What the world needs now is anthroposophy

 

The Yoga of Anthroposophy:
The Union of Earthly Knowledge and Heavenly Wisdom

Lecture 3 of 9

Rudolf Steiner, Dornach, February 4, 1923

As we may have gathered from yesterday's reflections, it is important for today's human being to orient themselves in the developmental process of humanity in order to imbue themselves with an awareness of what the present state of the soul must be so that the human being can be human in the true sense of the word.

The day before yesterday I used a comparison to point out the importance of the sense of time. I said that the insect has the task of always undergoing certain transformations within itself, coinciding with the course of the year. The insect undergoes the course of the year in its own transformation. It has very specific bodily functions in spring, summer, autumn and winter, and it completes the cycle of its life in connection with this course of the year. Thus, I said, the human being must find a way to consciously place himself in the present moment, not in a short period of time, but in the whole course of the earth, in the historical course of the earth. He should know how his soul experiences had to be shaped in ancient times, how they had to be shaped in medieval times, and how they have to be shaped today.

When we look back to the early days of human development and see how humanity drew its strength from the Mysteries, the strength to know, the strength to live, we find that those who were to be initiated into the Mysteries were always, as it were, given a very definite indication of the goal of their initiation. The initiates must realize that they will have to undergo exercises that ultimately lead to the experience of death; within their earthly existence, the human being must pass through death in order to gain the other knowledge of his own immortal, eternal being from this experience of knowing death. This, I would like to say, was the secret of the ancient mysteries: to gain the conviction of the human immortal being from the experience of knowing death.

Now we have seen in these days where this comes from. It comes from the fact that in those older times, man could not have come to his human self-knowledge otherwise than by realizing what happened to him immediately after death. Man of those ancient times only became the thinking, free being that he knows himself to be today in his earthly existence after death. Only after death could man in the early days of human development say: I am truly a being on my own, an individuality on my own. - Look beyond death, the ancient sages might say to their disciples, and you will know what a human being is.

That is why man in the mysteries should undergo dying in the image, so that he may receive from dying the conviction of eternal life and being. So essentially, the search for the mysteries was a search for death in order to find life.

Now things are different for people today, and therein lies the most important impulse in the development of humanity. What people went through in the old days after death, that they became a thinking being for themselves, that they became a free being for themselves, that is what people today must find in the time that lies between birth and death. But how do they find it there? He finds his thoughts first of all when he practises self-knowledge. But now we have found that throughout the time in which we have been dealing with the nature of man from a certain point of view, these thoughts, namely the thoughts that man has developed since the first third of the 15th century, since the time of Nicholas Cusanus, are actually dead as thoughts, they are corpses. That which lived lived in the pre-earthly existence. Before man descended to earth as a soul-spiritual being, he was in a spiritual life. This spiritual life died with the beginning of life on earth, and he experiences what is dead in him as his thinking. The first thing that man must recognize is that although in more recent times he can come to real self-knowledge, to a knowledge of himself as a spiritual-soul being, but that what surrenders to this self-knowledge is dead, spiritually corpse-like, and that it is precisely into this dead, into this spiritual corpse that what comes from the will must flow, from that will of which I said yesterday that it is actually in the nothing from the moment of falling asleep to the moment of waking up, anchored in the astral body and in the I. The I must shoot into the dead thoughts and must revive them.

Therefore, in the old days, all the care during the initiation was basically directed towards dampening something in the person. Actually, the old initiation was a kind of calming of the inner human abilities and powers. If you follow the course of the old initiation, you will find that in essence, the human being underwent an initiation training that led him to calm his inner excitement, to dampen the inner emotionality that would otherwise be present in ordinary life, so that what the human being had in ordinary life, the filling of his entire being with the divine-spiritual powers that permeate and animate the cosmos, would be subdued and he would consciously sink into a kind of sleep, so that he could then awaken in this subdued consciousness to a kind of sleep, which he otherwise only experiences after death: calm thinking, feeling himself as an individuality. The old system of initiation was thus a kind of system of quieting.

In the present time, this longing for reassurance has remained with man in many ways, and he feels comfortable when old initiation principles are warmed up and he is led to them again. But this no longer corresponds to the essence of the modern human being. The modern human being can only approach initiation by asking himself with all depth and intensity: When I look into myself, I find my thinking. But this thinking is dead. I no longer need to seek death. I carry it within me in my spiritual-soul nature. While the old initiate had to be led to the point where he experienced death, the modern initiate must realize more and more: I have death in my soul-spiritual life. I carry it within me. I do not have to look for it. On the contrary, I have to enliven dead thoughts out of an inner, willed, creative principle. And everything I have presented in 'How to Know Higher Worlds' is aimed at this enlivening of dead thoughts, at this engagement of the will in the inner life of the soul, so that the human being may awaken. For whereas the old initiation had to be a kind of lulling to sleep, the new initiation must be a kind of waking up. What the human being unconsciously experiences during sleep must be brought into the most intimate soul life. Through activity, the human being must awaken inwardly.

To do this, it is necessary to grasp the concept of sleeping in all its relativity. One must be clear about what anthroposophical knowledge is actually present with regard to this idea of sleep. If we place side by side two people, one of whom knows nothing of the things presented in anthroposophical knowledge, and we place next to him a person who has really taken in the anthroposophical with inner interest, with inner interest, not just with passive listening or passive reading, but with inner interest, the anthroposophical ophorophical has been presented, and we place beside it a person who has really taken in the anthroposophical with inner participation, with inner interest, not just with passive listening or passive reading, but with inner interest: then the person who has not taken in the anthroposophical is like a sleeper compared to the one who has taken in the anthroposophical and is awakened in the anthroposophical, as a person is awakened in the morning when he enters his physical body from unconsciousness. And we can only find the right place for ourselves within anthroposophy, we can only find the right orientation for the anthroposophical movement if we look at it in such a way that it gives us something like waking up in the morning, if we compare approaching anthroposophy in the right way with what we feel when we pass from the unconsciousness of sleep into the perception of an external world. If we can also have this in our feelings: just as immersing ourselves in the physical body when we wake up gives us a world, not just knowledge, but a world, so immersing ourselves in anthroposophical knowledge gives us a world, a knowledge that is not just knowledge, but a world, a world into which we wake up. As long as we regard anthroposophy as just another world view, we do not have the right feeling towards anthroposophy. We only have the right feeling about anthroposophy when the person who becomes an anthroposophist feels that he is awakening in anthroposophy. And he awakens when he says to himself: the concepts and ideas that the world has given me before are conceptual and ideological corpses, they are dead. Anthroposophy awakens this corpse for me.

If you understand this in the right sense, then you will come out on top in the face of all the things that are often said against anthroposophy and the understanding of anthroposophy. People say: Yes, a person who is not an anthroposophist is learning something in the world today. That is being proven to him. He can understand that because it is being proven to him. In anthroposophy, mere assertions are made that remain unproven - so the world says very often. But the world does not know what the reality is of what it considers to be proven. The world should realize that all the laws of nature, all the thoughts that man forms out of the world, that when he experiences them correctly, they are something dead. So what is being proved to him is something dead. He cannot understand it. Only when one begins to perceive what is today the ordinary world view as something dead, then one says to oneself: I do not understand what is being proved to me, just as I do not understand a corpse, because it is what is left over from a living being. I understand a corpse only when I know to what extent it was permeated by life.

And so we have to say to ourselves: what is considered proven today cannot in fact be understood if we look at it more deeply. And it is only when we allow the spark of anthroposophy to strike that which is otherwise offered by civilization today that we can truly understand it. — Those who, let us say, say to a mere natural scientist of today who comes to them and says, “I can prove my case, you cannot prove it,” are right. They then reply, “Of course you can prove anything in your way, but the very thing you have proved to me will only become intelligible to me when I allow the spark of anthroposophy to strike it.” That should be the information that an anthroposophist, speaking from a heart full of living spiritual life, can give to a non-anthroposophist. The Anthroposophist would have to say: You are falling asleep with your knowledge of nature; you are falling asleep to such an extent that you say: I have limits to my knowledge of nature, I cannot wake up at all, I can only state that with my knowledge of nature I do not approach the spiritual at all. You still have a theory for your sleep, for the justification of your sleep. But I want to refute precisely this theory of the justification of your sleep by bringing what is there sleep to wakefulness.

I pointed this out in the first chapter of my book 'Von Seelenrätseln'. There I expressed what has been repeated in lectures over and over again, namely that a person who remains with the present civilization simply says that there are all kinds of limits to knowledge that cannot be crossed. So he calms down. But this calming down means nothing other than that he does not want to wake up, he wants to remain asleep. The one who now wants to enter the spiritual world in the modern sense must begin to wrestle with the inner soul tasks precisely where the other person sets the limits of knowledge. And by beginning the struggle with these ideas, which are set at the boundary, the view of the spiritual world gradually opens up to him step by step. One must take what is presented in anthroposophy as it is intended.

Take this first chapter of 'Mysteries of the Soul'. It may be imperfectly written, but you can at least find out the intention with which it was written. It is written with the intention that you say to yourself: If I stop at present civilization, then the world is actually boarded up for me. Knowledge of nature: you move on, then the boards come, the world is boarded up for me. What is written in this first chapter, 'On Soul Mysteries', is an attempt to knock away these boards with a spade. If you have this feeling that you are doing a job, to knock away with a spade the boards with which the world has been boarded up for centuries, if you see the words as a spade, then you come to the soul-spiritual.

Most people have the unconscious feeling that a chapter like the first, 'On Soul Riddles', is written with a pen that flows with ink. It is not written with a pen, but with the spades of the soul, which would like to tear down the boards that cover the world, that is, eliminate the boundaries of knowledge of nature, but eliminate them through inner soul work. So, when reading such a chapter, one must work with it through soul activity.

The ideas that arise from anthroposophical books are quite remarkable. I understand these ideas, often do not contradict them, because they have their value for the individual; but take for example the “Geheimwissenschaft”. People have come to me who think they can do something for this 'Occult Science' of mine if they paint the whole 'Occult Science' so that it would stand before people in pictures. This longing has arisen. There have even been samples of it. I have nothing against it; if these samples are good, then one can even admire them, it is indeed quite beautiful to do such things. But what longing does it arise from? They arise out of the longing to take away the most important thing that is developed in “occult science” and to put images in front of people that are just boards again. Because what matters is - the way our language and the awful writing has become, this terrible writing or even the way it is printed - to take it as it is, not to rebel against what civilization and to take it in such a way that the reader can also overcome it immediately, that he can immediately get out and make all the images himself that have flowed into the awful ink, thus creating them himself. The more each person individually creates these images for themselves, the better it is. If someone else anticipates this, they are in turn walling up the world for him. I do not want to deliver a diatribe against the pictorial elaboration of what is presented in the Imaginationen of “Geheimwissenschaft”, of course not, but I would just like to point out what is fundamentally necessary for everyone as a living assimilation of this matter.

These things must be understood in the right way today. One must come to the point where one does not just take anthroposophy as something that one delves into in the same way that one delves into something else, but one must take it as something that requires a change in thinking and feeling, that requires one to become different from what one was before. So if, for example, an astronomical chapter is presented from the perspective of anthroposophy, one cannot take this astronomical chapter and compare it with ordinary astronomy and then start to prove and refute back and forth. That makes no sense at all. Instead, we must be clear about one thing: the astronomical chapter drawn from anthroposophy can only be understood when the rethinking and re-sensing is in place. So if a refutation of some anthroposophical chapter appears somewhere today and then a written defense appears that has been written with the same means as the refutation, then nothing has been done, really nothing at all, because one talks back and forth with the same way of thinking. That is not what is important, but that Anthroposophy be carried by a new life. And that is absolutely necessary today.

[Part 2 of the lecture on the affairs of the Anthroposophical Society, see “Appendix”, p. 141.]

Source: February 4, 1923