Truths of Spiritual Research
Munich, 25 November 1912
Spiritual research, as it is meant here, is aware very well
that there are some, also substantial objections against it. I
tried to show that in the last winter with two talks that I
have also held here
How Does One Disprove Spiritual Science?
and
How Does One Reason Spiritual Science?
At that time, I intended to discuss the
pros and cons more from the point of view of general
scientificity. This time I want to speak about the pros and
cons from the point of view of the spiritual researcher in this
and the next talk. I will deal less with individual questions
than rather with the question how one gets to the truths of
spiritual science and which errors confront the spiritual
researcher as well as those who want to approach this knowledge
and make them a component of their soul lives.
It
could seem peculiar from the start that one can speak about
numerous causes of error that refer just to the most important
questions of human life. These are the questions of the nature
and destination of the human being, of the soul experiences
after death, of death and immortality, of repeated lives on
earth et cetera, which are objects of spiritual research.
Hence, it is the more inevitable to speak about the ways of
truth and error to illumine these questions.
If
it is talk of spiritual research, its truths and errors, I ask
you to take into consideration that it concerns only the ways
of this spiritual research at first, so attaining the truths of
spiritual life. Here one has to consider as a basic requirement
that the spiritual researcher has a generally healthy soul
life. With it, I do not say that the results or the suggestions
of spiritual research could only help a healthy soul. I do not
at all claim this. On the contrary, these results have just
something recovering, something that not only gets the lost
soul, but also an ill soul life on the straight and narrow.
This should be clear from the start. If today it should mainly
be talk of a healthy soul life as the right requirement for
spiritual research, this means that one can get to the truths
in spiritual area only with a healthy soul life. What then
spiritual science can give can be almost called a remedy for
the human soul.
A
healthy soul life is the requirement. Why? Because the origins
of spiritual research are inside of the human soul because one
can look into the concealed spiritual depths of existence only
if one changes his own soul into a tool of spiritual
research.
Talking not generally, I would immediately like to take
something as starting point that I have already mentioned here
several times. If the human soul should be transformed into an
instrument for beholding into the spiritual world, then it is
necessary that the soul forces that are sufficient for the
everyday life are strengthened. In the everyday life, the human
being is only concerned with that which his senses teach him
and which the reason recognises. We already know from a trivial
consideration of life that the statements of the outer senses
as well as the usual reason are quiet if the human being is
sleeping. Our everyday life proceeds between waking and
sleeping. We notice that our senses gradually fail and we get
to a state of unconsciousness. Now it would go indeed against
the usual logical rules if one believed that everything that
the human being experiences from morning to evening were
extinguished at every evening and originated anew at the next
morning. Everything certainly exists from falling asleep up to
the awakening. The sleep does not cause that the experiences of
the day do not exist at night in our soul life, but the soul
forces are not strong enough to experience during sleep. It is
easy to realise that everything depends on whether the human
being is able to become aware of that which is unconscious
during sleep.
Are
we able to perceive if our senses are quiet if our brain is not
called for its service — is it possible that we have an
experience with that which is independent of body in us? Then
this experience can already show us whether it is supersensible
or not. That means so that the soul can become an instrument to
perceive other things than with the instrument of the body, it
is necessary to cause a state which is similar to sleep and is,
nevertheless, completely different from it. In this respect,
one has to extinguish the usual sense perception if the soul
should become an instrument of another perception. However,
unconsciousness must not happen; that is we have to evoke a
state that is similar to sleep and is still dissimilar because
full consciousness must exist.
One
can cause such a state different. It is the healthiest way to
cause it with methods, as I have described them in my book
How Does One Attain Knowledge of
Higher Worlds? and will outline them once again
here.
You
cause this state with inner soul work, with conceptual efforts
that we do not do in the usual life. One calls them
concentration of thinking, of imagining, of feeling or also
meditation. We immediately want to bring in an example that
appears weird at first, but from which we realise at once why
it seems so paradoxical. It concerns that we evoke particular
images to reach the desired state and relate to these images in
a particular way. We imagine facing two glasses; one is
half-full with water, the other empty. Now we imagine that we
pour some water from the half-full glass into the empty glass,
and the first glass would become fuller and not emptier. This
is a paradoxical mental picture, isn't that so? Now you may
have not only this mental picture and turn it over in your
mind, but you have to connect a particular sense with this
mental picture, then only it will become a meditation.
We
all know one fact that flows through our life everywhere whose
depth one can fathom difficultly. This is love in its different
forms. Love has the peculiarity that the lover pours as it were
his full heart onto the other human being that he does not
become poorer with it but richer. This is the secret of love
that the soul becomes fuller of contents, the more of it is
given away. Love is something complex and deep that we can
always grasp some sides of it only; however, its being is
unfathomable. However, this one side of love can be symbolised
by the image of the two glasses. We do something similar there
concerning a moral experience of life that we experience, for
example, also in geometry.
We
take a round medallion of any substance. If we draw a circle
with the help of the medallion we can study everything that
refers to a circle, and this applies to that which we have as
reality before ourselves. The geometrician forms symbols of
reality with his figures. The soul can also create symbols of
the everlasting if it gets clear about the fact that these are
just symbols.
If
we have such a mental picture like that of the two glasses and
have the sensation that this picture points to such an
important phenomenon as love, then we process this picture in
the right sense if we try, by strong effort of will, to
eliminate all images which come from the senses. As well all
mental pictures disappear while falling asleep, one
extinguishes everything arbitrarily that comes from without and
everything that the reason can think, and all soul forces are
concentrated upon this one picture.
Of
course, it is not enough to do this only once, but one has to
practise it in patience and perseverance repeatedly, then we
strengthen our soul forces gradually. Then it happens that we
become aware of such soul experiences by internal experience
that a time comes at which we do no longer need to put such
symbolic images before our souls, but gradually from deep,
concealed depths of our soul life such pictures appear by
themselves.
It
is better that the human being uses such mental pictures with
these exercises which are only symbols, that is they refer to
no outer reality. One could also use usual mental pictures, but
they do not work so efficiently. If anybody wanted to argue, it
is foolish to imagine something that is not there at all, one
has to say, this concentration work is not there to copy the
outer reality, but it should educate the soul to get forces
from it, which are not active, otherwise. This exercise is not
there to recognise truths. It concerns education of the soul to
get concealed forces from it.
If
now the time has come when in the soul the pictures emerge,
then you have to set the soul by a regular mental training into
a particular mood. If we speak about this mood in which the
soul must be if these pictures appear by themselves, there one
has to point to the fact that this imagery appears to the
layman who knows nothing of the whole matter as that which one
regards as visions, as hallucinations and other phenomena of
the pathological soul life. Someone who knows something of that
which modern borderline sciences, between physiology and
psychology, bring forward can think very easily — and
this is repeatedly argued — that the spiritual researcher
educates himself artificially for something that a pathological
soul attains if it has visions, hallucinations, delusions et
cetera.
Now, just by the education of the soul that we can only touch
today, this soul can make an exact distinction between visions
and similar phenomena and the symbolic mental pictures which
spiritual science calls the Imaginative world. The spiritual
researcher learns to distinguish these two worlds. Since that
which is generally necessary to be successful is that one is
hostile to all delusions, hallucinations and the like. It
belongs to this spiritual training to characterise them
distinctly.
There we want to indicate an important difference. Visions,
delusions et cetera have something in common: they overpower
the soul; they have something that demands the strongest belief
for itself. One knows from the everyday life that it is easier
to persuade a person who has visions or delusions from any fact
of the outer life than from his delusions. He possibly finds
the most astute reasons for his illusions. He has an invincible
belief in these soul experiences. However, the spiritual
researcher has to become free from any belief toward the
Imaginative world. Although he has brought up the pictures in
his soul and must regard them as worthy, he has to regard them
as nothing at all that can give him objective truth. It would
be his biggest error if he regarded that which he has attained
there as something that refers to an outer reality. He has to
educate himself just by strong soul forces and willpower that
the soul settles in a world of pictures at first, which do not
express any objective reality.
What do they express? They are only the expression of the soul
life. One gets to know nothing by this imagery at first but the
own soul life. One must not try at all to regard them as
something else than that it concerns an outflow of the own soul
life. These are the essentials.
If
one wants to compare an Imagination to a vision, a
hallucination on the way to spiritual research, one has to say,
a vision, a hallucination overpowers the human being, it
requests an almost invincible belief in the objectivity of this
vision; against it the spiritual researcher is aware of the
fact that he himself creates the Imagination.
He
has to pass this state. He has to get out a rich Imaginative
world from his inside to attain the consciousness at the same
time that it is only a mirror of his own soul. This
consciousness has something rather uneasy, because the world in
which one settles down is like a second world, a world full of
beauty and greatness, a beatific world. However, persons who
settle in such a world get easily angry if one wants that they
doubt the objectivity of this world because one lives well in
it. However, just one has to overcome this good life. What
happens in this world, actually? If I should describe this, we
can compare it to a phenomenon of the everyday life.
Imagine that you have all mental pictures at this moment again
in your soul that you ever had if all that were now in your
soul — you could not live with it at all. The soul wants
oblivion. We can bring up the forgotten again in our memory. As
well as now in the usual life these images submerge in
oblivion, the spiritual researcher must be able by the training
of his will to forget his whole Imaginative life, this new
world in which he liked to stay. The spiritual researcher has
to make this Imaginative world disappear more and more often in
the depths of his sub-consciousness about which he knows
nothing at first. Then he has to cause moments again, at which
the soul is quite empty, thinks nothing, feels nothing,
remembers nothing, worries about nothing, has no affects and so
on. Then gradually the Imaginations that he has sent down to
the unconscious emerge again. The pictures return but quite
different. They appear in such a way that one knows that they
are not fantasies but expressions of realities. Toward these
emerging pictures one has the immediate consciousness that they
express something real.
What has one really done, while one has carried out this
process? One has strengthened the inside of the soul life so
that this soul life has completely developed its formative
capacity. What one has produced, one has sacrificed, detached
from himself. One receives it again. As well as you put out
your hand in the physical world to touch something and thereby
get knowledge of that which you have touched, one puts out his
soul forces, one sends them away, they combine with the
spiritual world, and something returns from the spiritual
world.
The
objection was mentioned already repeatedly that one could also
harbour illusions because one knows that sensitive persons can
feel this or that, even if nothing at all is there. Thus, there
are, for example, persons who feel the taste of a lemonade if
they only remember it. This is right. However, a healthy soul
can still distinguish an only imagined lemonade from a real
one; you can have the taste, but you cannot quench your thirst
with an imagined lemonade. There is such an objection also
against the thought of Schopenhauer's philosophy that the world
is only our mental picture or idea. However, the trivial
objection is right, one can imagine a piece of steel that is
1,000 degrees hot which will not burn your hands. You are able
to distinguish imagination, mental picture, and reality in
life. You do not have any other proof in the sensory world. The
same applies to the spiritual world. If you enter into the
spiritual world, then that returns quite different which you
have sent down in the area of oblivion and is now expression of
those spiritual beings and facts, which are behind the physical
sensory world. You obtain mental pictures that you have not
given yourself. Since the mental pictures which you have given
yourself were there only to practise.
Thus, you get truths from the spiritual world, after the soul
has gone through an only imagined mindscape first — not
to recognise anything but to develop the soul, so that it
becomes strong to perceive what it can only perceive with other
forces than those of the usual soul life. Thus, you achieve
raised cognitive faculties; the soul life becomes more
concentrated, compressed. Then you live, so to speak, only in a
world of cognition. All mental pictures of the spiritual beings
that you get this way are completely saturated with reality.
They are much more active than the impressions of the outer
sensory world and still do not claim to be believed just like
that. We will recognise immediately, how it behaves.
However, I have to repeat something important before: if the
pictures of this Imaginative world that you yourself have
created first appear before you have sent this whole symbolic
world down to oblivion, they are ambiguous, oracular, and
someone is on bad way who believes these ambiguous things just
like that who gets involved with them. Even if by all available
means of the spiritual-scientific training such pictures are
obtained at first, it is impossible to assign any logical value
to them. Not before they return and show full clarity, they are
expressions of the spiritual world.
People think very frequently that spiritual research is done so
airily, and then many objections are raised. One says, for
example, how hard has the outer science to work to obtain its
results. There these spiritual researchers come and believe to
know everything, while they simply submerge with their souls in
the spiritual world. — First no true spiritual researcher
will claim anything else than that which he has really
investigated, and secondly one cannot observe the inner soul
work as the work in the laboratories and on the observatories.
It is much more intensive than the work performed there. The
conscientious spiritual researcher will reply, this is
rhetorical-ness; the spiritual-scientific knowledge is attained
really not easier than things of the outer science, but
laboriously and gradually.
Every person without damage can carry out what I have described
within certain limits. Today there are already methods with
which one comes slowly and gradually into the spiritual world,
so that that which could work frightening with quick coming
into the spiritual world does not occur, but that one can enter
quiet and calm into the spiritual world. This way is harmless
and more reliable than all other ways because consciousness
does not decrease. We are not put to sleep, but our soul is
always awake. We perform every step that we do with a much
stronger consciousness than in the everyday life. If one speaks
about dangers of this real spiritual research, one just does it
because one knows nothing about the fact that one performs all
steps much more consciously than in the everyday life.
It
is different if the soul forces are not used to get knowledge
but to something else. This may happen. We have seen that the
path of knowledge of spiritual research is based on
concentration of the soul forces. However, the same forces
— unless they are used to get knowledge but if the will
and the mood are called — lead to the counter-image of
the Imaginative knowledge. This counter-image exists with the
medium. There is, actually, no bigger difference between the
spiritual-scientific recognising human being who enters with
increased consciousness into the spiritual world and the
medium.
With the medium, just those forces, which must be conscious
with the spiritual researcher, are pushed into the will and
mood. The consciousness decreases, and the result is a certain
degree of unconsciousness, at least of daze. The person
concerned will carry out things as a medium with decreased
consciousness to witness the direct influence of the spiritual
world. With it, I do not say that with the medium spiritual
things cannot appear and can be investigated; I only mean such
cases where any dizziness and any charlatanism is excluded.
There already forces become known that lead us into the nature
of the soul as far as this soul has no body, for example, after
death. However, one has to stress that the spiritual researcher
completely has himself under control, while the medium becomes
dependent from the surroundings, or more precisely, he/she can
be made dependent. Even if now and again right results may
arise which are not to be doubted, one has to say that
appropriate investigations in this area are only possible if
they are carried out with absolute control of all appropriate
laws. Since there one gets into dangerous things which an outer
science cannot approach and, therefore, stares at them in a
dilettantish way. Mediumship is just the counter-image of
Imaginative cognition. However, within certain limits it is
possible to convince a person of something that one can inform
difficultly. Important things can be already revealed there,
and one has to acknowledge as something important if anybody
ventures on this field. I refer someone who wants to inform
himself in detail to the book The Mystery of Man by
Ludwig Deinhard (1847-1917, engineer, theosophist) and to the
writing The Cardinal Question of Humanity by Max Seiling
(1852-1928).
Thus, we realise that the human being attains a more intensive,
more active consciousness than in the usual life on the path of
higher knowledge at first. However, we also realise that
mediumship is the counter-image where the forces directly work
into the human being, so that he/she speaks or writes with
decreased consciousness after instructions of a spiritual
world. Not by some definitions, but by the fact that one
describes the things, as they are, as they are experienced, one
receives a concept of truth and error concerning spiritual
research.
We
have now to advance farther than to Imaginative knowledge. One
calls the next level Inspirative knowledge. It occurs if
the human being has repeatedly sent his Imaginations into the
depths of his soul and has already attained knowledge on this
first way and thereby his spiritual forces have become stronger
and stronger. Then a state occurs in which he perceives
something shapeless that does no longer remind of something
that one can perceive with the reason in the physical world.
The Imaginative world resembles our own soul life, for example,
if the mental pictures return which one has sent down, and
appear in colours and in similar figures, as one sees them in
the outer world. It is hard to distinguish illusion from
reality.
However, the Inspirative world has nothing at all that could be
a quality of the sensory world. Against it, something appears
on this level that you can compare with that process if the
human being listens to his own speech. You have this
consciousness immediately. You have the consciousness in higher
measure than before that you are present with everything, that
you only recognise beings and facts of the spiritual world if
you submerge in them and witness them, as well as you can only
speak your own words, if you use the own organs. About this
fact, you must not deceive yourself: you yourself let your
consciousness penetrate in everything and its life appears in
the other things and facts. Because this is in such a way, the
preparation of a true spiritual science is the possibility to
regard that which you yourself create in the soul as nothing
but what arises from your own arbitrariness.
The
human being knows if he speaks that he can form words that he
can express himself after his passions, depending on what he
likes or dislikes. However, he also knows that there is already
in the usual life a possibility to put forward not only that
which is pleasant but also to speak about that which is true.
Here one has to start. This development of feeling of truth is
the most essential for the Inspirative knowledge. You can
attain something in this area only, if you eliminate your own
opinion, your preferences, everything repeatedly that you would
like that it takes place in a way. You can develop these
sensations. They only lead to a truthful knowledge in this
area. I would like to give an example immediately.
The
question of immortality belongs to the most important ones. In
which question could the human being be more interested? An old
wisdom saying of occult science says, only that can gain real
knowledge of immortality who has advanced so far that the idea
to be mortal or immortal is indifferent to him. Before, the
interest clouds the real knowledge. It is a difficult inner
work to regulate your sensations this way.
With the Inspirative knowledge it concerns to get the soul into
a certain mood, in particular towards that which it can endure
or which it does not like to endure. The human being often
imagines that he can endure the one as well as the other thing.
There he has repeatedly to go through renewed soul inspections
to develop such a mood of calmness gradually, which enables
objective knowledge.
If
the spiritual researcher has attained Imagination, then he gets
a view of beings of the spiritual world that are on par with
our soul. However, our soul is connected with a physical body
here in the physical world. We have to ignore this if we want
to recognise beings that do not have physical bodies. One can
reach spiritual beings and facts already on the way of
Imagination. On the way of Inspiration, everything must be
attained that refers to beings that contribute to the phenomena
of nature. Natural sciences if they are aware of their limits
know principles and accept forces that work there. However, the
spiritual knowledge recognises beings that control the elements
as it were and cause the phenomena of nature behind all that
which is active in nature. The real creative in the world that
produces the outer material things is accessible only to the
Inspirative knowledge to which the soul becoming stronger gets
gradually because it completely lives in the beings.
Then the level of Intuition follows where the spiritual
researcher witnesses the actions of the creative forces that
form the basis of the material existence that are of spiritual
kind, but can embody themselves in space and time, either in
the big nature or as single restricted beings. Our souls are
concerned with the usual knowledge only. The soul that is our
spiritual goes from earth-life to earth-life. We live a life
from birth or conception to death, and then we live between
death and a new birth in the wholly spiritual-mental, then
again a life between birth and death and so on. There we deal
with the soul.
If
you develop the Imaginative knowledge sufficiently if you allow
yourself plenty of time, until you really have the ability to
discriminate that which comes from your soul and which emerges
from the subsoil, then you can distinguish that which belongs
to this one life and that which comes over from former lives on
earth. With advancing Imaginative knowledge, you get to an
insight into former lives on earth. This is relatively easy to
get. However, this knowledge restricts itself at the own soul
which goes from one life to the next. It is much more difficult
to know anything about the former lives of another person.
Since if one faces anybody, one is concerned with a physical
body in which he lives, and you can only recognise the soul in
it with Intuition. Hence, you have to ascend to this highest
level of knowledge if you want to behold into the repeated
earth-lives of another person. This belongs to the most
difficult that the seer can attain. The same fact may still
arise from something else.
Instead of Imagination, you can take, indeed, another way of
self-knowledge to the spiritual world in certain restricted
way.
If the human being knows the principle of karma and
If he does not only know but if he experiences in
himself that he caused that which happens to him by former
earth-lives,
If this self-knowledge is connected with the karma idea and
If he practises repeatedly to reflect on his own strokes of fate
and abilities,
Then he may get to a kind of Imagination, but to a subjective,
personal one that does not lead to objective truth and cannot
be applied to every human being.
However, this way leads us only to knowledge of us. We cut
ourselves off in our own soul. We can advance maybe to a
certain knowledge of former earth-lives, but much uncertainty
remains. However, we can never get to the objective knowledge
that refers to another human being.
If
you want to have a real concept of the truths of the spiritual
world, you have to distinguish reality and truth. You get to
know a new world, but getting to know and judging is not the
same, it is very different. You can experience many things in
the spiritual world, you can be able to tell many things of it;
the things that you tell can be real pictures, you may have
beheld the picture properly — however, it has not to be
true. As paradoxical as it sounds, I have to say that it is
something extremely important that someone who wants to enter
into this spiritual world brings the judgement from the usual
world with him.
Somebody who has learnt to develop common sense in the usual
world who does not deceive himself and is not deceived by
anything in the usual world will bring common sense with him
into the spiritual world and will judge the things that he
beholds there correctly. Only by own judgement, reality becomes
truth. You cannot develop judgement in the spiritual world; you
have to bring it with you. One is allowed to say, someone who
thinks logically in the usual world will also find the right
and the true in the spiritual world. He who is a fool in the
usual world and thinks illogically will think even more
brainlessly and illogically if he applies his thinking to the
things of the spiritual world. The most necessary if the human
being wants to make a decision of truth or error in the
spiritual world is the development of a healthy sense of truth
and a healthy talent for observing in the physical world. You
should not trust in someone who does not note with attention,
with healthy talent for observation how the things proceed in
the physical world and who proceeds inexactly in the physical
world, if he tells anything of the spiritual world. Since the
things of the spiritual world become true only if they touch
our sense of truth.
A
certain moral sense and spiritual condition is also necessary.
Someone who enters into the spiritual world with a moral
spiritual condition will come into relation with the healthy
forces of the spiritual world and get to know its truths.
However, someone who enters with immoral forces, in particular
not with a meticulous sense of truth beholds everything
distorted, caricatured in the spiritual world and, hence, tells
it this way.
What I wanted to reach today is to cause a sensation of the
truth ways into the spiritual world. Nevertheless, any
investigation in the spiritual world is based on the
development of certain forces slumbering in the soul, which are
connected with the human ego that has sympathies and
antipathies, and forces, which can darken the truth. In the
outer life, life itself controls and corrects. If we think
wrong, the outer reality corrects us. To the spiritual
researcher the direction of truth is only given by the
direction of the soul. Hence, first one has to develop that
truth which is independent from this subjective ego. That
means, the soul has to outgrow itself if it has to become a
spiritual researcher.
Moreover, the results of spiritual research have to be
informed. As well as not everybody in the laboratory or on the
observatory can investigate what the outer science
investigates, not everybody can attain all results of spiritual
research, although in our present everybody can cover a way to
a certain restricted aim. But that who does not want or is not
able to cover it cannot argue that he has to leave to the
spiritual researchers to know something about the spiritual
world. There the prejudice can originate about which we still
want to speak the day after tomorrow that the spiritual
researcher is a particular animal that simply thereby turns out
to be a more valuable human being because he can behold into
the spiritual world. We shall realise that that does not raise
the value of the human being that the value of the human being
depends on something quite different. It would be very useful
if just this truth would find wide distribution that one has
not to consider someone who makes himself a bearer of
spiritual-scientific knowledge as an authority or the like.
Against it, the true spiritual researcher has the obligation to
incorporate what he can investigate into the concepts and ideas
of his time.
This is even a difficult task to find an expression of that
which one beholds in the spiritual world, so that every
unbiased human being can understand the results. Since you must
not believe that the spiritual researcher has anything for his
own certainty and soul strength from that which he beholds in
the spiritual world. It becomes a property of the soul, a soul
food first if he expresses the beheld facts in usual concepts
and ideas and makes them comprehensible. The destiny of our
soul depends only on these concepts and ideas, it depends that
we have strength. If the spiritual researcher succeeds in
grasping the beheld truths with the laws of common sense and
logic, they have the same value for him as for the other human
beings. As long as he can only behold into the spiritual world,
he has nothing for his soul life. Not before he can tell the
things in such a way that the fellow men understand them with
their logic, only then he has something from it. Hence, the
essential task of the incorporation of spiritual research in
our civilisation is not the development of the spiritual
researcher, but the possibility to hand over the
spiritual-scientific results to the common sense and the
civilisation of his time so that every unbiased human being can
understand them.
One
understands them in a particular way, which we want to bring to
mind by a comparison. Let us assume that we have a picture
before ourselves. We only look at it, just without
understanding. However, we can open ourselves to it, and after
some time, after we have become engrossed in the picture, we
understand its contents. Of course, we do not need that we
ourselves paint the picture. It would be also misplaced if
anybody said, you have to look at the picture this or that way,
and then I can prove to you that the picture expresses this or
that. Someone who wants to make us understand the picture by
proofs would drive us to desperation at best, but would not
make us understand the picture. Understanding the picture
depends on the fact that something originates from the picture
and that it is independent from the painter's ability to paint
it. That also applies similarly to that which the spiritual
researcher investigates in the spiritual world, and to that
which he brings forward in the form of ideas and concepts to
his fellow men.
You
find two books by me on the book table. In one book, How
Does One Attain Knowledge of Higher
Worlds?, I have described the ways how one can develop
the soul, so that it ascends into spiritual worlds. In the
other book, Occult Science. An Outline, you find results
of spiritual science in the first part. As well as I could, I
have tried there to formulate the investigated matters in such
a way that now every contemporary who looks at them unbiasedly
and with common sense can understand them. We face two things
in these books: once the path into the spiritual world and
secondly, the portrayal of the attained results in form of
concepts and ideas that every human being can understand.
I
understand very well that people say, nobody can understand
this, because it is speculative fiction. — That is
possible with those people who do not exactly go into it.
However, if anybody goes exactly into it, that can occur which
really occurred to me. A very prudent and clever man said that
one can understand that which one can read in my books very
well, so well that somebody can get on it by mere logic.
— Well, you cannot investigate the things with the usual
logic, but if they have been investigated, they can be
understood with the usual logic. However, that man continued: I
can hardly imagine that these things have been taken from the
spiritual world, because they make such a plausible impression
to me that they can be reached in only logical way without
insight into the spiritual world. — I said to him that I
would consider that as an advantage of the book and that I
would like to hear that my description was successful.
This leads us again to that which the painter must be able to
do. The spiritual researcher has to recognise in the spiritual
world; if he processes the recognised, and conceptualises it,
then it faces us as the picture of the painter faces us. Then
the moment comes when that who opens himself to these results
of the spiritual world understands the thing immediately,
without doing research in the spiritual world. One can probably
distinguish whether one dedicates himself to a belief or to the
cogency of that which one has put in words.
I
shall characterise the paths of truth even more if we get
around to considering the almost more important part, the
origins of errors of spiritual research, the day after
tomorrow. However, that which one has always to consider with
spiritual research may be mentioned already today at the end of
this talk.
I
have said that if the spiritual researcher has finally got to
the formulated truth of the supersensible worlds every unbiased
human being can open himself to its cogency. Then, however, the
sum of spiritual truths is food for the soul, and then we
attain something without which our soul cannot live in the end.
One can take the spiritual food away from the soul but not the
hunger after spiritual food. Even if the human being lives from
day to day absent-mindedly and wants to know nothing about the
spiritual food, the hunger after it continues, although the
human being is not clear in his mind of the reason —
namely that he does not want to approach the spiritual world.
If this hunger is not satisfied, it destroys the whole soul
life; this appears in all possible pathological phenomena of
our time.
We
get to know by the outer science that we have certain
substances in the body that are the same as outdoors in space.
We feel by spiritual science that we rest on the whole world.
We recognise that that which lives in our soul and is
intimately associated with the vicissitudes of life, is one
with the spiritual-mental of the whole world that extends in
space and time. In our spiritual part, we recognise what is
effective outdoors all over the world. Then we feel what such
knowledge can give our souls as strength, certainty, and
health.
We
can summarise this into two remarks. Goethe wanted to show once
that the eyes must be created for the light — a thought
that also some philosophers pronounced — and that the
soul must have something spiritual in itself. He wanted to show
this with the nice dictum:
Unless the eye were like the sun,
How could we see the light?
Unless God's own force were in us,
How could delight us the divine?
However, Goethe also added that the human being was once a
being without eyes and that the sun had to be there, so that
the human being could have eyes that the light created the
eyes. It is true that everything would be dark without eyes;
the light must have been there to form the eyes. As well as the
light forms the eyes, the spirit that penetrates the whole
universe forms the human mind. We are allowed to say, you
recognise the one-sidedness of a significant truth deeper just
by such a thing. It is true that light and spirit must be
present in us if we want to perceive light and spirit. It is
true that the whole world must be filled with light if an organ
of light should be created in a being by this light, and it is
true that the whole world has to owe its origin to the spirit
if in the human being the spirit should emerge.
However, it is also true if one adds another truth to this
deep, but one-sided truth that arises from our
consideration:
Unless the world does have the sun,
How
could the beings get their eyes?
Unless existence were God's revelation,
How
could suffuse us the divine?
Answer to Question
Question: Has one acquired anything of the fourth
dimension and of higher ones spiritual-scientifically?
Rudolf Steiner: It is not easy to make you
understand this. The human being takes the physical-sensory
world as starting point, and there space has three dimensions.
The mathematician forms, at least theoretically, mental
pictures of the fourth dimension and of higher dimensions,
extending the mental pictures of the three-dimensional space
analytically with variables. Thereby one can speak of higher
manifolds in the mathematical thinking. If anybody is familiar
with these things, that means, who puts his heart into it and
is familiar with mathematics at the same time, for that many
things arise. I would like to point to the works of Oskar
Simony (1852-1915, mathematician, physicist) in Vienna.
At
first, it is only a mental picture. You get a view of it if you
enter into the spiritual world. There the real necessity exists
to familiarise yourself immediately with more than three
dimensions. Since everything that is imagined pictorially
— so still with the characteristic feature of three
dimensions — is nothing but a reflection of your soul
processes. In the higher worlds are quite different conditions
of space and time, if one can even speak about conditions of
space and time. Above all, those should take this into
considerations who always argue that that which is claimed
about the spiritual world is nothing but hallucinations. One
does not consider that one works in the area of spiritual
research with things that are quite different from
hallucinations.
This question gives opportunity to complement what I have said
in this talk, to point to the change that the things undergo
concerning time and space if they get to the spiritual world.
One cannot say everything in one talk, and today it has lasted
already very long. If the pictures [of Imagination] return
which one has sent as it were down to the underworld, that
which returns makes sense generally only if one touches upon it
as something multidimensional. This is a given then, as just
the three-dimensions are a given in the sensory world. This is
why one cannot apply the usual geometry to the things of the
spiritual world.
For
mathematicians I have to add that then the speculations of the
fourth dimension start having real value. However, normally
[the higher dimensions] are thought only as generalisation [of
the three-dimensional space], not from reality to which these
spaces do not completely correspond. One needs, actually, still
better mathematics if one possibly wants to count in the things
with which the spiritual researcher is concerned.
Nevertheless, I have to answer yes. Correlations to a
supersensible world, also mathematical ideas of infinity become
real, in particular things of the border area of mathematics. I
once experienced, for example, a sudden insight into an
exceptionally important quality of the astral space when I was
occupied with modern geometry, as one called it at that time,
and analytic mechanics many years ago.
The
fact that with an infinite straight line the infinite distant
point is identical on the left with that on the right that the
straight line is a circle in reality and one returns to the
starting point from the other side if one runs long enough
— one can realise this, but [one should not draw] any
conclusion from it. Conclusions lead to nothing in spiritual
research. You have to open yourself to the things, this leads
to the knowledge of the supersensible world. For generally the
mathematical element should not be overestimated if it concerns
the supersensible world. Mathematics is useful only formally;
it cannot get to reality. However, mathematics can be
understood with the forces within the soul, and it can be
applied to any other human being. Mathematics has this in
common with spiritual science.
Question: How do physical body, astral body, and ego
coincide?
Rudolf Steiner: Well, these things become clear
completely if one has done spiritual science for years. The
things are not so simple, and what one simply states, sounds
then, so to speak, like an oracle. The things of spiritual
science cannot be taken as dogmas if one wants to understand
them one day. I have described the sleep, for example, saying,
physical body and etheric body are lying in the bed, and astral
body and ego leave them. — How have we to imagine such a
thing? At first, we have it to take as a picture. As a picture,
it is right. If it may sometimes sound in such a way that a
fact forms the basis of this picture, nevertheless, this is
only quite one-sided. It is possible that one describes the
matter exactly contrariwise, saying, in the wake state, the ego
and the astral body are beyond the physical body in a way.
|