Steiner's remarks on PoF

[AshvinP]

I have recently been engaged in another FB discussion with FB (Jeff Falzone), about Steiner's intentions with PoF. Basically, his position remains the same as before, that the beginnings of spiritual science or higher cognition is not to be found in PoF, and rather Steiner at that time was simply pointing attention to how we can become a little more conscious of our thought-processes during the normal course of life. He feels that a lot of people practically engage in this 'higher consciousness' without ever coming across PoF or anything similar.

There is nothing too interesting in the discussion itself, except I wanted to call attention to an amazing book that I came across by Otto Palmer, Rudolf Steiner on His Book "The Philosophy of Freedom". I will paste some of the discussion below since it also contains great quotes from the book. Of course, FB simply ignored the quotes and I guess he feels that, somehow, he knows Steiner's intentions for PoF in the year 2024 better than Steiner himself knew them back in the years and decades following its publication.

***

FB:
I'll share one of my questions.

I don't have my Palmer book and most of my written files, books and documents are still in a 'sacred' storage unit in Ashland, Oregon. So frustrating.
So maybe somebody else can provide a few of those quotes in which Steiner talks about having written PoF in a way that each sentence logically links to the next, and that the book never asks us to assume anything, that it was written with mathematical percision. You know the quotes I'm talking about.

Early in PoF, Steiner is very clear that although he is forced to use the term self/I in writing, he is not yet wanting the reader to assume any actual, proven, valid reality of their being a self/I. I appreciate this for several reasons.

And my question for PoF readers is where in the text they see Steiner moving from not assuming the ontological existence of an I to, later, having pointed to the spot of validating it.

For context, there are so many different ways to study PoF, and there are so many different contexts which can be used for frames of reference. In this post, I am hoping to restrict our context to the text itself.

Me: Here is one of many such quotes from the Palmer book. I can certainly relate to what he stated. Far from leaving us in a state of indefinite uncertainty as to inner realities and the course of spiritual evolution toward realization of the higher self, the Cosmic "I", the process of engaging the etheric thinking embodied in PoF gives lasting certainty as to the true nature of the Self.

I wanted just to sketch these things today, for they have often been discussed by me here before. What I had in mind was to indicate the regions in which, in recent years, anthroposophy has been carrying on its research. Those interested in weighing what has been going on surely recall how consistently my lectures have concerned themselves in recent years with just these realms. Their purpose was gradually to clarify the process whereby one develops from an ordinary consciousness to a higher one. Though I have always said that ordinary thinking can, if it is unprejudiced, grasp the findings of anthroposophical research, I have also emphasized that everybody can attain today to a state of consciousness whereby he is able to develop a new kind of thinking and willing, which give him entry to the world whereof anthroposophy speaks. The essential thing would be to change the habit of reading books like my Philosophy of Freedom with the mental attitude one has toward other philosophical treatises. The way it should be read is with attention to the fact that it brings one to a wholly different way of thinking and willing and looking at things. If this were done, one would realize that such an approach lifts one's consciousness out of the earth into another world, and that one derives from it the kind of inner assurance that makes it possible to speak with conviction about the results of spiritual research. Those who read The Philosophy of Freedom as it should be read speak with inner conviction and assurance about the findings of researchers who have gone beyond the stage one has oneself reached as a beginner. But the right way of reading The Philosophy of Freedom makes everyone who adopts it the kind of beginner I am describing. Beginners like these can report the more detailed findings of advanced research in exactly the same way in which a person at home in chemistry would talk of research in that field. Although he may not actually have seen it done, it is familiar to him from what he has learned and heard and knows as part of reality. The vital thing in discussing anthroposophy is always to develop a certain soul attitude, not just to project a picture of the world different from the generally accepted one. The trouble is that The Philosophy of Freedom has not been read in the different way I have been describing. That is the point, and a point that must be sharply stressed if the development of the Anthroposophical Society is not to fall far behind that of anthroposophy itself. If it does fall behind, anthroposophy's promulgation through the Society will result in its being completely misunderstood, and its only fruit will be endless conflict!
(New Thinking, New Willing - Feb 6 1923)

FB:
Yes, I think that when Steiner wrote PoF, he was not hoping that careful readers would see that it encodes and explains the hierarchies of angels and the evolution of the cosmos. I think we have reason to believe that Steiner himself had not even begun his studies of those particulars.

From his young letters of hope and excitement upon its publication, to his honest declarations of sadness and disappoinment that it didn't persuade the men he thought would understand it, I think we can see that Steiner had more modest aims regarding what would be grasped by readers of PoF in 1894.

If Steiner had died in 1895, I believe we would be reading a book that is trying to situate human freedom within the context of a phenomenological experience of cognition, not unlike other books before it or after it. Its charm and force come from Steiner's enthusiasm and willingness to keep it as down to earth as possible.

Me: I see. Well, this becomes quite an academic debate for those who, through the portal of PoF, have indeed experienced the reality of the spiritual hierarchies and how their combined activity projects as the Earthly evolutionary process. The reality that the core of spiritual science is already encoded in PoF becomes a matter of intimate experience, no longer a matter of intellectual debate over how to decipher Steiner's intentions in 1895. As Steiner has remarked elsewhere, people only debate such things when the inner spiritual experience is lacking.

What it means to 'see' angels or etheric bodies is not simply exotic and more subtle perceptions of objects and processes. It is more like what was meant above when I read your post, tried to resonate with the underlying thinking-gestures, understanding the soul perspective from which the textual forms were impressed, and then said, "I see." In other words, this 'seeing' is a continual process of outgrowing the previous layers of reality we were merged with and thereby gaining an understanding of their deeper nature, like awakening from a dream and realizing the dreamscape was the manifestation of the waking self's inner life (ideas, emotions, sensations, etc.). In that sense, clairvoyance is not simply about more self-confidence and calm, but understanding the very process by which reality evolves and through which the disharmonious currents of soul and sensory life will be redeemed across all scales of existence.

...As you continue searching for the Palmer book, I will share another quote. There is little point in analyzing what Steiner intended or expected in PoF if we don't take his own statements about his intentions and his expectations literally.

Now what kind of reader approach did The Philosophy of Freedom count on? It had to assume a special way of reading. It expected the reader, as he read, to undergo the sort of inner experience that, in an external sense, is really just like waking up out of sleep in the morning. The feeling one should have about it is such as to make one say, “My relationship to the world in passive thoughts was, on a higher level, that of a person who lies asleep. Now I am waking up.” It is like knowing, at the moment of awakening, that one has been lying passively in bed, letting nature have her way with one's body. But then one begins to be inwardly active. One relates one's senses actively to what is going on in the color permeated, sounding world about one. One links one's own bodily activity to one's intentions. The reader of The Philosophy of Freedom should experience something very like this waking moment of transition from passivity to activity, though of course on a higher level.
...
When one suffuses one's thinking with active soul life, one realizes for the first time that thought is just a leftover and recognizes it as the remains of something that has died. Ordinary thinking is dead, a mere corpse of the soul, and one has to become aware of it as such through suffusing it with one's own soul life and getting to know this corpse of abstract thinking in its new aliveness. To understand ordinary thinking, one has to see that it is dead, a psychic corpse whose erstwhile life is to be sought in the soul's pre-earthly existence. During that phase of experience, the soul lived in a bodiless state in the life element of its thinking, and the thinking left it in its earthly life must be regarded as the soul corpse of the living soul of pre-earthly existence.

Palmer, Otto. Rudolf Steiner on His Book "The Philosophy of Freedom" (p. 42). SteinerBooks. Kindle Edition.

FB:
The more important point, I think, is that a person can be perfectly demonstrating free action and not be able to understand PoF. Steiner would be the first to point out atheists and materialists who are acting freely via intuitively grasping the ideas via free thinking. He spoke of freedom in terms of degrees, not absolutes; he said he'd take a creative materialist over a dogmatic Anthroposophist. This is because he, like most of us, can notice when a person's actions are deeply imbued by the force of their full being, whether they experience this as 'spiritual' or not.

So a person who can't understand PoF can be a great example of the freedom it speaks of. A person who grasps PoF need not believe in God.
...
The only way we can validate the core point of PoF is to direct our attention to the region of experience in which our free action is directly observed. This can be done without realizing or observing any other notions related to spiritual beings or realities, as Steiner often pointed out.

Me: Thanks for clarifying. In my view, what you are expressing can only make sense if 'spiritual worlds', 'spiritual beings', 'subtle bodies', 'hierarchies', 'God', and so forth is only understood as externalized abstractions, reduced to physicalized caricatures. In other words, the fact that these 'worlds' form the meaningful context in which all our sensing, thinking, feeling, and will impulses unfold daily, is entirely missed. In that case, yes one can understand PoF without 'believing' such externalized abstractions.

One cannot fail to understand PoF and start ascending a gradient of free activity, which I agree is not a one-time event but unfolds in degrees. Even if the person doesn't read PoF in particular, they must consciously lay hold of their thinking activity in some way similar to what is expressed in PoF. It is only in our mental experience, in the intuitively transparent feedback of thoughts, where our *present* spiritual activity finds its lucid reflection (in the sensory domain, it is our past activity that finds its reflection). That is why spiritual freedom begins with the observation of thinking, where inner activity and its perceptual feedback are almost completely in-phase with one another.

Anyway, it would make more sense for you to convey that you feel Steiner was wrong when later characterizing his own intentions and expectations for PoF. That, somehow, those are more transparent to you in 2024 than they were to him in the years and decades following PoF. Because his numerous quotes on the matter speak for themselves. Here is yet another one:

I tried to make clear in my Philosophy of Freedom, that one remains dependent if one responds to natural impulses only, that one can become free only by reaching the point of responding to the promptings of intuitive thinking as it develops in one's soul. This indication of the quality of soul that one has to achieve through self-development before one can partake of genuine freedom led to my necessarily making the attempt to carry to a further point what had been hinted at in The Philosophy of Freedom. I have been trying to do this for the past several decades in the form of what I have called anthroposophically oriented spiritual science. For after calling attention to the fact that human beings have to derive the impulse to freedom, to intuitive thinking, out of the depths of their own souls, one must also show what happens when a person draws upon this inner source of his soul life. The anthroposophically oriented expositions of the years that followed are actually all just statements of matters to which I called attention at the time of writing my Philosophy of Freedom. I pointed out that there are paths the soul can follow to the development of a thinking that is not summed up in an intellectual piecing together of a picture of the world, but instead goes on to lift itself in inner vision to an experiencing of the spirit. I felt impelled to describe what it is one sees on looking into the spiritual world.

Palmer, Otto. Rudolf Steiner on His Book "The Philosophy of Freedom" (pp. 56-57). SteinerBooks. Kindle Edition.

[Federica]

Thanks for the recommendation, Ashvin. I find it interesting that someone has put together such a complementary collection of 'voice-overs' to PoF. Surely worth reading, but I have so much on my reading list already, and it's only getting longer and longer. Right now I'm rather looking forward to coming to the PoF transcription of Part II, to read again the chapters on freedom amd moral imagination.

[AshvinP]

Thanks for the recommendation, Ashvin. I find it interesting that someone has put together such a complementary collection of 'voice-overs' to PoF. Surely worth reading, but I have so much on my reading list already, and it's only getting longer and longer. Right now I'm rather looking forward to coming to the PoF transcription of Part II, to read again the chapters on freedom amd moral imagination.

Yeah, I certainly understand the feeling of having too much to read. There are a million things I'd like to start, continue, or re-read.

I was really amazed at how many times Steiner had mentioned PoF in later lectures and how deeply he went into it, connecting the phenomenology to the deeper aspects of spiritual science.

Here's an idea - I will paste one quote from the book per day on this thread, starting today

***

This aliveness in thinking brings you in the end to the experience you will have if you read The Philosophy of Freedom as it should be read. To read it properly, you have to know how it feels to live in thoughts. The Philosophy of Freedom is something born entirely of real experience, but it is also wholly the product of genuine thinking. That is why you will find a certain basic feeling running through it. I conceived The Philosophy of Freedom in the 'eighties, and wrote it down in the early 'nineties, and I can report that I found no understanding for it at all among those people whose job it really was at the time to give at least some attention to the book's major premise. The reason was namely that people—even so-called thinking people of the present—are really unable to do more than reflect the physical world in their thinking. They then say that thinking might possibly convey something of a supersensible nature, but it would have to do so in exactly the way a chair or a table that is actually outside us is present in thought. This thinking that goes on inside us ought somehow to be experienced as though it were an external supersensible element, just as we experience a chair or a table that is there outside us. That is about the way Eduard von Hartmann conceived the task of thinking.

Then he got a copy of The Philosophy of Freedom. There, thinking is experienced in a way that makes it impossible for a person involved in it to have any other impression than that, when he is really living in thought, he is living—no matter how unclearly at the moment—in the cosmos. This relatedness to cosmic mysteries that one has in a really inward experience of thinking is the red thread running through The Philosophy of Freedom. That is why the sentence, “In thinking we really lay hold of a corner of the secret of the universe” is to be found there.

That may be a simple way of putting it. But what it means is that it is impossible, in a true experience of thinking, to go on feeling the world mystery to be inaccessible; one is inside it. One no longer feels oneself outside the divine, but within it. To lay hold on thinking in oneself is to lay hold on the divine there.

This was the point people could not grasp. For if one really grasps it, if one exerts oneself to achieve the experience of thinking, one is no longer in the world one inhabited before; one is in the etheric world. One is in a world upon which one knows that the earth's physical spatial being has no influence—a world ruled instead by the whole universe. One is in the cosmic realm of the etheric. When one grasps thinking in the sense of The Philosophy of Freedom, one can have no further doubts about the rule of law in this cosmic realm. So one comes to have what we may call etheric experiences, and achieving it gives one the feeling of having taken a uniquely decisive step for one's whole life.

Let me characterize this step. In an ordinary state of consciousness one thinks, in a room like this, of tables and chairs and people, too, of course. One may think of other things as well, but they are all things external to the thinker. Let's say, then, that there is a variety of objects surrounding us, and from the very center of our beings we reach out and embrace them with our thinking. Everybody is conscious of doing this, of making an effort to embrace the things around him with his thinking.

But if one reaches the point of having the experience just described, one does not reach out to the outer world or concentrate one's forces in one's ego center. Instead something quite different happens. One has the feeling, the absolutely right feeling experience, that one's thinking, which is really not located in any one place, projects its power of grasping inward. One has the sensation of feeling out the inner man. In ordinary thinking, spiritual feelers reach out into the world. In the case of the thinking that has an inner experience of itself, one constantly reaches feelers into oneself. We become objects to ourselves.

This is an important experience that we can have, this realization that our thinking is ordinarily used to grasp the world around us, but that we are now using it to lay hold upon ourselves. The result of this powerful laying hold upon ourselves is that we break through the boundary of our bodies.

Palmer, Otto. Rudolf Steiner on His Book "The Philosophy of Freedom" (pp. 21-22). SteinerBooks. Kindle Edition.

[AshvinP]

Now the question arises as to how we are going to bring the quarter of our soul life that is the sphere of reality to a true experience of freedom. We will have to relate it to something independent of the other three quarters. I tried to give a philosophical answer to this question in my Philosophy of Freedom.

I tried to show there that man can only realize his impulse to freedom when he subjects his actions wholly to the influence of pure thinking, when he reaches the point of being able to act on thought impulses rather than on stimuli originating in the world outside him. For nothing that has its origin in the external world permits of our realizing freedom. We can realize it only when we develop impulses to action in our thinking, uninfluenced by the world outside us.... Instead of letting stimuli to will and action rise up out of our physical, astral and etheric bodies, we can shut them out and accept only such impulses as come to us from the spiritual world in the form of imaginations based on underlying inspirations, underlying intuitions. But this need not necessarily be a conscious clairvoyant experience in the sense of saying, “Now I am training my will, based on inspirations and intuitions, on this particular goal.” But the fruit of having done so comes in the form of a concept, of pure thinking, that resembles an imaginatively conceived idea. Because that is so, because the concept upon which free action is based must appear to ordinary consciousness like an imaginatively conceived idea, I called the capacity that underlies free action “moral fantasy” in my book The Philosophy of Freedom.

Palmer, Otto. Rudolf Steiner on His Book "The Philosophy of Freedom" (p. 28). SteinerBooks. Kindle Edition.

[AshvinP]

Something that has no possibility of being intellectual is the human will as I tried to characterize it in its relationship to the impulse of love in my book, The Philosophy of Freedom. Human will comes to expression in the subconscious reality of drives or hungers that take the form of a variety of egotistical urges, of social or political ambitions. Everything in this category remains unconscious or subconscious. But when the will is raised to a really conscious level, when what the will impulses otherwise sleep through, or at best just dream through, is lifted into the sphere of consciousness, there is no further possibility of conceiving it materialistically. In our time will is not understood at all, as is apparent to anyone of genuine spiritual insight into a certain symptom of the period. The symptom I refer to is the fact that those who consider themselves the brightest spirits of the age can even raise the question in the way they actually do as to whether there is any such thing as freedom.
...
Man now had to be guided to a rediscovery of his true being. I made an attempt to do this in my Philosophy of Freedom. Such was the historical setting of the problem that confronted me as I felt prompted to write The Philosophy of Freedom. This “most highly developed animal” in which man is caught cannot be free, nor yet that thought-up human being that is just an idea, with its trappings of “in-itselfness,” “out-of-itselfness,” “for-itselfness,” for that is just a construct of logical necessity. Neither one is free. The only free man is the real human being holding the balance between external material fact and ideas that pierce through to the reality of the spirit. That is why the attempt is made in The Philosophy of Freedom to show that moral life is based on the inner experience of morality, called by me moral fantasy, rather than on abstract principles, that it is based on the capacity of the individual as such to draw on intuition.... Detouring thus through moral philosophy, one finds that one has reached the realm of the spirit, and that would perhaps be a way for present-day humanity to achieve understanding of the spiritual world, to realize something that is really not so hard to grasp, namely, that unless morality is conceived to belong to a supersensible, spiritual realm, it has absolutely nothing to stand on.

Palmer, Otto. Rudolf Steiner on His Book "The Philosophy of Freedom" (p. 32). SteinerBooks. Kindle Edition.

[Federica]

Now the question arises as to how we are going to bring the quarter of our soul life that is the sphere of reality to a true experience of freedom. We will have to relate it to something independent of the other three quarters. I tried to give a philosophical answer to this question in my Philosophy of Freedom.

I tried to show there that man can only realize his impulse to freedom when he subjects his actions wholly to the influence of pure thinking, when he reaches the point of being able to act on thought impulses rather than on stimuli originating in the world outside him. For nothing that has its origin in the external world permits of our realizing freedom. We can realize it only when we develop impulses to action in our thinking, uninfluenced by the world outside us.... Instead of letting stimuli to will and action rise up out of our physical, astral and etheric bodies, we can shut them out and accept only such impulses as come to us from the spiritual world in the form of imaginations based on underlying inspirations, underlying intuitions. But this need not necessarily be a conscious clairvoyant experience in the sense of saying, “Now I am training my will, based on inspirations and intuitions, on this particular goal.” But the fruit of having done so comes in the form of a concept, of pure thinking, that resembles an imaginatively conceived idea. Because that is so, because the concept upon which free action is based must appear to ordinary consciousness like an imaginatively conceived idea, I called the capacity that underlies free action “moral fantasy” in my book The Philosophy of Freedom.

Palmer, Otto. Rudolf Steiner on His Book "The Philosophy of Freedom" (p. 28). SteinerBooks. Kindle Edition.

Great complement to the known approach that tries to nail down the meaning of freedom starting from what freedom is not. What freedom is not appears in clearcut terms after a positive explanation is built up in oneself, I believe.

[AshvinP]

I would like to refer back to my book, The Philosophy of Freedom, which was published three decades ago, and I would like to call attention to the fact that I described in its pages a special kind of thinking very different from that generally recognized as thinking nowadays. When thinking is mentioned—and this holds especially true in the case of those whose opinions carry greatest weight—the concept of it is one that pictures the thinking human spirit as rather passive. This human spirit devotes itself to outer observation, studying phenomena or experimenting, and then using thought to relate these observations. Thus it comes to set up laws of nature, concerning the validity and metaphysical or merely physical significance of which disputes may arise. But it makes a difference whether a person just entertains these thoughts that have come to him from observing nature or proceeds instead to try to reach some clarity as to his own human relationship to these thoughts that he has formed at hand of nature—which, indeed, he has only recently acquired the ability to form about it. For if we go back to earlier times, say to the thirteenth or twelfth or eleventh centuries, we find that man's thoughts about nature were the product of a different attitude of soul. People of today conceive of thinking as just a passive noting of phenomena and of the consistency—or lack of consistency—with which they occur. One simply allows thoughts to emerge from the phenomena and passively occupy one's soul. In contrast to this, my Philosophy of Freedom stresses the active element in thinking, emphasizing how the will enters into it and how one can become aware of one's own inner activity in the exercise of what I have called pure thinking. In this connection I showed that all truly moral impulses have their origin in this pure thinking. I tried to point out how the will strikes into the otherwise passive realm of thought, stirring it awake and making the thinker inwardly active.

Now what kind of reader approach did The Philosophy of Freedom count on? It had to assume a special way of reading. It expected the reader, as he read, to undergo the sort of inner experience that, in an external sense, is really just like waking up out of sleep in the morning. The feeling one should have about it is such as to make one say, “My relationship to the world in passive thoughts was, on a higher level, that of a person who lies asleep. Now I am waking up.” It is like knowing, at the moment of awakening, that one has been lying passively in bed, letting nature have her way with one's body. But then one begins to be inwardly active. One relates one's senses actively to what is going on in the color permeated, sounding world about one. One links one's own bodily activity to one's intentions. The reader of The Philosophy of Freedom should experience something very like this waking moment of transition from passivity to activity, though of course on a higher level. He should be able to say, “Yes, I have certainly thought thoughts before. But my thinking took the form of just letting thoughts flow and carry me along. Now, little by little, I am beginning to be inwardly active in them. I am reminded of waking up in the morning and relating my sense-activity to sounds and colors, and my bodily movement to my will.” Experiencing this awakening as I have described it in my book, Vom Menschenratsel,1 where I comment on Johann Gottlieb Fichte, is to develop a soul attitude completely different from that prevalent today. But the attitude of soul thus arrived at leads not merely to knowledge that must be accepted on someone else's authority but to asking oneself what the thoughts were that one used to have and what this activity is that one now launches to strike into one's formerly passive thinking. What, one asks, is this element that has the same rousing effect on one's erstwhile thinking that one's life of soul and spirit has on one's body on awakening? (I am referring here just to the external fact of awaking). One begins to experience thinking in a way one could not have done without coming to know it as a living, active function.

So long as one is only considering passive thoughts, thinking remains just a development going on in the body while the physical senses are occupying themselves with external objects. But when a person suffuses this passive thinking with inner activity, he lights upon another similar comparison for the thinking he formerly engaged in, and can begin to see what its passivity resembled. He comes to the realization that this passive thinking of his was exactly the same thing in the soul realm that a corpse represents in the physical. When one looks at a corpse here in the physical world, one has to recognize that it was not created as the thing one sees, that none of nature's ordinary laws can be made to account for the present material composition of this body. Such a configuration of material elements could be brought about only as the result of a living human being having dwelt in what is now a corpse. It has become mere remains, abandoned by a formerly indwelling person? it can be accounted for only by assuming the prior existence of a living human being.

An observer confronting his own passive thinking resembles someone who has never seen anything but corpses, who has never beheld a living person. Such a man would have to look upon all corpses as miraculous creations, since nothing in nature could possibly have produced them. When one suffuses one's thinking with active soul life, one realizes for the first time that thought is just a leftover and recognizes it as the remains of something that has died. Ordinary thinking is dead, a mere corpse of the soul, and one has to become aware of it as such through suffusing it with one's own soul life and getting to know this corpse of abstract thinking in its new aliveness. To understand ordinary thinking, one has to see that it is dead, a psychic corpse whose erstwhile life is to be sought in the soul's pre-earthly existence. During that phase of experience, the soul lived in a bodiless state in the life element of its thinking, and the thinking left it in its earthly life must be regarded as the soul corpse of the living soul of pre-earthly existence.
(to be continued...)

Palmer, Otto. Rudolf Steiner on His Book "The Philosophy of Freedom" (pp. 41-43). SteinerBooks. Kindle Edition.

[AshvinP]

On a different note, Luke shared this interesting article with quotes about how people experienced Steiner's lectures. Here is the first one:



(A rare photo of Rudolf Steiner lecturing in the Schreinerei.)

“On December 17, in the evening, I was sitting in the Schreinerei (the carpentry workshop adjacent to the Goetheanum, often used for lectures and performances) with my fiancée, who was studying eurythmy in Dornach. Happy at being together again, we were waiting for Rudolf Steiner’s lecture. Outside it was bitterly cold; Dornach lay covered in snow. Suddenly the blue curtain by the side of the stage lifted, and Rudolf Steiner went to the lecture-desk. At that moment I had the direct experience of recognition. The impression was so strong that a whole series of pictures simultaneously arose before me, pointing indeterminately to earlier situations – as if I were seeing him as my teacher through ages of time. It was the most memorable experience I have ever had in all my life. For some time I sat as though carried away and did not realise until later that his lecture had already begun. It was the first of the three lectures subsequently published under the title: The Bridge between the Spirituality of the Cosmos and Physical Man….

When I came to myself again and saw Rudolf Steiner standing at the lecture-desk, I had the strange feeling that for the first time I was looking at a Man! It is not at all easy to describe this impression. I had met many well-known and famous people, among them scholars and noted artists, and had always moved in circles where a great deal was going on – it had by no means been a humdrum existence. But now I realised: this is what Man is meant to be. I began to question myself: what is the explanation for this? You have encountered many human beings – what is it that is so significant here? I said to myself first of all that it was his whole bearing, the bearing of one who is like a tree that grows freely between earth and sky. This impression was connected not only with his straight, erect figure, but above all with the poise of the head – it seemed to hover between heaven and earth. The second feeling was profoundly moving: from this beautiful, powerful voice came forth words which lived on even after they had been spoken. And thirdly, there were the thoughts. I was obliged to confess to myself that I could not always understand them, but I realised that they were not there merely to be understood intellectually, but they had another, quite different, significance as well. Listening to professors, what always mattered was whether one understood everything they said. What mattered here was not whether I actually understood – it was something different. Today I could speak of ‘ideas’, of seed-bearing impulses and the like, but at that time I could not. I knew only that different impulses were at work here.”

-Frederick William Zeylmans van Emmichoven (1893 – 1961)

[Federica]

On a different note, Luke shared this interesting article with quotes about how people experienced Steiner's lectures. Here is the first one:

Thanks! Yes, in a sense it's interesting, though I would say this type of articles is more like an entertainment that could distract from the enormous amount of more fundamental reading, self-work, and discussions one can dedicate oneself to. Of course it's personal, but for me, I try not to search too much for such parallel notes and accounts. Not that I think there's no value in these, and this one in particular seems really genuine. It's only that in my case I know I would read them more from a place of curiosity than one of spiritual development. This is also why I haven't read Steiners biography so far.


I have no idea if this is relevant to Luke, but it seems to me that some may have a drive towards bringing Anthroposophy into their current life - through reading articles like this one, visiting the Anthroposophical center/café in London, visiting the Goetheanum, or becoming a member of an Anthroposophical Society. Of course there's nothing wrong with all that and I agree it may be helpful in many cases. The only caveat is that, in a way or another, the primary goal is to bring one's current life into Anthroposophy, rather than the other way round (from my perspective of course). The former is essential, while the latter is only optional, sometimes helpful, but sometimes distracting and veiling.

[AshvinP]

(Continued)

"This becomes the illuminating inner experience that one can have on projecting will into one's thinking. One has to look at thinking this way when, in accordance with mankind's present stage of evolution, one searches for the source of ethical and moral impulses in pure thinking. Then one has the experience of being lifted by pure thinking itself out of one's body and into a realm not of the earth. Then one realizes that what one possesses in this living thinking has no connection whatsoever with the physical world, but is nonetheless real. It has to do with a world that physical eyes cannot see, a world one inhabited before one descended into a body: the spiritual world. One also realizes that even the laws governing our planetary system are of a kind unrelated to the world we enter with enlivened thinking. I am deliberately putting it in an old-fashioned way and saying that one would have to go to the ends of the planetary system to reach the world where what one grasps in living thinking has its true significance. One would have to go beyond Saturn to find the world where living thoughts apply, but where we also discover the cosmic source of creativity on earth.

This is the first step we take to go out again into the universe in an age that otherwise regards itself as living on a mere speck of dust in the cosmos. It is the first advance toward a possibility of seeing what is really out there—seeing it with living thinking. One transcends the bounds of the planetary system.

If you consider the human will further as I have done in my Philosophy of Freedom, you find that just as one is carried beyond Saturn into the universe when the will strikes into erstwhile passive thinking, so one can advance on the opposite side by entering deeply into the will to the extent of becoming utterly quiescent, by becoming a pole of stillness in the motion one otherwise engenders in the world of will. Our bodies are in motion when we engage in willing. Even when that will is nothing more than a wish, bodily substance comes into movement. Willing is motion for ordinary consciousness. When a person wills, he becomes part of the world's movement.

Now if one does the exercises described in my book, Knowledge of the Higher Worlds and its Attainment, and thereby succeeds in opposing one's own deliberate inner quiet to this motion in which one is caught up in every act of willing, if—to put it in a picture that can be applied to all will activity—one succeeds in keeping the soul still while the body moves through space, succeeds in being active in the world while the soul remains quiet, carries on activity and at the same time quietly observes it, then thinking suffuses the will just as the will previously suffused thinking.

When this happens, one comes out on the opposite side of the world. One gets to know the will as something that can also free itself from the physical body, that can even transport one out of the realm subject to ordinary earth laws. This brings one knowledge of an especially significant fact that throws light on man's connection with the universe. One learns to say, “You harbor in your will sphere a great variety of drives, instincts and passions. But none of them belongs to the world about which you learn in your experiments, restricted as they are to the earthly sense world. Nor are they to be found in corpses. They belong to a different world that merely extends into this one, a world that keeps its activity quite separate from everything that has to do with the sense world.”

I am only giving you a sketch of these matters today because I want to characterize the third phase of anthroposophy. One comes to enter the universe from its opposite side, the side endowed with its external character by the physical moon. The moon repels rather than absorbs sunlight; it leaves sunlight just as it was by reflecting it back from its surface, and it rays back other cosmic forces in a similar way. It excludes them for it belongs to a different world than the one that gives us the capacity to see. Light enables us to see. But the moon rays back the light, refusing to absorb it. Thinking that lays hold on itself in inner activity carries us on the one side as far as Saturn; laying hold on our wills leads us on the other side into the moon's activity. We learn to relate man to the cosmos. We are led out of and beyond a mere grain of dust earth. Learning elevates itself again to a concern with the cosmos, and we rediscover in the universe elements that live in us too as soul-spiritual beings. When, on the one hand, we have achieved a soul condition in which our thinking is rendered active by its permeation with will and, on the other hand, achieve the suffusion of our will with thinking, then we reach the boundaries of the planetary system, going out into the Saturn realm on the one side while we go out into the universe on the other side and enter the moon sphere. When our consciousness feels as much at home in the universe as it does on earth, and then experiences what goes on in the universe as familiarly as our ordinary consciousness experiences things of earth, when we live thus consciously in the unverse and achieve self-awareness there, we begin to remember earlier earth lives. Our successive incarnations become a fact experienced in the cosmic memory to which we have now gained access.

It need not surprise us that we cannot remember earlier lives on earth while we are incarnated. For what we experience in the intervals between them is not earthly experience, and the effect of one life on the next takes place only as a result of man's lifting himself out of the realm of earth. How could a person recall his earlier incarnations unless he first raised his consciousness to a heavenly level?

I wanted just to sketch these things today, for they have often been discussed by me here before. What I had in mind was to indicate the regions in which, in recent years, anthroposophy has been carrying on its research. Those interested in weighing what has been going on surely recall how consistently my lectures have concerned themselves in recent years with just these realms. Their purpose was gradually to clarify the process whereby one develops from an ordinary consciousness to a higher one. Though I have always said that ordinary thinking can, if it is unprejudiced, grasp the findings of anthroposophical research, I have also emphasized that everybody can attain today to a state of consciousness whereby he is able to develop a new kind of thinking and willing, which give him entry to the world whereof anthroposophy speaks. The essential thing would be to change the habit of reading books like my Philosophy of Freedom with the mental attitude one has toward other philosophical treatises. The way it should be read is with attention to the fact that it brings one to a wholly different way of thinking and willing and looking at things. If this were done, one would realize that such an approach lifts one's consciousness out of the earth into another world, and that one derives from it the kind of inner assurance that makes it possible to speak with conviction about the results of spiritual research. Those who read The Philosophy of Freedom as it should be read speak with inner conviction and assurance about the findings of researchers who have gone beyond the stage one has oneself reached as a beginner. But the right way of reading The Philosophy of Freedom makes everyone who adopts it the kind of beginner I am describing. Beginners like these can report the more detailed findings of advanced research in exactly the same way in which a person at home in chemistry would talk of research in that field. Although he may not actually have seen it done, it is familiar to him from what he has learned and heard and knows as part of reality. The vital thing in discussing anthroposophy is always to develop a certain soul attitude, not just to project a picture of the world different from the generally accepted one.

The trouble is that The Philosophy of Freedom has not been read in the different way I have been describing. That is the point, and a point that must be sharply stressed if the development of the Anthroposophical Society is not to fall far behind that of anthroposophy itself. If it does fall behind, anthroposophy's promulgation through the Society will result in its being completely misunderstood, and its only fruit will be endless conflict!2"