How do we build the bridge over the abyss between sensory consciousness and heavenly consciousness, that is indeed the great question of our time and there are of course very many movements, spiritual movements, that concern themselves with it, with this question and its answer. For me it is Anthroposophy that actually gives the most reliable answer to it. But it was already Johann Wolfgang von Goethe who looked at the whole question and told it in a fairy tale.

This fairy tale has a happy end, it ends well and the ending is truly that the bridge over the abyss has raised itself. At the beginning of the fairy tale it is still the case that the human being can indeed descend from the heavenly world into the earthly one, but once he is at home in the earthly world with sensory consciousness, then he cannot, with that consciousness, simply return again; in sleep, after death, but with earthly consciousness that is an impossibility. At the end of the fairy tale there is then more or less a free intercourse between the consciousness of the earthly world and the consciousness of the heavenly world.

That is truly a wonderful image. It is a kind of prophecy for our time. This has shown in Anthroposophy the possibility of allowing this bridge, which in fact has already raised itself, to arise within every human consciousness.

But that does not happen by itself. That is actually the great difficulty, that inwardly we do not truly feel inclined to become active. We assume that what the heavenly world promises us will reveal itself to us in the same way as the entire earthly world does.

We only need to direct our attention to it. That is essentially enough. A little more activity must be added, so that we also see through the connections.

The world more or less presents itself to us of its own accord. This is not the case with the heavenly world. It reveals itself only insofar as we ourselves bring forth the activity in which it can reveal itself.

I believe that this is a great difficulty for people today, first to see this and then secondly also to want to carry it out. We have become cinema-people. Even when you watch a video, you are actually sitting in a cinema.

Yes, I do not want to say: switch it off immediately, because this cinema nevertheless gives the possibility that we communicate. But if these explanations could not lead to an inner activity being awakened, then with videos we would actually only contribute to this cinema-consciousness. Rudolf Steiner has given us something very powerful with his The Philosophy of Freedom.

If one does not only take this into oneself, but also attempts to recreate it, then it gradually becomes clear that we as human beings live in our willing and our feeling under influences that we cannot immediately see through. Our impulses for action are sometimes our own and we perhaps think that they are always our own, but spiritual beings work within these feelings and impulses of will in an inspiring, intuitive way. We do not know it.

We are partly free in this, but we do not know it; most of the time we are not free at all. Rudolf Steiner has shown that this freedom is actually a fact only in thinking, because precisely in thinking we are entirely placed upon ourselves. Not in our thoughts, for thoughts are of course often consequences of our feelings and our wishes and so on.

But exact scientific thinking has become abstract. It has detached itself from nature and it has also detached itself from our subjective feelings and impulses of will. It is something entirely set upon itself and therefore it is also the most dead thing that we carry within us.

Precisely for that reason, however, freedom is there. We must become conscious — we ought to become conscious — that in this element of freedom, thinking, which is the most unspiritual thing we have because it has freed itself completely from the spiritual world, yet at the same time the most spiritual because it is spiritual in the activity of thinking, we should find the element that can reconnect us with the spiritual world.

We are free in it; we can see through exactly what we think and do in thinking, as long as it is not merely thoughts, but truly consciously produced thoughts formed in a scientific manner. In this thinking we have the possibility to connect ourselves fully consciously with the spiritual world, but we should notice that in the content of thinking the world has died and that nothing spiritual can be there anymore at all, because life has withdrawn.

For that reason, in the spiritual world one does not want to concern oneself with thinking. At the same time, it is that domain which has been taken directly out of the spiritual world and which, when we discover the activity of thinking — our thinking as activity — at the same time becomes this bridge.

The art is therefore that we find life again in the most dead aspect of our human being, by becoming active. Then becoming active in such a way that we do not drift into daydreaming, but proceed step by step with will.

If we do this and have experienced the activity of thinking, then in this experience we can also rediscover feeling. There is a sentence in The Philosophy of Freedom in which Rudolf Steiner says that the one has progressed the furthest who can reach highest into thinking with his feeling.

That is something one would like to meditate upon, what that means, for he does not mean that we should reach into the spiritual with our subjective feelings, but that what we create within ourselves as active effectiveness of ideas can be experienced with feeling.

Then one truly enters into an inner activity that one did not know before, which gives one something that is comparable to a kind of inner bliss. At the same time one also knows that what one has gathered in life as dead contents of thought is entirely bound to the body and will therefore die with it.

During life they are already dead, but one still has them at least. One can have them in consciousness. When one has died, one can be certain that everything that was content of thought falls away with the body.

Even spiritual thoughts, if they have not been raised into active thinking. That is the bridge.

We have such a deep, all-encompassing longing for this, that we may also during earthly life walk back and forth over a bridge to the spiritual world and then return again.

That is a longing that is born with us together with our time. Goethe’s fairy tale is an image of this.

This possibility exists, but not in content, not in feeling, not in the activity of will, as long as these are not impelled by exact thinking.

The bridge must first raise itself through the contemplation of the activity of our thinking.

That will be our bridge.