Spiritual Science and Natural Sciences — their
Relationship to the Riddles of Life
Part 2
Frankfurt, 3 March 1913
Somebody who speaks about spiritual science today cannot count
on general approval. Since all habitual ways of thinking of our
time have grown out of a ground which is different from that of
spiritual science.
Since the aurora of modern natural sciences, the essential
progress of human mind is based on the observation of the outer
world and on the application of the reason to this outer world.
Spiritual science has completely to acknowledge natural
sciences and their results. However, today we live again in a
time in which mind and soul of the human being long more and
more for an answer of those questions that exceed the sensory
view and rise to the creative powers of existence, and look for
them in the spiritual.
Spiritual science is based not only on quite different
requirements but also on another way of research than natural
sciences apply. However, one must not believe that spiritual
science contradicts natural sciences in any sense. On the
contrary. Even if it takes its starting point from quite
different requirements and research methods, spiritual science
— understood properly — completely complies with
the scientific results.
Natural sciences are based on the outer view. They have
achieved great things also with the development of those tools
that enable us to look into the physically smallest things.
However, if natural sciences want to do their task, they have
to limit themselves to that which approaches the human being
from without which one can grasp with the senses and understand
with the reason. Knowledge of spirit can establish only on an
inner deepening of the human soul by which the soul discovers
cognitive abilities and forces in itself that exist neither in
the usual day life nor in the outer science. Yes, if this usual
science were intermingled in ambiguous way with
spiritual-scientific methods, it would get only to unjustified
results in its area. Still one will find if one deeper invades
into the matter that the same kind of thinking, the same logic
that our natural sciences apply one also applies in spiritual
science. However, we have to realise that the human soul itself
is the only instrument to invade into the supersensible world.
It is not allowed to stop at the everyday life, but requires
that it can deeper invade into the things from the point of
view of the everyday life. So that this can happen, so that the
human being can become a spiritual researcher, it is necessary
that the soul behaves in its whole inner life different than it
was accustomed before it entered the way to spiritual
research.
Our
soul life proceeds in such a way that we think and feel certain
things, that we have mental pictures in our soul. Which sense
and purpose do we connect with this soul life? We mostly
connect the purpose with it to get to know the outer world and
to orient ourselves in this sensory world. The spiritual
researcher is concerned with something else. He has to select
single mental pictures, sensations, ideas, or impressions that
can be useful for him. I would like to take a comparison.
Let
us assume that we compare the whole soul life that proceeds in
manifold mental pictures, which change at every moment, with
many corns that exist in ears on a field. The owner of the
field selects some of the corns. While he lets the other corns
achieve their goal to serve as food, he selects single ones
that should serve as seeds and have to produce new fruits.
In
a quite similar way, the spiritual researcher has to behave
with his soul life. While, otherwise, the mental pictures
proceed without surveying them, he has to select single mental
pictures that he does not use for the outer cognition of the
world. One calls that concentration, meditation, and
contemplation. Which sense does one connect with these words?
We want to figure out the process that the spiritual researcher
carries out.
At
certain times, the spiritual researcher must try to turn away
his attention completely from the outside world. Then he also
suppresses all worries of life, all desires, affects, and
passions. He has to empty the soul, to cause a kind of empty
consciousness. He selects single mental pictures of his soul
life or of spiritual science whose contents do not matter and
is engrossed in these mental pictures — not in their
contents, they do not matter. However, the spiritual researcher
behaves in such a way that he moves a mental picture
arbitrarily in the centre of his consciousness, and calls all
soul forces and retains this one mental picture in his
consciousness, namely for longer time and with all inner
strain. It only matters that the soul makes an effort that
everything is concentrated upon one point. If you have to do
any work where you have always to strain your arm and if this
work has a purpose, you must exert yourself constantly to
fulfil the purpose of this work. However, if you want to
strengthen your muscles, it may just mattes not to reach this
or that purpose, but to evoke the forces that exert the
muscles, so that they develop. That also applies to the soul
forces with meditation and concentration, namely with forces
which are different from those which one applies in the usual
everyday life. We never exert our souls, so to speak,
concerning the forces that we consider here if we live in the
everyday life. We have to evoke deeper soul forces to
concentrate on a mental picture. That is the point that we
strain the soul in such a way that we also have the inner will
for it.
If
we get a mental picture because we can be stimulated from
without, then the mental picture is caused in our soul without
our assistance. It is there — we have not produced it.
The mental pictures that are attached to worries, to desires,
and passions originate without any effort. They are to no avail
to us if we want to make our soul the instrument of the higher
world. Not that is the point that we have a mental picture, but
that we exert ourselves to move the mental picture in the
centre [of our consciousness]. If the human being calls his
deepest soul forces in patience and perseverance this way,
something new happens for the soul. You can find the details
about that in my book How Does One Attain Knowledge of
Higher Worlds?. This is something that today many people do
not want to believe that for the soul something new can happen.
We can compare this new to a moment which takes place in the
human soul life [at a certain time]. The little child lives up
to the second, third years consciously, but not
self-consciously. One may say in a way that the consciousness
of the child sleeps, before in the child the moment comes where
it knows: I am an ego. This is a kind of awakening. It is a
kind of awakening also if in the described way the soul is
raised to another level of existence if it is made an
instrument to behold into the spiritual world.
What you experience in your soul if you carry out such
exercises can be compared with something with which it is
similar on the one hand and from which it is, on the other
hand, quite different: with falling asleep. How does this usual
sleeping state approach the human being? I do not go into the
details of the scientific hypotheses of sleep. Without special
scientificity, I talk only about that which the human being
experiences in the everyday life falling asleep.
We
know that at the moment of falling asleep the senses no longer
deliver impressions. The mind starts darkening. The human being
transitions into a state in which his body is not active. At
first spiritual science has to say — what logic already
confirms — that the whole human being does not exist in
the sleeping human being, but that the real human being leaves
the body in sleep and is free from the body, that the human
being is beyond his body. Now this is a hypothesis at first,
but spiritual science verifies this hypothesis as a reasonable
truth. Natural sciences more and more approach that which
spiritual science has to say at this point. Du Bois-Reymond
states that natural sciences can understand the sleeping but
never the conscious-wake human being.
If
one does not want to be so illogical to state that every
evening all desires and passions disappear and originate anew
in the morning from nothing, one has to suppose that they are
still there. However, within the physical body they do not
exist. This means that the human being is with his inner being
beyond his body. However, this inner being is of supersensible
nature, hence, one cannot see it.
There may be people who say that just certain things take place
in the human being and cause other processes so that the soul
life takes place. — Someone who speaks that way is in the
same position as someone who believes that one can understand
the nature of the air investigating the lung and its activity.
One can understand the air if one investigates it beyond the
body. Then it penetrates into the human body; the lung is there
to use the air. Natural sciences will just discover more and
more that one can compare the inner activities of the human
body during sleep with the inner activities of lung and heart.
It is an inner bodily work. However, just as little as the lung
produces the air, just as little is that which penetrates as
soul life the organism more and more a product of the body;
rather it penetrates into the body, and it is beyond the body
from falling asleep up to awakening.
One
can still argue many things against that. One can understand
these things only really, if one can prove by facts that that
is something essential which leaves the body in sleep as one
supposes it.
This just happens with the spiritual researcher if he does
those soul exercises that I have discussed just now. Thereby he
causes that soul condition which is free of the body. While the
spiritual researcher refrains from that which his body provides
for him, he causes that — completely awake — he
leaves the body unexploited. During the soul activity, the body
must not be active like in sleep. The senses must be quiet; the
worries and passions that the outer life stimulate must be
quiet as they are quiet, otherwise, only in sleep. The
spiritual researcher causes a completely empty consciousness.
Then, however, he puts one single mental picture in the centre
of his soul life. For it, he needs forces that slumber,
otherwise, in the depths of the soul and that he strengthens
now by exercises so that he can perceive them.
What the spiritual researcher experiences he has just to
experience if it should be conceded as fact. It resembles the
sleep under the mentioned circumstances: it is connected
neither with the movements of the body nor with the outer
senses and the reason. While such state is caused, otherwise,
only in sleep, the spiritual researcher gets around to getting
to know his soul from a new side with his exercises. He knows,
there is an inner life of the soul, even if the soul renounces
everything that comes from the body. One may prove ever so much
with some outer reasons that the human soul cannot live free of
the body — the insight that, nevertheless, it is able to
do it originates only if the body-free state is caused. Then
one knows that one has a soul life that is completely different
from the former soul life that the body has caused. One would
like to say, this is a basic experience which the spiritual
researcher attains if he has done such exercises long enough if
he has already conjured up strong forces from his soul. In my
book How Does One Attains Knowledge of Higher Worlds?,
you can read up further details about that. I would like to
describe the typical of this experience.
If
one has carried out the exercises long enough, a particular
inner experience appears. Either one awakes from the depth of
sleep, or, one feels tempted to pause in the middle of the day
life. What happens then is a kind of pictorial experience. Then
you have the feeling that something goes forward, as if a
lightning has struck you. What goes forward?
The
human being thinks possibly that way: now you feel what you
have always felt as your body, filled with physical elements,
and is taken away from you. — Indeed, you realise now
that strong forces are necessary to keep upright compared with
such an experience. One feels that which one has always called
approaching the gate of death. One is vividly acquainted with
that which appears at death. Indeed, now changed feelings and
mental pictures appear in the soul. Now you know what it means
to stand no longer by yourself as it was the case before. Now
you feel the soul transformed so that you know, it is not dark
and quiet, but is internally active if you renounce any
co-operation of the physical body.
This experience is very significant. It is a dramatic
experience for the soul. It is something about which the soul
says, whatever I have experienced up to now in life, I cannot
compare the significance of this experience that sometimes
shakes the soul. A lot of that which I have felt up to now only
as slumbering in the backgrounds of existence of which I
believe that I can only anticipate it, takes place before my
eyes. Hence, I know now: yes, the human being is connected in
his innermost core with that world which is behind the sensory
world and which, actually, the sensory world veils only.
However, you know something else. You know that it was
necessary to do such exercises, to strengthen the soul. You
know this, because you realise that to the experience of the
described a certain faculty of judgement is necessary and a
kind of moral courage to maintain yourself. The soul forces
that you have taken out of its depths give this courage and
faculty of judgement. You find the further details of this way
again described in my book How Does One Attain Knowledge of
Higher Worlds?. If you have arrived at this point, you just
know: unless you have prepared yourself, you would approach
this event with two qualities which are doubtful to the highest
degree if they appear in the context with these experiences and
which you get to know only at this point of soul development:
self-love, or more precisely, self-sense, and a certain fear
and insecurity of those regions which are behind the sensory
world. Self-sense or self-love plays a big role in the usual
life, but the soul can always master them. Bad habits appear in
our souls, and we can change them. Unless we want to change
them, we can at least feel that we could change them. Compared
with a force of nature, flash and thunder, we do not have the
feeling that we can change it. If we entered without
preparation into the state that I have just described, you
would realise that you have strengthened, indeed, your soul
forces, but that you have also brought out something else,
namely reinforced self-love. Only if you have also strengthened
the other soul force, you are able to decrease this self-sense.
Just as little as you are able to resist flash and thunder,
just as little you are able to resist self-sense, to snatch it
away from the soul life.
However, if you have made the soul an instrument for the
spiritual world in the right way, then the survey of the
picture enables you to recognise this self-sense in its true
form. Since this picture shows something else than one could
describe it with few words. It shows everything that we have
called our ego, our soul up to now as put beyond ourselves. It
shows what we have wanted up to now from which you suffer, with
which you are pleased. Now you know: I have to place down all
that from myself if I want to develop that out of myself, which
can lead me into the supersensible world.
You
get to know yourself as soul at this point of existence only.
You know now what it means to face yourself with true
self-knowledge; you know that you retain nothing of that for a
higher knowledge which you have called your ego up to now
— you have to cast off it and retain it as something
external. Facing yourself objectively, considering yourself as
another person or as an object is a preparation for penetrating
into the spiritual world. However, this requires that you have
also developed the strong forces to defeat the reinforced
self-sense. Someone who has not done this would experience
infinite pain if he realised that he has to cast off and
renounce everything that he has suffered in order to behold
into the spiritual world. — Nothing of that which serves
to you in the world seems suitable to lead you into a higher
world.
Hence, it is necessary that
you defeat self-sense. Something else yet appears. If the human
being does this experience, he notices that his whole security
of life was contained in that which you have to set aside from
yourself, which you ignore now. There fear seizes you, because
you must leave behind for a while what gave you security up to
now. Now it is as if you lose ground. Only if you have attained
other forces, you do not have fear but courage to penetrate
into the unknown land of spirit. What lives there in the soul
as fear appears quite different to you. The soul life is
something very complex. Only a part of it is aware; another
part rests always down in the depths of the soul that the
spiritual researcher brings out with his power. The human being
only knows a part of his soul life; other parts work into the
usual soul life. However, the human being knows nothing about
them. Yes, the usual soul life often is there to blanket what
rests in the concealed depths of the soul. The human being
helps himself to get over them, while he deceives himself. For
that who knows the soul a phenomenon is very interesting which
appears to the human being of the present paradoxical, but it
is true.
In
the present, we see people, materialists, who do not want to
search the spirit in its true figure on the way of spiritual
life. Why does one become a materialist? If you understand, why
this is the case, you become tolerant on one side towards the
materialist because you realise that under certain conditions
the soul cannot be different if it does not receive the
suggestion to come out of materialism. Since that who
investigates the soul of the materialist notices that in its
depths nothing but the fear of the spiritual world
prevails.
It
is that way. Even if the materialists resent that, it is in
such a way. They are afraid in the depths of their souls
without knowing it; they are afraid of the spiritual world
because they have a dark feeling of the fact that they lose
ground if they leave the sure ground of reason. They are afraid
of it, and, therefore, they blanket this fear with materialist
theories, as one dazes himself against fear. The materialist
monism is nothing but dazing fear in the depths of the soul.
The true psychologist will be able to recognise this always. In
the materialist-monistic theories is not only that which the
materialists say, but always fear is visible between the lines.
The reinforced soul power must overcome this fear, and then the
human being dares to jump over the abyss and to penetrate into
the spiritual area.
Then the human being becomes aware that, indeed, his soul life
splits for the experience of the spiritual world in a way. What
does this splitting mean? Expressly I would like to emphasise
that the true spiritual researcher should not be a dreamer or
romanticist who wants now to leave the sensory world completely
and to live in the spiritual world. He has to attract that
again about which he knows that he must cast off it for the
spiritual world. The spiritual researcher must manage to move
about freely between beholding the spiritual world and living
in the sensory world, otherwise he is no spiritual researcher
but a daydreamer for the outer world. He reaches this if he
takes a healthy soul life as starting point.
Hence, you can convince yourselves that the real spiritual
researchers are sober in the everyday life because they have
realised objectively, not only subjectively that it is
necessary to consider everything soberly to be no romanticists.
They position themselves in the usual life as practical people.
They know how to keep the balance between the usual life praxis
and the life in the spiritual world. It is very important just
to stress this point because the soul life must split, as well
as a big number of corns are separated from a few which are not
consumed, but are used as seeds.
Thus, the human being realises that his soul life is not
completely separated from himself. He sees as it were a part of
this usual soul life beside himself; he feels it as something
that cannot place him in the spiritual world: the corns that
serve as food. However, the other part bridges the abyss. This
is that part which develops from concentration; it is that part
which is used as seeds for the soul life that goes to the
spiritual world. So that it develops healthily, it is necessary
that the spiritual researcher is able at this point to behave
different from that who — with a pathological soul life
— has reached this special point which he learns to feel
as very painful.
That which approaches the spiritual researcher if he has
fulfilled all preconditions is that he does no longer need from
a certain time on to concentrate upon certain mental pictures,
but they appear spontaneously from his empty consciousness
which show a new world. A new world fills his consciousness.
For the outer viewer this world becomes very similar to the
pathological hallucinations. However, they are only externally
similar. A pathological soul life leads to hallucinations. The
healthiest soul life of the spiritual researcher leads to the
world of pictures or Imaginations. We realise with that who
sees an imagery emerging with an unhealthy soul life that he
believes with an inner force in their reality that he believes
that his delusions are true. Many of us know that one can
dissuade a person who is ill this way often from that which he
sees with the eyes but not from the “reality” of
his hallucinations. Why is this the case? Because just in such
pathological soul life which appears with such strong force
also the self-sense increases. The person concerned is one with
his mental pictures; he produces them from his soul; they are
the silhouettes of the soul life, they are compressed
imagination. Because he himself is that, he believes so firmly
in them. Since the human being must believe absolutely in
himself if he wants to stand firmly in the world — and
then he believes in his visions like in an objective world.
The
spiritual researcher has to attain defeating the self-sense
that he has now to remove that imagery arbitrarily again which
can work so blissfully on him. If anybody does the exercises in
the right way about which I have spoken, he attains the ability
to extinguish this imagery — which appears really as a
spiritual world as in the morning the sun appears on the
horizon. The exercise has to consist of the special will
training that one not only gets around to evoking this imagery
but also to extinguishing it again — any knowledge is
based on it in the higher world. This is the difference
compared to the pictures of the pathological soul life. If the
exercises are done, the human being attains the peculiar force
to make his will gradually stronger and then to diminish it
again. One does not have this ability in the usual life. One
can make efforts and refrain from them. One has to learn this
only by training that one makes the will as strong as I have
described it. If the whole imagery has emerged, one must
consciously weaken the will more and more which has conjured up
this world and must be able to let sink this whole world.
However, one is able to do this only after defeating the
self-sense.
Think only what you demand from your soul. You demand that you
assert yourself at first to evoke such a world; then, however,
you must extinguish it again. You cannot enjoy it. You must see
the whole world, which we have developed by external strains,
sinking in the depths of your consciousness as mental pictures
that you have forgotten. If you have attained this, you enter
only into the true spiritual world, the world of spiritual
beings and facts. The spiritual researcher knows by the
preceding exercises that he lives now in the spiritual world.
If he did not have acquired this ability to let disappear all
that again, he could not be a free observer of the spiritual
world. You can compare that with a situation where you look at
a thing and cannot turn away from it. Turning your attention to
and away from something corresponds in the area of spiritual
observation to attaining the impressions and removing them. If
the human being has come to this point, not only the splitting
takes place which I have already described but he faces two
separate areas as it were. From one area he experiences that he
has to set aside it from himself; he feels, it is that which he
has estimated up to now as his only possession about which he
also recognises that he casts off it at death. A certain
courage is necessary to grasp this in real knowledge. Since the
human being recognises that he must learn to deprive himself of
something willingly to which he is attached and which is
snatched away from him usually only at death.
Then he gets to know that as it were the fruit that is chosen
as seed is the human essence which is not taken up in the
physical body, but which is only the basis of it. The essence
is due not to the ancestors, but originates from the spiritual
world; it uses what the parents give to the external-bodily
existence.
Spiritual science points out that in the human being probably
the qualities of the ancestors live that, however, it is an
inexact consideration if one says that the human being is only
composed of that which he inherited from the parents.
Physically the human being bears the characteristics of his
physical heredity, but something spiritual-mental can come only
from something spiritual-mental. You can get to know the
spiritual-mental core this way. Because the human being is an
internally closed individuality, you are not concerned with
something generic. That is, the spiritual-mental core is rooted
in the individual of the human being. However, with it we
realise that teaching of repeated lives on earth.
This spiritual-mental that we bear in ourselves and through the
gate of death is rooted in a former life on earth and further
ones, until there comes a time when it lived for the first
time. What rests in this part of our being walks through the
gate of death and lives then in a supersensible existence. From
this, the human being enters into a new earthly life while he
proceeds towards the line of heredity.
You
realise, the logic is completely the same as in natural
sciences. He who wants to fight against it does only not know
about which he talks, actually. Since if that who stands on
scientific ground wanted to say: nevertheless, one can prove
that the qualities are inherited from the parents —, one
must answer to him: as far as natural sciences can prove it,
one can only say: it is true! — If, however, the
materialist monist says, because one has inherited these
qualities from the ancestors, they could not be due to that
which the human being has acquired in a former life as forces
which appear in his current life again, then one has to answer,
one can say just as well, the human being is wet because he has
fallen into water. — The one is true because the other is
true. It is true that the human being has inherited certain
qualities from his ancestors — it is true, however, also
that he was attracted by these parents because he has to
appropriate the forces which he can get just from these
parents. Something spiritual causes something spiritual
only.
Someone who wants to look properly at this matter admits that
today spiritual science has to go forward as Francesco Redi did
who had to establish the sentence as a scientific truth: life
can only originate from life. — Spiritual science will
experience the same destiny with reference to the acceptance of
this truth. People did not accept this sentence with pleasure.
Only by the skin of the teeth, Francesco Redi escaped from the
destiny of Giordano Bruno. Today one does no longer talk of
heresy, but today one calls the persons daydreamers who have to
announce something new. Today one has milder methods than
burning at the stake to prevent what must come into our
civilisation. However, it will happen in such a way as it
always happened in such cases. What one called pipe dream at
first becomes self-evident afterwards.
I
have already said, one is not surprised about opposition. The
thing is in such a way that not only those who deal a little
with these things, but also those who want to enter into the
spiritual world with good will do not yet want to understand
the teaching of the repeated lives on earth.
With the teaching of reincarnation, we face the question of
immortality quite unlike if one judges it concerning an
infinite time. Then you face immortality in such a way that you
see it establishing link about link. One speaks of the fact
that the soul lives on because one realises that in one life on
earth the seed of another life is enclosed
We
see a human being growing up from his earliest childhood in
affectionate surroundings, and we see another human being
growing up in surroundings that can work only badly on him. Why
is it that way? There we must consider the one and the other
life caused by a former life on earth. Even if it sounds
hopeless, on the one hand, that every misfortune is
self-inflicted, one has to say, and nevertheless that good luck
and misfortune concern something else if one considers good
luck and misfortune from the only entitled viewpoint.
What I mean with it, I would like to show by an example. An
eighteen-year-old young man whose father was very rich led a
loose life. He wanted to learn nothing, enjoyed life only, and
was on the way to become a scapegrace. Then his father died,
and at the same time, his property got lost. The young man was
thereby forced to learn something, to work, and he became a
capable person. There he had to say to himself, what seemed to
be misfortune was good luck for me.
Thus, we have to say to ourselves in a misfortune, we have
determined ourselves for this misfortune from a former life; we
have led ourselves to this destiny. Then it is unjustified to
judge a misfortune, while we experience it. One has to consider
it as the result of a former imperfection. We have to say to
ourselves, the soul would not be able to develop completely if
it did not experience this misfortune. The misfortune can be a
school of perfection.
If
anybody has already here attained a knowledge that he has
gained in life, and we ask him, you have experienced grief and
pain, joy, and bliss — which experience would you rather
give away? — If the human being contemplated about the
true issue, he would answer: I accept joy and bliss gratefully;
but from the sufferings, I have just received my knowledge: I
would never have become that who I am. — One judges
suffering different from the viewpoint of the usual sensations.
Thus, one must not call the teaching of repeated lives on earth
hopeless. What is given to us with this teaching? The question
of immortality and the question of destiny. The question of
immortality is solved because we know that this life carries
the seed of the following life in itself. Thus, the whole life
combines to an immortal one quite scientifically. The question
of destiny is solved because destiny is necessary for
development. Trying to understand death and pain means strictly
speaking that you develop interest for the big riddles of
life.
In
1909, a great scholar, Charles W. Eliot, held a lecture about
the future of religion. He admitted that the human being has to
get from the natural processes to assuming spirit and soul;
however, he also demanded that the future worldview must not
take death and pain as starting point. He said, the worldviews
of the past talked about pain and grief. The sufferings are
reduced with joy. A worldview should talk only about joys and
overcome pains. — One would like to agree with him,
because, indeed, it would be desirable that the human
being could speak also about a joyful material life. However,
if the human being wants to refrain from death and pain and
says, I do not want to build up a worldview on grief and pain,
I want to accept a joyful life only, then one must answer to
him, even if you accept a joyful life, death and grief come
automatically, they approach you, they enter into your life.
Only such a worldview can really cope with the riddles, which,
like spiritual science, encompasses suffering and joy because
both are means of perfection. A worldview can only cope with
death if it understands that the spiritual-mental core has to
cast off the cover that it has around itself as the plant seed
has to cast off the withering leaves and blossoms. To enter
into the next life we have to develop the spiritual-mental core
that has to cast off the body, has to go through death.
There one copes with death because one recognises that one can
get to a new life with it. One recognises death as the root of
the immortal life. Not because one copes with the world riddles
grief and death that one closes the eyes before them as Charles
Eliot means, but that one recognises them as necessary like
luck and life. I have just said that in the present many
preconditions are not yet there to penetrate into these things.
I would like to quote a man who tried to settle deeply in
spiritual problems who delivered some wonderful, however, also
often mystically-blurred things, Maurice Maeterlinck
(1862-1949, Belgian author). He approached the question of
immortality in the last time. He got to know the teaching of
reincarnation and karma. You can literally read in the
translation of his newest work (La mort, On Death, 1913)
about that which he regards as “faith.” He regards
spiritual science as faith. He says: “Since there
never was a faith, which is nicer, fairer, purer, more moral,
more fertile, more comforting and more probable in a certain
sense than this.” — He means the
“faith” of theosophy. —
“With its teaching of gradual atonement and purification
it only gives a meaning to all physical and spiritual
dissimilarities, to any social injustice, to any outrageous
injustice of destiny. However, the goodness of a faith is no
proof of its truth, although 600 million people follow this
religion. Although it is closest to the origins wrapped in
darkness, although it is the only religion that is not spiteful
and not vulgar, it would have had to do what the others did not
do: to give us unquestionable proofs. Since what it gave us up
to now is only the first shade of the beginning of a
proof.”
There you see such a person who has approached spiritual
science who finds, however, no possibility to provide a proof
— what he calls a proof.
One
has to say to that first: if he does not regard anything as
proof, it does not mean that this view cannot be proved, but it
means that this view has not penetrated him. It is typical for
the present that it is so hard for people to find their way to
something that once will be a matter of course.
Secondly, one has to say, if you just find such a statement
like that of the brilliant Maeterlinck and you figure it out
deeper, the thought suggests itself automatically: should this
view of repeated lives on earth be proven? As well as I have
today discussed that — even if sketchily — I have
given what you can call a rationale. However, it may be that
anybody demands something of a proof that one cannot demand at
all from a proof.
I
would like to remind of something else. There were always
people who dealt with squaring the circle. Those persons who
invented proofs over and over again have gradually become a
real scourge of mathematical societies. Since they received a
number of such proofs every year, which all were nonsense.
However, one always believed that the proof would be found
once. Finally, the Paris academy did not know how to escape and
cast them into the wastebasket. Nevertheless, it was not
allowed to suppose that the proof could not be found. Once one
could reflect on squaring the circle, now no longer, because
meanwhile one proved that this proof could not at all exist.
The squaring the circle is not possible. Nevertheless, there
are very simple means to transform the circle into a square.
One takes a paper, cuts a circle out, carves it into small
pieces; and puts them into a square. Then one has not done it
with calculation but with an action. One cannot calculate it,
but one can go forward this way. Nevertheless, the thing is
true and reasonable, but one has searched the proofs in the
wrong way. Maeterlinck does it that way. He demands something
that requires a wrong way of thinking.
We
realise from it which difficulties even today exist to
acknowledge spiritual science. We realise just in this newest
work of Maeterlinck that also such a man manages hard [with
these thoughts]; we realise that it is difficult to introduce
spiritual science into humanity.
One
cannot say, well, if the thing is in such a way as you have
told, then only the spiritual researchers can enter into the
spiritual world. That is not the case. To be a spiritual
researcher is only necessary to search the things in the
spiritual world. If one has found them, however, one has to
transform them into a thought-image as I tried it in my book
Occult Science. An Outline. If then this thought-image
is properly created, the common sense can understand it, and
then one does not need to prove it in such a way, as
Maeterlinck believes it. Everybody can understand spiritual
science who considers that unbiasedly which the spiritual
researcher has transformed into thought-images. As you do not
need to be a painter to understand a picture, you do not need
to be a spiritual researcher to understand the spiritual facts
that the spiritual researcher has received from the spiritual
world. The common sense is able to do this if it is not bound
to prejudices. The soul needs that which the spiritual
researcher has transformed into a picture for its security and
strength. The spiritual researcher has still nothing of the
spiritual world if he only walks around there; he has something
only if he transforms that which he beholds into thought-images
and ideas.
Although in our time everybody can become a spiritual
researcher to a certain degree as I described it in my book
How Does One Attain Knowledge of Higher
Worlds?, so that he can convince himself directly of that
which I have said today, it is not necessary that everybody is
a spiritual researcher. It is as with a riddle that you have to
solve; you have not to prove the solution if you find it out
for yourself. If you face spiritual science properly, you
combine with it from understanding, as well as one can find the
solution of a riddle.
He
who delves into spiritual science settles in it. Because the
soul is destined for truth and not for error, we know if we
have penetrated into the spiritual world by the messages of the
spiritual researcher: we have understood it. — If the
solution of a riddle is told to us, we believe not only
that it is in such a way, but we also know it. This is
the case with the understanding of spiritual science. It cannot
be accepted only on authority, but as soon as it has been
informed to us, our soul adjusts itself so that we also
understand it. The spiritual researcher has a little bit more
of this understanding if he has transformed the spiritual facts
and truths into thought-images. Every human being who
approaches spiritual science has the same for his soul; he has
a new relationship to the riddles of life, to the question of
death. This understanding is not only theoretic, but can serve
as an elixir of life. If a human being is so educated that the
spiritual-scientific concepts live in him, he will also feel
towards age in such a way that he can probably understand the
Goethean word “one becomes a mystic in old age.”
Then he says to himself, if my limbs start withering if my body
pines away, I am like the plant seed whose leaves wither. The
spiritual-mental core arises in me. One will not only know
about this essence, one will feel it as a force that goes
through the gate of death and through a spiritual world to
prepare a new life again. This solution of the question of
immortality is practical for life. The human being will
experience the immortal in himself.
Spiritual science will become an elixir of life this way; it
will be able to give the human being strength and security. We
know that today life is more complex because of the triumphs of
natural sciences than it was once. We also realise that the
soul sometimes needs a support that it cannot have from that
which you can get spiritually from the past. Natural sciences
continue to lead humanity from triumph to triumph. However,
with it the human being will be torn more and more. Strong
inner forces have to be there. Only spiritual science is able
to strengthen the human beings enough not to get nervous by the
effects of modern life. If, however, anybody really penetrates
into spiritual science, he rises more and more to those
viewpoints to which the true spiritual researcher rises already
today.
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