Central Europe Between East and West

GA 174a — 29 November 1915, Munich

Fourth Lecture

There is a time when the experience of death, from the point of view of the physical plane, comes before our souls in many ways, in a broader and in a narrower sense, a thousandfold outside in humanity and also in our immediate circle, from which, especially in the course of the last few years and also months, dear friends have passed through the gate of death. It is perhaps appropriate to direct our thoughts, to which we can feel connected here in this branch, to certain aspects of the mystery of death and many things related to it. We direct our contemplative gaze to the riddle of death, not merely because we are plagued by curiosity or a thirst for knowledge to recognize what is mysteriously connected with death, but because we have already sufficiently gathered from the insights that spiritual science can impart to us how intimately connected with the mystery of death, with the knowledge of it, is that which we need in the way of strengthening forces of life, how, in fact, the contemplation of death removes the gulf between the two worlds — the world we live through in the physical and the world of the spiritual. We have often realized and rightly called to mind again and again in the face of concrete deaths how those souls that were connected to us in physical life remain so even after they have passed through the gate of death. In this context, I was also able to say in this branch that it is one of the strengthening, invigorating thoughts that we can let carry us, that we have friend souls in the spiritual worlds who, through the way they were connected with our cause here on earth, have become and will become our loyal helpers and co-workers. It must be emphasized that we are now living in a time in which we feel obliged to elaborate spiritual science, but in which this spiritual science is still met with much misunderstanding and opposition arising from this lack of understanding. And sometimes doubts may arise as to whether, in the face of ever-increasing opposition - and it will truly take on even stronger forms - what forces are given to us within the physical world can suffice. Then we are consoled by the thought that the souls of our friends who have passed away and are still united with us in our work, who are not hampered by the obstacles that still confront us here on earth, combine their forces with ours. And out of such conviction we believe in the victorious, if also slow, advance of spiritual scientific work.

When a person passes through the gate of death, it is indeed, I would say, close to our soul to experience how he, after leaving his physical body on the scene of earthly existence, then ascends into the spiritual worlds, so to speak, leaving these physical worlds. If we have gained convictions in spiritual science, then we perceive the passing through of the gate of death in a human being as a leaving of the physical world. If now the spiritual scientific view is directed to the experience of death, that is, to the passing through of a human being through the gate of death, then to this spiritual scientific view the matter presents itself somewhat differently. What comes into consideration is mainly what the so-called dead person experiences himself, how he feels and experiences passing through the gate of death in his innermost being, and how it then unfolds for him between death and a new birth. And here it must be said that what passes through the gate of death is, as we know, first of all the etheric body with the astral body and the ego. Now, however, the dead person, by entering the spiritual world in this triad of his being, first feels the scene of the physical world and, standing on it, those people with whom he felt connected in life, and also everything else to which he felt connected, actually as if it were all leaving him, as if it were moving away from him, so to speak. And then the one who has passed through the gate of death and is settling into the etheric world with his etheric body, becomes one with this etheric world. And we also already know this: a kind of overview of the experience on earth in the last incarnation occurs before his eyes. This experience can really be compared to a kind of universal 'dream experience'. Life goes on for days in surging, weaving images that are meaningful and full of meaning. One feels like saying that this panorama of life enlarges as the dead person feels: 'This is what you see, your life unwinds, flows away.' And beyond this flowing life, the scene on which you were standing leaves you.

This is a completely ethereal experience. While we, when we experience physically and sensually, come across the solid and sturdy with our senses and know exactly: what we experience with our senses is out there and we feel ourselves within the boundaries of our skin, the one who has passed through the gate of death experiences his existence and his connection to the world in such a way that he does not distinguish in such a strong way; he feels, so to speak, what he has as a tableau of life, as a piece of his self. Yes, this tableau of life is his world in the first instance. He surveys what he has lived through in a great panorama of life, as his immediate world, in which he is at first. In a sense, earthly existence fades away from him, and from this fading earthly existence he extracts what he has experienced since his birth within this earthly existence. This unfolds like a powerful, vivid panorama of images, not with a dull 'dream consciousness', but with a clear consciousness, in which not only images are seen, but in which everything that we have experienced in life in some other way is revived. Every single conversation we have had with people: we hear it again; everything we have experienced with people, everything we have exchanged with them in terms of feelings: we experience it again. The fact that everything is flooded with life makes possible that abundance of life which, compressed into a few days, gives a complete overview – which is actually always before us at the same time – of what we have gone through in a sometimes long life on earth. And we go through it in such a way that we then know: earlier, on earth, you went through it in such a way that experience followed experience. You had an experience and were in a context of life. It flowed by, remained partly in your memory, was partly forgotten. Then something new occurred, and so the stream of life was composed over the years. Now all of this is standing before the mind's eye at the same time, and now all of this is, one might say, in the self expanded into the world.

In these days after death, one does not distinguish between the world and the self, but both flow together, and the world is simply what one has experienced oneself. Otherwise, at first there is nothing but what one has experienced oneself, in which everything we have lived through with other people on earth is also included. And then we feel as if the external ethereal material, which initially appears to be the carrier of this world of images, were to leave us, and as if this world of images were no longer like one we have seen, but one that we have now completely connected with our own being, that now forms our innermost being. And by absorbing it, as it were, into ourselves, we are able to perceive and experience the rest of the spiritual world, to survey it with our consciousness.

Now, little by little, human souls appear in the rest of the spiritual world. These are either souls who have gone through the portal of death before us and are now there too, or human souls who are still in the physical body, in earthly existence. One sees these human souls from the spiritual world by seeing them in their spiritual-soul aspect. The physical is, of course, only perceptible to physical organs, but the spiritual-soul that lines the physical is then also in the person before our soul's eye, rising up. We feel much more intimately connected to all that is now being experienced by us than we could feel connected to when we were actually on earth, where there are separating barriers due to the physical body.

There is just one thing we must always bear in mind: we must choose our words carefully when we want to describe the spiritual, because the experience in the spiritual world is simply much more intimate than the experience here on the physical plane. When we visualize how a thought, which represents an experience long past, emerges from within us, reminding us of that experience, and when we now now, I might say, imagine the reality of such a shadowy memory experience, then we gradually get an idea of how spiritual reality actually appears to us after we have passed through the gate of death. As a rule, it does not approach us from outside like the experiences of the physical-sensory world. The imaginations come up as they are, only with infinitely greater vividness than the memory images, but in such a way that we do not distinguish our I and the imaginations as we distinguish ourselves from the outside world here. They arise from within us like memory images, but in such a way that we know: what arises on the horizon of our consciousness is reality. An image arises and we know that it is connected to us in the same way that a memory image is connected to us here on the physical plane. It arises with all its vitality. But we know that we are connected to it, our I is within it. In this way the soul arises, and we feel ourselves in union with the souls and soul beings of the higher hierarchies that gradually arise. The spiritual world comes to me, I would say, from the indefinite twilight darkness, approaching my own soul, like memories that arise in our soul. Only that the memories are very dim and depict only an external reality, while the imaginations that arise become speaking imaginations, announcing themselves essentially through their revealing language, which then becomes for us a revelation of the souls, of the spirits, with whom we continue to be in the most varied ways warmer, more intimate, than we can be with a person here on the physical plane.

One must now be particularly aware of the significance of the very first experience that a person undergoes when he passes through the gate of death. This looking back at the last life has a great, an enormous significance for the whole of the subsequent experience between death and a new birth, and we can realize this significance if we think about how we actually come to our sense of self in physical life on earth; not to our self, but to our sense of self. We know how we come to the I from our study of spiritual science: the spirits of form give us this I by advancing us from a moon-based existence to an earth-based existence. But this I is initially subconscious. It becomes conscious through being reflected in the physical body. How is it reflected here on the physical plane? Well, you know that even in the ordinary dream experience you can see it: The I only very rarely becomes clearly aware of itself in the dream experience; the I becomes blurred with the experiences, with the images of the dream that emerge. How do we experience I-consciousness during waking hours? Become aware of how this I-consciousness is actually connected to all external perceptions and all external experiences. When we move our hand through the air like this, we feel nothing. But in the moment when we push through the air, we feel something. But we actually feel our own experience, feel what we experience through our fingers. It is by touching the outside world that we become aware of our self. And in another sense, we actually become aware of our self when we wake up, in that we descend from the consciousness of sleep into our physical body, we collide with our physical body. In this collision with the physical body, the consciousness of self is actually summoned to the soul.

Let us be clear about the fact that the consciousness of self must not be confused with the I. The I initially remains in the subconscious, one could say, incomplete. Only during the volcanic period will man experience what the I really is. But the I acquires earthly consciousness by submerging with the astral body into the etheric body and colliding with the etheric body and physical body. And in this collision with the physical body, the ego becomes aware of itself: this is how the sense of self arises from the moment when the physical body is so hardened that this collision is strong enough, that is, from a certain point in early childhood, as far as we can remember.

Now the soul must also collide with something in the life between death and a new birth. Here in the physical life, it collides with the physical body, which is given from the physical forces and substances of the outer nature, in order to come to the I-consciousness. After death, between death and a new birth, the soul, in order to come to its now spiritual self-awareness, collides with its own life, which it has just seen in the days after passing through the gate of death and which it keeps looking back on. First, life presents itself in a way that allows us to see it, then it becomes a constant looking back. As spiritual beings, after we have passed through the gate of death and continue to live in the stream of time, looking back on what we have directly experienced in and with death, the soul, as it continues to progress, always encounters this panorama of life in retrospect, which one has had, but which now remains as a spiritual memory. And just as the I is ignited to its I-consciousness here through its collision with the physical body, so after death the I-consciousness is ignited by the look back at our own life, which encounters the last life on earth. As we look back on it, we experience this I-consciousness between death and a new birth. It is different, this sense of self after death, but it is by no means weaker.

What is this sense of self actually like here in the physical world? It is the case that here in the physical world, if we want to become aware of our self, we actually have to rely on it being shown to us through something else in our physical body. It appears to us, as it were, in the mirror of our physical body, this physical self of ours. We feel quite passive in the production of our self, at least if we do not happen to live according to a philosophy like that of Johann Gottlieb Fichte. By contrast, after we have passed through the gate of death, we feel constantly active. We give ourselves, as it were, our now much more intense consciousness again and again by looking back at our own life and connecting with the consciousness of the self: we want us, and always want us again, and we may want us, because we remain unlosable to ourselves by the indelible impression of what we have once lived through. I would like to use these words to express very clearly what is experienced in the consciousness between death and a new birth. And the consciousness between death and a new birth is very different from the consciousness here on the physical plane. Here on the physical plane, no one can actually look back on their own birth from their own experience in normal consciousness. Someone cannot observe their own birth in their own experience with normal consciousness; remembering only begins later. I have said this before: if people only want to rely on experience, on what they have experienced themselves in life, then actually no one can believe in their own birth; basically, they only experience their birth when they look back clairvoyantly. If someone says: I will not believe in the spiritual world until I have seen it myself; I do not want to believe what spiritual science tells me, I only believe what I have seen myself - then one can basically answer: And your own birth? It seems as if you do believe that this has taken place? But you cannot have any experience of it. — This shows how even something quite significant for human life is only conscious of a conclusion for normal consciousness. We only ever assume for normal consciousness that we are born by concluding: we look just like the people we have already observed being born, so we must also be born. — But it is only based on a conclusion.

The situation is quite different in the time between death and a new birth. Just as little as one can look back in normal consciousness to one's own birth, so much one always looks with this remembered panorama of life to the moment of one's death. And just as birth fades away for earthly consciousness, so too does the event of death always stand in retrospective consciousness before the soul life between death and a new birth, but now viewed from the other side. Here on the physical plane, man sees the experience of death only from one side. There are many gruesome aspects to it. But one should not conclude from this that it is now terrible for the one who lives on to have to look back forever at the experience of death. Seen from there, this is the most beautiful, greatest, most significant experience that a human soul can ever have, because it always shows in a radiant way how the spirit conquers material existence. This continuous review of the experience of death has an invigorating, uplifting and elevating effect on all consciousness. It is mainly through this experience of death that the soul says to itself: I live here in the spiritual world, with the spiritual world. The fact that the soul has the strength to say this makes this experience of death of immense importance for the life that begins after death.

I said: Man feels how his body and everything that was on earth leaves him, and he feels how he must now balance his consciousness through inner activity, how he must achieve something for his consciousness that he used to receive through the instrument of the body. I can live consciously without the body within me: the possibility of grasping this thought produces a much stronger consciousness than one can have within earthly life. And this is the lesson that death teaches us: that one can feel that the body is leaving, but that now begins a time when you are no longer dependent on your body to feel yourself as an ego, now begins a time when you, so to speak, pour the spiritual forces into your soul-shell yourself, so that you continually call yourself to consciousness. By recognizing how this calling-oneself-to-consciousness can be there when one's body is snatched away, one has the life impression of the inner creation of existence. This begins with death, where one must begin to experience oneself as an ego without the body. This is the starting point for continuing to feel oneself as an ego without the body by looking back at the experience of death. When the spiritual researcher's gaze, by bringing the spiritual world to life within him, causes souls that have passed through the gateway of death to emerge in the imaginations on the field of consciousness within, one learns to recognize how the dead experience. One learns to recognize differences that arise. Of course, one can only describe individual cases. Let us consider one such difference.

One learns to recognize how human souls appear at the scene of the soul's observation after death. These human souls are of two kinds: those human souls that have already entered the spiritual world before our death, which we therefore find inside as disembodied souls, and those souls that are still embodied in the body on earth. We are also able to experience those that are still on earth in the same way. As the scene of earthly existence disappears from us, we are left with the possibility of still knowing ourselves connected to what was spiritual. Only the physical disappears from us, our soul expands, unites with the vast universe, and precisely because of this, the possibility is given to know and experience that we are still connected to the soul even as the physical, as it were, rushes away from us.

But there is now a difference between the experience of one kind of soul and the other kind of soul. When we experience a human soul in the spiritual world, then of course we do not experience it in such a way – it hardly needs saying, but those who have not yet understood anything about looking in the spiritual world believe that – that one confronts it as one confronts an external being; but one experiences it in such a way that one feels the being emerging in consciousness. And now, when we encounter a soul that has already been disembodied, that has already passed through the gate of death, we have the inner experience of its presence. This is where the impression begins. We know: there is a soul. But we must, as it were, live ourselves into it, feel into it. We must receive the imagination of it in such a way that we feel ourselves participating in the creation of the imagination.

It is really the case that one would like to describe the matter in the following way: One feels oneself in the spiritual world. The awareness arises: You are not alone now, a soul is approaching you. — Now it is as if, in the physical world, one carries a thought invisibly in one's soul. But one wants to make it visible. So one takes a piece of chalk and draws the thought, makes a picture of it. That is really how it is at first with experiences in the spiritual world. One knows that a real spiritual being is present. In order to see the soul, one must first come into contact with it in such a way that one draws it, as it were, into the spiritual realm as an image. And that is what one does, but one is aware of being active in creating the imagination. And when, through the music of the spheres, it wants to speak its essence to our essence, as the human being here announces his soul to us in the physical world through his speech, when it lets the music of the spheres resound from within, then one also feels that one cannot remain passive. If you hear someone speaking and you don't want to think about it, you don't have to understand it. You have to participate if you want to understand. So you have to participate everywhere here too. You live together so actively, you know that you have to co-create every piece of the manifestation of the essence of a soul that you can have before you as a manifestation. You create the manifestation, not the essence. There will also be times when you do not feel so intensely active that you know: now there is a human soul. But this soul impels us, without our participating as intensely as in the case just described, to imagination. Imagination arises more by itself before us. Then we are confronted with a soul that is still embodied on earth. And as the human being has passed through the gate of death and gradually lives on in the spiritual world, he gets to know the differences between souls, through the way he relates to the souls that he meets in the spiritual world and those that he imagines on earth.

This is one of the differences in how experiences take place in the spiritual world, as they are directly experienced. And so it is also necessary to distinguish between experiences, inner experiences, whether one is experiencing human souls or the souls of the beings of the higher hierarchies. Please consider what I have described as an experience of human souls. I said: One experiences human souls either in such a way that one creates or recreates the imaginations, or by creating them more or less by oneself. But then the experience can also be like this: One knows that a being is there. This being must also be present as an imagination, it must also be present in the experience if we really want to be with it. But we will not be able to produce the imagination directly in the same way as in the cases just described, where it even builds itself up by itself. We must, by having the experience that a being is there, develop something else in us. We must develop the feeling in us: we create this being in us. We give our powers so that the powers of this being may stream into us. While we feel ourselves as creating in our imagination with the human soul, we feel that with the beings of the higher hierarchies, the angeloi and the archangeloi, these beings create the imagination in us. And so we gradually live ourselves into this co-experience of the spiritual world.

We also know that in the concrete sense this co-experience happens in such a way that through a long series of years – we have already considered its length in relation to the last life on earth – life is experienced backwards again. First we have a few days of the panorama of life, then we begin to experience life on earth in reverse, but in a different way than we experienced it here between birth and death. We experience the last one first, then we experience what we experienced before that, and so back in our mind to birth. We experience it by looking at our life, but now from the other side. I can say that we look at it from the side of the effects. Let's assume something rough, I have said to a person at some time in my life: 'You are a base person', or I have hurt him in some way. Then I have experienced something during my life. What I have experienced is different from what he has experienced. He had experienced the hurt feeling, the insult, the pain, the suffering. Now, in the afterlife in the spiritual world, one experiences the effects of what one has done. The suffering that the other person experienced when we insulted him, we experience this suffering, this pain, in ourselves. We experience the effects of our actions in the other being by living back in this way. We get a certain insight into this experience after death when we focus on something that can reveal itself to the spiritual researcher as a connection between this experience after death and the experience here in the physical world.

What I am going to discuss now is something that can really make us aware of how the spiritual researcher gradually comes to his results, and how it is a prejudice to think that someone who has crossed the threshold to the spiritual world now knows the spiritual world from his own point of view, and that we can ask him anything. We must experience it again and again when the spiritual researcher talks about this and that, especially in public, and one - as it may seem desirable from certain points of view - gives a question-and-answer session on all things in heaven and on earth and the whole of infinity, by assuming that anyone who looks into the spiritual world already knows everything that can be known there. That is about as clever as if someone here would say: You have eyes, you know Munich, so describe California to me! — It is really the case in the spiritual world that one must acquire step by step what is to be understood from the spiritual world, and it is naive to believe that everything there does not have to be looked at step by step first. Now, the spiritual world is still different from here in the physical world. Here in the physical world, if you, I mean, have never been to Heidelberg and now want to describe Heidelberg, you go there, don't you, you set yourself in motion. In the spiritual world, things have to come to us, and we have to develop the power of waiting, the inner power of experience, in our souls. Things enter our field of vision when we have made ourselves capable of perceiving them. The Heidelberg of the spiritual world must come to us, we must prepare our soul for it. It is always in a sense dependent on the grace with which we are endowed, whether we can learn something about this or that in the spiritual world. In this way, the spiritual researcher can gradually be taught about the secrets of the spiritual world.

Now I would like to discuss a spiritual research result from a certain point of view today that I have not yet discussed here from this point of view. When, after developing certain inner, that is, spiritual powers of observation, one observes the soul experience of the human being between falling asleep and waking up in the spiritual world, when one observes the sleeping person as a soul, as he is outside of his physical body – one gets to know many things, but one must learn to look from a certain point of view if one wants to grasp something – then one notices that in sleep a person is actually constantly active in his soul, much more active than during waking hours. While awake, a person makes use of the activity that his body develops, and this is what he places himself in as a soul, this is what he lives in. In sleep, on the other hand, he lives in his own activity. And if you follow this, you will find that in sleep, man relives in a different way what he has experienced in the physical world from waking to falling asleep. Let us assume that I have done something, have read this or that: in my sleep I relive the whole reading, I go through everything again. We just don't have this kind of consciousness in our normal waking life yet, so that it also becomes I-conscious, but that is why it still takes place in the soul, only vaguely, but it is the soul that actually now actively processes what it has experienced during the day. The thoughts are transformed in such a way that they can bear fruit in the soul. We process as fruits of life what we have worked for during the day. During sleep, we always actively incorporate the fruits of life, the results of our life.

Then the spiritual researcher can make a discovery. When he compares this sleep experience that the person has here with the experiences that the person has in the years or decades after he has passed through the gate of death and thus walks through his life backwards, it is interesting that the person walks through his life in such a way that he actually lives through the nights, not the days. As he looked back on the day every night, he now experiences it in the world of the soul. It is the same thing that one experienced in the waking consciousness, but seen from sleep. We experience this in such a way that it is very strange. Most of the time, one does not think about it, but actually, in the physical life, our memory only extends to the experiences of the day. We remember what we have in our waking consciousness. Now, after death, we remember what we have relived during the nights, what we have gone through in our earthly life. Then the conscious memory of the night experiences occurs. I did not express this so clearly earlier, simply because I did not know it. Such things arise in a successive spiritual research.

But one thing comes to light that is important, important for the consciousness that we are to create in our collective work in the branches. I have previously – you can read about it – pointed out from a different point of view the fact that the life in the soul is about a third of the time one has lived through between birth and death. Reasons for this are given in the books. But these reasons are given from a different point of view than the one I am giving now. One lives through the nights of life. How long does one actually sleep normally? One sleeps through a third of one's life. It is approximately true that one sleeps a third of one's life. Now, by passing through the nights after death, a third of earthly life lasts. This is connected with passing through the nights. It is tremendously interesting and important. Because the previous statement was based on completely different reasons. I have recorded this again, for example in 'Occult Science in Outline': after death, reliving the same thing again takes a third of earthly life, the Kamaloka life. Now, from a completely different point of view, which was not thought of at all before, it turns out again: this Kamalokaleben is one third of earthly life - from the point of view that one lives through the nights. You see, these are the kinds of things that, when they occur again and again, are so tremendously supportive and strengthening as proving forces for what spiritual science can give to man. One searches for a truth from a certain starting point and arrives at the conclusion that the Kamaloka life lasts for a third of the earth-lives. Then one arrives at the same result from quite a different point of view. These results support each other. We come across this again and again and it gives precisely that certainty which is also given to him who cannot yet do research himself. I have often called attention to this harmony. By following in detail how things are found in the life of the branch, we gradually gain inner certainty and conviction, even though we still have a long way to go in making our own experiences and gaining our own experiences on our own path of knowledge.

And now, in conclusion, I would like to share with you a truth that is of particular interest for our time, although it can always interest people. In my public lecture, I already spoke from one point of view about the death that occurs when a person in the prime of life is hit by a bullet, for example, and his physical body is effectively taken away from him. As I said, I have shown what becomes of these unused forces. I have already shown this from various points of view. Today I would like to point out this experience of death from yet another point of view.

How does someone enter the spiritual world who has not lost his physical body through illness or old age, but who has lost his body violently through a bullet or other injury? I have discussed what remains of his unused powers. But how he enters the spiritual world himself, that becomes a mystery. Especially in a time like ours, when so many souls enter the spiritual world through the gate of death. Their body has been taken from them by an external influence. In the spiritual world they differ greatly from the souls whose bodies have been taken away through illness or old age. In order to explain and understand such things, one must be able to place the right thing next to the right thing in the spiritual world. One must now be able to ask: how must one combine the phenomenon that is becoming a mystery in order to solve it? And here it becomes evident that this phenomenon must be put together with something that is experienced in the physical world. Now, let us characterize the experience here in the physical world in such a way that we first look at the coarsely materialistic-minded spirits who want to accept nothing but what can be grasped in a rough way through sense experience, which, because it makes a rough impression, is designated as being. But there is something else in this world that makes this life valuable, and that something else is ideals. Of course, the most crude materialists will say: you cannot eat ideals, they have no proper being, they are mere thoughts. But those people who bring ideals into their lives are actually working for the right fertilization, elevation and enlivenment of earthly existence. That which is not in a purely materialistic sense must be brought into the course of earthly existence in order to make this life valuable. Idealists are those who, in a certain sense, are messengers from divine worlds for earthly existence. For ideals are something like messages from divine worlds, something that belongs to the physical world but does not come from it. You cannot observe ideals, nor can you experiment on ideals to demonstrate them through experience. Yet ideals are like messages from a spiritual world.

When the human soul, from whom the body has been taken, for example, by a bullet in the prime of life, passes through the gate of death into the spiritual world, it not only leaves unused powers that are used in the way I have already indicated, but it also brings a very specific consciousness into the spiritual worlds. Such a soul enters the spiritual world through the gate of death differently than other souls who were able to complete their lives or whose body was taken from them by an illness. These souls enter the spiritual world bringing with them the thought of something that could have been down there in the physical world, namely their own life from the point at which they sacrificed themselves. As far as the abilities are concerned, what could have been, was already destined for the physical world, could have been its natural life for the next few years. There would have been the possibility that, say, two years after the death the body would have existed as a physical body in front of others. Now it does not exist. There could have been something in the physical world that is now not there. This is taken up by the soul, from whom the body has been taken away, into the spiritual world.

Now it is just as necessary for the spiritual world to be able to proclaim that something exists up there as for something to exist down there in the world that has the potential of this coarse existence, but which does not live out as a coarse material existence. This proclamation is something similar for the spiritual worlds as the proclamation of ideals is for the physical world. These are the reverse idealists. Here below, life can take such a course that inclinations do not live out, that souls return from the physical world that have found violent death. This makes a proclamation up there among those who have not experienced this, which means the same as the proclamation of ideals here. Here in the physical existence one proclaims: Not only is valuable that which makes an impression on the senses, but also valuable are the ideals that come from the spiritual world. In the spiritual world, those who have been deprived of their bodies proclaim that there is an effective force that, although intended for the sensual world, does not enter into this sensual world, but enters the world in a different way, and that it animates the spiritual world just as ideals animate the sensual world. This is a very significant result of spiritual research, and it indicates to us that sacrificial deaths also have a significance for the spiritual world, not only the significance that I explained yesterday for the physical world, but also for the spiritual world. Among the souls of the spiritual world, there are those who look to the ordinary course of life, but there are also those who have learned that inclinations can be cut off with a single blow. And they are, so to speak, the reverse idealists for the spiritual world.

And so, little by little, the phenomena of life reveal themselves, the riddles of existence, and one really gains the impression, especially in such times as ours, when so much that is mysterious can be sensed in blood and suffering, of how spiritual science can first place man in the whole of full life. Humanity is progressing. Natural science as it exists today did not exist in the past; it has emerged out of the dim darkness of soul striving. In the same way, spiritual science must come into being. In the future, man will not be able to do without it. Today it still has many opponents, but man will feel more and more the riddles of existence and thereby more and more the necessity of approaching the riddles of existence in a spiritual-scientific way. This must arise again and again in our souls as the thought that holds us together with our spiritual movement, that points out to us, as it were, how we seek within our spiritual movement something that must spread more and more in humanity, and that we must persevere through all the opposition that still exists in our present time in a very natural way.

I would like to emphasize this in our time, especially in view of today's reflection, as the seriousness of our time should remind us in these days to do everything we can, out of our strength, to truly incorporate spiritual science into the development of humanity, as far as it is up to us. And I would like to focus this admonition to the effect that we must now make this thought all the more alive in us, because the circumstances of the times can really lead to our not being able to be together as often as in normal times. And so let me address this admonition to our souls, that we work all the more faithfully and devotedly in our individual branches in these times of war, even if the collaboration between you and me, for example, may now be less frequent until we return to normal times, because traveling around the world is now much more difficult than usual, and it may be that we have to learn right now to rely on ourselves and work independently in the individual branches. What we can do in this direction will bear real fruit for that spiritual striving in our minds that must flow into the evolution of humanity. For it must be pointed out again and again that The great sacrifices that so many people have to make in the present, and which are so intimately connected with what death, as a mystery and as pain, hides in the development of mankind, these events can only have a proper relationship to our soul life if we can look at them from the point of view of spiritual science, in the context of the history of mankind.

It is not my intention to go into all kinds of inhibiting and hindering things, which may already have reached your ears in the last few days because they had to be discussed somewhere. But these things have shown how necessary it is that we allow ourselves to be taken up quite objectively by the fruitfulness and necessity of the spiritual-scientific movement, and that we can separate from it that which arises as our personal wishes and desires and will always stand in the way of the right course of our spiritual-scientific work as an obstacle and hindrance. Spiritual science is so rich in content that it can occupy us entirely objectively. Let us try to remind ourselves often how easy it is for personal, ambitious or vain striving to mix with what we should actually take hold of and allow ourselves to be taken hold of by as a spiritual life pulsating through the world.

Some events that have taken place within our society have already suggested to our souls: Oh, there is blood flowing out there, a large part of humanity is struggling for things whose significance cannot yet be measured, and there is a spiritual movement that could truly stimulate interest in purely objective terms, in which one does not need to focus on what is only personal, but there is so much of the personal in it, and at such a time when the soul must feel obliged to live together with the great events. That is also a source of pain, what was possible in terms of mixing the personal with what should be impersonal.

Now, again and again, and especially today, we should look from our isolated lives at what all of European humanity and humanity beyond is experiencing, and say to ourselves: the right fruits, the hard-won ones, will only arise in the future if what spiritual science wants to incorporate into the development of humanity is added to humanity. When what can be achieved in thought through spiritual science unites with the fruits of blood and pain, of suffering and deprivation, which will live on for the future, then one day a spiritual life, a human life, will flourish in the fields that today claim so many victims, a life worthy of these victims. Looking at this, we want to conclude with the words:

From the courage of the fighters,
From the blood of the battles,
From the suffering of the abandoned,
From the people's sacrificial deeds
Will grow spiritual fruit —
Guiding souls, spiritually aware
Their minds into the spiritual realm.

May many such souls arise within our ranks, directing their minds to the spiritual realm, then the fruits and blossoms that arise from their efforts will truly be able to become not only a personal blessing but also a blessing for all mankind. In this spirit, whatever life may bring, we want to continue to work together on our cause with great intensity!