Human History in the Light of Spiritual Investigation

GA 61 — 26 October 1911, Berlin

Death and Immortality in the Light of Spiritual Science

When the subject of today's consideration is called “Death and Immortality,” it might seem at first glance that the impetus for such a consideration lies in the personal needs of the human soul, which have little to do with knowledge or science. However, if you look at the series of lectures that are to be given in this cycle as spiritual science lectures, you will see that the choice of titles and the like already indicate that a scientific standard, albeit a spiritual scientific standard, is to be applied to the subjects under consideration. Therefore, this evening's consideration will not so much start from what we find within our mere emotional life, within our longings and desires for a life that goes beyond the physical life of the body. Rather, it will be about how human knowledge must relate to the questions of death and immortality in the same way that this knowledge relates to other objects of our knowledge. For if we disregard the longing for a life that transcends the physical, if we disregard what is to be understood in terms of concepts such as fear of death and the like, then what remains for human knowledge in relation to death and immortality is nothing less than the question of the nature of our human life, of our entire human individuality.

In our present time, however, it might seem as if these important questions about death and immortality must be excluded from all considerations of spiritual life. For if one takes up one of the official doctrines of the soul in so-called psychology today, one will find a comprehensive treatment of the phenomena of the life of the soul as they encounter us in everyday life, for example, the question of the development of concepts, the question of memory, perception, attention, and the like, but one will search in vain for a discussion of the actual nature of our soul life. Indeed, in most scientific circles one will encounter the prejudice that anyone who even wants to raise these questions as scientific ones must be a dilettante.

Now, of course, thinking and scientific observation must be directed into different channels than is usually the case when subjects such as death and immortality are to be considered. It will not suffice to do what is so popular today: to have a doctrine of the soul — as it is called — without a soul, that is, a doctrine of the soul in which only the phenomena of the soul life are to be considered, without any possibility of looking at the actual essence of what lies in our own individuality and is expressed in the phenomena of soul experiences. Spiritual science or anthroposophy offers an unusual perspective on these and other questions. However, what it has to say about the questions of death and immortality has, one might say, emerged from Western cultural life for more than a century now, as if from dark spiritual grounds. Only it has always been taken as the dream of individual people, perhaps even of very distinguished people, when it occurred in a mind that had otherwise achieved so much, so great things for German intellectual culture, as in the case of Lessing, for example. But it has also been regarded as a meaningless dream when it occurred in the minds of those whose names are less illustrious in the intellectual life of recent decades.

Spiritual science also stands where it deals with such distant things as those contained in the words death and immortality, not in any opposition to what the admirable natural sciences are accomplishing today. However, there is a widespread belief that natural science must reject what spiritual science has to say. Thus we can see that every time something new emerges, as has happened in the last decade with regard to the problems of life, for example, it is pointed out how the assumption of an actual spiritual life that goes beyond mere physical, material life must gradually be completely overcome. Spiritual science is by no means compelled to deny anything that arises, for example, in debates such as those conducted by Jacques Loeb in the final days of the Monist Congress on the problem of life, while spiritual science, however, hears again and again, as it did then, that spiritual scientific observation is now finally over if one can hope that it will finally be possible in the laboratory to life, living becoming, from the external conditions of material events.

In response to all such things, one need only remember one thing. There have been times in human life and human thinking when there was truly no doubt that it would one day be possible to create life in the laboratory. And all those who thought about the depiction of the homunculus in the second part of Goethe's “Faust” and remembered that this depiction of the homunculus was really a kind of dream of natural science in ancient times, that is, the depiction not only of a subordinate living being, but also the dream of natural scientists to one day create the highest form of life, the human being, in the laboratory, — all those who cherished this dream did not think at all that the spirit must now be abolished from all human and worldly contemplation. There is no contradiction to all spiritual contemplations of life in the hope that living beings can be created from the combination of external substances. No, it lies solely in the direction of thinking, in the direction that thinking habits take. And the thinking habits that develop in those who delve more and more deeply into what is called spiritual science here, these thinking habits reveal a view of a certain factor in human becoming, in the whole of human development, that goes beyond the material.

The purely materialistic view of human life says: We see a human being come into existence, and we observe how, let's say, from birth or conception onwards, the material processes unfold in such and such a way, and we see how the human being gradually transforms from a clumsy creature into a human being who finds his way into life and can accomplish life's tasks. And in addition, after certain ascending processes, we see descending ones, which gradually lead to the dissolution of physical corporeality or to death. — This materialistic view of life focuses solely on what can be seen with the eyes or achieved with the armed eye and with methods of thinking and research based on sensory perception. This forces us to go beyond what is given at the moment of birth or conception, because not everything that will appear in a human being can be explained by considering only those factors that prevail between birth or conception and death. This leads us to speak of inherited predispositions, that is, of what humans are said to have implanted in their own nature through the characteristics possessed by their parents or even older ancestors. But as long as one remains within the purely materialistic view, one believes that all factors, all elements that are supposed to explain human life, are exhausted in what can be observed between birth and death, or what is implanted in human life through the inherited characteristics of parents or other ancestors.

However, as soon as people start to think about really investigating this heredity in humans, they soon realize how superstitious it is and that it is no less superstitious than the superstitions of earlier times, which sought to attribute everything that humans experience in their lives to inherited predispositions. In the last decade, a very intelligent historian and historical researcher, Ottokar Lorenz, undertook to examine families whose ancestry was known in order to determine the extent to which the characteristics of parents, ancestors, and so on shine through in the lives of their descendants. However, based on his purely empirical observations, he could only conclude that when one looks up the line of one's ancestors, one always finds that among the twenty to thirty ancestors that each person can count upwards, there are always people who were either geniuses or fools, wise men or fools, musicians or other artists, so that if one goes up the line of ancestors, one can have all the characteristics that are found in any human being, and that if one clings to the prejudices of scientific theories, one does not get very far in reality when one wants to explain this or that disposition, this or that expression of human character, this or that characteristic.

Spiritual science now adds to all that can actually be found within the line of inheritance as conditions for human life—and when it is found through experience, it does not deny the connection—a spiritual core that we cannot find in all that we seek in our parents, ancestors, and so on, but which we must seek within a supersensible, spiritual world. So that in the course of the process that takes place when a human being comes into existence through birth or conception, something is connected with the physical factors that cannot be demonstrated physically, something that is spiritual in nature. And this spiritual element, which cannot be seen with physical eyes, is the entity that we carry within us as the result of our previous earthly lives, as they say. Just as we trace our physical ancestry back to our ancestors, we have a spiritual ancestry that can be traced back to a spiritual ancestry, that is, to ourselves. Spiritual science is compelled to speak not only of one earthly life of the human being, but of repeated earthly lives. However, for reasons that will become clear in the course of these lectures, we must go back far, far into the past if we want to find our essence in our previous life, so that in the spiritual scientific sense, with regard to the human being's entry into earthly life, we say: We bring our core essence up from a previous life; we have lived through this previous life, gone through death, and undergone a life between death and our renewed appearance in our present life. Spiritual science is further compelled to think this core of our being, which is not a product of material existence but which, as it were, gathers and shapes matter so that we become this physical body, through the gate of death again when the body dissolves, in order to then undergo a new supersensible, spiritual life between death and a later life. Therefore, on the basis of spiritual science, we speak of repeated earthly lives.

Thus, within the Western world, this idea of repeated earthly lives first appears, out of the compulsion of thought, in Lessing's work, which he left behind as his testament, in “The Education of the Human Race,” where he says of this teaching: Even if it is the oldest to which humans have professed, should it not be one that must reappear at the peak of human development? — And Lessing also answers many questions that can be raised in his “Education of the Human Race” with regard to repeated earthly lives. However, when such a thing occurs in an outstanding person, people who judge this outstanding spirit usually say: He has achieved great things, but later fell prey to this strange dream of repeated earthly lives, and one must give credit to the great Lessing, who was also capable of committing this strange error. - Thus, every small mind feels called upon to judge the great minds with their “grave errors.”

But some individuals in the nineteenth century could not let this idea rest, and even before the advent of modern Darwinian science, the idea of repeated earthly lives reemerged as a necessity of human thought. We encounter it in a book by Droßbach on human rebirth, a book that is confusing from our point of view, but an attempt to entertain this idea, especially in contrast to scientific thinking. Soon after, a small community was formed that offered a prize for the best writing on the “immortality of the soul,” and this award-winning writing by Widenmann, published in 1851, dealt with the question of immortality from the standpoint of repeated earthly lives. I could cite many other examples that would show how human thinking has gradually led many people to consider the idea of repeated earthly lives.

Then came the scientific view of man, based on Darwin. At first, it led to a materialistic view of man, and it will continue to view him that way for a long time to come. But if you take my book Theosophy or others that are written in the spirit of both spiritual science and natural science, you will see that scientific thinking, taken to its conclusion, today compels human beings to consider the idea of repeated earthly lives. But that is not all. It is not merely a logical consequence that I want to demonstrate to you today, but rather to show that, based on the same principle that prevails in natural science, namely the experimental, experiential principle, human beings must indeed arrive at the idea of repeated earthly lives. This raises the question: Is there a way to gather experience about what is supersensible, what comes over from another life, what enters from supersensible worlds, what has an effect on the human body as it is, and what leaves this human body again at death?

On the surface, even without the foundations of spiritual science, it can be seen, but only in a rough way, how an inner, spiritual element works on the outer physicality of the human being; only today, reflections of this kind are not particularly popular. But if we were to focus more closely on what we call the physiognomy of the human being in its various plastic forms, if we were to see in this physiognomy, also in the facial expressions of the human being, in the gestures that are individual to each person, the creative spirit, the creative soul force, one would soon gain a feeling, a sense of how the spirit works internally on the physical body. Just try observing a person who has been working for about ten years on problems of knowledge, on the great questions of life, but has worked on them in the way one does in an external science or philosophy, where one thinks about these things without them saying much to one. Or try observing a person who has been so preoccupied with these questions that they have become inner matters of the soul, leading them to states of supreme bliss, but also of supreme pain and deepest tragedy, to heavenly views of existence that can make them happy, and again to realms that can make them supremely unhappy. Consider a person who is preoccupied with questions of knowledge in his mind, and consider him after he has led such a soul life through the deepest and highest regions for ten years, and one will see how this process is expressed in his physiognomy, how the person's face has changed, how the human soul actually works into the physical body, into the physical form and constitution. Could one now, through certain methods, continue to pursue such work on the outer physicality of the human being to the point where not only certain forms of our face are reworked so that the imprint of the soul life is impressed upon them, but where the indeterminate form that the human being initially has in earthly existence becomes completely what the human being has as his or her developed form? Could one seek beyond birth and death that which works on the human being and increasingly shapes the physical form of that human being?

To do this, it is necessary for human beings to take their soul life beyond the point where it stands in everyday life today. Human beings must learn to grasp within themselves the supersensible, that which is not accessible to external observation. Now, every human being can, through mere reflection, find the two points where our life directly touches the supersensible. These two points are the transition from the waking state to the sleeping state and back again from the sleeping state to the waking state. For no one should indulge in the illogical idea that human soul life ceases when we fall asleep and begins again when we wake up. What human soul life is, what flows from morning to evening as our drives, desires, emotions, passions, ideas, and so on, must be in some state of existence during sleep; in other words, it must be somewhere. This raises the big question that a child might ask, but which is by no means unjustified for those who engage with questions of knowledge, namely: Where does the human soul go when a person sleeps? We also see other processes come to an end; for example, we see a burning candle go out. Could we also ask: Where does the fire go? We would say: Fire is a process that ceases when the candle is extinguished and begins again when it is relit. Could one now compare the physical process of the human being with the candle and say: Is the soul life of the human being a process that is extinguished when the human being falls asleep in the evening and is lit again in the morning when he or she awakens? It may seem as if this comparison could be used. But this comparison becomes impossible if one could actually prove that, although not for ordinary perception or sensation, but rather for a sensation that can be attained through careful preparation of the soul, what leaves our body when we fall asleep and returns to it when we wake up can appear before us. If it is the case that when we fall asleep, it is not merely a process like that of a flame going out, but if we can follow what leaves the body in the evening when we fall asleep and returns to it in the morning, if we can prove this process in its reality, then we have a supersensible inner being of the human being, in relation to which we are then asked the question: How does it work within the physical body?

Even the famous natural scientist Du Bois-Reymond expressed the idea that the sleeping human being, as he lies before us, can be understood from the standpoint of natural science, but not the waking human being, in whom drives, instincts, passions, and so on ebb and flow. Now you can find what I have only briefly outlined today, albeit more precisely than in the first lecture, described in more detail in my book “How to Attain Knowledge of Higher Worlds.” There I describe the methods, which we will now briefly touch upon, by which human beings can actually come to know the reality of what leaves the body during sleep and what re-enters it upon awakening. Let us first ask attentive observers of the soul who do not pass inattentively by human waking and falling asleep, but have acquired a certain ability to listen to these important moments such as falling asleep and waking up.

There we hear what spiritual science can certainly confirm about human falling asleep: First, what is clearly and distinctly present in the environment, with sharp contours, is transformed into a nebulous, blurred form. Then the person falling asleep feels as if their entire inner being is expanding and no longer dependent on the forms of their physical skin; this is associated with a certain feeling of bliss. Then comes a strange moment in which the person can feel, as in a fleeting dream image, everything they have accomplished during the day that is morally satisfying to them; it stands vividly before them, and they know that it is part of their soul, they feel themselves within it. Then there is a sudden jolt, and the person feels: Oh, if only this moment could last forever! It is precisely this feeling – Oh, if only this moment could last forever, if only it could never end! – that many people feel when they observe the moment of falling asleep. Then consciousness disappears.

It can already be said that in such a moment, the human being passes into an inner essence, within which the outer physical body plays no role, since it is tired from the day's exertions and no longer makes its powers available to us. In such a moment, one feels the reality of the soul rushing by. And all the methods of spiritual science that we can call experimental in the field of spiritual research consist of nothing other than helping people to obtain the inner strength, the inner power, to maintain this which is fading away in full presence, so that they can go through the moment of falling asleep in full consciousness, so that consciousness does not fade away but is preserved. For why does consciousness fade when we fall asleep? It fades because in ordinary life we cannot develop the inner strength and will to continue experiencing something when our outer senses abandon us. Let us ask ourselves how much we experience within the soul in ordinary life that is not stimulated by external impressions, that does not at least form memories of what the senses have stimulated? For most people, very little remains. No wonder that there is no inner strength that can penetrate with inner streams of power what is inner soul life, and what is abandoned by all outer experience at the moment when it emerges in falling asleep. All spiritual development is based on the permeation of our soul with the power that the soul needs to maintain consciousness when it does not receive it through the body. What we call meditation, concentration, and contemplation are experimental means of advancing the life of the soul beyond what is possible in ordinary life. I will give just one example of this.

Let us suppose that a person comes to the point of placing a thought, for example of goodwill, or some other thought, at the center of their experience and excluding all other thoughts, including those that may enter through the eyes, ears, and so on, holding on to this one thought alone, for in such moments thoughts fly to a person like bees to flowers when one is in the midst of ordinary life. But if one can find the strength to return to such exercises again and again, to practice concentration of thought, to immerse oneself meditatively as soon as one can free oneself from mere external impressions, and to delve again and again into pictorial thoughts that express something symbolically, then such a thought can stir a person in their soul life, so that they become a stronger force than they usually are. Then such a person achieves conscious sleep, that is, remaining conscious of what leaves the physical body; they consciously experience how they grow into a spiritual world with their soul life. And this is not a dream, nor is it what one might call self-deception or self-suggestion, but something that is accessible to every human being, yet can only be achieved through diligence and energy. In this way, the human being can completely free themselves from physicality. Just as they otherwise free themselves from it unconsciously in the state of sleep, and just as every human being is outside the physical body in the state of sleep, so through such exercises they become consciously alive in what is otherwise unconsciously present outside the human being. In short, through inner soul exercises, human beings can experience a liberation of their soul being from physicality.

Of course, one can always counter such a description, which is based on inner experience, by saying: That is based on deception! But whether it is based on deception or reality can only be ascertained through experience. Therefore, I must say again and again: What people believe they experience in this way may well be self-suggestion, for how far can people go in terms of self-deception! — They can go so far that, for example, just thinking about lemonade makes them taste it on their tongue. So something may well give the impression of being a perception of a spiritual world, yet it may be self-deception. Therefore, anyone who undergoes such exercises and makes their soul an experimenter must use all means to rule out deception. But in the end, only experience decides. Certainly, someone can suggest the taste of lemonade to themselves, but whether they can quench their thirst with it is another question.

So there is the possibility of experiencing what is outside the physical body during sleep as reality. How is it experienced? In such a way that, by going further and further into the independence of their soul, people get to know a whole new world, a world of the supersensible. And indeed, they begin by getting to know a world that can only be called a world of spiritual light. Something very special then emerges. What people otherwise call their thoughts, their ideas, and what they are inclined to say are just thoughts, not realities — that is something that people take with them when they actually step out of their bodies with their souls. They detach their mental life from all materiality, and this mental life undergoes a metamorphosis at the moment when they are freed from their physicality. What I am saying now may seem like something baroque, like a dream, to those who stand on materialistic ground, but it is nevertheless a reality. What we carry within us as mere thoughts is transformed into a world that we can compare — but only compare, it is not the same — with a spreading light that leads us to the bottom of things. This is how one enters the world in which one detaches oneself from the thinking that is otherwise bound to the instrument of the brain and, with one's thinking, submerges into a newly appearing world. This is expressed in the way that one feels more and more enlarged and enlarged. There you get to know a world of which the outer physical-sensory world is only a revelation. Spiritual beings, not atoms, underlie all the outer sensory world, and we as human beings can penetrate this spiritual world. Thus, when we carry out this self-experiment in our soul, we see ourselves, as it were, absorbed and taken up by such a spiritual world.

We can only gain complete insight into the relationship between this spiritual world and us humans if we can also experience the moment of awakening spiritually. This is also possible. It is possible when a person engages in deep reflection on their inner life through meditation and concentration, for example, when they review what they experienced during the day or the previous day every evening or every morning, as if in a picture, in order to contemplate it within their actions or in connection with their actions, and contemplate it, or when they reflect on their moral impulses and really look within themselves. Then people can also consciously experience the reverse moment, when we reconnect from life out there to submerge ourselves in our physicality, that moment which we otherwise go through unconsciously every time we wake up, through such exercises.

Then he experiences something that can only be characterized in the following way. You may all know how a person's sleep, healthy, peaceful sleep, depends on what we call his emotions. No matter how much a person has thought, no matter how hard he has strained his mind, he will fall asleep easily. But if anger, emotions, shame, remorse, and especially a troubled conscience gnaw at them, they will toss and turn in their bed and find that sleep eludes them. It is not our thoughts, which we can carry over into the great spiritual world, but our emotions that can drive away our sleep. Our emotions, however, are connected with what we might call our innermost soul life. We share our thoughts with the whole world. The way in which our emotions affect us, how they bring us anger, remorse, pain, and happiness, is something that is intimately connected with what we ourselves are. Those who have learned in this way to consciously bring their soul out of their body are also clear from direct observation how they carry their emotions out into the world they enter when they have become body-free. And as blissful as it makes us, on the one hand, to enter a world of spiritual light, freed from the body, we also feel in this world as if we are forged to ourselves, to all that are our emotions, to all that has been unloaded onto us, to all that gnaws at us. We then enter the spiritual world with this and must also carry it back into our body. But through the exercises described, we are able to find our emotional world when we immerse ourselves in our bodies. It then appears to us as something foreign. We get to know ourselves by immersing ourselves in our emotional world, and we learn by consciously pursuing what is consuming, what is in truth killing our organism. I would like to note here that in a later lecture we will discuss how dying and death mean something completely different when we consider them in plants or animals than when we consider them in humans. Spiritual science does not take the easy route of finding these phenomena to be the same in all three kingdoms. In humans, if we consciously observe what has become our soul property, we find that it lives into our physicality and can have a destructive effect there. We then learn how it is the inner soul core of the human being that actually forms the body, that acts on the body by connecting with the physical factors that come from the father and mother and other ancestors. We see the human being entering physical life, see how he first enters in a clumsy way, how he cannot yet speak; then we see the forms gradually becoming more and more definite and see how he gradually becomes an active human being.

By observing the entire development of the human being from a spiritual scientific perspective, we see how an inner core of being develops and shapes the human being, working from the spiritual into the body from birth or conception. We find the same core of being that works creatively on the body when we can follow how it leaves the body and enters a spiritual world. There we find two things: an element that enables us to pour our own being into a spiritual world of light; but we also find in this core of our being something that we must carry into this spiritual world of light, namely the fabric of our joys and sorrows, our emotional world, that is, everything we have experienced in life. In these two things we have, on the one hand, what is creative in human beings, what leaves the body as our spiritual core, passes through death, and reappears in a new body after an intermediate period; and that which we initially know only as our emotional movements, but which we come to know through spiritual scientific observation as a real entity, as that which destroys our body and leads it toward death.

Thus we see how our spiritual core enters into existence, gradually building up the body, and we see this core working most strongly in the first days, weeks, and months, when we do not yet have an inner soul life, when we cannot yet stir this soul life into thinking. We see how human beings enter into existence as if asleep. And when we try to remember our life, we can only go back to a certain point, no further. We have, as it were, slept our way into existence. Only from the age of three or four can a human being feel themselves as an I, not before. This is because before that age, the spiritual core of the human being is busy forming and developing our body. Then it reaches a point where the body only needs to grow, and from then on, the human being can use what has previously flowed into their body for their soul life, their conscious life, that is, for what forms their emotions, what they carry from birth to death, but which continues to work within their physicality in such a way that, from the moment we begin to say “I” to ourselves, to the moment we can later remember, when we begin an inner life, we accept the necessity of dying within ourselves.

But what do we gain with this necessity to die? We gain the possibility of taking in the outer world as it surrounds us, of continually enriching our inner being, so that we become richer with each passing day in the life between birth and death. In the part of our being that we take with us into the spiritual world when we sleep, which forms our inner soul being, lies everything we acquire in terms of pleasure and suffering, joy and pain. By living and developing consciousness, we have the opportunity to continually enrich our inner core. We carry this enrichment with us when we pass through death, but we can only have it by working throughout our whole life on the destruction of the body. Our body is built as it has developed from the previous liver. But we are constantly taking in new things; this enriches our soul life. But this new thing can no longer penetrate completely into our physicality, only to a certain degree, which is expressed in the fact that we feel the fatigue of the previous day removed from us; but it cannot penetrate our body completely. In relation to what penetrates our body, a limit is created for the further development of the physical.

Let us take the earlier example again, where a person works on questions of knowledge within their soul for ten years. If this occupation is an inner soul matter for them, their physiognomy will have changed accordingly after ten years. But the physicality of the transformation sets a limit. The urge to develop further inwardly may still exist; but what is absorbed later can no longer work its way into the body. Therefore, since the body sets a limit, we only see the richer inner life begin when the soul has poured itself into the body. First we see the physiognomy of such a person — a thinker, poet, or profound artist — being transformed; only then do we see the rich inner life of the spirit developing. Only when a boundary is set for us in our outer world do we truly develop, but then we can no longer carry what we develop within ourselves into our physicality, because our body is built according to what we have acquired in a previous earthly life. Therefore, we must carry what we then still acquire inwardly through death. This helps us to build up our next physicality, so that only then, in a next life, will we have built into our physicality what must have a destructive effect on our present physicality.

This opens up a perspective that fits in perfectly with all scientific thinking, a perspective on what death and immortality are, what repeated earthly lives are. We see that when we rework our physiognomy, when we see what first enters into existence in an indeterminate form emerge more and more clearly, how human beings have built into their physicality what they have acquired through experience in their souls in previous earthly lives. We see in the unfolding body the results of our previous life, and we see in what we are now acquiring, what stands, so to speak, as spiritual opposite to our physical nature, the unfolding predispositions for our future life. Thus, spiritual science regards the life we lead between birth and death as standing in the middle between what has gone before and what is to follow. And later considerations will show how, in relation to the time when human beings live without a body for a long period, as indeed they do in sleep, our view expands to include the times of our existence that human beings spend in the supersensible worlds. But in order for such things not to remain mere fantasies, it is necessary to turn our attention to the methods by which the soul is enabled to perceive even when it does not have the external physical brain. Only by enabling the soul to perceive in the supersensible realm does what would otherwise remain a mere assertion become a proven reality.

Today, we are basically only at the beginning of a science that deals with such things. And in the widest circle of those who consider themselves the best connoisseurs of things, the most enlightened, these things will be regarded as fantasies. The speaker before you is not surprised if someone were to say: This is something that is pure fantasy, pure fantasy, something that completely contradicts any scientific truth of the present! — No one will find it more understandable than I myself if someone were to make such a statement tomorrow or after the lecture. But as people delve more and more into such spiritual science, they will realize that through inner contemplation we can prepare our soul to be able to know itself inwardly, to develop inner powers through which it can still know and perceive even when it leaves the body and can no longer perceive through the organs of the body. This must be established experimentally — one might say spiritually experimentally — that the soul, when it no longer makes use of the physical organs, is something that can be experienced. It is that which passes through births and deaths, which works in such a way that it builds up its body, which passes through death, and which gathers new forces for the building of the new body during earthly existence. Thus, by asking questions about the nature of human beings, we also obtain answers to questions about death and immortality. Goethe once said in a very beautiful essay that nature invented death in order to have much life, and spiritual scientific research confirms Goethe's intuition by saying: In every life, the human being enriches his or her soul life, his or her inner being; he or she must die because his or her present body is built up as a result of his or her previous earthly lives, and by killing his or her body, he or she creates the possibility of building into a new body what he or she cannot currently build into the world and into his or her body.

Such a worldview has a profound influence on our entire life. And when it permeates our whole being, when it does not remain merely a theory, then we feel such a truth as a real truth of life. For then we say to ourselves, when we have passed the middle of life, when our hair begins to turn gray and wrinkles begin to fill our faces: It's going downhill! Why is it going downhill? Because what the soul has conquered can no longer be carried into the body. But what we have achieved inwardly, and what must now destroy the body, will be built into a new body. The objection is obvious, and we know that it is often made, but in these lectures we will try to anticipate such objections, that someone might say: You spiritual researchers tell us how people become weak in old age, how their thinking diminishes, how their brains become weaker, so you are saying that the spirit disappears along with the physical body! — As natural as this objection is, and as natural as it must be for anyone who has not yet penetrated deeply into spiritual science, it only admits that such a person does not think about this: What is our present brain built of? — It is built from our former life! And we must destroy our physicality with our thoughts, insofar as there is a brain within us. But the thoughts that cause the body to die are those that make use of the brain. It is quite obvious that something that is bound to an instrument such as the brain must cease to exist. But our spiritual being does not cease with it. Therefore, when human beings move in a downward direction, we no longer find within ourselves the appropriate tools to live out what we have acquired in our present life. But this then works within us in a soul life that is not bound to the brain and therefore cannot be expressed through brain thoughts. It works to shape the next life. So it is not enough to say, in Goethe's words, that nature invented death in order to have more life — we must say that death is there to work out in new forms what we have acquired inwardly in life!

In this sense, when we see old age approaching, we can say: Thank God that life can go downhill, that death can be! For if it did not spread out, we could never take in what flows to us from the glorious world in such a way that it shapes us ourselves. In order to make what we can experience the content of our own being, we as human beings need death, we must have death. Therefore, we look to death as that through which life itself can form in an inner, higher configuration. So, in the most natural way, there is a better advisor in spiritual science; it is not only a comforter in the face of the fear of death, but it is something that gives us strength as we approach death and see the outer dying; for we know that then the inner grows. Spiritual science will raise the whole of life to a higher level, where life appears before human beings in a meaningful rationality.

The following lectures will show that life does not proceed endlessly forwards and backwards, but that repeated earthly lives also have a beginning and an end. This is only to be hinted at here. From what spiritual science has to say about death and immortality, it follows, when we look at our present life, that we will experience its effects in a subsequent life. For spiritual science, the whole of human existence breaks down into certain forms of existence: into the existence between birth and death and that between death and a new birth. Here we see what Goethe felt in relation to the simple life, extended to the full life, as we look back not only on the small yesterday, but on the great yesterday, where we have built our present life. We look at the joys or sufferings of life and feel: joy is what strengthens us for what is to come; suffering is what we must muster in order to overcome obstacles and thus strengthen ourselves for what is to come. Here we see a great contrast in life extending into the future and think of Goethe's verse:

If yesterday is clear and open to you,
If you act powerfully and freely today,
You can also hope for a tomorrow
That will be no less happy.

Happiness in life and courage to face life flow from the inner understanding of spiritual science, showing us that it is indeed the spirit that shapes the material world and sustains itself in the destruction of material life in order to reveal itself again and again, applying what it has newly acquired. In the spirit of this evening, this can be summarized in the following words:

In life, the spirit reveals
Only its power,
But in death, the spirit shows
How it preserves itself through all death
Only for a higher life.