The
Knowledge of Soul and Spirit
Berlin, 24 October 1907
The whole cycle of these talks is dedicated
to the knowledge of spirit, and if one wants to speak about the
knowledge of spirit and soul, this happens, because we can come
to an understanding with each other about the concept of the
spirit relating it to the concept of the soul. Since for those
who deal with spiritual science it is especially annoying that
one mixes up the concepts “soul” and
“spirit” considering the human being.
You all probably know
that we have a so-called psychology or soul science that is
today conducted to a relatively high degree just like in
school. In the schedules of lectures at the universities, you
find lectures on psychology that is literally the doctrine of
the soul. One has to note that with all people who talk of
psychology or soul science in such a way no distinct
consciousness exists of the fact that one has to speak of soul
and mind with the human being. One summarises the human inner
life — thinking, feeling, and willing — under the concept of
the soul. Soul is almost considered as the contrast to the
bodily and physical, and one says — if one deigns generally to
such a thing, if one is not completely addicted to the
materialistic way of thinking — the human being consists of
body and soul.
At first, we want to
regard those opinions only that have the point of view that the
soul is a real being. If one says that the human being consists
of body and soul, one is mostly not aware of the fact that one
falls a victim to dogmatics that relatively late, in the course
of the Christian development originated. Even the older
Christianity that has still gone out from the teachings of
wisdom distinguished, as all teachings of wisdom of the
different times and people did, body, soul and mind of the
human being. Only later decisions of Councils have abolished,
so to speak, the mind, and only since the (fourth) Council of
Constantinople (869/870), one speaks of body and soul. The
modern scholarship which deals with such a thing which thinks
not materialistically believes to stand on the ground of
absolutely free research and has no idea that it has taken up
this later Christian concept of the soul, which refrains from
the mind, as a prejudice, as a preconceived opinion. This
applies to many concepts generally which play a role in our
scholarship and are accepted as if they were results of
research, while they signify only an ancient
prejudice.
We will now have a look
at the general psychology in the most different directions.
However, I do not criticise here, but only characterise.
Psychology has suffered — we are allowed to state this — mostly
and most thoroughly from the materialistic attitude and way of
thinking. Not only the outer science of the sensory phenomena
has lost the concept of mind gradually, but also psychology has
even lost the concept of soul, that is its own object. The
cultural life went through an interesting development
there.
A daring researcher and
thinker who performed many quite extraordinary things in some
fields had the courage to pronounce what is, so to speak, only
a basic attitude and basic sensation within the modern psychology
with others. This daring thinker was Friedrich Albert Lange
(1828–1875, German philosopher). You can buy cheap his
History of Materialism
(1866) from Reclam's
Universal Library. It is an excellent book because just someone
who studies it thoroughly must come to the conviction — I have
explained it in the last talk — that materialism as a worldview
is to be compared to a man who draws himself upwards with his
own shock of hair. This Friedrich Albert Lange has pronounced
in relation to psychology something that can be summarised in
three words: “psychology without soul.” This is
from Friedrich Albert Lange. Other researchers did not dare to
pronounce this consequence; but they act and do psychological
research in such a way, as if a concept of the soul did not
concern them. Also today, you find all kinds of concepts about
the soul in the most famous works of the academic psychology.
However, if you want to get to know something about the soul,
you ask for advice in vain, because this psychology has lost —
this should be no criticism, but only a characteristic — the
concept of the soul completely even if this is not always
pronounced. Whether you ask advice from Wundt (Wilhelm W.,
1832–1920, German physiologist, psychologist, philosopher) or
another about those questions in which the human beings are
interested concerning the soul life, you nowhere get
information. You find all kinds of questions answered about the
way in which the human being perceives objects in his
surroundings. You also find all kinds of speculations about the
relation of perception to consciousness.
For example, one asks,
how long does it last, until the human being becomes aware of
it, after he has received a stimulus? You find questions about
attention, questions in which way the human being judges in
which way he compares the things with each other, how he
remembers and so on. However, who could deny that the
impartially feeling soul — in the usual sense — if it asks for
its own being has in mind above all: what is the nature of my
soul? Does it share the fate of the physical to disintegrate
and to end if death occurs? Does it only take share in the life
of the sensuous surroundings or does it take share in a far
higher one, in an extrasensory life that does not wear out
itself in the physical world? You will search these questions
in vain, which are vital matters for the human being in the
modern psychology even as questions. Everything in the human
life points to them; but if the real nature of the soul is
considered, one says, this goes beyond the limits of human
knowledge.
If you have a little bit
patience and have a look at such psychology, you become aware
of the fact that it applies quite the same methods of research
as the natural sciences. If one applies these methods, just
nothing else can result than what faces us in this
psychological literature. More than in any other field it
concerns in the soul research who does these researches. Where
one thinks materialistically, one has come more and more to the
conviction that the research results can be only of the kind
that they face everybody from the outside. Who does understand
the sense of the nice Goethean saying completely and thoroughly
still today?
Unless the eye were like the sun,
How could we see the light?
Unless God's own strength were in us,
How could delight us the divine?
Nothing faces us in the outside world if we
are not related to the concerning thing or being or to the
concerning force in the outside world if we do not carry
something related in ourselves. Thus, only someone can
investigate the soul who searches something beyond his self
that he has experienced in himself. Not everybody — this must
be stressed in particular in relation to psychology — can be a
psychologist; for the human being notices only so much of the
secrets of the other souls as he has experienced in
himself.
Spiritual science deals
with the spirit as such, as we said at the beginning. All the
talks are dedicated to the consideration of the spirit.
Howsoever the titles are called in detail, the spirit has to be
searched everywhere. As it arises already from the talk, which
I have held two weeks ago here, spiritual science has to show
that behind everything that faces us the spirit lives and
works.
What is matter to
spiritual science? It is only another form of the spirit. If
spiritual science speaks of matter, material, and body, it
speaks of it in such a way as it speaks of ice and water. Ice
is water in another form. Now, however, somebody could come and
say, then spiritual science denies the matter and corporeality
if it asserts that everything is spirit — and then there is no
matter for spiritual science. Spiritual science stands on this
weird point of view by no means. We remain with our comparison
of ice and water. What come into consideration for life are not
empty words, not empty definitions, but effects that you meet
in life. Even if one says, ice is water in another form — and
one is right with it completely-, are, nevertheless, the
effects of the water different from those of ice as everybody
can perceive if he puts a piece of ice on his hand instead of
pouring water on it.
Someone who wanted to
deny that ice is water in another form would make a fool of
himself. Thus, spiritual science does not dream of denying the
matter. It exists; it is only spirit in another form. In which
form? In the form, that one can observe it from the outside by
the senses. These are the essentials of matter. This talk links
to the talk eight days ago where we could show how any
materialistic view disintegrates into nothing before the
progress of the natural sciences as the fantastic concept of
the matter dissolves in smoke and fog due to the new
researches. Concepts like ether, matter scatter today in light
of the other researches. What remains to us of that which
approaches us in the outside world? What we see and hear, tone,
colour, warmth et cetera: what we perceive. We should soar the
view that behind the warmth, behind the tone, behind the light
nothing is of this terribly crude whirl of atoms that was the
only real during the long time of materialism. Real is in this
sense what we see what we hear what we feel as warmth. If we
look behind the colour, behind the tone, behind the warmth, as
we feel it, what do we find behind them? We find behind them if
we take the tone, as long as it remains in the sensuous world,
moved air. However, we are not allowed to go behind the
sensuous world with our speculations. We have to stop in the
sensory world. Someone pronounced something most important whom
the scholars did not take seriously, who was not only a poet
but also a great thinker: “Never search anything behind
the phenomena; they themselves are the
teachings.”
If we go behind the tone,
behind the light, we do not find material atoms that dive into
our retina, which impregnate it and create the mental picture
of the colour and the light. If we really look behind, what do
we find there? — Spirit! Colour relates to the spirit like ice
to water. Tone relates to the spirit like ice to water. Instead
of that fantastic world of whirling atoms the true thinker and
spiritual researcher finds spirit, spiritual reality behind
that what he sees and hears, so that the question of the nature
of matter loses all sense. For how does the question of the
nature of matter answer itself for the spiritual researcher?
What surrounds us outdoors in the world and appears to us as
matter? It is spirit! We know the spirit! We must visit its
nature in ourselves. What we are in our innermost being, these
are all things outdoors in the world, only in other forms. They
are it in such form that one can look at them from the outside
if the spirit gives itself a surface. Let me pronounce
something that every scientist regards as madness: if the
spirit goes outwardly, he appears as colour, tone. Nothing else
is colour and tone than spirit; it is completely the same what
we find in ourselves if we properly understand each other.
Thus, every mineral is spirit to us in spiritual science. The
true being of the lowest member of the human being, the
physical body, is spirit for us in the form in which it exists
just also in the apparently lifeless nature.
In what way does the
human spirit differ from the spirit that faces us outdoors as
mineral and plant, as mountain, as thunder and flash, as trees
and bodies of water et cetera? By the fact that this spirit in
the narrower sense appears as mind in its very own figure, in
the figure that is due to itself as mind. What one normally
calls nature, indeed, is spirit, but spirit, which turns its
outside to the senses, and what one calls spirit or mind in the
narrower sense, is exactly the same. According to its form,
nature is what turns to the core of our being.
If we search the spirit outdoors in nature,
we find it lifeless in the minerals, animated in the plants and
feeling in the animals. The human being combines this triple
figure of the spirit in himself in three members of his being,
as we know them from the point of view of spiritual science.
Thereby only, you come to a real knowledge of the human being
that you look at his complex nature and are not content with
the abstract differentiation between body and soul, but ask
yourselves, how is the human being built up?
At first spiritual
science distinguishes the physical body of the human being that
he has in common as materials and forces with the entire
so-called lifeless nature. In the physical body of the human
being are the same materials and forces that we find outdoors
in the mineral world. However, he has a second member, which we
call etheric body or life body. If we speak of ether, it has
nothing to do with the fantastic ether that has played a role
in science so long and that one will dethrone in the next time.
In relation to the etheric body, we cannot get involved in the
methods of the higher beholding. However, we understand the
etheric body best of all saying: if we take a plant, an animal,
the human being, the physical body has the same materials and
forces, but in an endlessly complex mixture and variety, so
that these materials cannot form the physical body by
themselves. No plant body can be what it is by the physical
forces, no animal body, and no human body. There is the
complication, the variety of the mixture that would make the
body destroy if it were left to its own physical and chemical
forces. At every moment of life, its so-called etheric body or
life body works against the decay of the physical body. A
permanent struggle takes place in it. At the moment of death
when the etheric body or life body separates from the physical
body, the materials and forces of the physical body follow
their own principles. Hence, spiritual science says, the
physical body is physically and chemically an impossible
mixture, it cannot survive. The etheric body is that which
struggles against the decay of the physical body
permanently.
The third member of the
human being is that which we have often called the bearer of
desire and pain, of joy and grief, of instincts and passions.
If the life starts becoming internal, then we start in
spiritual science speaking of an astral body. This is the third
member of the human being and of the animal.
Today one has such an
unclear concept of that what constitutes the single being that
certain researchers cannot make a distinction between an animal
and a plant. Of course, there are transitions; but they do not
interest us here. You can read in the popular works that are
otherwise very meritorious that the plant shows the same
manifestations as an animal or a human being, and one talks
there about a “plant soul” in the usual sense. One
confuses the animal soul and the human soul with simple
manifestations of life in the plant. When do we speak of an
animal or human soul or of an astral body? If to the outer
appearance inner life, inner experience is added. It depends on
the inside. If you see a plant, if you touch it, and it
contracts its leaves, a stimulus is exercised on the plant, and
this shows a certain response to this stimulus. Calling this
answer a soul manifestation is the most unbelievable
dilettantism. One is not allowed to speak already of soul or
astral body if any counter-effect takes place; otherwise, you
must also attribute a soul to the litmus paper if it turns red
in the acid. It does not depend on any outer reaction, but on
the fact, whether anything happens inside of such a
being.
If you push a being and
it shows a change of form or, otherwise, any outer reaction,
you may call that a manifestation of life. However, talking of
sensation or soul in this case means to turn all concepts
upside down. One can speak of soul or astral body only if to
that what goes forward outside a new event, a new fact is added
inside if because of a push or pressure pain or because of
another stimulus joy is experienced. The outer manifestations
do not make a being a soul being, but the processes which it
experiences in its inside. Only where sensation starts where
life itself is transformed internally into joy and sorrow where
any object outdoors not only exercises an attraction on any
being, but where inside of the being an experience appears in
relation to the outer object, only there we can speak of soul
or astral body. If a plant twines spirally round a rod, an
effect responds to the stimulus, it is a manifestation of life.
Even if it seems with some plants that — if you bring a finger
in their nearness — it follows the finger and not the rod, you
are not concerned with an inner process. It can be talk of such
a thing only if a desire inside of the being exists and it
follows the stimulus because of this influence. He who does not
distinguish these matters strictly is incapable to rise to the
concept of the soul, the astral body. The human being has this
in common with the animals, however, not with the
plants.
Then we have, as often
mentioned, the fourth member by which the human being
experiences something in himself that makes him the crown of
the earth creation, that what we call “I” or ego.
It is an exceptionally important matter for any knowledge to
recognise this ego in its nature. In former talks, I have drawn
your attention to the fact that there is in our entire language
only one word, one name that differs from all other names. You
can call any other object with its name, the clock, the table,
the notebook. You cannot call that in such a way that is the
“I” with its name. Try to say “I” to
another being! You can say I only to yourselves. Any being is
“you” for the other, and for any being is the other
“you.” Should the name I be pronounced, this name
must sound from the core of the being. The religions that were
based on spiritual science felt this too, and, therefore, said
correctly: here the divinity speaks the first tone, the first
word in the human soul in its very own figure, and thus the
expression for the ego was something holy for them. They called
it the ineffable name of God. What the Hebrew religious
doctrine called with the expression Yahveh is nothing else than
for the ego which calls itself. This is the fourth member of
the human being.
Considering this
four-membered being — physical body, etheric body, astral body
and ego — we have to say: with these four members, which no
other being has on earth than the human being, everybody faces
us, the uneducated savage and the high developed human being.
In what way do the individual human beings differ on earth, if
they all have four members? This is because the one has worked
more, the other less on his three members from his ego. If we
compare the savage who follows any desire, any passion with a
high-minded moralist who has pure holy moral concepts and
follows these who only accepts that of his desires and passions
to which the mind is able to say “yes.” In which
way do both differ? By the fact that the high-minded man worked
on his astral body from his ego. The uneducated savage has
worked less on his astral body; he has it still in such a form
as he has received it from nature, from the divine powers. The
high-minded moralist and idealist has transformed and purified
it.
An astral body consists
of two parts; of one part that the human being has got without
his co-operation, and the other part that is the work of his
ego. Human beings who stand on such a height as for example
Francis of Assisi have brought the whole astral body under the
control of the ego, so that nothing happens in their astral
body that the ego does not control. How does such a human being
differ from the savage? In the savage, everything happens
without the ego; in the high-minded human being, everything
happens by what he has done from his astral body. As much as
the ego has transformed the astral body, as much spirit self or
manas exists in the human being.
We have five members of
the human being now: physical body, etheric body, astral body,
ego and spirit self. Then we have the possibility to transform,
to purify and to improve not only our astral body, not only the
sum of our desires and instincts but we have also the bigger
ability to transform our etheric body. In the usual life, the
human beings work in the spiritual development on improving
their astral bodies gradually, already with the usual impulses
of life, the moral concepts, the intellectual mental pictures.
Everything that we learn transforms the astral body. If we want
to imagine the contrast of the transformation of the astral
body and the transformation of the etheric body by the ego, we
must remember how we were as eight-year-old children. Then we
did not know many a thing that we know today. We have learnt a
lot. With the sensations which we have taken up in such a way
the astral body has transformed itself, it has incorporated the
spirit self or manas. However, everything that constituted our
temperament, our inclinations etc. when we were eight years old
have not transformed themselves in the same way. If you were a
hot-tempered contrary child at the age of eight years, you are
probably hot-tempered or contrary sometimes even today. The
change of the temperament and the inclinations advances much
slower. One can compare the progress of the astral body to the
advance of the minute hand and the progress of the etheric body
to the advance of the hour hand. However, the
inclinations change only if the etheric body changes, and
stronger impulses are necessary than for the change of the
astral body. The human being who stands in spiritual science
has such strong impulses and can already have them if he
exposes himself to the impression of a piece of art, behind
which he realises the infinite sense, we say of Wagner's
Parsifal
or of Beethoven's
Ninth Symphony.
These impulses not only have effects on the astral body, but they
are so strong that the etheric body is purified and transformed.
The same applies standing before a picture of Raphael or
Michelangelo, and an impulse of the everlasting penetrates us
due to the colours. However, the strongest impulses are the
religious ones. They have transformed the human being so
strongly that they have seized their etheric bodies, so that
the human beings bear two parts of their etheric bodies in
themselves, the untransformed one, received from nature, and
the transformed one. One calls the transformed part life spirit
or buddhi.
If that approaches the
human being which we get to know in the talk on the initiation,
it becomes more prominent what transforms the etheric
body. The initiation consists in
giving the means to the human being to transform the etheric
body more and more. Hence, it also applies to the student of
occultism that any intellectual learning, everything that he
can take up just like in school is only a preparation. More
important than any intellectual taking up is for that who
submits himself to a spiritual-scientific training to transform
only one single inclination consciously into another, and if it
is only a movement of the hand. Transforming such a thing has
more value than any acquired theoretical knowledge. The
initiation consists in the impulses that purify the human
etheric body. Then these impulses go on purifying the physical
body, and this is the highest that the human being can attain
in this life.
One could say that
the physical body is the lowest; if the human being works on
the physical body, is this something particular. — Just because
the physical body is the lowest member, one has to apply the
strongest forces to transform it into its original form, into
the form of the pure spirit. The purification of this physical
body begins with certain methods to adjust the respiratory
process. Therefore, one calls the part that is converted atman
or the spirit man; atman means breathing (German atmen).
When the body is transformed — which keeps being as before —
the spiritual-scientific training takes place on the highest
level. Then the human being attains not only the ability to
live consciously in his physical body, to know any blood
corpuscle, any nerve he also attains the ability to work on the
big nature, to become a human being having an effect on the
forces of the universe from a human being that was enclosed in
his skin before. Thus, the human being changes into that stage
by which he becomes one with the universe. Any other talk of
becoming one with the universe that does not happen on the way
of proper training and development is gossip and phrase.
The human being thereby becomes one with
the universe transforming his astral body first, then the
etheric body and, finally, the physical body. He becomes one
with the entire universe, as the small finger is one with the
physical body. This is a quite regular course of the human
development which many human beings have gone through, which we
all experience already to a certain degree, and which all human
beings experience in the future.
What happens there,
actually? Let us visualise it: what is the astral body? It is
nothing else than the sum of desires, drives and passions, of
joy, sorrow, and pain. Everything that co-operates there in the
human being is a phenomenon of the spirit, spirit in any form,
because everything is spirit. In what way is it possible that
the ego works on the astral body? It is possible because the
spirit discloses itself to the ego in its very own figure. In
the passions, drives and desires the spirit is hidden, there it
appears in its phenomena. It flows into the ego in its very own
figure, and the ego lets flow it again into the astral body, so
that the ego mediates between the very own figure of the spirit
and its manifestations. The same applies to the etheric body
and, finally, also to the physical body, and thus a perpetual
spiritualisation takes place during the transformation of the
three human bodies or members. As true it is that any mineral
is spirit — but spirit in its outer effect-, as true it is that
the human being is on the way to spiritualisation by that which
his ego pours into the lower being.
Only because the ego is between these manifestations of
the spirit, his physical, etheric and astral bodies, and the
members of the spirit, which illumine the three bodies, this
transition of the spirit into the three bodies is possible. The
ego has to be in between. Then the upper can work on the
lower.
In what way did we get to
know the nature of the ego? We got to know it already in its
name. The name of the ego can never sound from the outside to
our ear if it means us. With it, one says more than with all
phrases that you read in the books of the usual psychology. If
one understood substantially what the ego is because this name
can never come from the outside to us, then one would have
performed more than any academic psychology. The philosopher
Fichte already said: the human being as an ego is the nicest.
However, most people would prefer to regard themselves
as a piece of lava in the moon than as an ego because they need
own energy to look at it.
We shall see in the talk
on the animal soul that the animal also has an ego, but not in
the physical world. The human being thereby differs from the
animal that he has his ego in the physical world. The ego is
something that lets the spirit flow from the inside into
another form of spirit, into the different matters, even into
the soul, into the astral body. Hence, we can call the being of
the ego almost an internalisation. This internalisation is only
prepared with the animal. Because we will still speak of the
animal soul, I only suggest this today. One must not forget
that also the animal has an ego, but not the single animal, but
the animal species. All lions together, all tigers together
have an ego, and this ego is in the supersensible world. It is
in such a way, as if from an animal, which belongs to a
species, invisible ropes or threads run to the common group
soul in the supersensible world. Such a group soul has become
the individual human soul. Any individual human being has what
an entire animal group has.
Hence, the
internalisation only prepares itself with the animal. We
realise it if we study the so-called animal soul, the astral
body. The real internalisation of this soul, the first
irradiating of the spirit is possible in our world where the
ego exists as an individual soul. The soul that has the ego in
itself is thereby able to let the spirit flow into the matter.
Thus, we see how mind and body or also spirit and matter are
two beings; however, one being is the same as the other, only
in another form. Matter and body are spirit in other form. They
are different from each other in the world generally as ice and
water. They are different, even though they are the same. In
the middle, the soul exists. It connects mind and body. Hence,
we understand the human being only if we understand him in this
tripartite composition, consisting of the physical, etheric and
astral bodies and consisting of nascent spirit: manas, buddhi,
and atman or spirit self, life spirit and spirit man. The soul
is the being that transforms one into the other that
participates in the body and in the mind. We can understand the
soul in the right light only if we see it working from the mind
on the body. If we study it from this viewpoint, spiritual
science answers just those questions that the human being must
put to the real soul being. We realise that the human soul is
positioned between body and mind at every moment. With the
savage, the soul is only able to take up a droplet of the
spirit in his body. Hunger and thirst, the manifestations of
the etheric body, almost animal instincts, and desires still
completely influence him. The soul of the sophisticated
idealist, as for example of Schiller or Francis of Assisi,
tends to the spirit, attains a higher consciousness, and frees
himself from the material existence. Spiritual science shows
that there is transformation of forms what we call matter. That
often will meet us in the winter talks but nobody can expect
that he can absorb all concepts of spiritual science in one
talk.
If we look at the world
round ourselves from this spiritual-scientific viewpoint, it
appears in a continual transformation as also nature appears in
a continual transformation. We see the flower arising from the
seminal grain in the spring. In autumn, we see it wilting, but
the being is preserved in the seminal grain to arise again.
Thus, spiritual science also shows how the spirit builds up the
body, and how the being of this spirit is preserved as a
spiritual seed when the body disintegrates. It appears again
and again.
We can transform ice into
water and water into ice. Similarly, spirit also changes into
body. The body disintegrates, but the spirit remains and
appears in always-new forms. There we are led to the principle
of transformation in the human life. The human being lives here
in the physical, etheric and astral bodies. However, he still
has a second life that existed before this life and will be
after this life. There he lives, as well as he lives here in
these three bodies, in the spiritual world. From there he
brings the forces that build up his bodies, which give him that
form which he has, even if the life in spirit is different. We
get to know this if we understand spiritual science in the
right way.
It becomes apparent that
the human being leads a life by turns: a life in the body
between birth and death and a life in the spiritual between
death and a new birth, until he prepares himself for a new
incarnation. What lives here in the body and there in spirit
and changes between the life in the body and the life in spirit
is the soul. However, every time when it has gone through an
incarnation, the human being has worked on his body and comes
back to the spirit land as a soul enriched with the fruits of
the earth-life. The soul keeps on developing higher and higher.
Hence, it is also the mediator between spirit and body. Thus,
we are led to the border which shows us — considering mind,
soul and body correctly — how the relation of the three human
parts is to each other. We get to know everything that
disintegrates that scatters as a transformation of that which
constitutes the innermost being of the soul as we recognise
everything temporal as a form of the everlasting. Spiritual
science leads to a science, which really the questions of the
temporal and of the everlasting answers and of the human
destiny after death. The human heart has these questions
generally if it wants to know something about such a science. A
science that sets limits to itself cannot see the most
important. Hence, our academic psychology is limited. In a
certain sense, it is important to learn what it offers.
Spiritual science does not disdain it, but it finds it
insufficient, as long as one does not go into the being of the
spirit and the soul. This is the right way to the knowledge of
the spirit and the soul: the soul is connected with its bodies
in the temporal life, it is involved in these bodies, and that
which attracts it to these bodies is that part which is an
obstacle for the pure, purified life in spirit between death
and a new birth. There we learn to understand gradually where
the obstacles of the soul are for the new birth. We also learn
to understand that the soul must free itself completely not
only from the body — by death — but from the longing for the
body. By the right concepts of mind, soul, and body, we also
come to the destiny of the soul during its bodily and spiritual
pilgrimage.
I have today tried to
show how one gets correct concepts of the soul and spirit using
the ordinary human mind. I did it without taking into account
what one can attain by the methods of clairvoyance and
initiation. I speak about them in the next talks. We must hold
on this: what faced us in the course of this winter will be
results of the spiritual research. One can only discover them
with the methods as I gave them in the talks on initiation et
cetera. However, one can understand them by the ordinary logic
and thorough thinking. Someone who says, what does the
spiritual science concern me, because I am no clairvoyant? He
turns away from the spiritual science not because of lack of
clairvoyance, but, because he does not apply his thinking
thoroughly and extensively enough to it. Just psychology has
suffered a lot in our time of materialism — which some people
regard as finished and is also dismissed in philosophy, but
flourishes just in the way of thinking of psychology. Today the
concepts of soul and spirit have suffered mostly from this
materialism. Spiritual science has the mission to bring pure,
purified concepts of the soul and the spirit again to humanity.
Thereby it will be the best servant of the high religious
traditions that distinguish between the human mind and the
world enclosing spirit that the religious traditions call the
Holy Spirit. We understand these scriptures as means of
understanding only if we comprehend them deeply enough and
consider everything in great enclosing pictures which are the
expression of facts.
We spiritual scientists
still know many things that humanity knows in future and only
anticipated due to its most significant spirits in former
times. Many strange feelings go through the human soul, if it
immerses itself in the spiritual activities. Some people say to
the spiritual scientist: you give us something for the mind,
but nothing for the soul; we search soul and you give us
spiritual achievements. They do not know that they reject just
that which gives the soul what they require. They covet the
will impulses of the soul. However, the soul can be only
happy if it lets the spirit flow in itself and develops the
bodies from the spirit.
What faces us from the
outside is formed spirit, and what shapes the matter flows from
the spiritual world down. What the eye sees in the figure as
colour is, so to speak, compressed spirit, and the force that
causes the figure in the matter comes from the everlasting.
Thus, someone who does not have the clearness of
spiritual-scientific concepts but feels and anticipates the
surrounding world says. everything appears to me as shaped by
the spiritual world. The figure appears to me as the holy that
flashes in the mere matter, and if I see the figure, it seems
to immerse itself in the matter and to withdraw again from the
matter. The poet anticipated this of spiritual science when he
put up the contrast between the body, the human soul, and the
spirit that both work creatively in the body. Schiller
(Friedrich Sch., 1759–1805, German poet) anticipated how the
soul lets the spirit flow in the matter in reality whereby the
matter disappears to the view. Considering this, he let the
sensation flow out in the nice
words:
Only the body appertains to those powers
that braid the dark destiny. However, far from any temporal
power, the playmate of blessed spirits walks aloft in the acres
of light, divine among divinities: the shape.
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