2
Psychology
WHEN
the riddles of existence touch the human soul, they become not only
great problems in life, but life itself. They become the happiness
or sorrow of man's existence. And not a passing happiness or sorrow
only, but one he must carry for a time through life, so that by this
experience of happiness or sorrow he becomes fit or unfit for life.
Now, man's attitude to his own soul is such that the most
important questions about it and about its spiritual essence do
not arise from any actual doubts he has regarding the spiritual
element within him. It is precisely because he is certain of
his spiritual substance and because he cannot help seeing in it
his human dignity and his true significance as a man, that the
question of the fate of his soul becomes for him a
tremendous riddle. To deny the mind in man himself does not, of
course, occur to even the most rigid materialist. He
acknowledges the mental as such, regarding it as a result of
physical, material processes. Yet anyone who, with no such
theory but simply from his deepest emotional needs, queries the
fate of this soul of his, will find himself confronted by a
plethora of phenomena and experiences. And these become
riddles to him just because he is fully conscious of the mental
or spiritual life, and must accordingly ask: Is this spiritual
life a passing breath, rising from physical existence and
returning with it once more into the generality of natural
phenomena, or is it connected with a spiritual world within
which it has eternal significance?
Of
the many experiences in the realm of the psyche which present
the riddles of the soul to our “mind's eye,” I will
select only two.
There are, it may be objected, very few people on whom such
experiences obtrude so much that they become even conscious,
let alone theoretical, problems. But that is not the point. The
point is that these experiences take hold of the subconscious
or unconscious, establish themselves there, and flow up into
consciousness only as a general temper or distemper of
the soul, making us courageous and vigorous in life or making
us dejected, so that at no point can we properly come to
grips with life. As I have said, I want to pick out only two of
these experiences.
The
first appears before the “mind's eye” every evening
when we fall asleep, when the mental and psychic experiences
that have floated up and down during the day sink down into the
unconscious as if extinguished. Now, when he looks at
this experience or, as is most often the case, when the
unconscious awareness of it affects his soul, man is overcome
by a sense of the powerlessness of his mental life in face of
the outside world. And just because man sees in this life his
most valuable and dignified quality and cannot deny that he is
in the true sense of the world a spiritual being, he is
assaulted from within by this sensation of powerlessness, and
has to ponder the question: Does the general process of nature
overtake mental experiences when man passes through the gate of
death, just as it always does at the onset of sleep? The first
experience, if I may so put it, is a sense of the powerlessness
of mental life.
The
second experience is in a way a direct opposite of the first.
We perceive it distinctly or indistinctly, consciously or
unconsciously, when on waking, perhaps after passing through a
fantastically chaotic dream world not attuned to reality, our
spirit descends into our bodily existence. At such times we
feel it informing our senses, feel too that our psychic
experience is being permeated by the interplay between the
outside world and our senses, which are of course physical and
physiological. We feel the spiritual element descending further
into our body; we inform our organs of will with it and become
alert and self-possessed, able to make use of our body, our
organism. On reflection, however, we cannot help
realizing: Anatomy and physiology make a valiant attempt to
penetrate and analyse the bodily functions from without; yet
looking from within, we ourselves, by means of ordinary
consciousness, do not know anything about the
interrelationship between our spiritual element and our bodily
functions. A glance at the simplest bodily function
controlled by the will, the lifting of an arm or movement of a
hand, tells us: First there exists in us the thought or
concept of this arm-lifting or hand-movement. How this
thought or concept flows down into our organism, however, how
it informs our muscles, and how finally there comes about what
again we know only through observation — what actually
goes on inside remains hidden from ordinary consciousness. So,
too, in that wonderful mechanism that physics and physiology
show us, the human eye or some other sense-organ, there remains
hidden the spiritual element that informs this wonderful
mechanism.
We
are thus faced with problems both by the powerlessness of our
mental life and by the darkness into which we feel our spirit
descending when it flows down into our own body. We are forced
to conclude (most people certainly don't do so
consciously, but it affects them as the temper of their
soul): this spiritual element in its relationship with
the organism is unknown to us just when it is creative; it is
unknown to us at the very point in physical life where it
manifests its outgoing function.
What every naive individual thus experiences extends, in a
different form, to psychology itself. It would need a great
many words to explain scientifically how these enigmas creep
into the subject; but we can put it, rather superficially
perhaps, as follows.
On
the one hand, psychology looks at the mind and asks: What is
the relation between this and the physical, the external and
corporeal? In looking at the physical, on the other hand, and
at what physical science has to say about it, some people
— and in this respect psychology has a long history
— believe that we must regard the mental as the really
effective cause of the physical; others believe that we
must regard the physical as the really empowering element, and
the mental only as a kind of effect of it. The unsatisfactory
nature of both views has been perceived by recent
psychologists. They have therefore set up the curious theory of
psycho-physical parallelism, according to which one cannot say
that the body affects the mind or the mind the body, but only:
corporeal processes are parallel to mental ones, and mental
processes to bodily ones; one can only say what mental
processes accompany the corporeal or what corporeal ones the
mental.
Psychology itself, moreover, is conscious of this powerlessness
of the mind! If we attempt to examine the mind, even as it
presents itself to the psychologist, with ordinary
consciousness, we find that it has something passive about it,
so that we cannot see how it can penetrate dynamically the life
of the body. Anyone who looks at the psychic
characteristics of thinking and feeling (volition is
impenetrable, so that for psychology much the same is true of
will as of thinking and feeling) — anyone who looks at
thinking and feeling with the tools of psychology finds them
powerless, and cannot locate anything that would really be
capable of effectively activating the physical. It is then that
the psychologist experiences his sense of the powerlessness of
mental life in the eyes of ordinary consciousness. The most
varied attempts have certainly been made to overcome this
feeling. But the disputes of philosophers and the changing
philosophies that have succeeded one another provide the
impartial observer of humanity with factual evidence of the
impossibility for ordinary consciousness of approaching the
mind's experience. Everywhere there obtrudes a sense of the
powerlessness of the mind as it is perceived by ordinary
consciousness.
With regard to this particular point, a series of works have
appeared here in Vienna which represent milestones in the
development of philosophy. Although I cannot associate
myself in any way with their content, I believe that, from the
standpoint of ordinary consciousness, these books are
extraordinarily significant. They include Richard Wahle's
The Whole of Philosophy and its End, which is designed
to show that ordinary consciousness is incapable of
reaching any significant conclusion about mental life, and that
what philosophical investigation is here attempting ought to be
handed over to theology, physiology, aesthetics and social
science. And Richard Wahle went on to work out these ideas
still more clearly in his Mechanism of Mental Life. We
may say: here for once ordinary consciousness is revealed as
basically incapable of saying anything about the problems of
mental life. The ego, the psyche, everything that earlier
psychology brought to light — all these collapse in face
of the self-criticism of ordinary consciousness.
In
recent years, however, psychology has, understandably and
indeed of necessity, not attempted to deal directly with the
things of the mind — in face of which, as we have seen,
ordinary consciousness is powerless — but has sought to
discover something about what are usually called mental
phenomena indirectly, via the physical phenomena that
spring from them. In this way, experimental psychology has come
into being. This is a necessary product of our present attitude
to life and methods of research. And anyone taking the
philosophical standpoint that I do will never for one moment
deny that experimental psychology is completely justified,
though he may not perhaps agree entirely with this or that
detail of its methods and results.
It
is here that the other enigma of the soul comes in. However
much we learn about what can be experienced by the human body
in experimental psychology, the fact remains: everything that
appears to be discovered in this way about purely psychic
functions is, strictly speaking, only indirect knowledge,
acquired via the body. It all belongs to a sphere which, at
man's death, is given over to the general process of nature, so
that through it can be learnt nothing about the soul, whose
fate in the world is of such paramount concern to man. Thus we
may say: for psychology, also, the great riddle of the
soul reappears.
This point, too, has been made by a modern psychologist who for
many years lived and worked here in Vienna, and who will never
be forgotten by those who sat at his feet here, as I did. In
the first volume of his unfinished work on psychology, he asks:
What can any psychology ever achieve by establishing —
whether experimentally or non-experimentally, I might add
— how concepts combine and separate, how attention
operates, how memory develops in life etc.? — if,
precisely because of the scientific character of this
psychology, with its emulation of natural science, we must
renounce all claim to understand the fate of the human soul
once the body crumbles into its elements? This was said not by
some eccentric or other, but by that rigorous thinker Franz
Brentano, who made psychology his central concern in life and
who sought to apply to his work the strict scientific method of
modern times. Yet he it was who presented the riddle of the
soul to his contemporaries in the way I have just outlined, as
something scientifically unavoidable.
From all this the impartial observer today must draw a
conclusion. It is that, in the study of man, scientific
methods will take us only to the point they have now reached;
but that we cannot deal with the soul by means of ordinary
consciousness, entirely adequate as this is for science and for
ordinary life. And so, since for scientific reasons this fact
must be apparent to the impartial observer today, I speak to
you from the standpoint of a philosophy of life that
concludes: it is impossible, with the soul-powers that manifest
themselves to ordinary consciousness and operate in ordinary
life and ordinary science, to investigate the life of the soul.
There must be developed other powers, which to ordinary
consciousness are more or less sleeping or, let us say, latent
in the soul.
To
adopt the right attitude to such a conception of life, we need
something which, if I may say so, is found only rarely in
people today. I would call it intellectual modesty. There must
come a moment in life when we say to ourselves: When I was a
little child, I developed a mental life that was so dim and
dreamy that it has been forgotten like a dream. Only gradually
did there arise from this dream-like mentality of the child
something that enables me to orientate myself in life, to bring
my thoughts, my impulses and my decisions into step with the
world, and to become a capable being. Out of the
vagueness and lack of differentiation of the child's
mental life, interwoven with the body, has emerged that
experience which derives from our inherited qualities, as these
develop with the growth of the body, and which derives also
from our customary education.
Anyone looking back, with intellectual modesty, on his
development during his life on earth, will not be above
saying to himself at a certain point: Why shouldn't this
continue? The soul-powers which are the most important to me
today, and by which I orientate myself in life and become a
capable being, were dormant during my existence as a child. Why
shouldn't there be dormant in my soul other powers that I can
develop from it?
We
cannot help reaching this conclusion, which springs from
intellectual modesty. I call it intellectual modesty because
men are inclined to say: the form of consciousness I have once
attained as an adult is that of the normal person; any
impulse in the life of the soul to be different from this
so-called normal consciousness is eccentric or
hallucinatory or visionary or something similar. The
philosophical standpoint from which I speak definitely
starts from a healthy psyche and attempts on this basis to
develop powers dormant in the soul, cognitive powers, which
then become clairvoyant powers in the sense in which I spoke
yesterday of exact clairvoyance. What the soul has to undertake
I indicated yesterday. I mentioned my books
Knowledge of the Higher Worlds and Its Attainment,
Occult Science,
Riddles of the Soul
and so on. There you will find details of those
exercises which, starting from a healthy soul-life, lead upward
to the development of the soul, which thus in fact
attains a kind of spiritual vision with which it can see into a
spiritual world, just as with the ordinary sense-organs it can
perceive the physical and sensuous world. In each of these
books there is a first part, which is accepted as something
that can be definitely useful to man even by many opponents of
the philosophy of life I am advocating. It shows that by
certain exercises of an intellectual, emotional and moral kind
man can produce in himself a state of soul and body that can be
regarded as wholly healthy. They also enable him to be on his
inner guard against anything which, deriving from an
unhealthy life of the soul, leads to mediumism, hallucinations
and visions. For everything brought about in this way is
unacceptable to a true psychology. Visions arise not from the
sphere of the soul, but because morbid structures exist in the
organism; the same is true of mediumism. None of these have
anything to do with sound psychology and sound psychic
development, and indeed from the point of view of this
sound psychology all must be condemned. Opponents today,
however, find fantastic and harmful the exercises which follow
these preparatory ones, and which are designed to draw
from the soul those powers of thinking, feeling and volition
which, once they are trained, introduce man into a spiritual
world in such a way that he learns to orientate himself in it
and can enter it at will.
I
have already suggested how, as modern man, we manage by certain
mental exercises to remove thinking from its ordinary state of
passive surrender to the phenomena of the outside world, and to
what appear inwardly as memories but are also connected
with the outside world. We transcend this kind of
thinking by carrying out exercises in meditation
seriously, patiently and energetically, and by repeating them
over and over again. Depending on predisposition, it may take
one person years, another not so long; but each can note, as he
arrives at the crucial point, how his thinking, from what I
have previously called dead and abstract thinking, becomes
inwardly vital thinking in tune with the rhythm of the world. A
balanced view of the world and of life thus strives, not to
conjure up visions or hallucinations from the soul, but to
experience the life of thoughts and concepts with an
intensity that we otherwise experience only through the outward
senses.
You
need only compare the vitality of our experience of the colours
we perceive through the eye, and the sounds we hear through the
ear, with the pallor of our experience of thought in ordinary
consciousness. By energizing our mental life in the way I
suggested yesterday, we can gradually give the mere life of
thought and concept the same intensive quality as the life of
the senses. Man today, seeking to know the spiritual, does not
therefore, if he is a reasonable being, seek
hallucinations and visions. He strives quite calmly to achieve
the ideal of the life of the senses, with its intensity and
plasticity, in his mental activity. And if you devote
yourselves as students of the spirit to meditations such
as I have described, you need not be in any way dependent
on the unconscious or subconscious. You can refer to the
exercises, they are all directed at what I am trying to
describe — and you will find that everything that is
carried out by way of exercises in the life of the soul is done
as consciously, as reasonably, as precisely we may say,
as are operations in mathematics or geometry.
To
sum up: we are concerned here not with the old nebulous
clairvoyance, but with a clairvoyance brought about by fully
conscious and balanced experiences and exercises of the soul.
The self-possession at each step is such that we can compare
what a man experiences and makes of himself here with what we
otherwise experience in the case of a geometrical problem. If
not, the exercises have no value.
A
conceptual life of this kind is energized; is independent of
breathing; is set free of the body; is a spiritual function
only; and in it, as we know by direct perception, thinking is
carried out not by the body, but in the purely spiritual
sphere. Only when modern man attains this kind of conceptual
life does he feel his thinking, in contrast to abstract
thinking, as something vital and not as something dead. Our
sensation when we experience the transition from ordinary
abstract thinking to vital thinking is exactly as if we found a
dead organism suddenly come to life. And although this vital
thinking is a spiritual process, it is not so linear, not so
superficial as ordinary abstract thinking. It is full and
plastic. And this plasticity is what counts.
Now, however, a very great deal depends on our carrying over
the balanced attitude, required during the actual exercises, to
the moment when this vitalized or plastic thinking appears in
us. If at this moment we surrender ourselves to the images we
have struggled to achieve, believing we find in them realities
of a spiritual kind, then we are, not students of the spirit
but simply fantasy-mongers. This is something we must certainly
not become; for it could not provide us with a firmly
based philosophy of life for modern man. Only when we say to
ourselves: we have attained one component of spiritual life,
but it is a semblance component; it merely tells us something
about powers that operate within ourselves — about
what we ourselves can do through our own human nature; only
when we really say to ourselves: this imaginal knowledge cannot
give us any information about any kind of outside world, not
even about what we are in the outside world; only if we
perceive ourselves in this semblance-making and know
ourselves as a power living within it — only then
do we have the right attitude to this experience and feel
ourselves as spiritual beings outside the body, and yet feel
ourselves only in ourselves, with an inner
plasticity.
Only by having the courage to continue the exercises to the
next stage do we attain true spiritual perception. This next
stage not only involves developing the capacity to focus our
consciousness upon certain concepts that are readily
comprehended — as we comprehend geometrical concepts,
which we know to contain no unconscious element — so as
to increase our strength of soul; it must also, and more
particularly, involve being able calmly and at will to banish
these concepts from our consciousness. This is, in some
circumstances, a difficult task! In ordinary life,
forgetting is not particularly difficult, as our ordinary
consciousness is only too well aware. But when one has just
struggled, although without driving oneself into
auto-suggestion — which cannot occur if we are
self-possessed — to focus one's consciousness upon
certain concepts, then unusual strength is required to banish
them from consciousness again. However, one must develop this
greater strength gradually; and just as at first we
concentrated all our attention and inner strength of soul, so
that we might dwell upon such a concept in a state of
meditation, so now we must dispel these concepts, and all other
concepts, calmly and voluntarily from consciousness. And
there must be able to enter, from our will, what one might call
“empty consciousness.” What “empty
consciousness” (if only for a few moments) implies, can
be judged by reflecting on what happens to ordinary
consciousness when it has to forgo both sense-impressions
and recollections — when for some reason or other
man is deprived of external impressions and even
memories: he falls asleep; that is, consciousness is
depressed and dimmed. The opposite of this is what must happen:
completely controlled, conscious wakefulness, despite the fact
that the will has swept consciousness completely clear.
If
we thus first strengthen the soul and then empty it, yet keep
it conscious, there will appear before it, as colour to the eye
and sounds to the ear, a spiritual environment. We can look
into the spiritual world. And so we may say: to the spiritual
investigation here intended, it is perfectly
understandable that ordinary consciousness cannot reach the
spirit and the soul, and indeed that it turns out, as Richard
Wahle found for instance, that ordinary consciousness
ought not to speak of an “I” at all! For in this
sphere, ordinary experience can only indicate and label with
words a dark element which is immersed in and contrasted with
the clear light; and which will never emerge until we have
developed powers that are usually lacking. It is a sober
recognition of the limits of ordinary consciousness, tied
to the body, that impels us to develop in ourselves those
powers that alone are capable of really discovering the soul
and the spirit.
There is another point to consider, however, if you seek to
arrive by this path at a sound and not a morbid psychology.
Taking the mediumistic, visionary and hallucinatory as morbid,
the fact is that anyone who falls into this kind of morbid
psychic activity is entirely absorbed into it. For the duration
of his sickness of soul, at least, he becomes one with
this activity. Quite the reverse with the exercises I have been
proposing here. Anyone who explores the soul with their aid
does, it is true, leave behind his physical body with its
capacity for ordinary thinking and ordinary orientation in
life. He steps out of this body and learns to see imaginally,
free of body; he develops a visual thinking. Yet not for a
moment is he completely subsumed in this higher man, if I may
so call it without arrogance. He always remains capable of
regaining his body and acting just as calmly as before: there
always stands beside this more highly developed man that
ordinary man with his healthy common sense who is a sober
critic of everything to which in his vision this higher being
attains.
By
developing plastic, vital thinking and then creating an empty
consciousness, we reach a view of our own psychic nature, one
that embraces in a single image all we have encountered in this
life since we entered it. Our past life does not stand before
the soul as is usual in the memory, with isolated reminiscences
emerging, independently or after some exertion. Instead, all at
once our life is surveyed like a mighty tableau, not in space
but in time. All at once, with a single glance of the soul, we
survey our life; but we see it as it informs our growth and the
energies of our physical body. We see ourselves as we have been
here on this earth as thinking, feeling, willing beings, but in
such a way that thinking, feeling and willing now densify and
at the same time take their places organically within the human
substance. We can see into our spiritual life in its direct
association with the physical. We cease trying to
establish by philosophical speculation how the soul affects the
body. In seeing the soul, we also see how at every moment our
physical life on earth has been informed by what the tableau
shows us. This will be described more fully in the next few
days.
The
next step must now be to strengthen still further by
removing them from our consciousness the energized
concepts that we have introduced into ourselves. We do this by
continually repeating the exercises, just as we
strengthen muscles by repeated exercise. And by continuing with
these energized concepts, we also manage to eliminate from our
consciousness this whole newly achieved tableau of the life of
the soul from birth to the present. This requires more effort
than the simple elimination of images, but one does eventually
achieve it. We succeed in removing from consciousness
what in our earthly existence we call our inner life, so that
now our consciousness is empty not only of current impressions,
but also of all that we experience within as if in a second and
finer body (which yet informs our growth and our memory), a
finer being, an ethereal being as it were, a now for the first
time super-sensible being. And when we do so, our consciousness,
which though fully awake is now empty and yet has attained a
greater inward power, will be able to see further in the
spiritual world. It will now be able to look at the nature of
its own soul before this descended from spiritual worlds to an
earthly existence. Now, what we call the eternity of the human
soul is taken out of the sphere of mere philosophical
speculation and actually beheld. We learn to look at the purely
spiritual that we were in a spiritual world, before we
descended to clothe ourselves, through conception, foetal
life and birth, in a physical earthly body.
Although attained by as exact a method as are mathematical
concepts, this may seem fantastic to many people today. Still
more paradoxical may appear what remains to be said, not only
about the soul when it still had a spiritual existence, but
also about the concrete nature of this experience. These things
can only be suggested in this lecture; more will be said in
subsequent lectures. The suggestions can perhaps be explained
in the following terms.
Let
us first ask ourselves: What do we actually see when, in
ordinary life, as beings who recognize, understand and
perceive, we enter into a relationship with our natural
environment? We actually see only the external world. This is
clear from what I mentioned at the beginning today. We actually
see only the outside world, the cosmos. What takes place
within us we see, too, but only by making it into something
external through physiology and anatomy. Imposing as
these sciences may be, we see what is within only by first
externalizing it and then investigating it exactly as we
are accustomed to do with external processes. Yet it
remains dark down there in the region into which we descend,
where we feel our spiritual element flowing into our body. In
the last analysis, we see in ordinary life only what is outside
ourselves; by direct observation we cannot look directly into
man and see how the spiritual informs the bodily organs.
Anyone, however, who can examine life impartially from the
spiritual viewpoint I have established will conclude: noble and
great is external appearance and the laws we discover in the
external world of the stars and of the sun, which sends
us light and warmth; noble and great is our experience when we
either simply look — and we are complete men when we do
so look — or when we investigate scientifically the laws
by which the sun sends us light and warmth and conjures forth
the green of plants; noble and mighty is all this — but
if we could look into the structure of the human heart, its
inner law would be even nobler and greater than what we
perceive outside!
Man
can sense this with his ordinary consciousness. But the science
that rests on exact clairvoyance can raise it to the status of
true research. It can say: far-reaching appear to us the
changes in the atmosphere, and there exists an ideal of science
which, here too, will discover greater and more potent laws;
but greater still is what is present and goes on in the
structure and functions of the human lung! It is not a question
of size. Man is a microcosm in face of the macrocosm. But
as Schiller said: “In space, my friend, dwells not the
sublime.” He means the highest form of the sublime. This
highest form can be experienced only in the human organism
itself.
Between birth and death it is not investigated by man with his
ordinary consciousness. Exactly the opposite is true, however,
of our existence before we unite with the body — our
spiritual existence, in a spiritual environment. In this
life on earth, the inner world is dark and the outside world of
the cosmos bright and full of sound; in the purely spiritual
life before our earthly embodiment, the outer cosmic
world is dark, and our world is then the inner world of man. We
see this inner world! And truly, it seems to us no smaller and
no less majestic than does the cosmos when we see it with our
physical eyes during our earthly existence. As if it were our
“outside world,” we come to understand the law of
our spiritual inner world, and we prepare ourselves, in the
spiritual realm, for dealing later with our bodily functions,
with what we are between birth and death. For what we are
between birth and death extends before us like a world, before
we descend into this physical existence on earth.
This is not speculation. It is direct perception arising from
exact clairvoyance. It is something which, starting from this
exact clairvoyance, leads us some way into the connection
between the eternal element in man and the life on earth
— that eternal element which remains hidden from us
between birth and death, and of which we see the first gleams
when we are able to perceive it in the still unembodied state.
And with this we explore a part of human eternity itself. We
don't even have a word in our modern languages for this part of
human eternity. We rightly speak of immortality; but we ought
also to speak of “unborn-ness.” For this now
confronts us as a direct experience.
This is one aspect of exact clairvoyance, one aspect of human
eternity, of the great riddle of the human soul, and thus of
the supreme problem of psychology in general. The other aspect
arises from those other exercises, which I yesterday termed
exercises of the will, through which we so take in hand
our will that we learn to make use of it independently of the
body I explained that these exercises induce us to overcome
pain and suffering within the soul, in order to make it into a
“sense-organ” (to speak loosely) or a spiritual
organ (to speak exactly) of vision, so that we not only look at
the spiritual, but see its authentic shape. And when we learn
to experience in this way outside our body, not only with our
thoughts but with our will itself — that is, with our
entire human substance — there appears before the soul
the image of death, in such a way that we now know the nature
of experience without the body: both in thinking and in
willing and in what lies between, feeling. In an imaginally
creative way we learn to live without the body. And in doing so
we gain an image of our passage through the gate of death; we
learn how in reality, too, we can do without the body and how,
passing through the gate of death, we enter once more that
spiritual sphere from which we descended into this bodily
existence. What is eternal and immortal in us becomes not only
philosophical certainty, but direct perception. By training the
will, we disclose for the soul's contemplation the other side
of eternity — immortality — just as unborn-ness is
disclosed by the training of thought.
When the soul becomes a spiritual organ in this way,
however, it is as if, at a lower level, a man born blind
had been operated on. What for those endowed with sight
is a world of colours, the blind man has hitherto been
accustomed to perceive by touch alone. Now, after the
operation, he sees something quite new. The world in which he
previously lived has changed. So too, anyone whose
“mind's eye” is opened in the way I have described
finds that his environment is changed. How far it is changed I
wish to bring out today in only one respect.
Even with our unopened “mind's eye” we can
see in life how, for example, a man takes his childish steps,
then grows up and reaches a fateful moment in his life: he
meets someone, and their souls link up so that the two people
combine their fates and move on through life together. (As I
said before, I want to single out just one event.) In ordinary
consciousness we are drawn to regard what happens in life as a
sum of chance occurrences; to regard it, too, as more or less
chance that we are brought at last to this fateful meeting with
the other person. Only a few individuals, like Goethe's
friend Knebel, gain an inner wisdom of experience, simply
in growing older. He once put this to Goethe in the following
words: If at an advanced age one looks back on the course of
one's steps in life, one finds that these steps seem to reveal
a systematic arrangement, so that everything appears to have
been present in embryo and to have developed in such a way that
one was led by a kind of inner necessity to what we now see to
have been a fateful event. Human existence as seen with the
“mind's eye” unveiled is as different from the life
observed by the unopened eyes as the world of colour is
from the merely tactile one of the blind man.
Looking at the child's soul life and the interplay of sympathy
and antipathy, we see how it develops from these first steps;
how then, welling up out of his innermost being, the man
himself, out of his innermost longings, directs his steps and
brings himself to the fateful moment. This is sober observation
of life. When we look at life in this way, however, we see it
rather as we see the life of an old man. We should not say that
an old man's life simply exists “in its own right;”
by logical processes we know how to refer it to its infant
beginnings; its very idiosyncrasies make us so refer it.
What simple logic does for the old man's life is done for human
life in general by exact clairvoyance, by true vision: if we
are really to look at life as it develops from the innermost
longings of the soul, we must follow it back. And when we do
so, we come to earlier lives on earth, in which were
prepared the longings that appear in the present and
lead to our activities.
I
have not been able to do more today than suggest that what
leads to this comprehensive contemplation of life is not a
tissue of fantasy, but an exact method. It is a contemplation
which, by means of an advanced psychology, penetrates to the
eternal in human nature. And on this foundation there now
arises something that is a certainty, something that
wells up out of the knowledge appropriate to us as modern
men today and forms a basis for true inner piety and true inner
religious life.
Anyone with an insight (and I may say that I am using the word
“insight” in its literal sense) into the way the
individual soul struggles free of the body, in order to enter a
spiritual realm, will have a different way of looking at our
social life too. Armed with this new attitude, he can see how
friendships, relationships of love, and other associations are
formed; how soul finds its way to soul, moving outside the
family and other social groups; how physical proximity may be a
means to the community of souls, the sympathy and togetherness
of souls. He now knows that, just as the body falls away from
the individual soul, so the physical element and all earthly
events fall away from the friendships and from the
relationships of love; and he sees how the
soul-relationship that has come into being between men
continues into a spiritual world, where it can also be
spiritually experienced.
On
a foundation of knowledge, not of faith, we can now say: as
they stride through the gate of death, men find themselves once
more together. And just as the body, which impedes our sight of
the spirit, disappears in the spiritual world, so too in that
world every impediment to friendship and love now disappears.
Men are closer together there than in the flesh. A mode of
knowledge that may still appear abstract in relation to
true psychology culminates in this religious feeling and
vision. Yet the philosophy of life I am here presenting does
not seek to infringe religious faith. This philosophy can be
tolerant; it can recognize fully the value of every individual
religious faith, and even exercise it in practice; but at the
same time, as a nurse to this religious life, it provides an
epistemological basis for this religious life too.
I
have sought today to say something basic about the
relationship to psychology of a spiritually appropriate
modern view of life. I know, better than many an opponent
perhaps, the objections that can be raised to the
beginnings of such a philosophy. But I believe I also know
that, albeit entirely unconsciously, the longing for such a
psychology is present today in countless souls. It therefore
needs to be said over and over again: just as one does not need
to be a painter to feel the beauty of a picture, so too one
does not need to be a spiritual scientist oneself —
although one can become one up to a point — to be able to
test whether what I am saying here is true. Just as one can
feel the beauty of a picture without being a painter oneself,
so with ordinary common sense one can perceive what the
spiritual scientist says about the soul. That one can
see it, I think I have established all the more firmly in
recognizing how souls thirst for a profounder approach to
psychology and to the great riddles of existence in relation to
the soul. The aim of a modern view of life such as has been
outlined here today does in fact represent the desire of
countless people, though they are not ordinarily aware of it;
it forms the pain, the sorrow, the privation, the wish of
countless people — of all those who are serious about
what we must regard as constructive forces in face of the many
forces of decline present in our age.
Anyone today who wishes to advocate a philosophy for the times
must realize that he has to speak, think and will in
harmony with what the souls in our serious age, if in
many cases unconsciously, strive for. And I believe — if
I may close on this note — that just such a philosophy as
I have adumbrated does hold something of what countless souls
strive for today, something of what they need as spiritual
content and vital spiritual activity for the present and for
the immediate future.
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