Spiritual Teachings Concerning the Soul

GA 52 — 6 September 1903, Berlin

I. The Eternal and the Transitory in Human Beings

The subject to be discussed here is undoubtedly one that is of interest to all human beings. Who could say that they are not interested in the question of immortality with all their thoughts? We need only realize that humans feel horror at the thought of death. And even the few who are weary of life, who seek peace from life in death, cannot completely overcome this horror.

Attempts have been made to answer this question in many different ways. But remember that no one can speak impartially about something in which they have a vested interest. Will they then be able to speak impartially about this question, which is of the deepest interest to their entire life? And there is something else you must consider: how much depends on it for culture. The development of our entire culture depends on how this question is answered. The position of those who believe in something eternal in human beings will be quite different when it comes to all cultural issues.

Some say that it is wrong to give people this hope for the afterlife. They argue that the poor are lulled into complacency by this hope and are thus prevented from creating a better life for themselves here on earth. Others say that this is the only way to make existence bearable at all. When human desires are so strongly involved in a matter, all reasons for it are sought out. It would have mattered little to man to prove that two times two is not four if his happiness had depended on this proof. And because people could not refrain from letting their desires influence this question of immortality, it had to be raised again and again. For people's subjective sense of happiness is involved in this question.

It is precisely this circumstance, however, that has made it so suspicious to modern science. And rightly so. It is precisely the most eminent men of this science who have spoken out against the immortality of man. Ludwig Feuerbach says: “First people believed in immortality, and then they proved it.” By this he implies that man sought to find proof of it because he desired it. David Friedrich Strauss and, more recently, Ernst Haeckel in his “Welträtseln” (World Mysteries) express similar views. If I had to say something here that goes against modern science, I would not be able to speak on this question. But it is precisely my admiration for Haeckel's great achievements in his field and for Haeckel as one of the most monumental minds of the present day that allows me to take a stand against his conclusions in his own spirit. My task today is quite different from fighting the natural sciences.

Theosophy does not oppose natural science, but rather works with it. However, it does not stop there. It does not believe that we have only made such wonderful progress in the 19th century; that only ignorance and superstition prevailed in all the centuries before, and that only the science of our time has brought the truth to light. If truth stood on such weak foundations, one could have little confidence in it. But we know that truth was also at the core of the wisdom teachings of Buddha, the Jewish priests, and so on. The task of theosophy is to seek this core essence in all the various theories. But it does not stop at the science of the 19th century. And because this is so, we can undoubtedly also approach the question from the standpoint of science. In this way, it can form the basis from which we start when we seek the eternal in human beings.

Feuerbach is undoubtedly right in his previously quoted statement when he turns against the scientific method of the last fourteen centuries or so. However, he is wrong about the wisdom of earlier times. For the way in which the ancient schools of wisdom led to the knowledge of truth was fundamentally different. It was only in the later centuries of Christianity that faith was first demanded, to which the scholars then provided the evidence. This was not the case in the mysteries of antiquity. That wisdom, which was not readily disseminated, which remained the possession of a few, which was handed down to the initiated in sacred temples through the teachings of priests, had a different way of leading its disciples to the truth. This knowledge was kept secret from the uninitiated masses; it would have been considered profaned if it had been communicated to everyone without selection. Only those who had organized themselves through long practice in their spiritual life were considered worthy of understanding the truth in a higher sense.

Jewish tradition tells that when a rabbi once spoke of the secret knowledge, his listeners reproached him: “O old man, if only you had remained silent! What have you done! You are confusing the people.” — The betrayal of the mysteries was seen as a great danger if they were to be desecrated and distorted and become common knowledge. They were approached only with sacred reverence. The trials that the disciples of the mysteries had to undergo were severe. Our time can hardly form a mental image of the difficult trials that were imposed on the student. Among the Pythagoreans, we find that the students call themselves listeners. For years, they are only silent listeners, and it is entirely in the spirit of that time that this silence lasted up to five years. They are silent during this time. Silence, in this case, means refraining from any argument or criticism. Today, when the principle is “examine everything and keep the best” — when everyone believes they can judge everything, when journalism helps everyone quickly form an opinion even about things they do not understand — we have no idea what was demanded of a student in those days. Every judgment should be silent; one first had to make oneself capable of absorbing everything. If someone makes a judgment without this prerequisite, begins to criticize, he rebels against any further instruction. Those who understand something about it know that they need to spend years just learning and letting it sink in for a long time. Today, people don't want to believe that. But only those who have already understood things inwardly will come to their own correct judgment.

At that time, it was not the task of teaching to instill faith in someone; one led them up to the essence of things. They were given the spiritual eye to see; if they wanted to, they could go and try it out. Above all, the teaching was purifying; it was the purifying virtues that were required of the student. He first had to cast aside the sympathies and antipathies of daily life, which are justified there. All personal desires had to be eradicated beforehand. No one was admitted to the teaching who had not also cast aside the desire for the survival of his soul. Therefore, Feuerbach's statement does not apply to this time. No, first the belief in profane immortality was eradicated in the students before they could proceed to the higher problems. Seen in this light, it is understandable why modern science, with a certain degree of justification, opposes the doctrine of immortality. But only to a certain extent.

David Friedrich Strauss says that appearances contradict the idea of immortality. Well, appearances contradict many things that are recognized scientific truths. As long as the movement of the earth and the sun was judged by appearances, no correct judgment could be made about it. We only recognized it correctly when we no longer trusted the eye alone. And perhaps appearances are not what we should rely on in this question.

We must be clear: Is it the eternal in man that we see being passed on and changing within him? Or do we find it outside? The individual flower blooms and fades, but only that which is expressed in every flower of the species remains. Nor do we find the eternal outside in the history of states. What once constituted the external forms of the state has passed away, but what presented itself as the guiding idea has remained.

Let us examine how the transitory and the eternal manifest themselves in nature. You all know that seven or eight years ago, none of the substances that make up your bodies today were in your bodies. What made up my body eight years ago is scattered throughout the world and has completely different tasks to fulfill. And yet I stand before you, the same person I was. If you now ask: What remains of what made an impression on the eye? Nothing. What remains is what you cannot see and yet what makes a person what they are. What remains of human institutions, of states? The individuals who created them have disappeared, but the state remains. So you see that we are wrong to consider the eye to be the essence, which only sees what changes, while the essence is the eternal. And understanding this eternal is the task of the spiritual. What I was fulfills other tasks. Even the substances that make up my body today do not remain the same, they enter into other combinations and yet are what make up my physical body today. What holds them together is the spiritual. If we hold on to this thought, we will recognize what forms the eternal in man.

The eternal reveals itself to us in a different way in the animal, plant, and mineral kingdoms. But there, too, we can observe that which endures. If we crush a crystal formation, for example table salt, into powder, put it into a suitable solution, and allow it to recrystallize, the particles automatically assume their characteristic form again. Their inherent formative power was the enduring element; it remained, as it were, germinating, ready to awaken to new activity when the occasion arose. Thus we also see countless seeds emerging from the plant, from which new plants emerge when they are entrusted to the field. All the creative power rested invisibly in the seed. This power was capable of awakening the plants to new life. And this applies to the animal and human worlds as well. Even what we perceive as the human form comes from a tiny cell. However, this does not lead us to what we refer to as human immortality. And yet, on closer inspection, we will find something similar here too. Life develops from life; the invisible stream flows through it. However, no one will be satisfied with the immortality of the species. In it, the principle of humanity is passed on from generation to generation. But it is only one of the ways in which the enduring is preserved. There are also other ways in which interdependence manifests itself. To illustrate this, let us take an example from the plant world.

Hungarian wheat, which was brought to Moravia and sown there, soon becomes very similar to the native wheat. The law of adaptation comes into effect here. It now retains the characteristics it has acquired. We see something new emerging here: the concept of development. The entire world of organisms is subject to this law. Underlying this is an idea of development, according to which imperfect living beings transform themselves into more perfect ones. They change their external constitution, acquire different organs, so that what is preserved develops progressively.

You see that we have arrived at a new kind of permanence. When natural scientists today explain a life form, they do not give the answer given by natural scientists in the 18th century, who said: There are as many species of living beings as were once created by God. — That was an easy answer. Everything that came into being was brought to life by a miracle of creation. Nineteenth-century natural science freed us from the concept of miracles in its field. Natural forms owe their existence to evolution. Today we understand how animals evolved into higher forms of existence, up to and including apes. When we look at the different animal forms as a temporal sequence, we recognize that they were not created as such, but arose through evolution. But we see even more.

The flowers of some plants undergo such considerable transformations under certain circumstances that one would no longer want to describe them as belonging to the same species. Nature does indeed make leaps, and so, under certain circumstances, it allows one species to emerge from another. But in every species there remains something that reminds us of what came before; we understand them only in relation to each other, not in themselves, but in relation to their ancestors. If we follow the temporal development of species, we understand what lies before us in space. We see the development over millions of years and know that in millions of years everything will look different again. Substances are constantly being replaced; they are constantly changing. Over thousands of years, the monkey evolved from the marsupial. But something remains that connects the monkey to the marsupial. It is the same thing that holds humans together. It is the invisible principle that we saw as permanent within us, which was active thousands of years ago and continues to work among us today. The external similarity of organisms corresponds to the principle of heredity. But we also see how the form of living beings is not only inherited, but also changes. We say: something is inherited, something changes; there is something transitory and something that is preserved through the changing times.

You know that humans correspond to their ancestors in terms of their physical characteristics. Their shape, face, temperament, and even passions can be traced back to their ancestors. I owe the movement of my hand to an ancestor. Thus, the law of heredity extends from the animal and plant kingdoms into the human world. Can this law be applied in the same way to all areas of the human world? We must seek out the specific laws in each area. If Haeckel had made his great discoveries in the field of biology, would he have limited himself to examining the brains of different animals chemically, for example?

The great laws are present everywhere, but in their own way in each field. Apply this question to human life, to the field in which people today are still the most fervent believers in miracles. Today, everyone knows that monkeys evolved from more imperfect forms of existence. Only when it comes to the human soul do people still stand on the ground of the most flourishing belief in miracles. We see different human souls; we know that it is impossible to explain the soul through physical inheritance. Who, for example, could explain Michelangelo's genius from his ancestors? Anyone who wanted to explain the shape of his head or his figure would probably want to draw conclusions from pictures of his ancestors. But what in them points to Michelangelo's genius? And this applies not only to genius, but to all people in the same way, even if one chooses genius to prove most clearly that its characteristics are not due to physical heredity.

Goethe himself felt this way when he spoke in his famous verse about what he owed to his parents:

From my father I have my stature,
The serious approach to life,
From my mother, the cheerful nature
And the desire to tell stories.

Even the talent for storytelling is, in essence, an external characteristic. However, it would be impossible for him to have inherited his genius from his father or mother, otherwise it would also be evident in them. We may owe our temperament, inclinations, and passions to our parents. But we cannot look to our biological ancestors for what is most essential to a person, what makes them truly unique. Our natural sciences, however, only recognize the external characteristics of human beings. They seek to explore only these. This leads them to believe in the miracle of the human soul. They investigate the nature of the human brain. But can it explain the human soul from the physical nature of the brain and so on? Is Goethe's soul therefore a miracle? Our aesthetics would like to regard this point of view as the only correct one to take towards genius, and believes that genius would lose all its magic if it were explained. But we cannot be satisfied with this information. Let us try to explain the nature of the soul in the same way that we researched plant and animal species; that is, to explain how the soul develops from lower to higher forms. Goethe's soul descends from an ancestor just as his physical body does. How else could anyone explain the difference between, say, a Hottentot soul and Goethe's soul? Every human soul can be traced back to its ancestors, from whom it developed. And it will have successors who will emerge from it. However, this development of the soul does not coincide with the law of physical heredity. Every soul is the ancestor of later soul successors. We will understand that the law of heredity that prevails in space cannot be applied in the same way to the soul. However, the lower law remains in existence alongside the higher laws. The chemical and physical laws that prevail in space determine the external organism. We too are entangled in this life with our bodies. Standing in the midst of organic development, we are subject to the same laws as animals and plants.

Regardless of this, however, the law of spiritual refinement takes effect. Thus, Goethe's soul must once have existed in another form and has developed further from this soul form, independent of the external form, just as a seed develops into another species, dependent on the law of change. But just as the plant has something permanent that survives change, so too has that which was permanent in the soul entered a state of germination, like the seed in the topsoil, in order to appear in a new form when the conditions are right. This is the doctrine of reincarnation. And now we will understand natural scientists better.

How can something that did not exist before be permanent? But what is permanent? We cannot consider everything that makes up a person's personality, their temperament, their passions, to be permanent; only that which is truly individual, which existed before their physical appearance and therefore remains after their death. The human soul enters the body and leaves it again, in order to create a new body for itself after the time of maturity and move into it. What originates from physical causes will pass away with our personality, with death; what we cannot find physical causes for, we will have to regard as the effect of a previous past. What endures in human beings is their soul, which works from the deepest inner self and survives all changes. Human beings are citizens of eternity because they carry something eternal within themselves. The human spirit feeds on the eternal laws of the universe, and only through this is it able to understand the eternal laws of nature. Human beings would only recognize the transience of the world if they themselves were not permanent. What will remain of what we are today is what we incorporate into our imperishable nature. Plants change under certain conditions. The soul, too, has adapted; it has absorbed much within itself and ennobled itself. What we experience as eternal, we will carry on into another embodiment. Only when the soul enters a body for the first time is it like a blank slate, and we transfer to it what we do and absorb within ourselves. As true as the law of physical inheritance prevails in nature, so true does the law of spiritual inheritance prevail in the spiritual realm. And just as physical laws do not apply to the spiritual realm, so too do the laws of physical heredity not govern the continued existence of the soul. The ancient sages, who did not demand belief before they had established it through knowledge, were fully aware of this fact.

The question: How does the soul relate to its former state in its present state? —, which might arise here, I would like to answer in the following way. Souls are in a state of constant development. This results in differences between individual souls. A higher individuality can only develop by going through many incarnations. In the normal state of consciousness, people have no memory of the previous states of their soul, but only because this memory has not yet been acquired. The possibility for this exists. Haeckel himself speaks of a kind of unconscious memory that runs through the world of organisms and without which a number of natural phenomena would be inexplicable. Therefore, this memory is only a question of development. Humans think consciously and act accordingly, while monkeys act unconsciously. And just as they have gradually risen from the stage of consciousness of monkeys to conscious thinking, so will they later, with the progressive perfection of consciousness, remember their previous incarnations. As Buddha says of himself: I look back on countless incarnations — just as it is true that in the future every human being will have the memory of so many previous incarnations, once this self-consciousness has developed in each individual, so it is already present in certain advanced individuals today. With progressive perfection, this ability will be communicated to more and more people.

This is the concept of immortality as given by theosophy. It is a new and an old concept. This is what those who wanted to teach not only faith but knowledge once taught. We do not want to believe and then prove, but we want to enable people to seek and find the evidence themselves. Only those who want to work on the development of their soul will achieve this. They will progress from life to life toward perfection, for the soul was not created at birth, nor will it disappear at death.

One of the objections often raised against this view is that it makes people incapable of living. Let me address this with a few words. No, theosophy does not make us incapable of living, but rather more capable, precisely because we know what is permanent and what is transitory. Of course, anyone who thinks that the body is a garment that the soul merely puts on and takes off again, as is sometimes said, will become incapable of living. But that is a false image that no researcher should use. The body is not a garment, but a tool for the soul. A tool that the soul uses to work in the world. And those who know what is permanent and strengthen it within themselves will use the tool better than those who know only what is transitory. They will strive to strengthen the eternal within themselves through constant activity. They will carry this activity over into another life and become ever more capable. This image will dispel the notion that knowledge makes people incapable of living. We understand how to act more capably and enduringly only when we realize that we are working not only for this one short life, but for all future times.

Let me express the power that arises from this awareness of eternity in the words that Lessing placed at the end of his significant treatise on “The Education of the Human Race”: “Is not all eternity mine?”