Steiner's name for waking out of ordinary waking consciousness, so that sense-reality can be judged from above as waking judges the dream.
What is the Second Awakening?
The Second Awakening in Anthroposophy is Rudolf Steiner's term for a further waking-up out of ordinary daytime consciousness, standing to sense-experience exactly as morning waking stands to the dream. Steiner set it out in the lecture cycle What is the Purpose of Anthroposophy and the Goetheanum? (GA 84), most fully at Prague on 27 April 1923, where he called it ein zweites Erwachen, a second jolt of life. The argument is a strict analogy: a dreamer cannot rate the reality-value of the dream from inside it, and only the waking standpoint can. By the same logic, no judgment about the reality-value of the sense-world can be made from inside the sense-world. The second awakening supplies that higher standpoint, reached by strengthening thinking, emptying waking consciousness, and raising love into a faculty of knowledge. What it first discloses is pre-earthly existence.
The Second Awakening is not a metaphor for insight or a change of mood. Steiner meant a literal second threshold, crossed by deliberate inner work, after which waking life is seen the way a waking person sees last night's dream: real in its own register, no longer the measure of what is real. Everything Anthroposophy claims about the spirit rests on that crossing.
In Steiner's Own Words
Now the question arises: Could there perhaps be a second awakening, a second life-jolt out of this ordinary day-waking on a higher level, through which we switch on our life forces into a new element, just as we switch on our will when we come out of dreaming into ordinary wakefulness? - Of course, this is only a question, and the answer to it depends entirely on whether we can set out on a path that is, firstly, inwardly safe and, secondly, can be walked by every person through their own efforts. If we were to come to such a second awakening, then through this second awakening we would gain a point of view through which we would recognize the reality value of our waking life, observing it from a higher perspective, as we observe it in dreams from the higher perspective of ordinary consciousness.
What it Means Today
Steiner's case rests on a claim that sounded untestable in 1923: that a consciousness held inside one state can, by trained effort, judge that state from outside it. Sleep science later put a version of it onto an instrument trace. At Stanford University's sleep laboratory, Stephen LaBerge trained sleepers to signal from inside a dream with a pre-arranged sequence of left-right eye movements, the eye muscles staying under voluntary control during REM sleep. The signals appeared in the laboratory record during verified REM, published with Lynne Nagel, William Dement and Vincent Zarcone in Perceptual and Motor Skills in 1981. A dreamer who reports in real time that the dream is a dream does what Steiner said the ordinary dreamer cannot.
Steiner asks the same question one storey higher. Lucid dreaming wakes a person inside the dream while the body sleeps; the second awakening wakes a person out of daylight consciousness while the body stands, walks and works. The Prague lecture is blunt about the price: exercises carried with a mathematician's accountability, a waking consciousness deliberately emptied of images, then the extinction of the earthly self.
Thalira synthesis: LaBerge showed that the boundary between two states of consciousness is not a wall but a doorway a trained person can stand in and report from, which is the one premise Steiner needed and could not demonstrate. Whether a second such doorway stands above the waking state remains, in his Prague phrasing, a question answered only by walking the path.
Where to Read More
- What is the Purpose of Anthroposophy and the Goetheanum?, GA 84
- Find Knowledge of the Higher Worlds at SteinerBooks
- The Second House in Astrology: Money, Values, and Self-Worth
- The Chaldean Oracles: Ancient Theurgy and the Fire of the Gods
- Theseus: The Athenian Hero, the Labyrinth, and the Civilising of Chaos