LECTURE TWO
JUNE 30, 1923
THE USES OF WHAT SEEMS BORING:
THE SPIRITUAL WORLD AS THE INVERSE OF THE PHYSICAL
WE WILL NOW CONTINUE to answer the
questions we took up last time. You must be quite clear that
the answers to these questions are among the most difficult. I
will try to make them as easy as possible. I
have already mentioned that, to find a way
to spiritual vision, first one must become accustomed to
completely independent thinking. Second, one must have the
ability to think backward. You must therefore attempt to think
backward those things that normally
occur in daily life in a 1, 2, 3, sequence. For instance, as I
told you last time, when I give a lecture, you should try to
think it through backward, from the end to the beginning. These
two aspects constitute the absolute first steps.
In connection with the second question, I want to explain
something else. As you know, a human being can live only within
a specific temperature range. When it becomes very hot in the
summer, one sweats but can still tolerate it. However, were it
to become progressively hotter, a
point would be reached when one would no longer be able to
live. Similarly, a human being can tolerate a given degree of
cold, and if it gets colder than that, one freezes.
The fact is that one cannot see spiritual
beings between the two extremes
within which the human body lives:
i.e., between the cold at which one freezes and the heat that
is still barely tolerable. Within these extremes, where human
life is possible, we cannot see spiritual beings. It is not
surprising therefore that one cannot
perceive spiritual beings when one is in the body.
As I told you last time, when we begin to
think backward and approach the point of consciously seeing
spiritual beings, we often fall asleep. Unless they have
trained themselves to stay awake, most people go to sleep.
One can also perceive spiritual beings at
temperatures higher than those normally tolerable. One could
see spiritual beings at such higher temperatures, but of course
one cannot tolerate them. At lower temperatures likewise one
could perceive spiritual beings if
one could transform oneself into a snow-being, but of course
one would freeze in the process. Thus, what seems so unlikely
to people is actually a fact: spiritual beings withdraw
themselves from the temperatures that are
tolerable to humanity in its
physical body.
A human being cannot tolerate those
temperatures in his body, but he can tolerate them in his
soul; but of course,
the soul goes to sleep. The soul does not
freeze, the soul does not burn, the soul goes to
sleep.
In in the
extreme temperatures outside those one ordinarily lives in. I
will give you an example. When one has a fever, one reaches
inwardly a temperature that one cannot bear. One does not
immediately reach so high a temperature that one dies because
the warmth is created from within,
one is able to bear it. However, when one's fever enters these
higher temperatures,
one may speak in a way that is not normal
on the earth. What people babble in their fever has no relation
to what we are used to on earth. Now, the materialist may say: Yes, but there are
nevertheless untrue thoughts produced that are cooked up in the
heat of fever.
A person, when he enters into a state of
high temperature, first of all feels feverish, then speaks
nonsense. The soul cannot speak
nonsense. Even when the soul is living in a high fever, it
cannot speak nonsense. It seems or appears to speak nonsense at
higher bodily temperatures because the body is not in
order.
You can verify the truth of this by the
following example. Let us think
about our experience with those glass spheres one sometimes
finds in flower gardens — a sphere that is actually a
kind of mirror in which the environment is reflected. If you
look at yourself in one of these, you will find yourself with a
face that you would rather not
have in reality. (He sketched this.) You would hate to have that kind
of face. You will not say, however, "Oh no! What kind of a
thing did I turn into?" You would not believe that this is
really your own face, just because it looks
changed in the sphere. Similarly, if
your soul talks nonsense when you have a fever, you will not
say that your soul is talking nonsense; but rather you
will assume that whatever is said by your soul seems
nonsensical because it is spoken out of a sick brain
— just as your face looks distorted
and flattened out because it is reflected by a false
mirror. So, you must say to yourself: When I have a fever and speak
nonsense, it is my soul that is speaking through a sick brain.
When I see myself reflected in a glass sphere, it is not that I have another face, but that
my face appears distorted. In the same way the speech of one
sick with a fever appears distorted because it is spoken out of
a sick body and a brain that is not working
properly.
Now, we might ask why the brain does not work properly? It is because the
whole blood circulation is too fast. You can verify this by
feeling your pulse when you have a fever. The blood circulation
produces warmth which rises to the head — you feel a
fever —and your soul now appears reflected as by a distorted mirror.
The opposite can also happen, but this will
not happen as a result of lying in the snow and letting oneself
freeze, because then one would actually die of freezing. This
opposite experience can happen, but only as the result of something spiritual.
We come now to a strange subject. Carefully
consider the following: Let's assume one begins to concentrate,
to think powerfully about the smallest things (it is better to
think about the small things that most people
wouldn't even want to give time to) —
for example, a triangle. Let us say we have a triangle, and we
divide it into four equal parts so that we have four equal
triangles. (He draws on the blackboard).
You can see that the whole triangle is
greater than the four smaller triangles. From this I can make a
general statement and say: The whole is greater than the parts.
(He writes the sentence on the blackboard.) But now let's
assume that a well-fed stockbroker
comes by and I tell him: Hey, just think, the whole is greater
than its parts. He will say, “No, that is too
boring for me.”
He would say it again if I continued to
speak to him and said: the blackboard is a physical body with a
given size and extension, the table
is also a body with a given size and extension, and I then
constructed the general statement: All bodies have extension
— are extended in space. (He writes the sentence on the
blackboard.)
If a whole conference were given to you, if
a lecture was given consisting in
the single statement "all bodies have extension," you would
walk away, saying, “Gosh, that was
boring!” Let's say I were to come to
you and make other obvious remarks like the meadow is green,
the rose is red, these things have colors, and yesterday there
was a trial in court and the judge passed judgment, the
judgment had no color. Then I went to another place
and there also was a trial and a
judgment, and it had no color either. And therefore, I said: judgments
have no color. (He writes the sentence on the
blackboard.)
Let's assume someone stood in front of you
for an hour and told you: judgments have no color.
You would think to yourself: I have spent a
whole hour listening to someone bore me. This is the ultimate
boredom. But why are these statements so boring? I should not
be telling them to you humorously; I should be
standing before you stiff and severe like a professor, announcing: Gentlemen, today we will
consider the statement, "Judgments have no color," and then of
course I would have to lecture for a whole hour to prove that
judgments have no color; all bodies have
extension etc.
I could also give you another instance: draw a line from one point to
another;
this is a straight line. All others are
curved, and when you look at it you would immediately say the
straight line is the shortest way; all others are
longer. Here again I could write down a general
statement: The straight line is the
shortest distance between two points. Again, if I were to speak
for a whole hour on the subject, you would find it exceedingly
boring.
THE WHOLE IS GREATER THAN ITS
PARTS
ALL BODIES HAVE EXTENSION
JUDGMENTS HAVE NO COLOR
THE STRAIGHT LINE IS THE SHORTEST
DISTANCE
BETWEEN TWO POINTS
There is a German professor who said that
it is quite possible to perceive things of the spiritual world,
but that the only things that we can perceive of the
spiritual world are what reside in
such statements as: the whole is greater than its parts,
judgments have no color, bodies are extended, and the straight
line is the shortest distance between two points. This, he
says, is all one can know of the spiritual world.
Of course, most students are extremely
bored by his lectures. It is also the case that people today
have come to believe that science has to be boring, and
therefore many of the students are actually excited by this
professor! This, of course, is just
an aside. The real story is the following. Taken by themselves,
sentences such as "the whole is greater than its parts" and
"the straight line is the shortest distance between two points"
cause the back of our head to become cold. This is what usually
happens: the temperature drops and
the area at the back of one's head becomes cold. When the
temperature drops you begin to freeze, and you want to get
away from such statements — they are so boring. It is a
fact — boredom causes a drop in temperature at the
back of the head — not the
whole body, but just at the back of the head. What cools it
down is not snow or ice but something of a spiritual nature,
insofar as there are subjects that hold no interest for the
human being.
It is of course possible to make fun
of these sentences, but the fact
remains, that patiently to think such thoughts over and over
again means to put oneself, again and again, deliberately into
a state of dreadful boredom, and this is a good way to reach in
the direction of a true spiritual perception. It is remarkable that the very things men do
not want in general are the things they must practice if they
wish to have a real look into the spiritual world. Mathematics
for many is boring; it causes a
drop in temperature at the back of the head; and precisely
because it is a cold subject for most, and precisely because
they have to work at it, those people who do, have the least
trouble reaching into the spiritual world. Those who overcome
this resistance and experience again and again the truth
of these statements are those who can
create artificially a state of boredom in themselves. They have
the easiest way into the spiritual world.
I have told you already, when one has a
fever one's pulse speeds up. One warms up, and this warmth
reaches into one's head and into
one's brain, and in this way the warmth causes one to talk
nonsense. If, on the other hand, one struggles with such
statements as we have mentioned, this causes one's blood to
slow down, and there is an accumulation of salts
deposited in the back of the brain.
Most people react in one of two ways to this. Some get a
stomachache, and
they notice this right away, as soon as they start to think of
these statements, and so they stop. One can go on thinking, as
for example Nietzsche did. He always
tortured himself with such statements when he was a young man,
and the salts accumulated in his head, and in his
case, he
suffered dreadful migraines. The objective is to be able to
think such thoughts without causing a migraine or a
stomachache.
One must find a way to be completely
healthy while at the same time artificially producing in
oneself a state of boredom. Thus, if someone were to tell you
quite honestly how to reach into the spiritual world, he would
have to tell you first of all to learn how to create boredom artificially in yourself.
Short of this you have no hope of reaching the spiritual world.
But look now at our contemporary world. What is it that people
want at this time? People today are constantly trying to drive
away boredom. Just look at all the
things and all the places people run to in order not to be
bored. They always want to be amused; but what does
that mean, to want to be amused all the time? It means that
they really want to run away from the spirit! It has no other
meaning; and people
today always want to be amused, which makes it clear that
wherever anything spiritual might be present people of our time
always run away from it immediately. People are not conscious
of this, they do it unconsciously, but the fact
remains that they want amusement and
to run away from the spirit.
Well, gentlemen, only those can reach into
the spirit who are not afraid of renouncing amusements and of
living in such sentences. When one can manage to live
artificially in those sentences without getting a stomachache or a migraine but can actually
tolerate living in such sentences for many hours at a time,
then it becomes possible to contemplate the spiritual
world.
An additional change must take place in
this act of holding oneself consciously in these sentences. One notices, if one has
been living with these sentences for a while, that they start
to turn around. If I think about the sentence "the large
triangle is greater than its parts" for a long time, if I think
about it for a very long time, there
comes a point when the sentence somehow turns around. It even
starts to become interesting, for I start to have the following
perception: If I have a triangle here, and I consider one
quarter of that triangle and take it out, it somehow
begins to grow with me and it no
longer remains true that the whole is greater than the parts.
Suddenly that quarter part is larger for me, I see that it has
grown, so that I now must say: The whole is smaller than the
parts! (The sentence is written on the blackboard.) By doing this, I have worked myself into a
position where I can see how things work in the spiritual
world. Things there are the opposite of the way they are in the
physical world.
In the physical world, the whole is always
greater than its parts. In the
spiritual world, the part is greater than the whole. It is
impossible to know a human being without knowing that the part
is greater than the whole.
Contemporary science always wants to look
at the smallest parts, the components of things.
If, for example, we study the liver of a
person, we find that it is smaller than the person in the
physical realm. But if we start looking at it from a spiritual
point of view, we find that it grows and grows to gigantic
proportions;
it actually becomes a whole world in itself. If one cannot see this, then it
is impossible to perceive the liver at all in a spiritual
way. Therefore, you must first honestly arrive at the statement: the
whole is smaller than the part, or the part is greater than the
whole.
In the same way, if you think for a long
time —long enough — about the statement: All bodies
have surfaces, or are extended, then there is a danger that the
back of your brain will freeze. If you think upon this sentence
in this way, all the bodies shrivel into one;
they stop having surfaces — external
surfaces — and in the end you arrive at the statement:
Bodies do not have surfaces, they are not extended. (The
sentence is written on the blackboard.)
Now I will take a funny example, funny for
the physical world, but of the
highest seriousness in the spiritual world. It could seem that
there is nothing more foolish than to say: in Buxtehude there
was a trial, and judgment was passed — it has no color.
In Trippstrill, judgment was passed in the course of a
trial — and this also had no
color. But if you think about judgments for a long time, they
in fact acquire color. Just as you can say the rose is red, so
you can say the judgment in Buxtehude was a kind of dirty
yellow, and the judgment in Trippstrill was
red. There can even be some
judgments that are a beautiful red, although this is rarely the
case.
As you begin to understand this, you begin
to grow into the sentence: All judgments made by human beings
have color. (The sentence is written on the
blackboard) Only now does one reach
the point of being at all capable of thinking about the
spiritual world, because it has the opposite characteristics of
the physical world.
The straight line is the shortest path
between two points. This is true to such an
extent that all geometry is built
upon it. It is one of the first statements in geometry. It is
as true in the physical world as anything ever can be true in
the physical world. But if one thinks about it long enough
— if some being goes from village A to
village B, and that being is not a
physical but a spiritual being, the way will seem very short if
he walks in a half circle. The sentence then changes to: The
straight line is the longest way between two points.
(The sentence is written on the
blackboard.)
THE WHOLE IS SMALLER THAN ITS
PARTS
NO BODY HAS EXTENSION
JUDGMENTS HAVE COLOR
THE STRAIGHT LINE, IS THE LONGEST
DISTANCE
BETWEEN TWO POINTS
You must admit there is something here that
astonishes you, but the world as a whole does not like these
kinds of things, and people will
say: If someone says that judgments have color, he must have a
fever or he is mad! Of course, the whole point is that one
reaches these things in full consciousness without the use of
one's body. The spiritual world has characteristics that are the opposite of the
physical world, and one may come to this realization through the simplest statements, for the
simplest statements are the hardest to believe.
As you know, if someone starts telling you
interesting things about the spiritual world, everybody starts
listening;
for instance, if someone starts
talking about ghosts. But if someone
tells you first that you must get used to creating boredom in
yourself artificially — it has to be artificially —
this doesn't seem so interesting. If you are just naturally
bored by external science, nothing comes of
it; it has to be done
artificially, through an inner effort that enables you to reach
the state of boredom without getting a migraine or a
stomachache. The body must not participate in that state of
boredom. The moment your body is involved, it is clear that
you will get a migraine or a
stomachache. Don't listen when people tell you, Do not let
professor so and so bore you. Such advice will be of no help,
it will not make you see into the spiritual world. What you
must do is gradually overcome both migraines and
stomachaches.
You see, the student is sitting here
— the professor bores him to death — he should be
getting a migraine or a stomachache, but he doesn't. What
happens in this case is that other organs come into play which
do not hurt. People, in fact, do get
sick when the physical body is involved in the boredom. If you
induce the boredom in the way contemporary science does, it
only makes people sick.
If one teaches people in the right way, one
gives them the ability to produce, through their own
powers, in total freedom, the
boredom which, when penetrated, will gradually allow entrance
to the spiritual world. One must take hold of absolutely basic
judgments in the physical world and see how they are turned
upside-down in the spiritual world. There is
one extremely good way in which it is
possible to work on oneself. For example: let us say you have
experienced something very boring, so boring that you walked
away from it because it was so boring, so boring that you could
not stand it anymore, (you were so
happy when it was over!) In such a case it is important that
you start very, very slowly thinking it through again. Let me
tell you that I have learned a great deal from this kind of
exercise in my life. When I was young, I listened to many
dreadfully boring
lectures;
but before it even started, I would look
forward to a boring lecture, because it brought about the kind
of result sleep normally does in life. I was very happy. I
would tell myself: You are going to listen to a few hours of
boring lectures. When the lecture
started and the professor started to speak, I often had the
feeling: He is talking too much, he is disturbing me in my
boredom. But afterward I would think very deeply about every
single thing he had said, not that it interested me —
it didn't interest me at all —
but I relived every single hour. I relived it from the very
beginning exactly the way it had been presented. Sometimes I
went over it so thoroughly that it would actually take two
hours. I would have two hours of artificial
boredom. In this process, one can
make an extraordinary discovery. This kind of discovery is one
that could be made at the end of the nineteenth century.
Imagine that you have come out of a lecture by a giant
rhinoceros — this can happen! — and that you have
been bored to death.
Now you can meditate, as the saying goes,
on this boring lecture, bringing everything that was boring
back into yourself, into your soul. Then suddenly, behind that
giant rhinoceros of a man who was presenting you with all this
boring stuff, a higher man,
something like a completely spiritual human being, will emerge.
The whole lecture hall is thereby transformed for you. I am
putting this in a way you can understand rationally. The
lecture hall becomes transformed in such a way that behind the
professor the spiritual — a
truly and deeply intelligent man — appears. I knew many
professors of the nineteenth century with whom this was the
case; but of course,
I don't want you to talk about this,
because people would think it a terrible thing. For the
truth is that humans are not
inwardly as unconscious or as stupid as they pretend to
be. Often, they are quite smart. The dumbest are often quite
smart, and the opposite is also true. But they don't know their
own intelligence. It is a very deep secret: behind a
person there often stands the true nature
of his soul and spirit, which he cannot perceive in himself.
This is already a way of reaching into the spiritual
world.
As you know, at the end of the nineteenth
century there existed a materialistic natural
science, and people today still
adore this materialist science. I must admit however, that this
science was tremendously useful to me. What it did, from start
to finish, was bring up the most boring statements. It is as if
the modern scientist licks his fingers with enjoyment when he thinks he has discovered that
all humans descended from apes. But if one thinks about this
statement again and again, with complete energy, it changes! It
changes into another statement that is spiritually correct.
That is to say, humans do not
descend from apes but from a spiritual being.
There are different points of view here. A
child was once sent to school. There he heard for the first
time from his teacher that humanity is descended from apes
— too early as it turned out. When he returned home, he said to his father, "Hey, I
heard today that humanity is descended from apes. Just think of
that!" "Well," said his father indignantly, "You're certainly a
stupid fellow. That may be the case for you, if you like, but
not for me!" You see, for the father
— he took it with reference to the soul — the story
was quite unbelievable.
From all that I have told
you, you
will see that one can find one's way into natural scientific
thinking in two ways. If you have not studied natural
science, as many did in the
nineteenth century and indeed still do, instead of simply
parroting the conclusions, you can think about them — but
think about them in a meditative way. Think them over for hours
and hours, and you will find that what is true in
the spiritual world comes forward. If you
think for a long time about plants and minerals, and you have
thought all the things about them that people tell you these
days in such a dreadfully materialistic way, then you finally
come to the meaning of things like
the meaning of the zodiac, the meaning of the stars, all the
secrets of the stars.
The surest way to this goal is to start
with those simple statements that are taken for
granted and proceed forward from there. The part is greater than
the whole, bodies have no extension,
judgments have color, the straight line is the longest path
between two points. In saying these kinds of
sentences, you
tear yourself away from your physical body. When you have
experienced all this, you come to the point where you
can use your etheric body instead of your
physical body. You can then start thinking with your etheric
body — your etheric body thinks everything upside-down,
or in the reverse of the way it appears in the physical world.
It is the etheric body that gradually brings one into the spiritual world. At precisely
this point, however, very often one gets stuck: one must still
accustom oneself to one thing more.
You may know that one can read very strange
things these days. I was in a small southern Austrian
town (which is no longer in Austria) and I
found an evening paper. It had a so-called
editorial;
it was a very interesting story, in all
detail — every particular — a political story.
There were three columns — it was all very interesting.
Then at the end — still on the
same page, there was a small disclaimer that said: We are sorry
to notify our readers that everything in today's editorial
article is based on false information and therefore not a word
of it is true! This is the kind of thing that can
happen to you today. This of course
is rather an extreme case, but whenever you read
newspapers, it
can happen that on every single page there is something that is
not true at all. At some later point what one is now reading
will be exposed as untrue. My feeling is that most people have become dreadfully
insensitive in such matters, and they take in, quite
evenhandedly, both truth and lies. The mind has become blunted
in this way, so that truth and lies are both taken in the same
way. This makes it impossible to reach into the spiritual world.
I told you last time that when someone
becomes crazy, only his body is sick; the soul is not
sick, it remains healthy. I told you that when someone
hallucinates in a fever, it is only his thoughts that become
caricatures — for the soul
itself is intact. One must get used to these things, if one
wants to penetrate the spiritual world. One must get used to
feeling pain in one's soul when something is not right, and to
finding that something that is correct gives one a
spiritual joy. One must rejoice
about the truth the way one would if one were to receive a
million dollars. One must be happy when one is told some truth.
The opposite case is that when something is discovered to be a
lie, a suffering is felt in the soul —
not in the body — suffering as
if one had a dreadful illness. The suffering need not be so
severe that the soul has to become sick, but it must be
possible for the soul to experience pain and joy just as, when
the body is disturbed in a physical way, one
feels pain and joy. This means that
one must come to the point where one feels the truth in the
same way that one experiences happiness, cheerfulness, and
general pleasure in the physical world. One must eventually
come to the point where one suffers such pain in the face of untruth that one's soul becomes sick
— as one can be in a bodily way. If someone heaps lies
upon you, you must be able to say inwardly: Damn it, this
person has just sold me deadly nightshade. This must be true in
an inner way. Now of course, if you
look at the current world — for instance, at the
newspapers —one eats that deadly nightshade all the time.
You must constantly nourish yourself spiritually, for the soul
has to remain healthy. You must continually be spitting out
what is bad, spiritually, if your
spirit is to remain healthy. One has to get used to this fact,
because one cannot be without newspapers. Once you come to the
spiritual world, you will have to be used to the bad taste of
newspapers;
and to feeling joy when you read
something exceptionally good —
the same kind of joy, in my opinion, that you would have when
you eat something that tastes very good.
Truth, and the striving for truth, must
taste good to you;
and lies, once you are conscious of them,
must taste bitter and poisonous. You
must not only know that judgments have color, but also that
printer's ink nowadays is mostly wild cherry juice. You must be
able to experience this in all honesty and rectitude, and once
you can do so you will be in a state of spiritual
transformation. People read these
days about alchemy and
believe it in an external way. They believe
that they can change copper to gold, and there are charlatans
who will tell you all kinds of superstitious variations of
this. Of course, in the spiritual world these things are possible; but one must
believe in the truth of the spirit. One must be able to tell
oneself that the printer's ink used is the same everywhere,
materially, whether it has printed a true book or a lying
newspaper. In the second case, the
printer's ink is really the wild cherry juice, and in the other
it is like liquid gold. Things that in the physical world are
exactly the same are quite different in the spirit. Of course,
if intelligent people today hear the statement "printer's ink
can be liquid gold or wild cherry
juice" they will tell you that you are only speaking
'metaphorically'. It is only a metaphor! But the metaphorical
must become spiritual reality and one needs to understand how
metaphors become spiritual.
I will give you an example — it actually comes out of the history of
the Social Democratic party. You probably did not experience
this as much in this country. At one point the party
split;
on one side were those led by Bernstein
— happily making all kinds of compromises
with the middle class — and on
the other side, led by Bebel, were the radicals.
[Eduard
Bernstein (1850-1932), socialist theoretician, writer, and
politician, who rejected revolution and established revisionism
as a moderate, evolutionary path for socialism
in the 1890's. August Bebel
(1840-1913), co-founder of the Social Democratic Labor Party
with William Liebknecht in 1869, writer,
politician.] I am sure you have heard about Bebel in books. At one
point in Dresden there was a party convention, and Bebel
got angry about the others and said
he was going to put some order into social democracy. He gave a
big angry speech. In the course of it he said: Well, if this or
that happens on the other side, it feels like a louse running
across my liver. Now everybody would
say this is only meant metaphorically. Of course, there is no such
thing as a louse on his liver! But then one can ask: Why use
such an expression? Why is it possible to speak in terms that
suggest a louse walked on your liver? For the most part it
is extremely unpleasant when people
have lice, it is extremely unpleasant; it is actually
a distressing feeling.
Not everyone is as lucky as a certain sorry
fellow who was always picking lice from his head. Someone asked
him once, "How is it that you are so
skillful and always manage to find a louse?" He answered, "Its
easy. If I miss the one I'm aiming for, I get the one beside
it." It does not happen to all of us to aim for a louse and
miss and still get one!
Generally, when people have lice, it's
terribly unpleasant — a
horrible feeling. I remember a case when I was a tutor and one
of the boys entrusted to me came home after being out. He had
been sitting on all kinds of benches in a big city and he
started to have dreadful pains in his eyes. Everyone
was wondering which specialist to take him
to for his terrible pains,
but I said, "Why don't we first try a
lice-killing cream on his eyebrows?" Indeed, it was then
noticed that he was full of lice, and once the cream went to
work, his eyes stopped tearing. Now,
you should have seen how upset people — the mother and
the aunt — looked when they suddenly discovered that he
had lice. Their feelings were so intense that they had
repercussions in their livers; they had pains
in their bellies. They said, "My God, our child has lice, what a terrible thing!" When this
happened, the sensation was really as though they had lice
running across their livers.
In the case of the Social Democratic party,
it was not a matter of people getting lice, but rather of some
people doing things that seemed so
awful, so repugnant to the others, that the sensation was the
same — the same as would have been experienced in earlier
times, or would still be experienced in some classes of
society, at the thought of having lice on
one's liver. So you can see, in the
way the expression was formed, it did correspond to a reality.
Latterly, however, these expressions have been used in a way
that only refers to spiritual matters or matters of the soul.
But again, one has consciously, deliberately, to make those connections. One must really be
able to experience, not just the sound of the phrase, but the
actual sensation that it came from.
Let us say I have a newspaper in front of
me: most of the things that are printed in it must be felt
by me as if the printer's ink was a
somewhat toxic deadly nightshade juice. I wonder what people
would do if they truly experienced that these days? Think for a
moment how much deadly nightshade juice is used when, for
instance, people talk about war guilt —
Germany's war guilt in the first World War,
or Germany's innocence in the war — and the fact that
people, just by reason of belonging to this or that nation,
feel comfortable when they claim innocence, using all manner of
untruthful statements. They feel good doing this, but not because what they say is
actually true.
So, how in today's world can one reach the
spirit? One must, first of all, make a firm decision, a very
intense commitment, to be very different from these
contemporaries — and yet get along with them. For of course it is not going to be very
helpful to just stand on a stage and insult people. One way or
another, one has to find an avenue for truth. This is extremely
difficult, as I have shown you today. Today I had to present
difficult things so that you would
see that it is not easy to enter the spiritual world. You will
see that it is good to work with difficult things. Later
on, we will come
to things that are easier, less strenuous. Next time, I will
show you the whole way into the spiritual world.
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