Errors of Spiritual Research
Part 1
Munich, 27 November 1912
It
is not only desirable indeed in every area of thinking and life
but also necessary to get to know the sources of error beside
those of truth. Since one can only shelter from all obstacles
which oppose the quest for truth by the knowledge of the
sources of error. However, the knowledge of the sources of
error is particularly necessary in the area of spiritual
research because there the error lies in wait for you
everywhere, so to speak. However, it is disguised in most cases
so that you can hardly recognise it. In many cases it is in
such a way that one can get to truth only on the paths of
spiritual research if you can really defeat the error like an
adversary.
I
have explained the day before yesterday that the human being
has no other means on the path of spiritual research than the
human soul that can mediate between the human knowledge and the
supersensible worlds. The usual science produces its outer
instruments with which it observes its experiments. The
spiritual researcher has as an instrument only what he can make
of his soul, while he gets out soul forces, which are not
necessary for the usual physical life and cognition, but are
cognitive forces slumbering there, and enters with these
cognitive forces into the supersensible world.
I
have also shown that the soul — if it applies the
characterised means to itself — advances first to the
so-called Imaginative knowledge and how already there an error
lies in wait for you against which the spiritual researcher
must fight, namely the error to consider this imagery as
something objective that exists outside of you in the
world.
I
have already said that any self-education of the spiritual
researcher must tend to a strong willpower so that the pictures
emerging in the soul are considered as nothing but reflections
of own soul experiences. I have also said that one has to erase
this Imaginative world from the soul, has to descend to
unfathomable depths, and that only thereby the soul becomes
able to feel the supersensible facts and beings
objectively.
As
a counter-image of the Imaginative knowledge, I have put the
mediumship. Of course, it is not possible to repeat everything
that I have said the day before yesterday; I want only to
remember that I have drawn your attention to some doubtful
aspects of mediumship. If I do not mention them today, you must
not conclude that these doubtful aspects were not enough taken
into consideration. I have already said what mediumship
consists of. While with the Imaginative knowledge the inner
vitality of the soul is strengthened, the consciousness is more
strengthened than, otherwise, in the usual life, the ego; the
usual consciousness of the medium is diminished, so that with
the medium the usual thinking and feeling stop and an
unconscious state takes place. Because the consciousness is
expelled from the medium as it were. The forces that exist
except the consciousness in the human nature are brought into
the universal world being, and this world being with its
spiritual subsoil and processes works immediately into the
medium. The medium can thereby reveal itself, but not as an
individuality, the interplaying forces and processes of the
world reveal themselves. The medium becomes the revelator of
the spiritual work and actions of beings of the world. Thus,
the Imaginative knowledge with the strengthening of
consciousness confronts mediumship where the consciousness is
extinguished more or less.
Let
us go first into the sources of error of mediumship. Those
people who like to get knowledge by the revelations of media
reject as a rule that the medium takes up some
spiritual-scientific teachings, concepts, or ideas in its
consciousness. That is, such researchers who want to recognise
objective truth by mediumship do not like that the medium has
learnt ideas of the spiritual world. From their viewpoint, they
are right because the knowledge of spiritual science uses the
consciousness strongly, and pushes its way into the human
consciousness. Then it is difficult to blank out this
consciousness of the medium, to quieten these strong forces
really. Then one can experience that the medium instead of
making known that which is independent of its own individuality
reveals that only which has worked before as spiritual science.
The investigators of this field are very much anxious as a rule
to keep their media away from the influence of spiritual
research.
A
strong imagination of the medium is also not appropriate
because it can describe various things in the world. Since
every strong imagination works substantially on the
individuality and pushes its way through if the consciousness
is diminished. Thus, one may say, any active and creative
content of the consciousness disturbs the manifestations of the
medium. Yes, everybody knows who has experience in that field
that people with strong imagination are just bad media. If a
personality has taken up, for example, that which you can read
in my Occult Science about the evolution of the
planetary system, and can induce her/him to make
manifestations, you will find out that that which the medium
has learnt this way is mixed in her/his manifestations, while
one can get, otherwise, the strangest results which are
grotesque now and again. If one gets over the grotesque
expression, it appears just with media of certain kind how
cosmic connections of the evolution can be expressed. It is
necessary for that who wants to investigate with the help of a
medium above all to appropriate a certain experience to
distinguish the subjective, individual consciousness contents
of the medium from that which the medium cannot know and still
manifests itself by it. Hence, for more trivial investigations
one has to consider those manifestations of media in particular
with which one knows for sure that the medium makes known
something that he/she could not at all make known with her/his
full consciousness.
I
bring in things only which are exactly verified which everybody
knows who has experience in this field, as one knows any
scientific facts. If one receives a communication from a
medium, for example, in a language which the medium has not
learnt, then one knows that here something speaks through the
medium that cannot be associated with the individuality; one
knows that the medium unveils objective world contents.
Thus, everywhere we recognise the source of error by the
peculiarity of the medium that the practical person has to
avoid in this field. In particular, one has to consider this
source of error if one deals with the observation of
somnambulistic persons who make known something of the
spiritual world by those methods, those manifestations to which
they are enabled. There one will always find that something
subjective is largely mixed in the manifestation. Someone who
has experience in this area knows that a medium that is for
example a Protestant receives her/his manifestations quite
different from a medium that is a Catholic. One can experience
that a Catholic medium whose emotional life is penetrated with
Catholic views beholds certain beings in the spiritual world
that appear, however, in such a way, as the person concerned
imagines it, for instance, as an angel. What can be the case
with such a Catholic medium will not be the case with the
Protestant one. Hence, it is again urgently necessary, beside
the observation of that which makes known itself by the medium
to envisage the individuality of the medium exactly. Here we
get to an area that can light up the sources of error to a
great extent.
That who is a sceptic in this area or regards the whole story
as folly will say, there you have it, there that makes known
itself by such a person what he/she thinks, what he/she has in
his/her consciousness. — Indeed, if one looks above all
at that in its totality what the media unveil, then one will
almost never escape the errors unscathed. However, the
objective beholder of these things considers the contents of
the manifestations less and less but it comes more into
consideration that even such things can be experienced with
diminished consciousness. The experience is considered.
If
one appropriates the practice to ignore the contents of the
manifestation and observes which processes happen in the human
soul as results of this coherence of the human nature with the
universal forces, then you realise why it is possible that once
the manifestation is coloured Catholic and the other time
Protestant. Since the experience of spiritual forces and beings
matters that dress only in the described way. The error
originates if one considers the sheaths as the essentials. You
find truth if you can ignore the disguise and look at the fact
that generally such a process takes place — no matter if
and how the experience is coloured by the individuality. Since
the experience is not an angel or anything else, but these are
spiritual forces which you can behold only with careful
investigations, but whose existence the medium can prove and
express.
One
cannot say easily where in the described area error stops and
truth begins because really the one changes into the other. One
has to characterise the matter rather in such a way that one
takes a way where one approaches truth more and more if one
acquires the practice to exclude the sources of error, so that
probably someone who looks for truth in this area
conscientiously can be very misunderstood in our present where
one does not like such matters. One believes that that which he
wants to tell as experiences is anyhow contestable. However,
the conscientious researchers in this area, actually, do not at
all mean that; they only mean the description of something that
has appeared, and if they are conscientious, they themselves
indicate where the sources of error are. However, it is
sufficient to be able to show a path to attain knowledge of a
spiritual world that is threatened by error, indeed, with every
step you do. However, you can thrust aside the error, the
further you advance. Hence, it is not a matter of answering the
question: what is truth what is error? — but the matter
is that there is a way to overcome the error gradually and get
to the area of truth, so that truth is as it were like
something that you approach as a distant aim. These are the
essentials in this field.
Then it depends with the progress on this way whether one gets
more and more to such experiments — if we like to call it
so — in which the individual of the consciousness is
extinguished, and that that which still remains intervenes only
in the objective world processes. Thus, it is a question of
decreasing the consciousness in mediumship. The more one
succeeds in diminishing this consciousness and making the
medium only an instrument for supersensible world processes
taking place without her/him, the more one attains truth in
this area. Besides, I have to call attention to one thing: if
you are concerned with such a somnambulistic person who gets
either by her/his nature at certain times or by certain, often
rather doubtful means to such a state, you get principles of
the supersensible world in their manifestations. Principles of
the world express themselves; this comes strongly to light in
the manifestations of the person concerned. Should beings of
the supersensible world reveal themselves this way, they must
take possession of the medium first, and one must have the
possibility to look through the medium at the real beings that
makes known itself. A trained view of such things belongs to
it, which you can only acquire on one side by practice, on the
other side by insight into that which spiritual science can
give generally.
The
Imaginative knowledge is the complete counter-image of that
which I have just described. Today I tried to point sketchily
to that which spiritual science has to say about mediumship,
while I do not consider this, otherwise, as my task. However,
that which I represent here should come from the counter-image
of mediumship, from that which the human soul can explore which
has made itself a tool by developing forces that are slumbering
in it to behold into the Imaginative world. I have already
spoken the day before yesterday, to what extent this
Imaginative world is radically different from the pathological,
fantastic world of hallucinations, visions, and delusions and
so on. Now you may ask, do any errors ambush the esoteric also
in this area like adversaries? Are there also sources of error?
— This is absolutely the case. You can already receive,
even before you enter into the supersensible world, an idea to
what extent errors may generally originate if the soul is left
to its own resources, as I have described it the day before
yesterday, and takes the way into the spiritual worlds.
We
have all possible worldviews or viewpoints in the usual world.
There one has materialism, positivism, individualism,
spiritualism and so on. Try only once to listen objectively to
another person who feels pressured into alleging all logical
and other reasons for materialism or spiritualism and so on by
his whole education, by his whole life. Then you will convince
yourself that it is never quite entitled, actually, to feel as
an opponent of materialism or spiritualism and so on. You will
realise that for all these viewpoints numerous reasonable
arguments can be brought forward. You may mostly completely
agree — if you are unbiased — with a representative
of the concerning viewpoint. Even if you do not stand at all on
the materialist viewpoint, you may say if you listen to a
reasonable materialist: yes, nevertheless, it is well founded
what he brings forward for his viewpoint. The uncomfortable
begins where people are committed to any viewpoint unilaterally
and attack and reject another viewpoint to the point of
intolerability sometimes. It would be very well conceivable
that somebody says who has experiences in this area: yes, I can
be a materialist rather well, where materialism is entitled,
and a spiritualist where spiritualism is entitled and so on.
This possibility absolutely exists.
I
wanted to give a sample in two talks that I have held here in
last winter about the subjects: How Does One Disprove
Theosophy? and How Does One Justify Theosophy?
— a sample of how one can bring forward something
positive for contrary standpoints. Reasonable people have
always pointed to the fact that — considered unilaterally
— no point of view shows the truth really. People, who
get a feeling of this fact, often say, truth is between the
contrary points of view in the middle. — However, this
statement seems to someone who goes deeper into this matter in
such a way, as if anybody said, if I have two chairs, I sit
down not on the one or the other, but between them. —
Goethe who had good experiences in this area said rightly,
truth is not between two contrary opinions but there is the
task in between which should lead us only to the facts. —
As a rule, truth is to be found neither in the one nor in the
other one-sidedness. This already becomes obvious if we have
not yet entered into the supersensible world. This fact could
work quite stupefying on someone who takes the knowledge
seriously to whom knowledge is really a matter of life. Since
you can describe everything unilaterally from a viewpoint and
bring good reasons forward, and one can prove the same thing
with maybe equally good reasons from the other side. This can
lead in many cases to a kind of doubt about truth. However, it
will not lead that who is strong enough to a doubt about truth
but to an investigation about how the human being gets
generally to a viewpoint.
If
anybody is not committed only to materialism, but has saved so
much freedom for himself to refrain from his approach and to
exert some self-knowledge, then he can ask himself, how has my
present life proceeded, actually? How have my habitual ways of
thinking developed, what has induced me, for example, to follow
more the material coherences? Thus, a follower of materialism
may ask. The follower of a more spiritual view can also do
that. There you already find in the usual life that one creates
a subjective viewpoint. Thereby one gets to know the logical
value of a viewpoint that one knows how one has got it how a
certain life direction has induced one to think just in such a
way. Not because one looks for truth in the middle between the
different viewpoints, but because one recognises how this
viewpoint has originated and why one judges in such a way, one
becomes fair towards the other, and one gets around to
acknowledging the value of the other viewpoint. The different
viewpoints compensate each other if the followers of these
different viewpoints practise self-knowledge.
Imagine once that some people of contrary viewpoints meet like
in a board and quarrel about their different viewpoints.
Somebody who has taken part in such a thing knows that,
besides, normally nothing results. If people rise after
hours-long discussion, everybody is normally still convinced
fanatically of his viewpoint as before. If the attempt were
done that such a board were quiet one hour and everybody
checked during one hour only how he has got to his viewpoint,
and if they started talking only then again, they would not
start quarrelling. This possibility is imaginable. Since one
would find understanding for the other viewpoint by
self-knowledge, by investigation of the way which one has done
to get to his viewpoint. Already in the usual life, it is
obvious that self-knowledge is the way to approach truth
gradually, and that then the truth positions itself in the
middle that one, however, must not put his opinion between the
contrary viewpoints.
This self-knowledge must take place to a much greater extent
with that who wants to avoid the sources of error in the
supersensible area. Here I have to say that the spiritual
researcher can approach truth only if he begins to practise
self-knowledge in the area of the supersensible in the extreme.
He has enough opportunity if he does not surrender to that
which appears as pictures in his soul at first, but if he can
say to himself, you yourself are the pictures in your soul;
even if they are maybe wonderful — this is no
supersensible world; you yourself are all that, projected onto
space.
Thus, the first step on the way to spiritual research already
gives him the possibility of self-knowledge. Because you become
acquainted with yourself this way, you learn only to eliminate
yourself from that which can be then considered as objective.
There is in the field of spiritual research no other way to
avoid errors than to get to the full self-knowledge first, so
that you can remove that which you yourself are from that which
is left over. Here the spiritual researcher can recognise by a
particular step, which he has to do, that he has advanced
enough in self-knowledge. If this were not the case, one should
not at all venture into the supersensible area. Since it is
nothing as difficult for the human being as self-knowledge,
because all interests, all inclinations, all sympathies that
you have for yourself put themselves in the way and deceive us
as it were while they lead us to believe that they are
something real, whereas they are only reflections of our
being.
One
calls the step by which the spiritual researcher can know that
he has the necessary self-knowledge “encounter with the
guardian of the threshold.” What is this so-called
guardian of the threshold? You can get an image of him only
gradually. We suppose once that at a certain age we intensely
look back at our development, at our favourite opinions, at
everything that we have learnt, how we have felt up to now
concerning sensory and extrasensory. Even if these things are
very difficult — it is important to know that you have to
put just such questions to yourself and to consider them as
meditations beside the other exercises. This evokes the forces
slumbering in the soul of which you can say that you get away
by them as it were from your own being that you face
yourself.
Single symptoms show this clearly in the Imaginative world at
first. If you do such exercises of self-knowledge, you feel a
certain change in the soul that is rather awkward at first. It
consists of the fact that you grow tired of your own being in
many respects. Someone is not yet a right spiritual researcher
who has not strongly felt this weariness of the own being.
Since strictly speaking you are everything that you have formed
up to now as opinions, feelings and sensations, you hardly are
something else in your consciousness. That all has now become
something external to you. You are estranged from yourself.
What you once regarded as your peculiarity becomes anything
external to you; you feel empty, as nothing compared to that
which you really are and which does no longer appear to you as
something valuable as it used to be.
These feelings can be experienced so subtly that your soul life
does not at all experience any danger if in so careful way the
path is searched to the spiritual world, as I have described it
in my book How Does One Attain Knowledge
of Higher Worlds?.
With somebody who wants to reach higher levels of spiritual
knowledge the described sensations must strongly appear so that
his soul is transformed quite considerably and he feels as if
he has everything that he had in himself now beside himself,
and, hence, feels as if he faces an abyss. What he had up to
now appears to him as something that he should no longer use.
If you have intensely done such an experience, you feel another
experience emerging in the Imaginative knowledge very soon that
consists of the fact that you become acquainted with yourself
in a new way. You get to know that which you have released as
your own being as it were from yourself with all possible,
mostly unpleasant qualities. Besides pictures of beings appear,
and now they become critics of that which you really are. You
see yourself surrounded by nothing but pictures of other beings
that stalk you that judge everything that is good or bad in
you.
Briefly, you feel your being as it were allocated to other
beings. It is really something that is well met with the
picture of Dionysus whose being is split and divided. Any
training as it is described in How Does One Attain
Knowledge of Higher Worlds? aims at the fact
that you know how to behave in the right way at the moment when
the just described occurs when, so to speak, not the own
individuality perceives, but when the world perceives and
judges you. However, for this moment you have to be trained
first, so that you are not shocked. The fact that the human
being does not behold and that he lives, actually, in a glass
house and everywhere world forces and beings are there that see
through him until his most secret depths would interfere in the
usual life everywhere. One denotes the fact that he does not
behold them that he is protected against them the encounter
with the guardian of the threshold that leads into the
supersensible world.
In
detailed way, I tried to represent that in my mystery drama
The Guardian of the Threshold where I tried to turn the
truth described more theoretically into action. Now you get to
know when you have experienced this encounter with the guardian
of the threshold that everywhere not only the error of
knowledge but also the real error lies in wait for you and that
you have to take care of yourself everywhere and find the right
possibility to look at the things as they are in truth.
Because self-knowledge is difficult, the risk of a substantial
error arises that the spiritual researcher does not reach the
point where he can place himself, so to speak, beside himself.
However, you cannot say, here is truth, here is error, but only
that you can wend your way to truth. The more you are able to
consider yourself as an objective being, the more you approach
truth. While the consciousness of a medium has to be
diminished, it has to be strengthened with the spiritual
researcher just in such a way that he is not mistaken about
himself and about what he has in himself. While entering the
spiritual world you have to target the fact as sharply as
possible that you face your concentrated own self. Thus, you
eliminate everything personal from the supersensible
percipience.
Let
us assume that a person wends his esoteric way honestly and
conscientiously, he can maybe get to a certain point, then he
loses his courage or desire, and he does not go further. Of
course, you can suppress everything that you have experienced
up to now. The spiritual researcher is not always a spiritual
researcher but only at certain moments. If he were always in
such a soul state, he would appear like a crazy person. That
who has already transformed his soul to a certain degree and
gives up the thing again can experience that he now mixes that
which he has recognised up to now in the spiritual world
chaotically with that which the sensory world gives him. The
things intermingle, and then you are confused. The ears hear,
but also something supersensible interferes, and you are
confused. This can happen of course only, if you do not take
the instructions into consideration which I have given in my
book How Does One Attain Knowledge of Higher
Worlds?. Wrong application of the methods may appear in any
science. That, however, who has got to a certain end of this
way will experience the following:
He
not only surveys the qualities of his mind, his prejudices et
cetera and does not involve them in his objective knowledge,
but also never mixes pictures of that which the senses perceive
which the physical reason invents in the objective knowledge.
Since he will not be able to eliminate his personality. Now
here we can get to a kind of definition of error in the
supersensible world. This error consists of the fact that one
has insufficiently cast off the own subjectivity, and,
therefore, always the own individuality intermingles in the
pictures of objective reality. It is quite natural on one side
if one often says that everybody portrays that somewhat
different which the seer perceives, and, hence, one can count
on nothing at all. One can concede such a fact, but stressing
this is trivial, it is just a self-evident fact. It is natural
that the ideal of the spiritual researcher can hardly
completely attained and that, hence, everywhere in that which
the spiritual researcher describes a subjective, individual
element intermingles. He, who can compare, however, will find
that if one does not only look at the pictures, but at the
experiences they are more or less similar.
Concerning the moral qualities that are necessary for the seer
one has to emphasise that he must be conscientious that he must
practise all those qualities that I have already mentioned the
day before yesterday. It is correct that one can look into the
spiritual world, indeed, only by the described processes that,
however, the research results of the spiritual world are to be
transferred to the concepts of the physical reason. You have to
search them in the supersensible world; you can understand them
with common sense. It is true that someone who can think well
can also properly judge that which he experiences in the
spiritual world. Someone who is a fool in the sensory world and
cannot think logically describes everything that he beholds
wrong and caricatured. That also applies to the moral qualities
of the person concerned. Somebody who wants to get with immoral
attitude to the spiritual world will just get in the spiritual
world to the disturbing and hampering things and beings and he
recognises them distorted and caricatured because of his
immoral attitude. However, someone who enters with moral
attitude finds the beings of the spiritual world that show the
things in their right mutual arrangement and weightiness.
Thus, the determinative of truth or error in spiritual research
is not anything that you acquire to yourself as a seer only,
but something that you have already acquired before in
intellectual and moral respects. In particular, moral things
are strongly involved in how one interprets the supersensible
phenomena. Someone who is prejudiced in a certain belief who
has sympathies and prejudices for the fact that something
certain should be true, brings this disposition, this prejudice
into the supersensible world; he interprets the phenomena after
it. Everything that he fathomed and announced of the spiritual
world can be an error because it is coloured with his
subjective belief.
Here is the area where I have to point — after we have
discussed the sources of error of spiritual research — to
the sources of error by the dissemination of spiritual science.
In a way, the dissemination of spiritual research resembles the
dissemination of any other research. As for example not
everybody can be a chemist, but everybody can accept and figure
that out what the chemists have investigated in the
laboratories about the substances, everybody can judge, even if
he is not a spiritual researcher, what the spiritual researcher
announces, namely not only up to a certain degree but to its
full extent. In this respect, the things are similar; in other
regard, they are dissimilar. They are dissimilar because
chemistry, mathematics, or any other science is something that
one can face cool and objectively if researchers announce it,
even if with true thirst for knowledge.
This is not the case with spiritual research. Spiritual
research touches the most intimate of our hearts, the big
questions of life. As the researcher carries his prejudices,
his belief, his sympathies and antipathies into the spiritual
world and thereby distorts the things and beholds wrong, the
audience, the confessors — let me use the term —
meet the spiritual researcher with certain beliefs, certain
sympathies, or antipathies. Something develops that does not
lead to an objective judgement, but that is associated with all
possible things which take effect from human being to human
being. As strongly as the soul longs for experiencing something
about these things, as the human soul is careless now and again
to apply the unbiased reason to judge what the spiritual
researcher brings forward, although it could be judged
completely. Then belief often replaces an unbiased judgement
because one likes that which the one or the other says maybe
only because he brings it forward emphatically or because one
finds him pleasant. The belief replaces the objective,
conscientious verification; one accepts the things trusting in
authority. The worst is if authority mania interposes itself
between the spiritual researcher and his audience. Therefore,
as with all things about which we have heard today that the
spiritual researcher should follow them he keeps guard as it
were beside his own self. The confessor, who listens to the
spiritual researcher, should pay attention to his common sense
and repeatedly carry out a kind of self-inspection to realise
how much belief, prejudice, and sympathy intermingles in the
facts that he accepts with the messages of the spiritual
researcher.
Since in double respect accepting at mere belief causes big
damage is a source of error just with the dissemination of
spiritual science. The one is that the confessor does not
develop healthy judgement what is the most necessary. Because
common sense can be practised best of all if the results of
spiritual research are thought through; you deprive yourself of
the best opportunity if you accept these results at mere
belief. The second one is: because the things are important
which the spiritual researcher has to say, he may exercise an
incorrect influence over his supporters — if the listener
does not constantly keep his common sense in readiness —
because one believes him because one takes up that prejudiced
what one should check, actually. Thereby the spiritual
researcher tries — instead of exercising an entitled
influence, while he is convincing and the listeners realise
what he says —, to persuade while he overpowers their
common sense. Even if this ideal condition cannot yet be
reached today, one has to say that if truth should prevail the
confessors should make it to the spiritual researcher as
difficult as possible to spread his truths and should impose
the highest requirements on him if he expresses his knowledge
in concepts and ideas of common sense. Then one counteracts
what, unfortunately, is a fact and a forever returning source
of error with the dissemination of spiritual truths that
charlatanism and all possible similar mingles so easily with
spiritual research. Unless just common sense is applied
permanently, one does no longer know where conscientious
spiritual research and where charlatanism and humbug is, and
everything is thrown together.
Two
oppose soul directions will throw charlatanism and
conscientious spiritual research together. One soul direction
is that of those who are prejudiced in authority mania, who
make themselves confessors of spiritual science light-heartedly
because of their sympathies and prejudices. They mingle
everything and often accept the one as well as the other. There
is for this kind of people who are oriented in such a way no
other remedy than that there are conscientious spiritual
researchers who position themselves conscientiously on the
ground of truth. Only experience can teach us whether this is
the case. The different people who may hardly differentiate
charlatanism and conscientiousness and jumble everything up are
those who do not at all want to go into the matter who judge
about the matter cursorily with some concepts they have knocked
together, and who — because they often succeed in
uncovering fraud — not only label everything with this
name, but lump everything together. The direction of the
religious confessors often regards the biggest charlatanism as
irrefutable highest truth, the other kind of human beings, the
biased ones, the non-experts, even regards conscientious
spiritual research as charlatanism and error sometimes, and one
cannot bear a grudge against them because they do not better
understand what they say.
Thus, it will be necessary above all, so that truth and not
error can prevail with the dissemination of spiritual research,
that in particular with the confessors of spiritual research
critical reason, critical judgement, and common sense and not
belief in authority develop. This belief in authority will
already wither away if a knowledge spreads among those who like
and need spiritual research, a knowledge that is not common,
unfortunately, among the confessors of spiritual science that a
seer is no higher animal because he can behold in the
supersensible world. He does not differ from other human
beings, just as little as a chemist, a botanist, a machinist,
or a tailor. The possession of spiritual knowledge does not
really determine the value of the human being but only that he
can investigate this area and bring the acquired knowledge to
his fellow men. Only his common sense determines the value of
the human being, his power of judgement and his moral
qualities. Just spiritual research could prove that
intellectual and moral qualities of the human being already
determine his value, before he enters into the spiritual world,
and that if he is inferior there the results of his research
will be inferior. It is exceptionally necessary to realise
this. Even more than the opponents of spiritual science, its
supporters should take stock of themselves in this field.
Thus, I tried today to describe not only the possibilities of
error finding spiritual truth, but also the possibility of
error with the dissemination of spiritual truths. I tried to
evoke a sensation that conscientious spiritual research
acknowledges that its opponents can often argue this or that
rightly and that conscientious spiritual research can and has
to argue in the same way because it is just important in this
area to face the error to recognise the truth. For the
confessors of spiritual science has that who wants to be
conscientious, as a rule, only one consolation: truth has a
strong power, and, even if error slips in because of the belief
in authority, by the self-correction of truth those are cured
who were supporters of this or that for a while at mere belief
in authority. In most cases, such a cure takes place because
one has to pay the price as it were to have had such a blind
belief in authority. Often it just happened that because one
did not observe the details sharply, but took one's word for it
that then with a radical case it appears how little
conscientiously one has gone forward. If then pain and
disappointment are the more significant, the cure is just
successful.
For
those, however, who throw together spiritual research and
charlatanism benevolently or malevolently, for those the
today's consideration may offer another consolation that people
can have always if they generally face truth. The truths of
spiritual research if they appear as new are much more exposed
to those destinies to which, however, also the other truths are
exposed which appear gradually in the evolution of humanity.
How, for example, did one accept the Copernican worldview! How
did one treat Galilei! How did the whole world defend itself
when Francesco Redi spread the truth that earthworms do not
originate from river mud and other lifeless matter, but that
any life arises from a living zygote! How academic
organisations rose when the truth was pronounced that iron
stones can fall from the air onto earth — the meteorites!
How did people defend themselves against an apparently so
unimportant thing like the post stamp. At that time, an
authoritative person said, if really the correspondences
increased to such an extent, the post-office buildings would no
longer be sufficient! - I could bring in numerous other
examples that truth when it entered into the world was regarded
as paradoxical and was rejected.
The
sight of these destinies of truth can give us the consolation
and the confidence towards all those who reject spiritual
science and throw it together with charlatanism, the
consolation which one just had compared with truth generally in
all ages and which one can dress in the words of someone who
was often mistaken who tried, however, to look for truth. I am
allowed to summarise just both talks that dealt with the
interrelation of truth and error in spiritual research with
words of the vigorous truth seeker Arthur Schopenhauer
(1788-1860) who said in his writing The Fundamentals
of Moral (1839):
“During all centuries the poor truth had to blush about
the fact that she was paradoxical, and, nevertheless, it is not
her guilt. She cannot accept the figure of the sitting
enthroned general error. There she looks up sighing to her
tutelary deity, the time, that shows victory and fame to her,
but her wing beats are so big and slow that the individual dies
away in the meantime.”
Answer-to-Questions
Question: Some persons get a peculiar feeling sometimes,
mostly after long straining thinking, as if they stood beside
themselves, with a dreadful emptiness around themselves, and
then the body appears as something very strange. Then one must
only force himself to feel again as a body, as with E.T.A.
Hoffmann. What is to be done there?
Rudolf Steiner: Above all, one has to consider
that everything that appears of this kind in the world has
different degrees. What I have described in the talk today
shows only a more significant degree of the phenomena that can
appear in weaker degrees always in the human being. The way to
get away from the instrument of the body is just the way of
meditation and concentration. If the interrogator says
“mostly after long straining thinking” —
meditation and concentration is a quite intensive degree of
concentrated thinking, feeling, maybe also of willing. Hence,
such phenomena are definitely possible which take place in an
extraordinary measure with meditation and concentration if the
single members of the human nature are in a looser balance
— with every human being they are, by the way, in another
balance. This was described, for example, belletristically very
appropriately. Somebody errs who supposes that with a
belletristic portrayal of such things always only imagination
forms the basis. The serious artist describes, even if he takes
unusual matters as objects, from experience. This applies to
E.T.A. Hoffmann (Ernst Theodor Amadeus H., 1776-1822, jurist,
poet, and composer) to a great extent. Many people would
experience this if they had always observed themselves, but the
degree of attention does not always reach the events, and
thereby such facts remain often unnoticed. Strictly speaking,
spiritual research is not something special, but only an
increase of that which also appears in the usual life
everywhere and always.
Question: In which regard is the knowledge of higher
worlds worthwhile — apart from curiosity —, because
it is dependent on common sense?
Rudolf Steiner: For someone who does not long for the
answer of the higher questions of existence, spiritual science
will be superfluous. However, to someone who longs for the
answer of such questions one has to say: as well as the body
hungers for food, the soul hungers for the answer of the big
questions of life. As I have already said in the talk, you can
probably take truth away from the soul, but not the hunger for
truth. Its effects will become more prominent that at first the
soul experiences all possible states of disorder, even of
desperation that a matter of knowledge changes into a question
of health. Here I only point to the close coherence of
nervousness and indifference to spiritual truths. They are just
a necessity of human nature.
You
can learn from this question again, what I have already often
touched, that people do not listen exactly enough to these
things which can be presented so difficultly. If one had
listened to that precisely which I have said in the talk, such
a question would not have been put. One would have also heard,
for example, that the value of the human being depends on the
soul condition, on moral and intellectual qualities, and not on
the contents of the truths, because one has to find them only
by supersensible research. One will find the intellectual in
the higher knowledge if one is intellectually minded and the
moral if one is morally minded that you have to bring, however,
your intellectual and moral abilities with you into the
supersensible world.
Question: It is a fact that one can give the functions
of the soul another direction by mental work. Where are
guarantees, however, of the absolute validity of the
immutability of our soul?
Rudolf Steiner: I have said twice in the talks that one
cannot say, here truth stops and here error begins — that
there is, however, the possibility of entering the ways to
truth. Of course, it would be best if one could write all
truths on a small piece of paper; one could put it into the
vest pocket and look at it if necessary. However, truth is not
this way. You have gradually to work your way upward. Is the
question generally entitled to demand guarantees that anything
is objectively valid?
Question: Is intellectual soul and mind soul the same in
theosophy?
Rudolf Steiner: No, but these are two sides of
one and the same being, so that one soul member is called
intellectual soul once if it turns outwardly and judges the
things, and the other time the same being is called mind soul
if it experiences its own inside.
Question: Is there any particular moral of the spiritual
researcher?
Rudolf Steiner: No other than the generally human moral
which can be refined, however, as I have described it in
How Does One Attain Knowledge of Higher Worlds?.
However, as morality does not have double-entry accounting in
other ways as well, I have to say that also the spiritual
researcher is not allowed to have double-entry moral
accounting. However, as I have said, he must practise certain
moral qualities more intimately.
Question: Does spiritual science have the right to
reveal holy laws?
Rudolf Steiner: These are just the laws of
nature.
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