Lecture 1

We do not know how to find our way in the world today with our full humanity.

Why is there so little in cultural life today that satisfies young people?

The scientific, artistic, moral, social and religious fields. These separate branches of cultural life no longer understand each other. Which is why they are in conflict with each other within the human personality. The scientific spirit of our age has produced an immense conscientiousness and exactness of methods. The question of this scientific spirit is… How can we obtain surety, how can we obtain certainty in researching the truth?

The current scientific spirit demands certainty in its search for truth, from thus great things have been achieved for cognition and practical life. And yet if we ask ourselves. Does this scientific spirit satisfy the urgent purposes of young people today? Do todays young people grow into this scientific spirit in such a way that they feel there is something flowing toward them in it for their full humanity. By developing the scientific spirit in its exact methods and strictly trained thinking, those who want to pursue and enjoy life artistically feel they have to keep the artistic at a distance from the scientific spirit. Today what art creates must come from different human sources than what science fathoms in its certain and intellectually observing way. We feel the scientific spirit has no place in art, science investigates the truth in a way that should not carry over into an artistic approach. Today there is no justification for trying to fathom anything of the truth of the world through art. We must make a strict separation between art and science. Science wants certainty in formulating things, in such a way that they can stand there rigidly fixed and then must be recognized to be so by every impartial human mind. In striving for this great certainty, you do not have the confidence in what you fathom about nature and humanity in a way that has meaning for the whole human being. A firmly established science has been founded but we don’t have confidence that it can say something where it is a question of human needs beyond science itself. There is something in the depths of the human soul that strives for unity, for harmony of the scientific, artistic and moral fields.

While logic makes a distinction between science and art, still something in us demands a balance. How can we gain confidence in the sciences which have sought certainty above all else. So we can penetrate through their realms of truth into what we encounter in artistic formation, in artistic creation? What if nature wants to be understood artistically? What if human nature, particularly the human physical organism, wants to be artistically grasped? What do we do when we have such a rigorous science and yet nature and the world demand an artistically formulated cognition from us? It is no different when we look at the other areas of cultural life, everything that falls into these areas (art, moral, social, religious) has been banned from science since the scientific spirit so tightly griped modern humanity.

We can only stand before science today in admiration, opposition to what is truth in science would be foolish. But science in spite of its greatness and triumphs is only creative in the realms of thought, in the field of observation, and the regulated observations of experiments. Science has only been creative in relation to what can be obtained from the human mind through logical judgment and observation. Our age is not creative in the realms of art, morality or religion. We carry the longing for creativity in all areas of life. We find creativity in the scientific field yet this not enough, we long for something deeply creative in the artistic field, in the ethical and religious realm.

The way people think about themselves today, how strongly people feel their own being, their “I”. People did not think about or recognize themselves in this way before the 15th century. They were much more obtuse within. They did not say “I” with such intensity. There has been a general intensification of inner experience. This intensification is demonstrated in the field of science, when you completely reject the belief in authority. When you accept only that which can be justified to your own self-consciousness. It manifests itself in the artistic field in that people want above all to form into, to shape into their artistic creations, what they can experience in their deepest self-consciousness. Its shows itself in the religious field in that people can only fully experience something divine when it sinks into their in most self, which they experience forcefully and intensively, which they want to experience together with the divine in order for it to have any validity, any meaning at all. In the moral sense, humanity strives for impulses, for ethical motives, for ethical rules of life that arise from this ground of intensive self-consciousness. In social life today we have the peculiar phenomenon that social demands appear everywhere. It is said everywhere we need a social structuring of life. But in essence human perception is very far removed from social perceptions, from social feelings. And precisely that we lack social feeling is why we demand a social organization of life. We would like what is lacking within us to come from the outside. We say we have to become social beings, because in recent times while the spirit of science has grown powerful, we have basically only become strong in our “I” feeling, strong in what is anti-social and egotistical. Thus, today we seek a balance between this strong “I” and social demands.

And so we encounter this self-consciousness in all areas of human life. We study the social questions today as they arise out of the structuring of human work. You need a heartfelt sense for what has become of social questions. Under the influence of modern technology, its forces have taken many people away from an immediate connection with joyful work and placed them in front of indifferent machines. In this field too, a social will cannot emerge from an awakened self-consciousness, because when this self-consciousness is placed in front of a machine it cannot feel satisfied in the least.

This is one pole, the self-consciousness of modern humanity. But how could this self-consciousness come to have the power that is has? How has this modern humanity awakened to such a strong sense of self? You can only come to this self-consciousness through a special development of the life of thought, the life of ideas. This self-consciousness has grown strong, because people have become capable of thinking more and more abstractly, more intellectually. So we came to develop thinking to the highest degree. Whereas before we lived more in feeling, looking, intuition, imagination and inspiration. More dream-like and unconscious. Humanity has developed thinking and with thinking it was possible to achieve through thought our strong self-consciousness. Because of this humanity as arrived at a one-sided spiritual life. Thought distances us from reality, thought can never achieve full reality, thought remains only a picture of reality. Through a picture of reality, we modern people have developed our strong self-consciousness. Todays young people feel with particular intensity that a person is standing there with unreal thoughts.

At the one pole we face reality with our self-consciousness that has been grasped through thinking. It cannot get close to life, it remains an image of life. We are completely within ourselves in our self-consciousness. We stand as strongly as possible inwardly within ourselves, but never the less we are powerless and cannot penetrate reality within our thoughts. This feeling of the powerlessness of the self pervades modern humanity. This is why we tend to approach life without joy, without inner devotion and without understanding. We have a feeling of meaninglessness to life. This strongly developed “I” will always feel powerless in the life in which we have to work. Today we only trust something when we can follow it in the external world through observation. We want nothing from within ourselves mixed in when we follow the external world through experiments, in so called objective observation. The inner being is supposed to be completely silent when observing or experimenting. Only the outside world should speak.

How has this arisen? We research this external world through experiments and observations but through this research we can only get as far as mechanism. The universe has become a mechanism for astronomy, the earth as become a mechanism for geology, the human organism itself has become a mechanism. This objective approach only leads to an understanding of the machine. We think we are satisfied knowing how things work mechanically, but inwardly we are not satisfied. There remains something in the machine that pushes us back, especially in regard to our full humanity. This understanding of the machine is what has contributed to the triumphs of the modern scientific spirit. The machine becomes transparent to us, not for the eyes, but for the understanding, for cognition. When we look into an organism, things remain obscure at first for external observation, whereas everything in the machine is transparent. It is not true that what becomes transparent outside our own being, therefor becomes more comprehensible to us. When we face it we feel that which works in the machine is something alien to our own being. The machine becomes transparent to the mind but is nothing we can find within ourselves. It is completely alien to us, and so we feel pushed out of the world we understand as a machine.

From the one pole, we are powerless to enter reality. From the other pole the reality that we do understand pushes us out. That is the deep dichotomy in modern humanity. We develop our self-consciousness through thinking but with this thinking we can no longer enter the world. We derive the machine form the world but when we understand it we are pushed back because it has nothing in common with our humanity. The two poles of modern intellectual life- (1) the impotence of self-conscious thinking with its merely pictorial character which is unable to penetrate into full reality. And (2) the mechanistically presented contents of observation and experimentation which repel us as alien to our own being.

On the one side there is this Moden spiritual life with the two poles just described. On the other side is Anthroposophy. Here we try not to stop at self-consciousness through thinking but to progress to a vividly clear formative imaginative way of thinking. We progress through thinking that then becomes so strong that it becomes seeing. It becomes as strong as our sense impressions are. How do you come to clairvoyant seeing of a super senseable world by developing thinking itself? When you advance to imagination through the development of thinking then you stand there with this imagination, no longer alone with a self-consciousness that has become alien to reality. You stand in a new spiritual reality, you stand in the reality in which you stood before you descended from the soul spirit world into physical embodiment. If you really develop self-consciousness thinking in a systematic way, you get to know your prenatal life. It is precisely the thinking that has been trained in imagination that leads to a new reality, it leads to a reality that out of yourself has taken hold of your physical body, our ”I“ expands beyond our birth or conception, we attain to a spiritual world. If on the other hand you grasp observation and experimentation precisely from the spirit of modern science, then you become aware that in the experiment thinking is completely silent. Thinking only notifies, such thinking only understands events statistically and forms laws but it does not become emersed in reality. What connects with reality in the experiment is the human will, human volition.

Anthroposophy on the one hand develops thinking into imagination and on the other it develops the will into inspiration and intuition. When you achieve this strengthening of the will you now make your own soul organism transparent, you make not your physical body but your own spirit soul body transparent. This means you develop in relation to your own being what you previously developed only for the external world, for the mechanism, for the machine. Thus, your own being presents itself in a completely different way. You are not pushed back, you grasp what has streamed into your being from the whole cosmos with such transparency as you otherwise only have when your grasp the machine. But it is yourself that you grasp, you are not pushed back, you grasp yourself within yourself. And you grasp first of all, in an image of what the moment of death is, you get to know the eternity of the human soul. By strenghening your will you get to know how the body becomes transparent and by such clear vision you learn to understand how you make the passage through the gate of death. Learn how you go out of the body to enter a world of spirit and soul. Through the further development of thinking we learn to cognize what is before birth. Through the cultivation of our will we learn to cognize what is after, what lies beyond death. We learn to cognize ourselves in reality, we learn to place ourselves into this reality. We don’t stay isolated within ourselves. We learn to develop a way of thinking which penetrates into life. We learn to observe something first in ourselves then in the world which does not push us back but rather connects with this developed thinking. A developed thinking not powerless to reality but submerged in reality.

This arises in the human being in 3 stages of cognition. Imaginative cognition, through which thinking is intensified to the point of imagery. Which is strengthened inwardly to the point where you see the super senseable, the spiritual world in images. Then comes inspired cognition, the spiritual world penetrates into our soul. Then comes intuitive cognition, through which we place ourselves within the spiritual beings of the world.

In the scientific spirit we live in an intellectual state of mind. Such a state is only appropriate for us when we are fully grown, at least reached our 20s. The period from 14-21, we live in this period not in abstract thoughts but in intense soul experiences, which emerge from within. There with inner intensity and full of power are the inwardly full-blooded ideals of youth. Which are not just experienced as pale dull thoughts. There the young human being is under the impressions of an inner impulsiveness. What is effective in such a young person actually lives in them in a half dream. You don’t become conscious of it at this age. Only imaginative cognition teaches us to bring this to consciousness. In our youth what works subconsciously in us, can only be revealed consciously through imaginative cognition. Young people that have passed the 14th year, long for a cognition that is imaginative because only then do they understand themselves. Otherwise, they have to wait beyond the 20th year, until the intellectualistic life fully enters into them and then they can only come to a thinking consciousness, within they are alone and isolated, up to this point in human life they are board. They demand a revaluation from the ancients (teacher, educators, and guides), a revaluation that the ancients can only give if they possess imaginative knowledge. Then they would be able to tell these young people what they are.

Between the change of teeth and sexual maturity we live an inner bodily soul spiritual life that takes place unconsciously. What is reality there can only be understood by inspired cognition. External intellectual experimental cognition cannot know, it actually works itself out in us during childhood. Everything wants to be shaped according to artistic impulses, not to the laws of nature. Inspirations from the universe work into us. Adults will only be able to know what these children long for if they know something about inspired cognition. We are able to talk to children in a truly instructive and educational way if we know something about inspired world cognition and especially with very young children. If you do not become like little children, you cannot enter the kingdoms of Heaven. In this age during infancy up to the change of teeth, the child lives through the integration of the soul and spirit into the physical body. Such a working in of forces, a plastic shaping of the body out of the soul can only be grasped with intuitive cognition. Therefore, children will only understand us feelingly, instinctively, and be influenced by us in the right way if we can receive religiously formed truths from training in intuitive cognition. As young people do not understand the older generation today in our spiritual age because we are basically losing our youth. However, we would not lose it if what we experienced in childhood and adolescence could be remembered at a later mature age, by looking back through the cognition that comes from imagination, inspiration and intuition. With this cognition we can immerse ourselves in our childhood. With this knowledge we as teachers, educators, and leaders of humanity could speak to youth in such a way that they would learn to understand us instinctively. This is the only way to fill the gap between youth and old age. It will not be possible to fill it in any other way and if there is not the will to bridge or fill the gap in this way our age will show more and more when it is already showing that the young do not understand the old and old age does not understand youth.

The consequence of this is that people do not understand each other, and our social life becomes more and more impossible. Only by establishing cognition in accordance with the spirit, by expanding our scientific spirit to spiritual cognition. Only in this way will humanity be able to fully understand itself. Then humanity will arrive at the point where we no longer feel powerless to penetrate reality but are able to observe reality in such a way that it does not push us away. Only in this way will we be able to bring the two poles into a living balance. The pole of thought and the pole of reality, which are so alien to one another in modern humanity.

Anthroposophy wants to understand itself in such a way that it is not dead abstract knowledge, not merely knowledge in theories. It wants to flow into people, not only as thoughts and not only as results of observations but as the lifeblood of the soul. It is grasped through life and in life and is itself living cognition. It wants to be present as life itself within humanity. Life is full of riddles and only as long as there are riddles will there be life. We have to experience the riddles and only in experiencing these riddles can we continue our existence in a truly human way. A world without questions would be an inanimate world. It is not that anthroposophy promises to solve all the riddles of life but it wishes through its own character to be able to serve life. It wants through the power of cognition to give a real foundation to the whole full human being. The artistic, the religious, the moral and the social human being. Anthroposophy wants to serve this life not by being merely dead but by being living cognition and thus developing its own life force. It wants to serve life and nothing can serve life other than life itself.