PART TWO
THE MISSION OF THE SPIRIT
I
MEDITATION:
THE PATH TO HIGHER KNOWLEDGE
OXFORD, AUGUST 20, 1922
I WOULD LIKE to respond
to your kind invitation to speak here this evening by telling you
something about how, through unmediated research, one can come to
spiritual knowledge, and I would like to explain the educational
consequences of that knowledge. At the outset today I would also
like to say that I will be speaking primarily about the method for
entering and researching super-sensible worlds; perhaps on another
occasion it will be possible to impart some of the results of
super-sensible research. Everything I have to say today will refer
to the researching of spiritual, super-sensible worlds, not to
the understanding of super-sensible knowledge. Supersensible
knowledge that has been researched and communicated can be
understood by ordinary healthy human understanding if this ordinary
understanding has not lost its unbiased perspective. A biased view
is present when the understanding takes as its starting point the
proof or logical deduction appropriate for dealing with the outer
world of sense. Because of this hindrance alone it is often said
that the results of super-sensible research cannot be understood by
anyone who is not a researcher of the super-sensible.
What will be imparted here today is the
object of what is known as initiation knowledge. In previous ages
of humanity's development this knowledge was cultivated in a form
different from the form appropriate for today. As I have already
said in other lectures, the things of the past are not to be
brought forward again; rather the path of research into
super-sensible worlds is to be entered upon in a way appropriate to
the thinking and feeling of our age. When it comes to initiation
knowledge, everything depends on the individual's ability to
undergo a fundamental reorientation or revisioning of his entire
soul configuration.
An individual possessing initiation
knowledge is distinguished from those who have knowledge in the
present-day sense of the word, not merely because his initiation
knowledge is a step above ordinary knowledge. Of course, it is
achieved on the foundation of ordinary knowledge; this foundation
must be present; intellectual thinking must be fully
developed if one wants to acquire initiation knowledge.
However, a fundamental reorientation is then necessary. The
possessor of initiation knowledge must come to see the world from a
point of view altogether different from the way it was seen without
initiation knowledge.
I can express the fundamental difference
between initiate and ordinary knowledge in a simple formula: In
ordinary knowledge we are aware of our thinking; indeed, we are
altogether aware of the inner soul experience through which we, as
the subject of knowing, acquire knowledge. For example, when we
think and believe that we know something through thought we think
of ourselves as thinking human beings, as subjects. We are
looking for objects when we observe nature or human life or perform
experiments. We always look for objects. Objects are supposed
to present themselves to us. Objects should surrender themselves to
us so we can encompass them with our thoughts, so we can apply our
thinking to them. We are the subject and that which comes to us is
the object.
With a man who strives for initiation
knowledge an entirely different orientation comes into play. He
must become aware that as a human being, he is the object; then,
for this object, this human being, he must seek the subject. A
situation exactly the opposite of ordinary knowing must occur. In
ordinary knowledge we experience ourselves as subject and look for
the object outside of us. In initiation knowledge we ourselves are
the object, and we seek the corresponding subject; in other words,
genuine initiation knowledge leads us to find subjects. But that
would be the object of a later knowledge.
It is as though the mere definitional
concepts already force us here to see that in initiation knowledge,
we must actually flee from ourselves; we must become like the
plants and stones, like thunder and lightning, which are, for us,
objects. In initiation knowledge we slip out of ourselves, so to
speak, and become objects that seek the corresponding subjects. If
I may express myself somewhat paradoxically, I would like to say
that from the point of view of thinking the difference is as
follows: In ordinary knowing we think about the things; in
initiation knowledge we seek to discover how we are being thought
by the cosmos.
This is nothing more than an abstract
guiding principle. But you will find that this abstract guiding
principle is followed everywhere in the concrete methods of
initiation. To begin with, if we want to receive initiation
knowledge appropriate for today we must proceed from thinking. The
life of thought must be fully developed if we want to come to
initiation knowledge today. This life of thought can be especially
well schooled through an immersion in the natural scientific
development of the last centuries, the nineteenth century in
particular.
People react in different ways to natural
scientific knowledge. Some listen to the pronouncements of science
with what I would like to call a certain naïveté. They
hear, for example, how organic beings have developed from the
simplest, most primitive forms up to the human being. They think
about this development but have little regard for their own
involvement in these ideas. They do not stop to consider the fact
that they themselves unfold something in the seeing of
external processes, something which belongs to the life of
thought.
But someone who receives natural
scientific knowledge with critical consideration of his own
involvement must ask himself: What does it mean that I myself can
follow the development of beings from the imperfect to the perfect?
Or he could say to himself: When I do mathematics I create
thoughts purely out of myself. Properly understood, mathematics is
a web spun out of myself. I then apply this web to the outer world
and it fits. Here we come to the great question, I would like to
say the really tragic question: How do things stand with respect to
thinking itself — this thinking that is involved every time I
know something?
No matter how long we think about it we
cannot find out how things stand with thinking; for thinking
remains always stuck in the same place. We merely spin, so to
speak, around the axis we have already built for ourselves. We must
accomplish something with our thinking. With our thinking we must
carry out what I described as meditation in my book
Knowledge of the Higher Worlds and Its Attainment.
[Note 1]
We should not think mystically about
meditation but then neither should we think of it lightly. It
must be completely clear what meditation is in the modern sense. It
also requires patience and inner energy of soul. Above all there is
something else that belongs to meditation, something that no one
can ever give to another human being: the ability to promise
oneself something and then keep that promise. When we begin to
meditate we begin to perform the only really fully free act in
human life. We always have the tendency toward freedom within us.
We have also attained a good measure of freedom. However, if we
stop to think about it, we will find we are dependent upon our
heredity, our education, and our present life situation.
To what extent are we in a position to
suddenly leave behind all we have acquired through heredity,
education, and life? We would be confronted with nothingness were
we to suddenly leave that all behind.
Although we may have decided to meditate
mornings and evenings in order gradually to learn to see into
the spiritual world, we can, in fact, on any given day, leave this
undone. There is nothing to prohibit this. And experience teaches
us that most people who approach the meditative life, even those
with the best intentions, soon leave it again. In this we are
completely free. Meditation is an essentially free act.
If we are able to remain true to ourselves
despite this freedom, if we promise ourselves, not another but
ourselves, that we will remain faithful to this meditation, then
that is, of itself, an enormous power in the soul.
Having said that, I would like to draw
your attention to how, in its simplest form, meditation is done. I
can only deal with the basic principles today. This is what we are
dealing with: An idea or image, or a combination thereof, is moved
into the center of our consciousness. Although the content of this
thought complex does not matter, it should be immediate and
not represent anything from our memory. For this reason it is good
if the thought complex is not retrieved from our memory but rather
given to us by someone experienced in such things. It is good for
it to be given to us, not because the one who gives the
meditation wants to exercise any suggestion but because we
then can be certain that what we meditate is, for us, something
entirely new.
We could just as well find a passage for
meditation in any old book that we know we have not read. What is
important is that we not pull a sentence out of our subconscious or
unconscious, which would then overwhelm us. We could never be
absolutely certain about a sentence like that. All kinds of things
left over from past feelings and sensations would be mixed in. It
is essential that the meditation be as transparent as a
mathematical equation.
Let us take something very simple, the
sentence: “Wisdom lives in the light.” To begin with,
the truth of this sentence cannot be tested. It is a picture. But
it is not important for us to concern ourselves with the content in
any other way than to see through and understand it. We are to
dwell upon it with our consciousness. In the beginning we
will only be able to dwell in full consciousness upon such a
content for a very short period of time. But this period of time
will get longer and longer.
What then is essential? Everything depends
upon our gathering together our whole life of soul in order
to concentrate all our powers of thinking and feeling upon the
content of the meditation. Just as the muscles of the arm
become strong as we work with them, so too soul forces are
strengthened by focusing them on a meditative content again and
again. If possible the content of meditation should remain the same
for months, perhaps for years. For genuine super-sensible research
the forces of the soul must first be strengthened,
empowered.
If we continue practicing in this way, the
day will come, I would like to say, the big day, on which we make a
very special observation. Gradually we observe that we are in a
soul activity entirely independent of the body. We notice that
whereas previously we were dependent upon the body for all
our thinking and feeling — for our thinking upon the nervous
system, for our feeling upon the circulatory system, and so
on — now we feel ourselves in a spiritual-soul activity
that is fully independent of any bodily activity. And we notice
this because we are now in a position to cause something in
our head to vibrate, something that had remained entirely
unconscious previously. We now discover the strange difference
between sleeping and waking. The difference consists in this: when
man is awake there is something vibrating throughout his entire
organism — except in his head. What is otherwise in
movement in all the rest of the human organism is, in the head, at
rest.
We will better understand what we are
dealing with here if I draw your attention to the fact that, as
human beings, we are not these robust solid bodies that we usually
believe ourselves to be. We are actually made up of approximately
90 percent fluids; and the 10 per cent solid constituents are
immersed in the fluids, they swim around in the fluids. We can only
speak of the solid part of the human being in an uncertain way. We
are, if I may put it this way, approximately 90 per cent water; and
to a certain extent, air and warmth pulsate through this
water.
If you can imagine the human being this
way — to the least extent solid body and to a greater extent
water and air with warmth vibrating therein — then you will
not find it so difficult to believe that there is something even
finer and more rarefied within us. This finer element I will call
the etheric body. This etheric body is more rarefied than air. It
is so fine that it permeates us without our being aware of the fact
— at least in ordinary life. This etheric body is what is in
inner movement when we are awake — in a regular movement
throughout the entire human body, except in the head. In the head
the etheric body is inwardly at rest.
In sleep it is otherwise. Sleep begins and
then continues when the etheric body also begins to be in movement
in the head. So that in sleep the whole human being — the
head as well as the rest of the human being — has an etheric
body that is in inner movement. When we are dreaming, for
example, just upon awakening, we are then still just able to
perceive the last movements of the etheric body. They present
themselves to us as dreams. We are still able to perceive the last
etheric movements in the head; however, when we awaken
quickly that cannot happen.
Someone who meditates for a long time in
the fashion I have indicated arrives at a stage where he can form
pictures into the etheric body which permeates the head when it is
at rest. In the book
Knowledge of the Higher Worlds and Its Attainment.
I have called these pictures Imaginations. These Imaginations, which
can be experienced in the etheric body independently of the
physical body, are the first super-sensible impressions we can
have. They bring us to the place where, entirely without regard for
our physical body, we can behold, as in one picture, our life in
its movement and its actions. What has often been described by
people who were submerged in water and about to drown —
that they have seen their lives backward in a series of moving
pictures — that vision can be developed here systematically
so that everything that has happened in our present earth
life can be seen.
The first result of initiation knowledge
is a view of our own soul life. This turns out to be entirely
different from what one usually expects. We usually abstractly
suppose this soul life to be woven from ideas and mental images.
When we discover it in its true form we find that it is something
creative and, at the same time, that it is what was working in our
childhood, what shaped and molded our brain, what permeates the
rest of the body and brings about a plastic form-building activity
within the body as it enkindles and supports our waking
consciousness, even our digestive activity. We see this inner
activity in the organism as the etheric body of the human being.
This is not a spatial body but a time body. For this reason you can
describe the etheric body as a form in space only if you realize
that what you are doing is the same as painting a bolt of
lightning. When you paint a picture of a lightning flash you are,
of course, painting only a moment of its existence. You are holding
the moment in place. The human etheric body also can only be
captured as a spatial form for a moment. In reality we have a
physical body in space and an etheric body in time, a time body,
which is always in movement. And it is only meaningful to speak of
the etheric body if we speak of it as a body of time which we can
behold. From the moment we are in a position to make this discovery
we see it extending backward all the way back to our birth. This
is, to begin with, the first super-sensible ability we can discover
in ourselves.
The development of the soul, brought about
through processes such as I have described, shows itself above all
in a change of the entire soul mood and disposition of those people
who strive for initiation knowledge. Please do not misunderstand
me. I do not mean that someone who arrives at initiation knowledge
suddenly becomes an entirely transformed and different human being.
On the contrary, modern initiation knowledge must leave a man
standing fully in the world so that he is able to continue his
life, when he returns to it, just as he once began it. But when
super-sensible research is carried out man has become, through
initiation knowledge, for those hours and moments someone different
than he is in ordinary life.
Above all I would like to emphasize an
important moment that characterizes initiation knowledge. As a
person penetrates further into experience of the super-sensible he
feels more and more how his own bodily nature disappears. That is,
it disappears for him with respect to those activities in which
this bodily nature plays a part in ordinary life.
Let us consider for a moment how our
judgments in life come about. We grow up and develop as children.
Sympathy and antipathy become solidly set in our lives
— sympathy and antipathy for the things that appear to us in
nature and for other people. Our body is involved in all of this.
Of course, this sympathy and antipathy that, to a large
extent, actually have their foundation in the physical processes in
our body, are then placed and located in the body. In the moment
when people about to be initiated rise into the super-sensible
world, they live into a world in which, for the duration of the
time spent in the super-sensible, the sympathies and antipathies
connected with their bodily nature become increasingly foreign to
them. They are lifted above that with which their bodily nature is
connected. When they wish to take up ordinary life again they must
again fit themselves, so to speak, into their usual sympathies and
antipathies — something which otherwise occurs by
itself.
When we awaken in the morning we fit into
our bodies, develop the same love for things and people, the same
sympathy and antipathy we had before. This happens by itself. But
when we stay for a while in the super-sensible and then wish to
return to our sympathies and antipathies, then we must exert an
effort to submerge ourselves into our bodily nature. This
condition of separation from our own bodily nature is a
phenomenon that shows that we are really making progress. The
appearance of wide-hearted sympathies and antipathies is,
altogether, something that an initiate gradually makes a part
of his being.
There is one thing that shows the
development toward initiation in a particularly strong way:
the working of the memory during initiation knowledge. We
experience ourselves in ordinary life. Our memory is sometimes a
little better, sometimes a little worse; but we acquire a memory.
We have experiences and later remember them. This is not the case
with what we experience in super-sensible worlds. We can experience
greatness, beauty, and meaning, but after it has been experienced
it is gone. And it must be experienced again if it is to stand
before the soul again. It is not imprinted in the memory in the
usual sense. It is imprinted only if we bring into concepts what we
have seen in the super-sensible, only if we can also bring our
understanding along with us into the super-sensible world. This is
very difficult. We must be able to think just as well on the other
side but without the body helping with this thinking. For this
reason our concepts must be strengthened beforehand; we must have
become proper logicians before, so that we do not always forget
when we look into the super-sensible world. It is just the primitive
clairvoyants who, although they can see quite a bit, forget their
logic when they are over there. It is just when we want to share
super-sensible truths with someone else that we notice this change
in our memory with respect to these truths. From this we can see
how our physical body is involved in the exercise of memory,
not in thinking, but in the exercise of memory, which always plays
into the super-sensible.
If I may be permitted to say something
personal, it is this: When I myself hold lectures it is different
from the way lectures are usually held. People often speak from
memory, they often develop from memory what they have learned, what
they have thought. Anyone who really presents super-sensible truths
actually must always produce them in the moment when he presents
them. I can hold the same lecture thirty, forty, fifty times, and
for me it is never the same. Of course, that would be so in any
case, but it is even more so with this independence from memory
that comes into play when a higher stage of memory is
reached.
I have already told you about the ability
to bring forms into the etheric body of the head. This then makes
it possible to see through the time-body, the etheric body, all the
way back to birth. It also brings the soul to a very special mood
with respect to the cosmos. One loses one's own bodily nature, so
to speak, but feels oneself living into the cosmos. Consciousness
expands, as it were, into the widths of the ether. One can no
longer look at a plant without becoming immersed in its growth. One
follows it from the root to the blossom. One lives in its juices,
in its blossoms, in its fruits. One can steep oneself in the
life of animals according to their forms, but especially in the
life of other human beings. The slightest gesture encountered in
another human being leads one, so to speak, into the entire soul
life of the other person. One feels as though one is no longer in
oneself, but is out of oneself during this super-sensible
knowing.
But it is necessary that we be able to
return again and again, otherwise we are lazy, nebulous mystics,
dreamers, and not knowers of super-sensible worlds. We must be able
to live in super-sensible worlds while simultaneously being able to
return at any time to stand firmly on our two feet. For this
reason, whenever I explain such things about super-sensible
worlds, I must stress that it is far more important for a
philosopher to know how a shoe or a coat is made than it is to know
logic, that he must really stand in life in a practical way.
Actually no one should think about life unless he really stands in
it in a practical way. This is even more so the case for someone
seeking super-sensible knowledge. Knowers of the super-sensible
cannot be dreamers or fanatics or people who cannot stand on their
two feet; otherwise they would lose themselves, for one must, as a
matter of fact, get outside of oneself. But this “getting outside
of oneself” must not lead to the loss of one's self. The book
Occult Science — an Outline
was written out of knowledge such as I have described here.
Then it is important that we penetrate
further into this super-sensible knowledge. This happens when
we further develop our meditations. With our meditations we rest
upon certain ideas or mental pictures or a combination thereof,
thereby strengthening the soul life. But this is not enough to
bring us fully into the spiritual world. It is also necessary
that we practice the following: Beyond dwelling with our
meditations upon ideas, beyond concentrating our entire soul
upon these ideas, we must be able, at will, to cast them out of our
consciousness. Just as, in the life of the senses, we can look at
something and then away from it whenever we want, so too, in the
development of super-sensible knowledge we must learn to concentrate
on a content of soul and then be able to cast it out of the soul
again.
Even in ordinary life this is not easy.
Just think how little we have it in our power to drive our thoughts
away at will. Sometimes they will pursue us for days,
especially if they are unpleasant. We cannot get rid of them.
This becomes much harder after we have become accustomed to
concentrating on the thoughts. A thought content we have
concentrated upon eventually begins to get a firm grip on us; then
we really have to work hard to remove it. When we have practiced
for a long time we can manage the following: We can remove, we can
cast out of our consciousness, this entire retrospect of our life
from birth onward, this entire etheric body, as I have called it,
this time body.
This is, of course, a stage to which we
must develop ourselves. We must first become mature for this step
by ridding ourselves of this colossus, this giant being in our
soul. The whole terrible specter that embodies life between the
present moment and our birth is standing there before us. This is
what we must do away with. If we can get rid of it then something
will appear for us that I would like to call a more wakeful
consciousness. Then we are merely awake
without anything in the waking consciousness. Then it begins to
fill. Just as air streams into lungs that need it, so too the real
spiritual world now streams into the consciousness that has been
emptied in the way described.
This is Inspiration. Now something streams
in that is not a finer, more rarefied matter. It is related to
matter as negative is related to positive. The opposite of matter now streams into the human being
who has become free of the ether. This is the most important thing
we can become aware of. It is not true that spirit is merely an
even finer, more etherealized form of matter. If we call matter the
positive (it really does not matter if we call it positive or
negative; these things are relative), then in terms of the positive
we must call spirit negative. It is as if I had the vast
fortune of five dollars in my wallet. If I give one away then
I will have four left. But say, alternatively, that I accumulate
debts. If I owe one dollar then I have less than no
dollars.
If through the methods described I have
removed the etheric body then I come, not into a still finer ether,
but into something that is the opposite of ether, in the same way
debts are the opposite of assets. Now I know from my own
experience what spirit is. Through inspiration the spirit comes
into us and the first thing we experience is what surrounded our
soul and spirit before our birth, that is before conception, in the
spiritual world. That is, the preexistent life of our soul and
spirit. Previously we had seen into the etheric realm back to our
birth. Now we look back beyond birth, that is conception, into a
world of soul and spirit and reach the point where we can perceive
how we were before we descended from spiritual worlds into a
physical body taking on a line of heredity.
For inspiration knowledge these things are
not thought-out philosophical truth. They are experiences, but
experiences which must only be acquired after a preparation such as
I have indicated. So the first thing that comes to us when we
enter the spiritual world is the truth of the preexistence of
the human soul, that is, of the human spirit. We learn now to see
the eternal directly.
For many centuries now European humanity
has considered eternity from one side only, from the point of view
of immortality. Europeans have asked only: What becomes of
the soul after it leaves the body at death? Of course, it is the
egotistical right of human beings to ask such a question. They are
interested in what will follow after death for egotistical reasons.
We will presently see that we too can speak about immortality, but
immortality is usually discussed for egotistical reasons. People
are less interested in what happened before their birth. They say:
We are here now. What went on before has value only as history. But
knowledge of history that has any value is only possible if we seek
knowledge of our existence before birth, that is, before
conception.
We need a word in modern languages that
makes the eternal complete. We should speak not only of immortality
but also of unborn-ness. For eternity consists of both
immortality and unborn-ness; furthermore, initiation knowledge
discovers unborn-ness before it discovers
immortality.
A further stage of development in the
direction of the spiritual world can be reached if we strive to
free our soul and spiritual activities still further from the
support given by the body. We can achieve this freeing by guiding
our exercises, meditations, and concentration more in the direction
of will-exercises. As a concrete example I would like to
describe a simple will exercise that will allow you to study the
principle under consideration. In ordinary life we are
accustomed to think along with the flow of the world. We let the
things come to us as they happen to come. What comes to us first we
think first, what comes to us later we think later. And even if in
more logical thinking we are not thinking along with the flow of
time, still in the background there is the effort to stick with the
external, “real,” flow of events and facts. In order to
exercise our soul and spiritual forces we must get free from the
external flow of events. And a good will exercise is this: We try
to think back through the experiences of the day, not as they
occurred, from the morning to evening, but backward, from evening
to morning, paying attention to the details as much as
possible.
Suppose we come to the following in this
backward review: We walked up a set of stairs. First we picture
ourselves on the top step, then at the one before the top, and so
on down to the bottom. We descend the stairs backward. In the
beginning we will only be able to visualize backward the episodes
of the day's experiences in this way, say from six o'clock to three
o'clock, or from twelve to nine, and so on, back to the moment of
waking. But gradually we will acquire a kind of technique by means
of which, as a matter of fact, in the evening or the next
morning we will be able to let a tableau of the day's events, or
the events of the day before, pass before our soul in reverse
order.
When we are in a position (and everything
depends on our achieving this position) to free ourselves entirely
from the three dimensional flow of reality, then we will see how a
powerful strengthening of our will occurs. The same effect can be
achieved if we are able to hear a melody backward or if we can
picture a drama of five acts running backward from the fifth,
fourth, and so forth back to the first. We strengthen our will
inwardly with all of these means, and outwardly we tear it free
from its bondage to events in the world of the senses. Other
exercises that I have mentioned in previous lectures can be
added. We can take stock of ourselves and our habits. We can take
ourselves in hand, apply iron will in order, in a few years, to
acquire another habit in place of the old. As an example, I mention
the fact that in his handwriting everyone has something that
reveals his character. Making the effort to acquire another
handwriting, one which is not at all similar to the former,
requires a powerful, inner strength. Of course, the second
handwriting must become just as habitual as the first. That is a
small thing. There are many such things through which we can alter
the fundamental direction of our will through our own energetic
efforts.
In this way gradually we are able to do
more than just bring the spiritual world as inspiration into us.
With our spirit freed from the body we are really able to immerse
ourselves in the other spiritual beings outside us. Genuine
spiritual knowing means that we enter into spiritual beings around
us when we behold physical things. If we want to know spiritual
things we must first get out of ourselves. I have described this
freeing of ourselves from the physical. But then we must also
acquire the ability to sink ourselves again into spiritual things
and beings.
We can only do this after practicing the
kinds of exercises just described; then, as a matter of fact, we
are no longer disturbed by our own bodies but can immerse ourselves
in the spiritual side of things; then the plants no longer merely
appear to us, but we are able to dive down into the color itself.
We live in the process whereby the plant colors itself. By not only
knowing that the chicory growing alongside the road is blue, but by
being able to enter into the blossom inwardly and participate in
the blue we dwell intuitively in this process. From this point we
can extend our knowledge more and more.
From certain symptoms we can tell we have
really made progress with such exercises. I would like to mention
two, but there are really many. The first symptom consists in this,
that we acquire entirely different views concerning the world of
morality than we had before. For the pure intellect the moral world
is something unreal. Certainly, if he has remained a decent person
during the age of materialism, a man feels himself obligated to do
what the old traditions prescribe. Yet even if he does not admit
it, he thinks to himself that doing the good does not make
something happen that is as real as what happens when lightning
flashes or when thunder rolls through space. He is not thinking of
reality in this sense when he thinks of morality. But when he lives
into the spiritual world he becomes aware that the moral order of
the world has not only a reality such as is found in the physical
world, but actually a higher reality. He gradually comes to
understand that this entire age, with its physical
ingredients and processes, can decay and be dissolved; but
the morality that flows forth from our actions continues to exist
in its effects. He becomes aware of the reality of the moral world.
The physical and moral worlds, being and becoming are then one. He
really experiences the truth that moral laws are also objective
laws of the world.
This experience intensifies our sense of
responsibility with respect to the world. It gives us an altogether
different consciousness, a consciousness much needed by
modern humanity. Modern humanity looks at the beginning of the
earth, how it was formed from a primal plasma in space, how life,
man, and — much like a fata morgana — the world of
ideas arose out of this primal matter. Our present-day humanity
looks at the cold grave of the universe that entropy will bring us
to. According to this materialistic idea, everything in which human
beings live will again sink into a great graveyard. Humanity needs
knowledge of the moral order in the world, the knowledge that can
be achieved through super-sensible sources. This I can only touch on
in this lecture.
Another symptom of our progress must be
mentioned: the intensified suffering that we experience. We cannot
come to intuitive knowledge, to this submerging of ourselves
in things external to ourselves, without having gone through
an intensified suffering. This suffering is intensified compared
with the pain involved in imaginative knowledge, the pain that
always arises when we must find our way again into our sympathies
and antipathies. The great effort required to find our way
back always hurts. The pain now becomes a cosmic co-experiencing of
all the suffering that rests upon the ground of
existence.
It is easy to ask why the gods, or God,
created suffering. Suffering must exist if the world is to
arise in its beauty. We have eyes because, to begin with, in a
still undifferentiated organism something organic was, so to
speak, “dug out” and transformed into the power to see
and, then, into the eye. If we were still able today to perceive
the tiny, insignificant processes that go on in the retina when we
see, then we could perceive that even those processes represent a
pain that rests upon the ground of existence. All beauty rests on
the foundation of suffering. Beauty can only be developed out of
pain. We should be able to feel this pain, this suffering. We can
only really find our way into the spiritual by going through pain.
To a lesser degree this can already be said for a lower stage of
knowledge. Anyone who has acquired even a little knowledge will
admit to the following: I am grateful to my destiny for the
happiness and joys life has brought me, but my knowledge has only
been achieved through my pains, through my suffering.
If this is felt with respect to more
elementary knowledge, it can then become an even greater experience
when we overcome ourselves, when we find our way through the pain
that is felt as cosmic pain to a neutral experience in the
spiritual cosmos. We must struggle through to a co-experiencing of
the events and essential nature of all things; then intuitive
knowledge is present. We are fully within an experience of
knowledge that is no longer bound to the body. We can then return
to and live again in the sensible world until death but with
full knowledge of what it means to be real, to be real in the
soul-spiritual outside the body.
If we grasp this experience of intuitive
knowledge, then, in a picture, we have knowledge of what happens
when we leave the physical body at death, then we know what it
means to go through the gate of death. The reality we encounter,
that the soul and spirit go over into a world of soul and spirit
when they leave the body behind — we experience this reality
beforehand when we have ascended to intuitive knowledge. That is,
we know what it is like in a world where there is no body to
provide support. When we have then brought this knowledge into
concepts, we return to the body. But the essential thing is that we
learn how to live without a body and acquire thereby the
knowledge of what it will be like when we can no longer use our
body, when we lay it aside at death and step over into a world of
soul and spirit. Once again, this is not a question of
philosophical speculation concerning immortality based upon
initiation knowledge. It is, I would like to say, an experience, a
pre-experience of what is to come. We know what it will be like. We
do not experience the full reality of dying, but we experience
immortality. This experience also becomes a part of our
knowledge.
I have attempted to describe how you can
rise through Imagination, Inspiration, and Intuition and how,
through this development, you can learn to know yourself in
your full reality as a human being. In the body we learn to know
ourselves for as long as we are in the body. But we must free our
soul and spirit from the body, for only then can the whole human
being be free. What we know through the body, through our senses,
through thinking based on sense experience and bound up with the
body's nervous system — with all this we can know only one
part of us. We only learn to know the whole human being if we have
the will to ascend to the knowledge that comes from initiation
science.
Once again, I would like to stress that
once the research has been done, then the results can be understood
— just as what astronomers and biologists say about the world
can be understood and tested — by anyone approaching them
with an unprejudiced mind, with ordinary, healthy human
understanding. Then you will find that this testing is the first
step of initiation knowledge. Because man does not seek untruth and
error but truth, we must first get an impression of the truth in
initiation knowledge. Then, as much as destiny makes it possible
for us, we will be able to penetrate further and further into the
spiritual world.
In our day, and in a higher sense, the
words which stood inscribed above the Greek temple as a challenge
must be fulfilled: “Man, know thyself.”
Those words certainly did not mean that we
should retreat into our inner life. They were, rather, a challenge
to search for our being: to search for the essence of immortality,
which is found in the body, to search for the essence of
unborn-ness, which is found in the immortal spirit, and to search
for the mediator between earth, time, and spirit which is the soul.
For the true human being consists of body, soul, and spirit. The
body can only know the body, the soul can only know the soul, and
the spirit can only know the spirit. Therefore, we must try to find
the spirit active within us so that the spirit can also be
recognized in the world.
|