Supplements to Member Lectures

GA 246 — 1 March 1916, Hanover

73. The Victory of the Spirit over the Body

My dear friends,

We remember those who stand outside on the fields of the present:

Ghosts of your souls, working guardians!
May your wings bring
Our souls pleading love
To your guardianship trusted earth people.
That, united with your power,
Our plea may shine helpfully
To the souls it lovingly seeks!

And for those souls who have already passed through the gate of death as a result of these temporal events:

Ghosts of your souls, working guardians!
May your wings bring
Our souls pleading love
To your guardianship trusted sphere people.
That, united with your power,
Our plea may shine helpfully
To the souls it lovingly seeks.

And the spirit that we seek through our aspired knowledge of spirits, the spirit that has gone through the mystery of Golgotha to the salvation of the earth, to the progress and freedom of mankind, be with you and your heavy duties.

My dear friends, we live in a time in which it can be even more appropriate than in any other to base such a reflection, as we are allowed to do today, on what we call the life of man between death and a new birth. We have often spoken about this topic here. We also have printed lectures on this subject. But you know, my dear friends, that the mysteries of the spiritual world can only be understood by us again and again if we look at it from the most diverse points of view, if we always add something new to what we already know about such a subject. And so today, once again, let us add to what we already know from a more or less new point of view.

As we know, man enters the spiritual world when he passes through the gate of death. This passing through the gate of death is for man's sensual contemplation and for all that man can contemplate with the intellect, which is bound to the brain, to the nervous system, it is the end of life, which spreads out between birth and death. For the one who has passed through the gate of death, the moment of death itself is something highly significant and of lasting importance. We can say that the experience of death is connected with the following life between death and a new birth in the opposite way to what is connected with the experience of birth in physical life. As you know, my dear friends, in normal human life a person cannot remember his birth experience. Our memory goes back to a certain point in time, but it does not go back to birth. No human being with the normal faculties of human consciousness can remember his birth here on earth, so birth is not personally experienced. Death is experienced again and again for the life between death and a new birth; or rather, this experience stands before the consciousness of the soul again and again after death.

So the reverse is the case with the birth experience for physical life. By passing through the gate of death, man learns to know, to know again - again for the reason that we have often already passed through earthly incarnations - he learns to know again, has again the experience of death. And a tremendous amount depends on this experience of death, that it remains like something that one always sees before oneself after death. If one can speak of death as something horrible at all, then this only applies to the sight of death here from the physical world, where it represents an end, an end of physical life. But it does not apply to the time between death and a new birth. For as the human being looks back all this time to the experience of death, this experience of death, or rather the sight of this experience of death, is one of the most sublime, one of the greatest, one of the most blissful impressions that a human soul can have in this or any other world. For this contemplation of death from the other side, from the side of the spirit, signifies the victory of the spirit over corporeality, the emergence of the spirit from corporeality. And this contemplation of the victory of the spirit over corporeality is what is soothing, what is warming for the whole time between death and a new birth.

But there is something else connected with it. You see, here during physical life we have our ego experience. But we only have this ego experience as we have it here in physical life, in the physical body. As you know, when we are out of the physical body from the time we fall asleep until we wake up, the ego experience is not there. The fact that we squeeze ourselves into the physical body when we wake up, that we are, so to speak, squeezed and pressed in by the physical body, causes us to have the ego experience between waking up and falling asleep.

The ego experience is different in the time between death and a new birth. There, too, the human being has the ego experience. But he has it because he can always look back to the experience of death. Just as we have to wake up in the physical body in order to have the I-experience, we have to direct our spiritual gaze back to the experience of death after death so that the I, the self-consciousness, is there in the time between death and a new birth; for the I-consciousness for this time is ignited by this sight. So the fact that we have a personal ego, an individual ego, after death depends on our being able to look back to the most sublime event, to the event of death.

Now you know - and this is the most common observation that a human being can already make here on the physical plane - you know that death initially consists of the human being casting off his physical body, detaching it from himself, and that this physical body - be it through incineration, be it through decomposition, it only differs in the length of time in which this takes place - that the parts, the elements of the physical body are handed over to the earth. We also know from the [elementary] teachings of our spiritual science that the human being then lives for days with his etheric, with his astral, with his ego. But he has detached his physical body from these three other parts of his being. The fact that he has detached his physical body also means something very important, and one can only describe what it means if one tries to describe the process as sensually as possible. My dear friends, you have to get used to making your concepts and mental images flexible if you want to understand the spiritual world. One must try to gradually acquire other mental images than those which are suitable for the physical world. Those who want to be extremely comfortable and only want to imagine the spiritual world as something like a diluted physical world will not arrive at any real mental image of the spiritual world. All mental images, all concepts must be internalized.

What this discarding of the physical body means for the consciousness after death, this sharing of the physical body with the earth elements, can be described in the following way. It is really something that appears after death as if the part of space that our physical body used to occupy were now empty of our physical body and we look back at this empty space.

Take this in, my dear friends: As long as you have your physical body, you know yourself here within your skin, and you say: You are inside. When you die, you step out of your body and out of space. It need not always be in the same place, of course; it depends on the form of the space, not on the place. Your physical body falls out of space, is communicated to the earth, dissolves, as they say, into the earth. But the mental image of space remains. Here you feel it filled with what your physical body is, with bones, muscles and so on. Now, after death, you feel the same space, the same spatial form, empty. This is tremendously important, tremendously significant, because more and more after death the human being gets the feeling that he is spreading out, dissolving; but that part of space which remains empty is not filled with anything, it remains. Nor is it filled with anything else for observation afterwards. And what you have there, when you look at yourself physically filled here as you look at yourself physically empty there, like a hollow in space, that is a feeling, a sensation. This sensation is tremendously significant, tremendously important. If you want to put it into words, you can do so in the following way. You can say: by looking at this emptiness that has filled his physical body between birth and death, man feels that he has his place in the world, that there is a place, something in the world that is only there for him. This is a tremendously important fact. It is so important because it gives you direct awareness for the whole time between death and a new birth: You belong as a building block to the whole universe. It wouldn't be quite this universe if you weren't in it yourself. Everything has its task, its purpose. And this sense of belonging to the universe is expressed by looking at this empty space. Of course, it is easy to say that an empty space, which has the form of a human being, cannot evoke such a feeling here in earthly consciousness. Only the sensation in the body and outside the body is different. This feeling is something quite natural to the human being after death: I am assigned a place that is there for me to fill as a human being when I create the conditions for myself to re-enter an earthly incarnation. This place can only be filled by me, can only be filled by my re-entering an earthly incarnation. Just as one has a physical feeling within the skin, one has a cosmic feeling through the presence of what I have just described: the feeling of belonging to the whole universe.

Now we know that the human being lives on for days - as they say with his etheric body. What is this etheric body actually experienced as? You see, here in the physical world we don't just perceive things, we form mental images of them. You know not only what you see now, but also what you saw yesterday: What you saw yesterday also remains in your memory. And so the sum of the experiences is made up by the fact that the ongoing memory is there.

How does this memory actually come about? The memory comes about in the following way: when I am confronted with a color impression or any other experience, the sensory impression is there first. Then this sensory impression is grasped as a mental image; but the mental image takes hold of the whole person and really sets the whole etheric body in motion. And this movement accumulates, you could say. This movement accumulates in the physical body; otherwise it would run away in all directions; but the physical body holds it together. This is why memory is also bound to the physical body. But in our etheric body, all the mental images that we have ever conceived during our life are present in all the possibilities of movement. Of course, it is not so easy to think, but you must remember that this etheric body is the most elastic thing you can imagine, and that you get an impression of everything you think, everything you imagine, and that you tend to retain this impression. Of course, our etheric body can retain not just millions, but billions of such impression tendencies. It has them too; they are dampened so that our entire memory is not constantly in front of our soul. They are dampened by the fact that we immerse ourselves in the physical body and in the entire etheric body.

But now, when the etheric body comes out of the physical body, this etheric body spreads. And you have around you presently - not one after the other as in memory, but presently - everything that you have ever imagined and that can become memory in life; not what is, but what can become, what you have ever imagined, that arranges itself into that great panorama of life that you have throughout the days. You have everything you have experienced in front of you in the form in which you thought it at the time, as you imagined it. Because the etheric body separates, everything becomes visible to the soul as if in a panorama. Otherwise it is all crowded together in the space of the skin through the physical body. Now it becomes interwoven with the whole world ether. And what was previously in us as memory until death now goes out and is interwoven into the outer ether. Our own experience, insofar as we have imagined it, now becomes world experience: We see it outside ourselves. It is outside of us. That which we have experienced between birth and death lives into the world ether. It is interwoven, woven, molded into the world. We do not live in vain, but that which we think during our life becomes, when we die, when we have passed through the gate of death, a piece of world life, a life within the world ether. It would be a strong prejudice to believe that our thoughts, which arise from the fact that we have experiences, belong to us longer than until our death. When we die, they penetrate out of our body and weave themselves into the world ether.

This is very important to note. Our inner being becomes an outer being in this way. And while all our mental images, our thoughts, submit to the world ether, there is added to our astral body and to our ego what could be called a kind of precondition for a spirit self. The spirit self will indeed approach the human being in a physical capacity once Jupiter has arrived. But everything that comes later in physical capacity comes early in spiritual capacity. And by shedding our etheric body, that is, by weaving it into the world ether, the spirit self is incorporated into us - not to the extent that it will be on Jupiter, for there it will have physical organs, but spiritually and mentally as a higher member of human nature.

So that we develop within the detaching inner etheric world, which influences and weaves itself into the world: astral body, as we already had it, ego and spirit self. Our ego can therefore now be directed towards that which we ourselves have now woven into the world ether. In the past, if we wanted to think about any thought that was within us, we had to lift it out of our memory, bring it out of our inner being into our consciousness. Now it is buried somewhere, buried as imagination in what we have worked into the world ether.

Then comes, as we have already learned in elementary spiritual science, the time in which the human being lives back, lives back the last life from death to birth at threefold speed. But he lives it back differently than it has been lived through here. When we live through life here, we have the impression of what we have as intentions towards other people, of how we behave towards other people, towards the things of the world. But there is a difference. Let's take a blatant example: I offend someone. I have certain feelings by insulting the other person, certain feelings. But the other person has also received feelings that offend them. He has them. I have the feelings that led me to say the insult; the other person has the painful feelings of receiving the insult. What I felt when I was insulted during my life here on earth is not what I go through after death, but what the other person who was insulted felt. We go through all the effects of our behavior in this return life. We cannot inflict anything on a person without experiencing it after death in this afterlife in the same way as he experienced it here in life. This means that we experience the effects of our actions, our thoughts and our feelings. We experience the effects. And while we experience these effects and live our way to the point where we have again arrived at our birth or conception, there now develops what we can call a precursor of the life-spirit, which as a physical organ will first be born on Venus for the human being, now spiritually and mentally surrounds the human being, so that, by shedding his astral body, he then has I, spirit-self, life-spirit. Thus the human being now lives himself into the spiritual world.

Then, when man in this way, we can say, has finished with the physical world by the fact that he has incorporated that which the physical world has given him, that he has incorporated it into the etheric body in the form of a tissue, has thereby also finished with the physical world, that he has not only lived in what he has done and thought, but also in the effects of his deeds, [in] his thinking, his feeling, his willing, then man is fully inside the spiritual world.

And you see, what does this being inside the spiritual world mean? It means that our whole environment actually becomes something different from the environment we have here in physical existence. Here in physical existence we are surrounded by other people, insofar as these other people have a physical body. We are surrounded by beings from the animal kingdom, the plant kingdom and the mineral kingdom. When we enter the spiritual world, we have ourselves in the actual spiritual world in such a way that our lowest member is the ego; here it was the highest, there it is our lowest member.

The next beings are beings [superior to us], Angeloi; just as here we have the beings of the animal kingdom standing below us as the next beings, there we have the Angeloi as beings standing above us. Archangeloi instead of the beings of the plant kingdom here, who are two steps below us, just as we have two steps above us there: Archangeloi. And so upwards: Archai and so on.

Now, as you can easily imagine from this, a time begins in which such an animal kingdom, such a mineral kingdom, as surrounds us here on earth, are naturally not present for us on earth. We live among our own kind at first and among beings who are higher than us. This being among our equals begins very soon after man has passed through the gate of death. It can be described in the ordinary sense, with ordinary words: Finding the souls that one has somehow approached on the physical plan, finding the souls again.

And you see, first of all it is important to form certain mental images about this re-finding. Most people would like to have mental images of the spiritual world that are as similar as possible to those of the physical plan. And if you give them difficult ideas, they say that these ideas are too difficult for them because they cannot understand them.

But you cannot understand the spiritual meaning if you only imagine it like shadows of the physical or something like that, but you have to turn upwards to higher mental images.

Suppose, my dear friends, that after death we meet a soul that has already passed through the gate of death before us. The first mental image we then have is this: We come face to face with a soul. - That it is a soul that has something to do with us is clear from the fact that we have the inner experience: You are now facing a soul. And now it is a matter of, starting from this feeling, this sensation, spiritually feeling, as it were, the spiritual place from which this feeling emanates: you are facing a soul. And then you experience inwardly what is in this soul. But it is not the case that the soul simply approaches you and gives itself to you; you have to create all the concepts, all the mental images, all the impressions you want to have of it yourself. At most you would get a mental image if you thought that we did not live in the light, but lived in darkness, and we would only know about each other by bumping into each other, and then we would have to create ideas by feeling each other plastically, by actively creating the ideas. So it is with regard to the dead who have gone before us. We must come together with them inwardly in this way, for this is the very basis of being with them - we must come together with them inwardly in such a way that we create the mental image of them ourselves inwardly and vividly when they confront us. If we want to have a mental image of them, we have to actively create this image.

Thus life after death presents itself as much more active, much more intense, than life here between birth and death. Here much can be at rest for us, there everything that is to become an experience for us is there through our own activity. We are in constant activity. But you must not think that this activity is unpleasant for us. We do not become lazy and casual in life after death; on the contrary, it would appear dead to us if we had to rest. This is how we perceive those souls who have passed through the gates of death before us. And this is also how we perceive those beings who belong to the hierarchies of the Angeloi, Archangeloi, Archai and so on. We have to create mental images of them. We know that they are there: We must create the mental images of them.

An exception to this are those souls that remain behind, souls that are therefore still in the physical body when we have already passed through the gate of death. We can also perceive such souls from the world in which we live after death. But these souls appear as if of their own accord; they appear like imaginations without us first generating these imaginations in activity. So that in a sense we have the world filled with self-existent imaginations and know: What comes to us as souls that confront us like an imagination are souls that are still here in the body. Where our activity demands that we have imaginations of them, pictures, these are souls that are at the moment only in the spiritual world. We then really look down from the world that we enter through the gate of death to the souls that we have left behind here and with whom we have lived between birth and death. And we not only perceive these souls, but we also perceive that which is in these souls, if it is something related to the worlds in which we are then inside, and our souls are already related to the worlds, so we perceive them. The souls of people who have remained behind are related to the spiritual worlds; they are perceived. But what these souls often experience here, you see, does not have to be perceived. If these souls here are completely turned towards the physical-sensual world, then the dead person perceives the souls, but not the impressions of the physical-sensual world; that no longer concerns him after death.

But when we read to the dead, as we have called it, when we therefore fill our souls with that which itself deals with the spiritual world, then these are thoughts which apply to the world in which the dead also live. Then this means that the dead see present in our souls those thoughts that relate to the spiritual world. - Therefore, we can really read to the dead in our thoughts. Even when we send them thoughts of love, that is, when we think of them, of the dead, we think of something that is in the spiritual world ... can they perceive that?

And the question can be raised, and it appears to be an important question, my dear friends: What are actually the thoughts for the dead that arise here in the soul of the living for the dead? The question is not so easy to answer. And you only gradually come to answer this question when you look at the spiritual world. For you see, you cannot gain real knowledge about the spiritual world by simply looking into the spiritual world at will and answering questions at will in the spiritual world, as people imagine.

To know what is right from the spiritual world, my dear friends, depends on experiencing things, really experiencing such a question: What do the thoughts of love for the dead mean? The thoughts that live in the souls of those who have remained behind here as pre-reading thoughts about things of the spiritual world for my sake - what do these thoughts mean for the dead?

This cannot simply be answered out of nothing, but it has to be experienced just as one has to carry out experiments here, for example in the field of natural science, in order to find out something, and one cannot fantasize at will about what one now has to read from the experiment, so one has to wait, if one researches spiritually, if one is to get to know the spiritual secrets here still in physical life, therefore in the physical body, one has to wait until the soul is suitable to receive something like this; otherwise you are fantasizing, otherwise you are not researching spiritually. Not at every moment is the soul capable of really seeing these or those truths. It must wait, wait until it is ready - and until the spiritual world is also ready - to give it these truths.

However, these are things that the so-called scholars in the physical world do not like to go into. Just think if you were to say to someone who wants to be a philosopher as a professor: Yes, you can already recognize the truth, but you have to wait - well, that's not possible, isn't it, that's exactly what the person who wants to be a philosopher in the outside world won't agree to; he knows, doesn't he, that he is a clever man and that he can think about that at any moment, that he can tell about what he sets out to fathom.

The fact that things want to be experienced, that things want to be approached, is not something that the bearer of such a conceptual stupor, one must say, as for example the philosopher Eucken lets it flow around the intellectual life of Central Europe, will engage in! Of course he will not get involved in such things. So these things are not so easy to find.

First and foremost, my dear friends, it is a matter of asking oneself the question again and again in all patience and in all humility, and first of all being content to put the question to the universe, as it were: What is the meaning of the loving thoughts we send after the dead? What do these thoughts mean that we send to the dead, reading to them from spiritual science?

If there is not yet time to answer such a question, we must wait, wait. Then the answer comes by following the question, as if in an imagination, a picture in which one experiences it. And I would like to give you an image for the question that is now before us. You see, one day, for example, you can experience that this answer comes to you, first as an imagination, whereby you know exactly: it is given to you as an image. Isn't it true that you first have the impression that you now have to raise a new question - the question: Could people live on earth if, for example, there was no art at all? You could eat, you could drink; but you would not see what Raphael painted, what Michelangelo painted - not true, if there were no art, you would not see your own portraits either. But you could live. - People could already live; they just wouldn't be human in the fullest sense of the word here on the physical plane: Art is added as something that makes life something higher than what is absolutely necessary: that is art.

The dead person could also live over there in the spiritual world between death and new birth if he had nothing but that which the spiritual world could give him; but it would be a life as it is for earth people here without warmth, without light, if life had to be lived without looking down on that which is going on in the souls of those still living on in the physical body. This is something that is added to the experience in the spiritual world, like art or, for my sake, the portraiture of people, isn't it, whereby life is also given something beyond what is necessary. - So something that goes beyond life, that enhances life, that is what is added; just as it is true that the world here is something through the fact that man does not merely remain limited to the continuous stream of natural events, but that this activity enters into him, going beyond the natural events, going beyond his own natural events - it is just as true that the life of the dead is infinitely enhanced precisely through that which lives here in the souls with regard to the dead.

From a deep instinct, people therefore celebrated the festivals of the dead in the times when they still lived out of the consciousness of the spiritual world (?). This retrospective view of the world of thoughts that remained in this world ... means a lot to those who go through life between death and a new birth.

So first you are given such an image when you ask the question, an image that relates to the physical world: Natural progression and art reference. And then you know: this image gives you something that you have to [read] first. And that's how you come to look at it: What do the dead do with what comes to them here in the way described? - It presents itself to you like this when you prepare yourself to recognize such a fact.

Another question, my dear friends, is certainly this: What do the dead do in the long time between death and a new birth? For, you know, it is a long time.

Now, what do the dead actually do? Yes, you see, this question is not so easy for the ordinary earthly mental image to answer, for the simple reason that people with materialistic ideas will very easily be inclined not to regard the much more comprehensive activity of the dead than of the living as activity at all. People have quite strange mental images of the actual deeper impulses of the world. You see, I have already pointed out such strange mental images. People say: Even mental and spiritual qualities that people have are inherited. People today, with their crude materialism, think that this can be proven: mental qualities are inherited from the father, the grandfather and so on. Because, if you look at genius, people say, you can see: a genius enters the world ... Goethe. A thick volume has recently been published on Goethe's ancestors, in which all the individual qualities that were concentrated on Goethe are collected from his father, grandfather, mother, grandmother and so on, far upwards, with great diligence. There should be no objection to the erudition of these honorable men; they are certainly all honorable men. It is said: You can see from the genius that his qualities are gathered from his ancestors.

Yes, my dear friends, that is a strange logic - merely taken as logic; for the fact that he who embodies himself as soul in the body has the qualities of his ancestors, in so far as these are bodily qualities, is no more wonderful than if someone falls into the water and is pulled out wet! Of course, he has in himself that through which he went: Namely, because he fell into the water, he got wet. That is not great wisdom. There would only be proof if one could prove it in outer life: Characteristics of a mental-spiritual nature are inherited as such.

But then you would have to prove that the genius passes on his genius traits to his descendants - that will be left alone, because we should start proving Goethe's traits in his descendants right down to his grandchildren! Or others.

That is the worst thing about materialistic science, that it regards the most stupid as the most logical, so to speak! One cannot say otherwise than: the most stupid. ... For it would only be a proof if one could prove from the descendants that the ingenious qualities of the ancestors were inherited in the same way and not, as one merely shows, that something was present in the descendants that was present in the ancestors, as is natural because the soul passes through that with which it connects itself in embodiment, because the soul envelops itself in that in which it embodies itself.

But not only that is the case; this so-called doctrine of heredity, which among all the follies that are spread by more or less materialistic philosophies or worldviews or whatever as monism - and God knows what all - is that which is pretty much one of the worst that is spread among the people: It turns all the true mental images upside down, as it were.

Just think about it, my dear friends: a soul comes into existence at a certain point in time; it has gone through life between death and the new birth and now comes into existence. What does it mean at first that this soul comes into existence? It means that this soul feels a certain kinship with two people, with the people who then become father and mother, a kinship. And because it feels a kinship with these people who become father and mother, that's why it leans towards this father and mother. But it inclines much earlier than you think!

In older times, who still knew much about these things (they also interpreted this materialistically; and what I am saying now is a materialistic interpretation; but at least the materialistic interpretation goes back to something true) - just think what value was placed on the first-born child in older views of life ... what that meant, the first-born child! Why was the first-born child regarded as something special? Because one felt in this first-born child (one only became conscious of it in the very oldest times, but not in later times, one only felt it there), because one saw in this first-born child the soul that first brought the parents together in the world, that brought them to marriage. The power had already worked down long before and brought the parents together. You could see that in it.

The later child had already found what his ancestor, the older child, had brought together; he no longer had so much freedom to put something together. His kinship was also there in relation to his father and mother, but he could no longer form the bond, he had to adapt his strength to a bond that had already been formed. And the institutions that were there are often interpreted materialistically today, regarded as superstition, but they do point to something that is based on truth in a certain way.

But not only this is the case, that the soul, after it has gone through the life between death and a new birth, when it has turned towards a new life, now works down to the parents, to father and mother; namely not only to the parents, but it goes much further: Also that the parents are the children of their respective grandparents, that is also already in this cooperation, the power already works in this. And again parents of grandparents. That which ultimately leads from a broad family stream to the parents works as if brought together from the whole world. The power that then descends and embodies itself in a human body is already at work there - and one can say: through centuries.

So it is indeed the case that one can say: Well, Goethe entered physical existence on August 28, 1749. He not only had an effect on his parents, he had an effect on his grandparents and caused his grandparents to have the parents he needed; he already had an effect on his great-grandparents and great-great-grandparents. In short, for centuries certain forces have been developed through the succession of generations, which can ultimately culminate in the soul in question appearing in the right way, in the measure most appropriate to its nature.

What takes place in this cooperation of people, in this weaving of a fabric between people, could now not only be our souls involved - they are involved in the way I have described - but these souls are involved under the guidance of the spiritual beings of the higher hierarchies. For this is a weighty process, these are weighty processes, my dear friends! Think of what is at work here in the world as something physical. Yes, people look at this physical world in a most [peculiar] way. Just think if there were beings who could not see people; it is quite conceivable that there would be beings who could not see people, but who can only see souls. So let's say: All the souls we have here would be able to see such beings, but they would not be able to see humans. Let us accept this hypothesis for a moment. What would these beings say? These beings would say: The clocks all come into being by themselves ..., because they would not see the work people do on the clocks. For these beings, the clocks would come into being all by themselves, they would run together somewhere themselves. So for these beings, the clocks would be self-generating entities. Such beings would walk through the city of Hanover and would say: There aren't any beings in there who make the clocks. ... So the clocks are created by themselves. - That's roughly what materialistic thinking says when it says: When a person is born, well, then he just comes into being by himself, doesn't he, through the gametes and so on. That is just as clever as if beings were clever who let the clocks come into being by themselves.

For, my dear friends, in the whole process, which goes on from century to century, and which appears to men only through their short-sightedness as proceeding through themselves, there the forces from the spiritual world work into it; there is nothing of chance, there the forces from the spiritual world work into it everywhere. That they appear to be somewhat coincidental is only because the forces flowing away are always thwarted many times by Ahriman. The spiritual powers always have an effect. The world is always directed and guided from the spiritual world. And the human being between death and the new birth participates from the spiritual world in the guidance of the physical world. He takes care of those matters that are directed and guided from the spiritual world.

To do this, however, many things have to happen in the spiritual world that are not visible in the physical world, that are only a matter for the spiritual world. You see, my dear friends, in our physical world we can say that our brain is a miraculous structure. Do you think you would have to put it there consciously? Of course you wouldn't be able to do that. You would not be able to create this miraculous structure of the human brain that you carry within you. It is not possible for your consciousness either, because the spirits of the higher hierarchies are also working on this miracle structure according to earlier periods on earth, according to our karma. Our karmic effects in earlier earth periods are being worked out. Our karmic effects today for later periods - as we make machines here. That's all we can do on earth. However, we can use them just as well as they are suitable for destruction, also in such a way that they prove useful for many works of man, many works of nature.

As we can make machines here, so those beings are made from the spiritual world, which cause those facts, which then lead to the beings, which go beyond the machine being.

How does such a human head actually come into being? This head that you have put on, how does it come about? Well, my dear friends, I have said that when man has passed through the gate of death, his thoughts are first interwoven into the world ether. They are in there with him.

That which he has felt, sensed, willed is not interwoven, but the thoughts. The other remains with his ego, which he carries through the world between his death and the new birth. This world of thoughts is interwoven. His sensory impulses, his feelings, his volitional impulses, they remain with him. But depending on what they were, the next life must be shaped. You see, the human being here in the physical world is, as it were, a duality: his head with that which goes into the spinal cord as a continuation - and then the rest of the organism, which is simply attached. You can see this in the skeleton, which you can see everywhere in every scientific collection; there you can observe this division into branches purely in the physical body: that which belongs to the head and the spinal cord, and that which is attached to it. If you look at these two, you will say to yourself: The head, with the exception of the sense of feeling, is primarily there to be the organ of cognition, the organ of thought, with its appendage, the spinal cord. The rest of the organism is attached to it, in which our movements develop, in which - even if today's physiology still looks at it from a completely wrong angle - our sensations, our feelings and so on are also physically localized, from which we now experience in this incarnation, my dear friends, from the rest of our body attached to the head. The new head for the next incarnation must be formed from these forms in accordance with the thoughts we have here.

And this new head will be formed in such a way - of course, it is difficult to state such a thing, but one can say - that it actually includes the whole universe. That which is in there now [in your head] was the appendix in your previous incarnation. That was the whole body. And that has been transformed in accordance with the thoughts that have been drawn outwards to the present head. It was, as it were, spread out over the whole world and is being drawn together more and more so that it can be our head. It is being spun together more and more. I only want to indicate that a whole world art and a whole world wisdom is necessary to create this sphere with its appendages, which is the human head that we use here between birth and death. Infinite work in the spiritual world is necessary to shape this head in such a way that it corresponds, is adapted and corresponds to what we prepared in the previous incarnation. Every little thread must correspond to what we prepared in the previous incarnation!

This means that we must exert an effect on the whole succession of generations from which we descend, so that from the eldest onwards everything is arranged in such a way that when we then have to choose a body, it is adapted to what we were in the previous incarnation. Here machines can be made - a human head, so that it becomes so (for that which happens in heredity is only, I would like to say, the shading of that which happens in the spiritual world), the forces that all this is inherited in such a way and that finally our head emerges, all this emerges as accomplished from the spiritual world. For our head to emerge, all the spiritual work is necessary, in which we ourselves participate between death and a new birth and in which the beings of the higher hierarchies participate.

If we can think wisely about our head, which we carry about us, we must not think otherwise than that we say to ourselves: You carry this head about you; but this head was, as it were, stretched out in the time between your last death and your present birth - as great as the outer world itself. Then the model of this head had to be prepared, adapted to all that you were in your previous incarnation, whole worlds of gods.

Then it had to be contracted into the small space it occupies when it sits on you as a head. We do not even think that we have the work of gods on us, that actually no other feeling, no other sensation can come over us - already through the way we are organized - than the feeling of deepest gratitude towards the spiritual beings among whom we are between death and a new birth. Knowledge of spirits is not only suitable for acquiring this or that knowledge, but for acquiring a feeling towards that which contributes to the formation of man.

I have tried, my dear friends, to evoke a sense of what I have now tried to express again in a certain form, to evoke a sense of it in the first part of the second [mystery drama] “The Trial of the Soul”, where it goes through Capesius' thought that whole worlds of gods work on what makes us human.

We are a small world in the truest sense of the word. But the big world has to work so that this small world, which is the human being, can come into being. Just as we work here in physical life, first in the mineral kingdom, but then also in the plant kingdom, in the animal kingdom, as we establish history, create social order, there is something similar in the world between death and a new birth. But so there is that the imprint of it is precisely in what we have around us as a human organization for the soul.

When you look at life, my dear friends, you will say to yourself: an important, a very, very important duty is incumbent upon the present. For of all the things to which attention is thus drawn - what does the outer science of the present know of all this? How does this external science of the present relate to all this? It knows nothing; its attitude is mocking, deriding. But on what path is this external science? One can truly have the greatest respect for the diligence and industriousness and precision and exactness of this external science. But what does it lead to?

You see, for example, an eminent criminal anthropologist has dissected a great many criminal skulls and found that murderers and other serious criminals have a very specific brain constitution: The occipital lobe does not completely cover the cerebellum, whereas in people who are organized normally, i.e. not criminally inclined, he found that all the occipital lobes fully covered the cerebellum. In criminals, it does not cover it. So you can say: There are people among us who have occipital lobes that are too short, they become criminals.

Yes, just think, when the materialist asks: Where does criminality come from? From the occipital lobe being too short! Because that makes humans similar to apes. The ape also has this: an occipital lobe that is too short. That is a regression, an atavism to the apes! - Is there the slightest point, my dear friends, in punishing someone or somehow punishing them for a crime if it is simply because they have an occipital lobe that is too short? Just think what a lie of life we live in when we still somehow talk about morality, when materialism teaches people: if you have an occipital lobe that is too short, you simply have to kill, for example! You can still punish, but it is nothing but a brutal lie if you still punish. - Other characteristics depend on other facilities in the brain. These things are not wrong ... They are right, absolutely right. It is true: criminals have too short an occipital lobe.

Imagine now that the materialistic worldview prevails, then it will never be accepted that man has an etheric body, for example. But if the spiritual-scientific worldview is victorious, then it will be said that man has his etheric body - and apart from the fact that he has the too short physical occipital lobe, he has his etheric occipital lobe! A person can now have his short physical occipital lobe quite well and be organized for it from childhood. But if you notice that he has certain characteristics that reveal that he has an occipital lobe that is too short, then you will place all the more emphasis on educating him in such a way that the etheric body is developed more strongly, that it becomes larger and the physical occipital lobe that is too short cannot harm him! The etheric brain will be trained all the more. And one will already have the experience if one educates in the sense indicated in the little book “The Education of the Child from the Point of View of Spiritual Science”: Then the human being will still have an occipital lobe that is too short in an incarnation, but the etheric brain will be in order and he will not become a criminal.

And this also results in the fact that in the next incarnation the dispositions that are in the etheric brain then become better physical dispositions in the next incarnation. But also here in the physical incarnation the corresponding training of the etheric body will serve them.

Now, however, if one denies it, then one can say nothing other than: However one may educate, one cannot then presuppose anything other than what is there. You cannot make someone who has too short an occipital lobe into anything other than a criminal. So if you deny the etheric body, you won't be as brainwashed and educate as if there were an etheric body, will you? In other words, if you have a materialistic worldview, if you deny the etheric body, then you will not develop the etheric bodies; then people with their small occipital lobes will become criminals.

But the tendency is there for everyone to gradually get it! In other words, what is worldview now creates the human physical form for future times. Let this have an effect on your soul and you will see that a false worldview is not merely an error, but that it is the seed for the downfall of nobler forms of humanity. What is only thought today will be the form of humanity in the future. Spiritual science must really intervene in life. Pedagogy must become something quite different, must above all become such that the people who have to practise pedagogy are instructed to really examine man in order to recognize what qualities he has, in order to then gain an insight from there into what his hidden dispositions are - not just the ordinary external ones.

You can see what an important start has been made with spiritual science for a necessary future human culture. But today everything still lends itself to denying this necessity, to not wanting to know anything about it. But sometimes one cannot understand how certain people can be so obtuse towards the world that they do not recognize certain things! We in the field of spiritual science emphasize again and again that it is only recently that people have come to live in the outer physical world in this way, for in the past they had clairvoyance, even if it was unconscious and atavistic. Those people who believe today how we have come so wonderfully far think: "Well, what a childish thing it was, what people fantasized about the spiritual world. “We've come so wonderfully far”, that we can finally see the world properly. And then they believe, no matter how far back you go, that people were all organized in the same way as they are now.

I would like to give you an example - but there are many such examples in the world - to show you how bluntly this is actually conceived, how really bluntly it is conceived! Look, if someone today paints that wonderful symbol, that wonderful picture in the Bible where the snake appears on the tree and performs the seduction that we call Luciferian seduction - today's painter paints the snake, doesn't he, of course: why shouldn't he paint a snake as it crawls through the grass?

He has no idea that he should do anything other than paint a snake, because that's clever, isn't it? If you didn't paint an ordinary snake, you would be stupid according to the materialists. He is clever, the painter, although he cannot quite see why he should be clever; for I do not believe that any woman, even if it is Eve, would allow herself to be seduced by a modern snake in this way! For how is this supposed to happen? How is this actually supposed to happen?

Not true, the point is that this serpent, even as it walks along today as a physical serpent, can only be a symbol, only an image, because the outer form for the seducer cannot be there on earth, since it is a lunar being. We have always emphasized that Lucifer remained behind during his lunar existence. He must have been organized differently then; he cannot have a physical form on earth. The serpent can only be a symbol, subsequently formed, is itself something that has descended, representing Lucifer.

But that which was there during the time of the moon cannot now be seen with physical eyes; it can only be seen inwardly. And how will Lucifer be seen? He remained behind during the lunar development. Why during the evolution of the moon? Because at that time he was already so far advanced that he had this human head; but the other, that which attaches itself to this human head, that is only earth organization; it was not yet there. If we wanted to depict Lucifer during the lunar period, we would see his head and the serpentine spinal cord attached to it. So if we as painters could perceive this clairvoyantly, we would, if we wanted to depict Lucifer, paint him as a serpent's body with a head. That would be roughly what you could recognize as Lucifer through inner vision.

When we were recently in Hamburg, my dear friends, we went through the main picture museum and found a picture from the 13th, 14th century by the master Bertram: there is the head story painted, the biblical story of temptation; and in paradise there is not a snake painted as today's naturalistic painter paints it, but on the tree a snake-shaped body and at the top a human head: Lucifer! In the 13th and 14th centuries, my dear friends, people still knew this, which now has to be conveyed to people through spiritual science.

There you have proof that can even be documented, because the picture is hanging there! The painter has not painted a biblical scene according to the naturalistic or materialistic view of the world, but what is real. It is not so long ago that mankind came out of the view of the spiritual world and into the materialistic worldview. But you see, how entangled humanity is today; how it cannot even imagine that just as that which today are spiritual dispositions has developed from something else, this in turn must develop into something else.

Through this, however, mankind cannot gain any ideas about that which is so connected with life, but which is life between death and a new birth, but only by gaining ideas that are not from the physical-sensual world, but ideas such as we have again cited today for life between death and a new birth, only through this can one understand the fullness of life.

But certain things that are taken for granted today, my dear friends, must first be eradicated from human development. Almost all school philosophy, even that which is admired today, must actually be eliminated because it is misleading, because it leads man away from the most important concepts and does not lead him towards them. It is very strange, for example, when you see - you will find this described in the chapter of my “Riddles of Philosophy” where I have titled the chapter: “The World as Illusion” - that is not because I want to show that the world is an illusion, but because there are philosophers in the nineteenth century who talk about the world being an illusion, that everything that is outside only makes an impression on our senses, so that we only have what the eyes evoke, what the ears evoke, in general what is evoked by the senses, that the world is actually only an illusion.

Where does it come from that people can indulge in such familiar mental images? It merely stems from the fact that people continue to think in a certain dishonest way - which can be proven - in a certain dishonest way. People come to the conclusion that if something is not color, if it makes a colorful impression, perhaps electric light, then the eye reacts to the perception of light, so actually all perception of light comes from the eye. Certainly, that which we initially have as our consciousness is a mirror image, and everything individual is a mirror image. People still say to themselves that everything is a reflection; but now they can't think any further, people. Now they let something be a reflection, their head, the other head, each head a reflection. But if one reflection gives the other reflection a slap in the face, a so-called slap in the face, then they can no longer claim that the image gave it a slap in the face; the relationships become real, real! The fact that you have to recognize reality from the thing itself, not through the intellectual, is something people already come to. You need not go into this in detail, my dear friends, for of course the friends gathered here cannot be familiar with the entire philosophical development as it exists today; but it is important for those who want to contribute to the development of spiritual scientific concepts to get a sense of how the present formation of the times actually leads people into a materialism that is initially an outlook on life, but which, if it were to become the practice of life, would lead humanity down the most crooked path.

What I was allowed to present myself, my dear friends, is presented in Central European spiritual education, but it will not only become a duty, it will have to become a love of duty; and it can become a duty for those who are seized by spiritual science, otherwise it will not be able to flourish! Spiritual science is also placed upon our souls as a task, as an important task for the future of humanity. That which man has an overview of must be expanded, expanded beyond the observation of that which works between birth and our death, beyond the greater time that lies between death and a new birth.

Today I tried to evoke sensations of these experiences between death and the new birth. As I said, this is obvious today. And I was already able to tell you here last year how this also brings us to a deeper understanding of the current meaningful events. We spoke here today about how everyone who passes through the gate of death sees interwoven what his thoughts and mental images were during his life. Now think of how many, many people go through death at a young age. The etheric body that they carry within them, that is, the sum of the powers of the etheric body, would still be able to sustain a physical body for decades on earth. The forces are not lost, they remain present. Of course, only that which the human being has lived through can become interwoven in the way I have described. But that which he could still have lived through remains there. These etheric bodies are therefore not present for the individual human being, who discards them; but they are present in the spiritual world.

Think how many, many young etheric bodies, which could have provided for human bodies, i.e. human lives, for decades, can be present in the spiritual world in the human future: These etheric bodies have the powers to work on people. They could have had an effect on the people who had discarded them if they had not had to make the sacrifice; they have the power to have an effect and they will have an effect. But the effect must be accepted, it must be accepted! It can only be accepted by those who can direct their thoughts up into the spiritual world. Note how important, how essential it is to allow oneself to be penetrated by perception: Through that which is brought about in such a terrible way by so, so many deaths in the present, this can bear fruit for the coming humanity, if souls are found here on earth who will have understanding for it, who will say to themselves: The world is woven and wafted through by the powers of the etheric bodies that come from those who passed through the sacrificial death. And thousands who have now passed through the sacrificial death are in the spiritual world. It is up to me, to me who am still in the physical world - as man must also say in this respect as in many others - to be able to develop a feeling for the fact that there are forces that want to enter me, that want to work!

Think of it, materialism lives on, survives the effects of this war - up there will be the forces of which I have now spoken to you, these etheric forces: on earth people will think materialistically and not let these forces flow into them, not let them flow into them in such a way that more and more people are already educated in the spiritual-scientific sense, that people experience the possibility of feeling the spiritual world! Then, of course, these powers are also there, but people do not absorb them, the light does not shine into the darkness! Instead, the light is then naturally taken over by other entities, by the ahrimanic, by the luciferic entities - and the development takes a completely different course. It is a cheap evasion, my dear friends, to say that it is not up to me to direct and guide such things. No, the gods have set people free. People must cooperate, cooperate here in physical life and cooperate between death and a new birth. It is not so important, it is really not so important that we absorb the individual teachings. We have to absorb them so that we strengthen ourselves more and more in the sensations. It is not important that we merely absorb these individual teachings, but that we feel more and more how we stand inside as spiritual scientists in the most important, in the most essential task of humanity. How this must happen, what can happen through spiritual science alone, learning to feel, that is the infinitely important thing! And so we can look at the overall stream of spiritual scientific development.

In this way we can look at such an event as the present war. ... Everywhere we see that we understand our time here correctly when we understand it in the light of spiritual science. Let us conclude by summarizing, with reference to the immediate events of our time, mainly that which results from such an observation, when we look up into the remaining, still unspent etheric bodies of men who have passed through sacrificial death, and look up to what these etheric bodies can become. We could just as well grasp the great currents of humanity in our perception in this way, but we want to do this with reference to the event of the time, so that this event of the time does not merely bring external glory to one state or the other, but that this severe test of humanity can also really serve to bring people themselves forward, to bring humanity forward as soul and spirit beings. And indeed, it was certainly a good thing for the Germanic tribes of that time that they were victorious over the Romans at the time of the fall of the old Roman Empire. But it was not only for this reason that the Germanic tribes won the victory over the Romans at that time, but everything that has happened since then, including the greatest tasks that mankind has solved, depends on the fact that the Germanic tribes and not the Romans won at that time! And so what the current events mean for the world does not depend solely on who prevails right now, but on whoever carries the important tasks for the next future of humanity must prevail.

Let us become aware of these human tasks, quite aware, otherwise these warlike events will remain external events. You must gain soul through soul knowledge, soul science. That is why we are once again penetrating ourselves with the feeling:

From the courage of the fighters,
From the blood of battles,
From the suffering of the abandoned,
From the sacrifices of the people
Becomes spiritual fruit -
Souls spiritually conscious
Their mind into the spirit realm.

May it so happen that you spirit-consciously direct your mind into the spirit realm so that spiritual science finds a soul earth realm into which it can sink its seeds! Humanity will need spiritual science as a force. Let us do our part, my dear friends, so that what must happen can happen. To arouse these feelings in your soul, it was dear to me that we were once again allowed to be together. But it is precisely at this difficult time that we must stick together in our thoughts, even when we are not physically together. For it is important, my dear friends, that there is now a group of people who faithfully and firmly hold on to spiritual science with their feelings. Whether we can see each other often or little with external physical eyes, let us stay together all the stronger in the spirit that unites us in our spiritual knowledge.

In this sense, let these last words be a word of comfort to you, and this as a parting word, my dear friends: goodbye!