LECTURE ONE
UNDERSTANDING THE SPIRITUAL WORLD (PART ONE) Berlin,
April 18, 1914
When you
remember a dream, it will probably be quite obvious to you that
during the dream you merely observed the images weaving before your
soul without having a clear awareness of yourself. Self-awareness,
then, is not as clear in dreaming as it is in waking consciousness.
The images weaving before the soul present two types of scenes. There
are either series of images familiar to the dreamer because they
relate to recent or not-so-recent events, or scenes where such events
are changed in all sorts of ways, their form altered to such an
extent that specific occurrences are unrecognizable, and we think we
are dreaming of something completely new. We can indeed have dreams
that are not connected with any experiences we have had and are
therefore completely new. But in each case, we will have had a
feeling that a type of living, weaving image has been revealed to the
soul. This is what we remember after waking up. Some dreams remain in
our memory longer and others seem to vanish as soon as we have to
deal with the events of the day.
So today let us examine
what we perceive in such weaving dreams. We know what we perceive
when we are awake in this world, which we call the physical. But what
fills our perception when we dream, as events and material things
fill our daytime experience? It is what we call the etheric world,
the etheric substance permeating the world with its inner processes
and with all that lives in it. That is the essence, as it were, of
our perceptions when we dream. But we usually perceive only a very
small part of the etheric world when dreaming. The etheric world is
inaccessible to us when we are awake and perceive the physical realm;
we cannot perceive the etheric substance around us with our physical
senses. Likewise we cannot perceive all of it in our ordinary dreams,
but only a part of it, namely, our own etheric body.
As you know, we leave our
physical and our etheric bodies behind in sleep. In our usual dreams
we look back, as it were, from within our astral body and I to what
we have left behind in sleep. However, we are then not aware of our
physical body and do not use our physical senses. Rather, we look
back only at our etheric body. Fundamentally, therefore, processes in
our etheric body reveal themselves in certain places, and we perceive
them as dreams. In fact, most dreams are nothing else but looking at
our etheric body in sleep and becoming aware of some of its
exceedingly complex processes.
Our etheric body is very
complex and contains all our memories, ready to present them to us
when we recall them. Even those things that have sunk down into the
depths of the soul, things we are not aware of in waking
consciousness, are contained in the etheric body in some way. Our
whole life in this incarnation is retained in the etheric body, is
really present in it. Of course, this is very difficult to imagine,
but it is true nevertheless. Imagine you were to talk all day long,
as some people do, and everything you said was recorded on records.
When the first record is full, you take a second one, then a third,
and so on. The number of records would depend on how much you spoke.
Now if someone collected all the records, everything you had said
would be nicely preserved on records at the end of the day. Then, if
someone played them, everything you said during the day would be
heard again. In a similar way, all our memories are retained in the
etheric body. Under the special conditions of sleep one part of the
etheric body appears before us, as though — to stay with this
metaphor — we took one record from the collection and played
it; this is the most common kind of dream. Thus our consciousness
weaves in our own etheric body.
The same applies to
hallucinations affecting our soul. As a rule, such hallucinations
arise because the person can see with the ego and the astral body,
which are still in the physical body, a section of the etheric body
that has become detached. This can happen when a part of your
physical body is ill, the nervous system, for example. Your etheric
body is then unable to penetrate the physical at the point where the
nervous system is diseased; it is cast out there, so to speak. The
etheric body itself is not sick, but it has been separated from the
physical body in a specific place. If it could remain in the physical
body, our normal state of consciousness would prevail, and we would
be unaware that our physical body is sick. When the part our etheric
body cannot penetrate shines out toward it, we experience this in our
consciousness as a hallucination.
This etheric substance,
from which dreams or hallucinations develop, surrounds us everywhere
in the world. And our own etheric body is like a section that has
been cut out of this etheric substance. After passing through the
gate of death and discarding our physical body, we pass through this
etheric substance and never really leave it on our path between death
and a new birth. It is everywhere and we have to pass through it; we
are in it. Sometime after death, we discard our etheric body, which
dissolves into this surrounding etheric substance. Usually, we cannot
perceive this outer etheric substance. That is why we have nothing in
the etheric world that could be called perception, parallel to
perception in the physical world. Our perceptions of the etheric in
our dreams depend completely on us.
True perception of the
etheric world after death or here on earth in clairvoyant
Imaginations requires greater strength than we usually have between
birth and death. We need greater inner strength of soul. We do not
perceive the etheric world around us during earthly life because we
lack sufficient strength of soul. To perceive the etheric world we
must become much more active, work much harder than we do in ordinary
life. After death, too, the soul must be filled with much more active
strength than in ordinary life to relate to its environment.
Otherwise we do not perceive the etheric world, just as we wouldn't
perceive anything if we lacked all senses in the physical world.
Thus, we need a more active strength of soul to find our way after
death and not to be deaf and blind, figuratively speaking, to the
world we enter then.
To get a clearer idea of
how the soul perceives after death, or after it has developed the
faculties to unfold its imagination, let us compare this soul faculty
to writing. What you write down expresses something that stands
behind your words; still, it is you who put down the letters. You
have the power to make what you write true, to make it correspond to
an objective state of affairs. If you want to inform a faraway friend
about something and write it down for him, it is you who form the
words that will tell the friend about the fact when he reads them.
Someone may object that this fact does not exist in the world as an
objective fact, but is only what someone has written down. This is
nonsense, of course. It is possible to describe an objective fact
with the letters you wrote. The same applies to imaginative
perception in the super-sensible world. You have to be active. You
have to set down the signs, the letters that express the objective
processes in the spiritual world, and you must be aware that this is
what you are doing. Whether you can do that or not depends on whether
you have the strength necessary for a living relationship with
spiritual reality, whether it inspires you to set down the truth and
not falsehoods. But the fact remains: You have to know you are
setting it down.
Now, let us return to
dreams. When we dream, we usually feel the dream images “weave”
and simply unravel on their own. We should think of these dreams as
images that float past the soul. Now suppose you were thinking that
you yourself place the dream images in space and time just as you set
down letters on paper. This is not what we normally associate with
dreams or hallucinations, but it is the type of consciousness
required for imaginative thinking. You must be aware that you are the
determining power in your dreams. You put down one thing after
another just as you do when writing something on paper. You yourself
are in control. The same power is behind you that makes what you
write true. The great difference between dreams or hallucinations and
true clairvoyance is that in the latter we are aware that we are the
esoteric scribes, as it were. The things we see are noted down as an
esoteric script. We inscribe onto the world what we perceive as
expression, as revelation, of the world.
Here, people could object
that we do not need to write these things down because they are known
beforehand. But that is not valid, for in this case it is not we who
do the writing but the being of the next higher hierarchy. We give
ourselves up to that being, and it becomes the force ruling us. In an
inner soul process, we record what holds sway through us. When you
look at this esoteric script, you will read what is to be revealed.
That is why I have said so
often in public lectures that the development of clairvoyance
requires that all perception becomes active and does not remain the
passive openness to the world that is appropriate for understanding
our physical environment. Gradually, then, we comprehend what we have
called “learning the esoteric script,” since the beginning
of our anthroposophic work. I have described it in more detail in
The Threshold of the Spiritual World.
[ Note 1 ]
To write the esoteric script into spiritual space and spiritual time our
soul must be more active and powerful than it needs to be in everyday
life. We need this greater strength when we have passed through the
gate of death. If you seek imaginative clairvoyance, you will achieve
it gradually through meditation. You will experience and perceive,
knowing all the while you are in a world of which our dreams are but
a weak reflection. You can live in that world in such a way that you
can control your dreams, just as you are in control when you assemble
a table or a shoe.
Many people object they
have tried to meditate in all kinds of ways but are still not
becoming clairvoyant. This lack of clairvoyance simply shows they do
not really want the activity and strength I have just described. They
consider themselves fortunate because they do not need them. They do
not want to develop any active strength of soul, but want to become
clairvoyant without having to acquire this strength first. They want
the tableau that arises before them through clairvoyance to appear by
itself. But that would be nothing but hallucinating or dreaming. To
put it bluntly, a dream is a piece of the etheric world that we can
take with our etheric feelers and move from one place to another.
This has nothing to do with true clairvoyance. In experiencing true
second sight we are as active as we are in the physical world in
writing on paper. The only difference is that when we want to write
in the physical world, we need first to know what it is we want to
write down — at least it usually helps if we do. By contrast,
in spiritual perception we allow the beings of the spiritual
hierarchies to write, and only then, while we are writing, do the
things appear that we are to perceive. Real clairvoyance cannot come
about without our active involvement in every single aspect of our
perception.
We also need the strength
that enables us to write in the etheric world when we have passed
through the gate of death. The kind of thinking that serves us well
in the physical world is of no use for perception after death. A
person may be exceedingly clever and smart about things of the
physical world, but after death these capacities will be of no help.
This kind of thinking is much too weak for writing anything into the
etheric world. All ideas we have developed relating to physical
things have their origin in this weak thinking, which is useless
after death. We need a stronger kind of thinking, one that is
inwardly active of its own accord. We need thinking that forms
thoughts which do not merely mirror the outer sense world. We must
develop this inner capacity to form thoughts independent of anything
external that arise, as it were, from the depths of the soul, or we
cannot have a corresponding capacity after death.
Now you might object that
we could just think up all kinds of things, or create a lot of
fantasies that do not reflect anything external, and then we would be
well prepared for developing the strength of thinking necessary after
death. It could be that someone wants to have a great deal of
thinking ability after death and therefore imagines winged dragons,
which do not exist, terrifying beasts, and so on. The person imagines
all these things so as not to be tied to the apron strings of outer
images, and to be able to develop inner strength of thinking in
preparation for life after death.
It cannot be denied —
people who do this will have greater faculties in the world after
death than those who do not. However, they would perceive only false
images, distortions, just as people with impaired vision see a
distorted image of the physical world and those with damaged hearing
have a false impression of its sounds. People who follow this course
of action sentence themselves to perceiving nothing but grotesque
things in the etheric world, instead of what is truly rooted there.
In past periods of human
development, care was always taken to ensure that human beings were
given mental images neither borrowed from the physical world nor
created in the arbitrary and fantastical manner I have just
described. According to the methods available to them, the great
founders of our religions handed down images not based on the
physical, but on the spiritual world. Thus, by following their
religious teachers, people were able to develop mental images that
were not tied to the sensory world but were true all the same because
they originated in the spiritual world. This is the immensely great
education of the human race undertaken by the founders of our
religions. They had set themselves the task of giving human beings
images that would help them to develop a kind of thinking that would
keep them from arriving spiritually deaf and blind in the spiritual
world after death. The founders of our religions wanted to be certain
that human beings were fully alive, fully conscious, and that their
consciousness would not vanish or fade in their hour of death or
become a false consciousness then.
As I have often said, we
are currently living at a stage of evolution when human beings are
meant to come of age, as it were. Religious founders will no longer
appear as they formerly did and appeal to our faith. Those times are
past, although, of course, they still reach into our time. At
present, only a few people are beginning to experience this new
existence, so to speak. Most still yearn to cling to the traditional
ideas of the ancient founders of religions. But humanity must come of
age and what the founders of religions provided for our faith must be
replaced by the contribution of modern spiritual science. For this
science of the spirit is by nature completely different from those
ancient teachings. In order to avoid misunderstandings, we must
emphasize that when we speak of the old religious founders we are not
including Christ among them. I have often said that Christ's
significance does not lie in his teachings, but in what took place
through him. The ancient religious founders were in a sense teachers,
but Christ's main deed was to imbue humanity with His own power
through the Mystery of Golgotha. To this day, this has been extremely
difficult for many people to understand. That is why they speak of
Christ as only a great cosmic teacher. For those who really
understand the full significance of Christ, this is simply nonsense.
Humankind is coming of age
through our modern spiritual science, through the concepts, ideas,
and images that are linked with our life after death and thus with
our entire soul life. For spiritual science can be understood by
every person who wants to understand its findings. It strives to give
people what each individual soul can truly achieve on its own, not by
following the religious founders, as in earlier times. And although
it must be individual researchers who make the results of this
science of the spirit available today, they do so in a form that can
be understood by everyone who wants to. I have often emphasized that
it is a complete misunderstanding to say spiritual science must also
be believed. When people say this, it is because they are so crammed
full with materialistic prejudices that they do not look at what
spiritual science really has to offer. As soon as it is examined,
everything becomes understandable. One does not need clairvoyance for
this; our ordinary understanding is enough to really grasp and
comprehend all this gradually — of course, “gradually”
will be inconvenient for some people.
In other words, spiritual
science appeals to our understanding, making use of the opposite
principle to the one used by the ancient religious founders. Their
ideas gave something to human souls that awakened them spiritually
and gave them strength to perceive in the etheric world, and that
also means to lead a conscious life after death. Assimilating modern
spiritual science will in turn give our soul the strength to develop
the necessary power of thinking after death to consciously perceive
its etheric environment. Both people of ancient times who followed
their religious founders and modern people who are willing to
understand spiritual science will be able to find their way after
death.
Only one type of
person will have difficulty in finding his or her way after death. In
fact, this type will frequently not even experience a life after
death, because it will have become so dulled and obscured. This sort
of person is the dyed-in-the-wool materialist who clings to images of
the physical world and does not want to develop any strength to
perceive the world we enter after death. In terms of the
soul-spiritual, to be a materialist really means the same as wanting
to destroy one's eyes and ears in the physical world, gradually
deadening one's senses. It is no different from someone saying,
“These eyes — they can't be trusted, they provide only
impressions of light. Away with them! These ears — they
perceive only vibrations, not the one single truth. Get rid of them!
Get rid of the senses, one by one!” To be a materialist in
regard to the spiritual world makes as much sense as this attitude in
regard to the sensory world. It is basically the same, as will be
quite easy to see when we consider the reasoning presented by
spiritual science.
Today I have attempted to
explain from this perspective what it means to be in the spiritual
world. I want to go on to explain a type of dream we will all
recognize, because everyone has probably experienced a dream of this
kind. I am speaking about dreams where we stand face to face with
ourselves, so to speak. As I described earlier, usually the dream
fabric unrolls itself before us, so to speak, and we have no clear
awareness of ourselves at the time. It is only afterward that we
reflect on the dream with self-consciousness.
There are also other dreams
where we face ourselves objectively. And beyond simply seeing
ourselves, as sometimes happens, we can also have the dream students
often have, of sitting in school, trying to work out an arithmetic
problem, but unable to solve the equation. Another person comes and
easily finds the solution. The student really dreams that this
happens. Well, you will understand that it was he himself who came
and solved the problem. Thus, it is also possible that we face
ourselves in this way without, however, recognizing ourselves. But
that is not the important thing. In such a situation the I divides in
two, as it were. It would be nice, wouldn't it, if in the physical
world as well, the other ego appeared and immediately produced the
right answer when we do not know something. Well, it does happen in
dreams.
When we are dreaming, we
are actually outside our physical and etheric bodies and only in the
astral body and ego. While the type of dream described earlier gives
us a glimpse of the etheric body, the ones where we face ourselves
result from the astral body we took along revealing a part of itself
to us and facing us with it. We perceive a portion of ourselves
outside the physical body.
We do not perceive the
astral body in ordinary life, but we can quite easily see part of it
in sleep. It contains things we are not at all aware of when we are
awake. I spoke earlier about the nature of the etheric body; it
contains everything we have experienced. But now I have to tell you
something quite strange — the astral body contains even those
things we have not experienced. You see, our astral body is a rather
complicated structure. It is in a certain sense built into us out of
the spiritual world, and it contains not merely those things we
already have in us now but also those we will learn in the future!
They are already present there as a disposition. This astral body is
much cleverer than we are. Therefore, when it reveals something of
itself in our dreams, it can confront us with our self in a form that
is much cleverer than we have become through physical life. If you
bear this in mind — I say this now only as an aside and not as
part of the lecture — it will throw some light on the
“cleverness” of animals. They also have an astral body.
It can bring out things that do not emerge in the ordinary lives of
the animals. Many surprising things can reveal themselves there. For
example, the astral body contains, believe it or not, all of
mathematics, not only as far as we know it today, but also everything
that still remains to be discovered. Nevertheless, if we wanted to
read the mathematics contained there and read it consciously, we
would have to do so actively by acquiring the necessary faculties.
Thus, it is a revelation of
part of our astral body when we come face to face with ourselves in a
dream. And many of the things that come to us as inner inspiration
spring from these revelations of the astral body. In the same way
hallucinations can occur under the circumstances I described earlier.
The part of us that is cleverer than we usually are can, through a
special disposition in our constitution, take on a voice of its own.
Then we can be inspired, which would not happen if we used only our
ordinary judgment in our physical body. But it is dangerous to give
ourselves over to such things, because we cannot control them until
we are able to penetrate them with our judgment. And since we cannot
control them, Lucifer has easy access to all these developments, and
we cannot keep him from directing them according to his intentions,
rather than in accordance with the aims of the proper world order.
When we develop our inner
forces, we learn to lead an inner life that makes us clairvoyant in
the astral body. But you will see from what I have said that becoming
clairvoyant in the astral body requires that we are always aware of
facing ourselves, our own being. Just as we do not lead a healthy
physical life if we are not fully conscious, so we do not lead a
healthy soul life in the super-sensible world if we do not see
ourselves at all times. In the physical world we are ourselves; in
the higher, spiritual world we have the same relationship to
ourselves as we have here to a thought representing a past event. We
inwardly look at such a thought and treat it as a memory. As we deal
with a thought in this world, so we know in the spirit realm that we
are looking at and observing ourselves. Our self must always be
present when we experience things in the spiritual world. Basically,
this is the only principle applying also to those things over which
we have no control. In fact, in the realm of the spirit this
principle allows us to master things, to become the controlling
power. Our own being is the center of everything. Our own being shows
us how we act in the spiritual world, revealing to us who we really
are in the spiritual world.
If we are in the spiritual
world and perceive something is incorrect, that means we are using
the esoteric script incorrectly. Well, if we use the esoteric script
incorrectly but perceive ourselves as the center of everything going
on, we experience in our own being: You look like this because
you did something wrong; now you have to put it right! We can see how
we have acted by what we have become. We can compare this to how you
would feel here in the physical world if you were not inside but
outside yourself. For example, if you said to someone, “It is
now half past eleven” — something that is not true —
and look at yourself, you see how you stick your tongue out at
yourself. You say, “This isn't you!” And then you start
to correct yourself and say what is true, “It is now twenty
past nine.” At that moment your tongue goes back in. Similarly,
you can tell whether you are acting correctly in the spiritual world
by looking at yourself.
Such grotesque images may
serve to characterize these things, which should be taken much more
seriously than everything said about the physical world. The point is
to gain an understanding of the super-sensible realm through the power
of thinking we already possess in the physical world. That way we
free our thinking, which otherwise remains bound to our physical
environment.
In earlier times people had
a basic, atavistic clairvoyance. It was possible for them to have
Imaginations, even Inspirations. But in contrast to this earlier
stage, we have now reached an advanced stage and can form ideas about
the physical world. When people still possessed an atavistic
clairvoyance, they could not think properly. For proper thinking to
develop, the strength used earlier in clairvoyance had to be applied
to thinking. Some people nowadays develop clairvoyant faculties at
certain times in their life by methods other than those described by
spiritual science. This is because they have inherited these
faculties from earlier times and they have not yet achieved sound
judgment in those areas of life where they are clairvoyant. But we
are approaching the time when sound judgment must be present before
clairvoyance can be developed on the basis of such mature and
balanced judgment.
In other words, when people
these days show certain psychic abilities, a certain clairvoyance,
without having done serious exercises, without having studied
spiritual science — which, if applied in the right way, can be
the best exercise to bring out the old clairvoyance — this does
not mean that they are more advanced than everyone else, but rather
that they are lagging behind. Having atavistic abilities today does
not mean one has reached the stage of clear thinking. The more
advanced soul is clearly the one that comes to sound judgments out of
its ordinary understanding — and this ordinary understanding is
completely sufficient to grasp spiritual science if one is free of
preconceived notions.
We are making a great
mistake if we allow atavistic clairvoyant abilities to impress us. We
are on the wrong track if we believe such a person's soul is
particularly advanced. That this soul shows such abilities means that
it has failed to go through certain things that had to be experienced
in the age of clairvoyance. Therefore, that soul is now catching up
on what was missed earlier. It is quite grotesque when people
involved in spiritual science believe that someone who displays a
certain clairvoyance without having studied spiritual science must
have been someone important in a previous life. Such a person was
quite certainly less important than someone displaying sound judgment
about things.
Now it is very important
that our movement should try to build a certain circle of people who
see through these things, who truly and thoroughly understand them
and can reach the following insight: We need spiritual science in our
time because only by understanding it can we progress.
This is very important.
There are, of course, childhood illnesses in all areas of life, and
naturally also in spiritual streams entering the world. And one can
understand easily enough why spiritual science has childhood
illnesses because it tries to give human beings the results that were
achieved by clairvoyant consciousness. But you can see how we have to
describe this. We have to say that becoming clairvoyant in the way
humanity needs it now and in the future does not appeal to people's
love of comfort and convenience. It requires a great deal more than
just waiting for things to happen. Participation at every moment,
self-control and the capacity for self-observation are required to
reach the spiritual world. This must be widely understood. It is much
easier to wait for clairvoyance to approach us like a dream,
streaming to and fro. People want to experience the spirit realm in
the same way they experience the world of the senses. This is a
remnant from past periods of our history. In ancient clairvoyance,
things were experienced in such a way that people did not really
“know” them. This is probably why even today people want
to experience the spirit realm in such a way that they do not
actually “know” it. We do not properly appreciate what we
know for sure. When we do arithmetic, for example, we follow certain
set methods, without being much involved in what we are doing. When
we add up five and seven, we are not really participating in the
sense referred to here; we are not fully present in what we do. That
is why people do not like it if others have developed their own view
of the world. As soon as you can show people something you have come
to know without this inner participation, they are happy, exceedingly
happy! But when someone demonstrates knowledge of the spiritual world
and knows of it in such a way that he is involved, then people say,
“Oh, he knows it! That is a completely conscious process and
not objective.” But if someone comes along and has had a vision
whose origin he cannot explain, people say, “That is objective,
completely objective! We can believe this person.”
The most important aspect
of our spiritual science is to develop clear ideas. Spiritual science
is still relatively new; therefore, now that people's longing for the
spiritual world and knowledge of it has awakened, they want to
connect with everything still coming up from the old world of
clairvoyance. They gather all these old things and believe they are
doing something quite special in preserving them.
However, our task is to see
clearly in this field! It must be clear to us that there is nothing
inferior about giving advice in full consciousness on a matter of
spiritual healing. But most people will appreciate indications given
by someone “above” the situation, who yields himself to
quite obscure feelings and does not “know” things, much
more because his statements result in the dark, blissful feeling:
This is the result of something unknown! Everywhere we hear people
saying that things they can grasp are of no interest to them. They
have come for the inexplicable — that is supreme,
divine!
Believe me, the individual
truths of spiritual science must gradually enter our souls, and at
the same time we must have a clear and sure sense for the conditions
I have just touched upon. I have spoken about these conditions to show,
beginning with the nature of dreams, that true clairvoyance requires
the kind of active work by the soul we can compare with writing. I wrote
The Threshold of the Spiritual World
with the aim of clarifying these matters more and more. Those who understand
my book will grasp the vital nerve, the keynote of our movement. I
have to emphasize again and again — in spite of having said it
frequently over the years — because so much depends on this:
Those who really want to gain access to spiritual science have to
acquire a healthy sense for the things that truly belong to it. Then
we will gradually develop into a Society that can set itself the task
of having a genuinely healing effect on everything belonging to
cultural life.
Next time, we will continue
to talk about what we began today as a description of the world of
dreams based on the spiritual world.
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