While it had been preferable
before to use fairy tale imagery to the child, how processes of
nature were like human processes, by personifying and
clarifying, now the child may be educated about nature in a
more instructive manner.
Stories of nature, even in their most elementary forms, should
actually only from this moment be presented to the child
because the child, as it starts with its first period of life,
feels its Ego clearly, while it had just sensed its Ego before.
This is a clearly outlined concept, a more or less sharply
outlined term linked to the Ego which appears at this time. The
child first learns at this moment to really distinguish itself
from the surroundings. This corresponds to a definite counter
streaming of the breathing rhythm with the circulatory rhythm,
the astral and the ether bodies.
There are two sides to this within the human being. On the one
side it is present in the condition between waking up and
falling asleep. For this state I have just made indications. In
the condition between falling asleep and waking, something
different presents itself. When we have made progress in
Imagination and developed Inspiration somewhat, we may evaluate
what happens through Inspiration during the breathing process
which has its physical correlation, we discover only at this
moment in time — for one child it will be a little
earlier, for another a bit later but on average between nine
and ten — there is a liberation of the I and the astral
body from the physical body during sleep. The child namely
becomes intimately connected with his physical and etheric
bodies even during asleep. From this time the I lights up as an
individual being when actually the I and astral body are not
participants of the functions of the ether and physical
bodies.
If
a child dies before this moment when life had led it up to its
fifth, sixth and even into its eighth, ninth year, it still has
something which hasn't separated much from the soul spiritual
world which is experienced between death and a new birth; so
that children relatively easily are pulled back into the soul
spiritual world and to some extent only attach something to
life which they completed with conception or birth, that an
actual cutting off from a new life, if we consider this kind of
death, is only really there when children die after this point.
Their connection to a certain extent to a new life will be less
intensive than the life before. Here clearly conditions are
experienced as I've described in “Theosophy” where
children who have died earlier are thrown back and then piece
life together from what they experience to the life they had
led up to their conception or up to birth. One should even say:
what we have before us in the child up to the time between his
ninth and tenth year of life shows there is much less
separation between the soul-physical and the soul-spiritual
than in the later human being. Later a person is much more of a
dualistic being than the child. The child has the
soul-spiritual incorporated into his body and this works into
the body. As a duality the soul-spiritual appears opposite the
bodily soul element only after this illustrated time. One
should say: from this moment the soul-spiritual is less
concerned by the bodily element than it had been concerned
before. The child as a bodily being is far more of a soul being
than the older person. The body of the child is even permeated
by the soul forces of growth because it still retains soulful
forces even when the largest part of dentition has taken
place.
Thus we can say that this battle I have depicted calms down
gradually from about the twelfth year onwards and with sexual
maturity the astral body takes its full entitlement in the
human constitution. That which loosens itself from the human
being, which to some extent now is less concerned with the
physical is that which the human being takes again with him or
her through the gate of death on dying. As we've said, the
child in its earlier years is more thrown back to its former
life; human beings after this period in time are separated from
their former life. What is released here holds within it a seed
which allows it to pass through the gate of death. One can
really penetrate these things with imaginative knowledge and
one can discern particularities precisely. One can point out
how the forces rising here lead to sharply defined concepts
— which however diminish spiritual
realities in whose presence
we are during sleep — and make the human
being into an independent being.
As a result of the human being cutting
off, diminishing the spiritual realities, the human being again becomes
the spirit amongst spirits who he must be when he goes through
the gate of death. The child always slips, I might say, into
spiritual realities; the later human being detaches himself
from these spiritual realities and becomes consistent in
himself. Admittedly, what becomes consistent can only be seen
clearly with imaginative and inspired knowledge, but it does
exist in people. This process happens anyhow, as I've indicated
yesterday. When human beings don't allow spiritual science to
work on them, then it is already so: what is released
— particularly during this age in which we receive such
materialistic concepts and intellectual ideas, where already at
school intellectualism and materialism are imported, because
our school subjects are presented materialistically
— what is
released here is organised in an ahrimanic direction. Because
we are asleep in our will even during the day, what becomes
released here are trapped by our instincts. We educate
ourselves in order to master our instinctive lives by
absorbing spiritual scientific concepts.
Intellectuals, materialists or sensualist
have an opinion about these concepts, they say these spiritual
scientific concepts are fantasy, there's nothing real in them
compared with reality. What they mean with
“reality” is only what can be perceived by the senses. This is
not what is meant by these concepts at all. Everything
which appears as concepts in my “spiritual science”
does not refer to the outer sense world, it wants to describe
the supersensible world. Should these concepts be accepted
thus, then they are taken up in a supersensible way even though
one can't yet see into the supersensible. Concepts are taken up
which are suitable for the supersensible world and not
applicable to the senses, physical world, and one thus breaks
free from the physical sensory world, in other words,
instincts.
This education however is necessary in the human race; without
it humankind will enter more and more into social chaos. The
actual results — it is like I said yesterday — the
actual results of intellectualism and materialism in science,
the actual outcome of our present day scientific leaning is a
social condition which is chaotic and rising in such an
alarming manner in Eastern Europe.
As
I said, with logic you can't derive Bolshevism from Bergson's
philosophy or from Machsher Avenarius's philosophy; but plain
logic brings you closer to deriving it. This is something which
present day mankind must look at clearly; dualism has developed
in the last centuries between nature observation and the moral
world of ideas. On the one side we have the observation of
nature which only works with the necessity, as I've often
pointed out, to being strictly exact and wanting to link
everything to definite connections and causalities. This kind
of nature observation creates a worldly structure, builds
hypotheses about the beginning and the end of the earth.
Here you stand before what the human being experiences in
religious and moral ideas. This is completely torn away from
what lives in the observation of nature. This is why people
strive so hard to justify the moral-religious content through
mere faith. The moral-religious content has been elevated to a
system whose content must stand for itself which to some extent
should not be allowed to be ruined by anything else, like how
outer nature is described, what a person may feel, how the one
influences the other. Our present day nature observation, as it
exists in its newest phase, where optics and electrodynamics
merge, draws by necessity the imagination of the death of
warmth to itself. Then the earth with all its people and
animals will die and then no human soul will develop despite
all its moral ideals. This earth's demise is ensured by the Law
of Conservation of Matter, of the Conservation of Energy:
through this Law of the Conservation Of Energy the result is
the death of the earth, the death of all human souls just like
materialists consider the death of the soul as connected to the
death of the human body. Only when we are absolutely clear in
our mind that what lives in us as morality, what permeates us
as religious ideas, form a seed within us, a seed containing a
reality, just as the seed of a plant unfolds into a plant the
following year, only then can we know that the start of this
seed is for a future natural existence and that the earth with
everything it contains, visible, audible, perceptible to our
senses, does not depend on the law of conservation of energy
but that it dies, falls away from all human souls who then
carry the moral ideals through as new natural events, into the
Jupiter-, Venus-, and Vulcan existence; only when we are clear
that Heaven and Earth will perish but My word, the Logos, which
develops in the human soul, will not perish — when we are
clear, literally clear about these words, only then can we
speak of moral and religious content of our human souls.
Otherwise it is dishonest. Otherwise we put to a certain extent
morality in the world and adhere to another certainty than the
natural certainty. If we are clear in our minds that the words
of Christ are true, that a cosmos originates from morality,
wrested free from the death shroud when this cosmos
disintegrates, then we have a world view which indicates
morality and naturalness in its metamorphosis.
This is essentially what must penetrate present day humanity
because with the schooling of natural thinking developed over
the last decades, it is impossible to also accomplish the most
essential social concepts which we need. Something must live in
the social concepts which recognise morality at the same time
in its cosmic implications. The human being must once again
learn that he or she is a cosmic being. Earlier the social
affairs which needed to be organized on the earth round was not
understood; before it had been acknowledged that human beings
are connected with cosmic intentions, with cosmic entities.
This is what is felt by people in our age who experience the
whole tragedy in their souls, who have come from the abyss
between the natural scientific notion and the moral view which
we have. Probably only a few slightly sense the implications of
this abyss, but it must be crossed over — to say this
literally: “Heaven and Earth will perish but my Word will
not perish.” This means, what sprouts in the human soul
will enfold, just as the earth will perish.
One
can't be an avid supporter of the Law of Conservation of Energy
and believe at the same time that the moral world indicates
eternity. Only to the degree with which courage is found to
establish and view the world through the view of nature, will a
way be found out of this chaos of the present. This way out can
only be found when human beings decide, once again, but now
fully conscious, to revert back to that wisdom which once was
experienced in the old mysteries in an instinctive way. If
humanity makes the decision to consciously penetrate the
spiritual world it is an objective possibility, my dear
friends. Since the end of the 19th Century a wave
from the spiritual world wants to enter our physical world. I
could say, it storms in, it is there. Mankind only needs to
open their hearts and their senses, and human hearts and human
souls will be spoken to. The spiritual world has good
intentions, but humanity is still resisting. What was
experienced in the second decades of the 20th
Century in such a terribly way, ultimately is the bracing of
humanity against the inward thrusting wave from the spiritual
world. However one could say, it is at its worst, just where
scientific minds turn against the streaming in from the
spiritual worlds. One should not however, once materialistic
and intellectual thinking habits have been withdrawn, now
introduce some sort of form which would rule, which could be
acquired from the spiritual world.
In
relation to this the intellectual-materialistic wave it had its
peak, its impact in the second half of the 19th
Century. Obviously materialism prepared this long in advance. I
have repeatedly referred to its actual worldly historic
beginning: what lived in Hellenism as materialism was only a
prelude, somewhat in Democritus and in change. Its world
historical importance only gradually developed from the
15th Century. It developed slowly, certainly, but it
still, when the actual dogmatic tradition was relinquished, I
might say, allowed a feeling for a spiritual world's existence
within the physical, that the spiritual world can be grasped
but not registered through mere intellectual gestures.
Today some who do not see the essence of it, point out with a
certain nostalgia to not that far back in time, positivism and
materialistic thoughts actually shamed the human being who was
regarded as completely inhuman. After that, basically only in
the second half of the 19th Century they came to
view humankind as completely inhuman, wiping out the
specifically human. Thus they avenged themselves by claiming
that the human being had thoroughly educated itself in a
relatively total abstract way of thinking, as it appeared in
the renewed version of the Theory of Relativity. As a result it
is always interesting and one should take responsibility for
it, that there are still singular minds who refer back to the
time when even materialistically orientated minds considered
that anything pertaining to people should be dealt with through
the mind.
Certainly, a thoroughly intellectual and positivistic mind was
Auguste Comte but he wasn't alive in the end of the
19th Century when people were completely excluded
from human observation even though, where intellectualism and
materialism only became external nature's concepts — but
only the outer nature concept, where a human being no longer
considered his own humanity in relation to it, that even his
own human qualities were thought of as being in the images of
nature. Thus it is interesting if we can read what the English
thinker Frederick Harrison, briefly wrote about Auguste
Comte. He said: I'm thinking about a concise remark by Auguste
Comte which he made more than sixty years ago. Auguste Comte,
the positivist, the intellectualist who was still somewhat
touched by the spirituality of olden times, already saw that in
the future the human being will be completely omitted. Despite
his positivism, despite his intellectualism it displeased him
to what he referred to and what he had been creating, which
only came about in the last third of the 19th
Century so he hadn't seen it: our modern doctors, said Comte,
appear to be essentially animal doctors. He meant, so Harrison
continues, that they often, more particularly with women, are
treated like horses or cows.
Comte stressed that an illness should be observed from more
than one side, that it contains a spiritual element and
occasionally even a prominent kind of spiritual element, thus
the human doctor should just as much be a philosopher of the
soul as an anatomist is to the body. He claimed that true
medication would have two sides. From this basis —
Harrison adds — he would reject Freudian one sidedness.
Harrison continues — how this Comtian point of view has
developed further and how people have gradually degenerated to
the point of view where people are treated like horses and cows
and how this has gradually made human doctors into animal
doctors. Everything is relative — this is already
contained in the kernel of the theory of relativity. The main
teaching of Auguste Comte had a better basis and a more
thorough philosophical depth and life than Einstein, he
said. — It is always refreshing when one can still today
hear such a statement, because we live in the age where the
scientific mind opposes everything which comes from a spiritual
side, namely what wants to transport the mind in human life, in
human action and particularly in important areas such a medical
activities.
If
we ask ourselves: what is it then, which makes materialism and
intellectualism so attractive for today's science? Look for
yourself how things are taking place. Consider how our
education is set up to hardly involve the teachers in the
child's whole organization. The teacher is far too comfortable,
and has personally been raised far too comfortably to really
delve into the intricacies of child development, like I have
depicted today again. Such things would rather not be bothered
with — because what would be required? It would call for
not shying away from every transition in daily life while
living a delusion, to a life which is quite different, where
our knowledge becomes reality.
This transformation of people, this otherness, this change
pertaining to knowledge is shied away from today; people do not
want it. People want to comfortably rise to higher truths which
can only be the highest abstractions because to reach
abstraction can be done with a certain comfort. This way no
inner changes are needed in order to reach it. However, to come
to a real life content, how it forms the basis of our outer
sensory content, can't be attained when at least concepts
aren't changed which have no significance for ordinary sense
life, whose meaning one can only penetrate with a power coming
from within and working outward. People are put into life which
also stretches into the supersensible world, and in our age it
relies on this supersensible world being elucidated in a
healthy way. When I said yesterday that the
materialistic-intellectual point of view doesn't just include a
few scientifically educated people, even with a scientific
education, but that they are popular beliefs in the simplest
people still connected to ancient beliefs, then it must be
said: it is urgent and necessary that whatever flows into our
overall life in popular form should also contain information of
the spiritual world.
Presently overall characteristic attributes can be found
everywhere where the effort is made to introduce
Anthroposophical spiritual science into areas of life. In
medicine, in religion, the social life, everywhere the
introduction of anything non-sectarian should be made:
Anthroposophically orientated spiritual science, which comes to
the fore with the same scientific earnest with which it had
been introduced since the middle of the 15 Century as
scientific, is to be fully recognized.
When a child has grown up and has had the luck to have
undergone some higher learning, what becomes apparent today?
These young people, doctors, theologians, philologists,
lawyers, will not become anything else; they will not be
converted but stay as they are and only accept abstractions
applicable to their science. If an attempt is made to offer
them some knowledge of the world then they immediately withdraw
particularly into this comfortable life of abstraction in which
they desire to continue living — but which is leading
towards chaos. Thus we can observe an interesting symptom
arising which I want to single out. On occasion where the
Nurnberg main preacher Geyer held seemingly many
lectures at various places, it can be noticed: here people
suspect, mainly scientific people suspect that an attempt is
being made to introduce Anthroposophically orientated spiritual
science into their lives. This the people don't want. Even well
minded people don't want it. They sense that here they must
re-adjust their views in relation to their entire scientific
orientation, here they must think quite differently about their
own basic beliefs. As a result when something appears which
challenges their own basic beliefs, they revert to their
comfortable abstract criticism. So we discover already at the
start of the Geyer lectures a quote by the topmost Medicinal
Council psychiatrist Kolb, director of the mental
hospital and nursing institution in Erlangen, but also a person
who should be able to greet with inner satisfaction and joy
anything available in this area where spiritual science can
fruitfully bring clarification into the psychological areas and
is fruitfully elucidated.
Spiritual science goes along a healthy path while the
psychiatrist follows it in a morbid way. Psychiatry can only
become healthy if it is enlightened in all areas, in all its
details if it is based in the healthy manner of
anthroposophical spiritual science. Through this the
psychiatrist should rise up, letting his psychiatry be
permeated by spiritual science; because this psychiatry has
basically become nothing other than psycho-pathology. This is a
terrible thing at the present — this psychiatry. What
does the psychiatrist do? He doesn't sense how the rays of
light which can come to him through anthroposophical spiritual
science can clarify psychiatry. Instead, he positions spiritual
science as he does psychiatry at present that means, he uses
the same measure for both. Even if he means well by doing so it
becomes something extraordinarily interesting because we can
compare it to looking at our faces in a garden mirror ball
— if you have a pretty face you will still see the
beauty, but it is broken up in squares. Naturally spiritual
science will thus appear checkered if it is opposed in full
force even by someone with good intentions. It is always
interesting to read a bit of what Dr Kolb, the principal
medical psychiatrist, always meaning well, has to say:
“The famous Anthroposophist Rudolf Steiner I see
...” excuse me, I must read this — “a genial
but extraordinarily imbalanced personality with some
understandable striking traits according to psychiatric
knowledge. The principal preacher Geyer from Nurnberg appears
to base his teachings on Steiner. I have twice heard a public
lecture like this from many highly respected clergy. The
lecture as a piece of art, was charming. I would consider it an
atrocity to pick this blue flower of poetry, which was served
so gracefully, and the blue haze” — the blue
appears to be less critical than the haze — “in
which he brings us closer to Steiner's painted age clouded by
critical colour. Now as psychiatrist I must say: the
`clairvoyance' of Steiner is nothing other than ordinary
thinking which is influenced by a kind of self-hypnosis when a
genial and what I would like to accept as...” —
after this it becomes quite different! — “an
ethically high-standing personality with glowing scientific and
general education, highly informed about the present
religious-philosophic teachings, as Steiner is, to some extent
see into your brain and offer the content of the brain as
`Anthroposophy,' yet amongst a multitude of fantastic traits
much which is good, noble and morally high standing, perhaps
isolated valuable scientific thoughts can be found.”
Now
I ask you, just listen to this: ordinary thinking, influenced
by Anthroposophy, sees into the brain and what is seen in the
brain, is presented as Anthroposophy! Please, take this genial
quote from this psychiatrist: therefore everything perceived by
looking into the brain is also a bit influenced by auto
suggestions!
“When however his teaching up to now are thrown to be
people from the pulpit, then fewer genial people, without
previous training, will preach about the marvelling products of
his `clairvoyance.'”
They have actually done quite well, these untrained people! It
is in fact as if this psychiatrist, whose anthroposophical
thoughts are influenced by auto-hypnosis which he sees in the
brain, actually lives completely outside the actual world.
“As occultism is similar to communism with a fatal
attraction on the mentally weak, on immature youth, the
prematurely old aged, on dreamers, on hysterics, above all on
psychopaths, the insecure, the sick liars and swindlers, so we
will experience that demoralized through war, death and misery
and worry about the future we have become susceptible for the
rise of `Prophets' similar to those historical deeds of the
Munster Anabaptists we read with horror. The Catholic church is
greatly merited by rejecting Steiner with complete lucidity and
sharpness.” This `lucidity and sharpness' you read near a
living person here! — “and I would like as
Protestant to ask every single spiritual Protestant heartily,
to test the danger of the demise of our church into a dreary
and dangerous sect before it becomes a dangerous temptation of
ideally orientated Christians with pathological traits strongly
recommending Steiner's teachings.”
This lesson was received by the principal preacher Geyer from
the topmost Medicinal Council psychiatrist Dr Gustav Kolb,
director of the mental hospital and nursing institution in
Erlangen.
You
see how the state of mind of a person is constituted who has
completely accepted the thinking habits of the modern
scientific spirit. Please, just consider for a bit, just for my
sake meditate over what appears when a person, instead of
directing his gaze to the outer world, directs himself through
Imagination, Inspiration and Intuition and brings sharply into
focus what is in my `occult science,' letting this gaze turn
inward and depict the human brain, as if influenced by auto
hypnosis. Isn't it true that what the psychiatrist is
describing is madness! This depiction actually rises from a
psychiatric base! Yet one must say that such a man as Gustav
Kolb is well meaning and discovers that the blue haze should
not be dissected by other critical colours; because he finds it
barbaric to oppose the blue flower introduced by the priest
Geyer. So from the one side he is even benevolent but he is
really a typical representative of modern science.
This is the situation which can definitely be hoped for and
expected from by modern science towards anthroposophically
orientated science. Therefore it must always be mentioned that
active, spiritual science orientated collaborators are needed,
in every shop, found on every corner, who are revealed in this
way and then drawn into the right light in which they are moved
when there is a reference to, first of all, present day science
being unable to be different from what it is, and secondly:
brain instead of Anthroposophy.
Really, we must free ourselves from preconceived ideas in order
to make it possible today, to convince the occasional person
permeated by these modern scientific habits, to change. The joy
several of our short minded followers often have that the
occasional person can be converted, is a misplaced joy. It is
concerned with unprejudiced humanity being penetrated by what
anthroposophic spiritual science offers and then grimly facing
the characteristics of modern science where it turns into
nonsense, even when well meant. We are confronted today with
immense seriousness. Therefore it must ever and again be
stressed that at least among us many who sense this earnestness
must rise instead of merely sitting and listening for a bit
with the pleasure of hearing anthroposophic truths, but should
rather want to permeate anthroposophic orientated spiritual
science into every part of active life and also have the
courage and energy to step forward where it is needed. I draw
your attention repeatedly to what opposes spiritual science,
with all the possible grotesque, ridiculous, deceitful and
good-natured impotent forms it assumes. The battle which is
fought against this, is even more sparse. It has to be done for
the salvation of the further evolution of humanity. Healing
must come through the modern spirit of science — as you
know, where it is entitled, it is also appreciated by spiritual
science — because it wants to set itself up in those
areas of which it understands nothing, making it sick.
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