Results of Spiritual Research

GA 62 — 5 December 1912, Berlin

5. Results of Spiritual Research into Vital Questions and the Mystery of Death

The greatest mysteries of life, which have universal human significance, are not presented to us through special scientific research, but we encounter them at every turn in life. And the greatest questioner is surely life itself, which constantly confronts us, a questioner who not only arouses our curiosity with his questions, but who, through his questions, can mean happiness and suffering, satisfaction or even despair for our soul. Spiritual science, as presented in these lectures, is intended primarily to answer these questions posed by life itself, to the extent that human cognitive ability is allowed to look into the secrets of existence. Even if this spiritual science appears to be something new and unusual compared to today's conventional science, this is understandable for anyone who takes just a glance at those branches of conventional science that deal with questions of the soul, with questions of spiritual life. What is today called psychology or soul science can, to a large extent, be researched to the extent that it presents itself, and it will be found that precisely the great existential questions, the great riddles of life, are very much neglected in this conventional science.

One of the greatest contemporary researchers of the soul, Franz Brentano, stated the following in his “Psychology”: How questions are actually answered in current research into the soul, or at least how they are attempted, how one idea follows another, how one sensation evokes another in the soul, how perhaps those soul forces within our consciousness , which we call memory, all this – Franz Brentano also believes – could not be a substitute for what soul research once sought to fathom as a certain solution to the mystery associated with the name of the immortality of the human being. Today, questions such as that of the immortality of the soul are sought in vain in the usual humanities or spiritual science, and the same applies to other questions. They cannot even be raised from this usual spiritual science, so to speak.

One might say that the most trivial words could be used to raise the most everyday great riddles of mental life, namely with the words: How can man come to terms with himself and the world when he experiences in himself how he becomes a different person at every age, how every age presents him with new tasks even in the time between birth and death? How can man answer the great riddle of existence that confronts him every day and that, as everyone can see, is intimately connected with the whole being of man? The great mystery: how is it that everything that flows in and out of us from morning till evening when we are awake, in the form of ideas, drives, desires, passions, affects and so on, sinks into an uncertain darkness when we fall asleep and is resurrected from this uncertain darkness when we begin the new day? — Sleep and waking, which are so intimately connected with the riddle of human existence, science itself must admit and admits more and more that it hardly knows how to answer these riddle questions. And then there is the enigma of death, as already mentioned, about which a significant researcher of the recent past, as already mentioned here, knows nothing to say except what, so to speak, observation of the external physical world reveals. Huxley cites them right at the beginning of his “Outlines of Physiology” the words of the melancholy Danish prince Hamlet:

The great Caesar, dead, and turned to clay,
Might stop a hole that lets the north wind through;
Oh that the earth, to which the world did bend,
Might fling a barrier to the wind and rain!

And further, he explains what he wants to say by showing that the individual material parts that make up a person, when he passes through the gate of death, gradually dissipate, as it were, into all winds, into the other matters that surround us, and how we would have to search there for what a person was, if we were to look for the material atoms where they can be found after some time, in the vastness of the world.

That this, what has become of the atoms of the great Caesar, is not at all the question that actually concerns the human soul, this is no longer felt, so to speak, by external scientific observation. That the question is this: Where are the soul forces that worked in Caesar? What has happened to them? How do they continue to work in the world? — that this is the great question, even an external science can no longer feel that. And then there is the question that is contained in the meaningful word destiny, the fateful question that really confronts us at every turn in life, that presents us with the great riddle that shows itself to us everywhere. We see a person entering into existence, born into poverty and misery, so that we can predict at his cradle that he will have a less than favorable destiny. Or we see him entering into life with seemingly insignificant talents, so that we can again predict that he will be of little advantage to himself and to others. In another we see how he enters life, born in happiness and abundance, surrounded by caring hands from the cradle, endowed with abilities that show from the outset that he could become a useful member of the world order for himself and his fellow human beings. How much of all that we call happiness and sorrow, and what daily, hourly befalls us, is included in this fateful question! One would like to say that the great questions of existence only begin where science, so to speak, must end. And anyone who today tries to familiarize himself with such a world view, which is shaped by purely scientific principles, will say to himself: What is offered to me as a summary, however beautifully formulated, of scientific truths, shows me only the beginning of the question, the question of how I must pose the great riddles of existence; there are not yet many answers to be found.

In the face of all this, however, it must be emphasized that in the broadest sense of today's education, there is no possibility of addressing the vital questions of the human soul, for the simple reason that, as a result of phenomena and facts that have taken place over the last few centuries – and which will be discussed in the next lectures will be addressed, human thought habits, the entire faculties of human thinking, have been directed more towards external material and only feel reassured when they can apply their judgment and their research to something that is apparent or accessible to the brain-bound intellect. These habits of thinking are often deprived of the possibility of looking only at what is soul life, at those events within which what takes place is not exhausted in the physical, but is specifically soul-based.

It is clear from the lectures already given this winter that the question is not so much whether man can look into those regions where the answers to the questions raised can be found by means of the paths into the supersensible life, which were indicated in the last lecture here, but rather whether he can do so through the paths into the supersensible life, which were indicated in the last lecture here, but rather whether he can do so through the paths into the supersensible life, which were indicated in the last lecture here, but rather whether he can do so through the paths into the supersensible life, which were indicated in the last lecture here, but rather whether he can do so through the paths into the supersensible life, which were indicated in the last lecture here, but rather whether he can do so through the paths into the supersensible life, which were indicated in the last lecture here, but rather whether he can do so through the paths into the supersensible life, which were indicated in the last lecture here, but rather whether he can do so through the It has been emphasized several times that certain things must be investigated in this way, but that then the unbiased human understanding, the unbiased judgment, is quite capable of grasping what supersensible research can give. If this is the case, then it will also be understandable that the path of supersensible knowledge described in the last lecture always offers the possibility of looking at what is present in life in any case, what presents itself everywhere in life, in the right way and of getting answers to the great riddles of existence through the right view.

The spiritual in man is present everywhere, it is always there, and in order for it to proclaim its immortality, it is not so much a direct glimpse into the supersensible world that is needed as a right contemplation - which, however, can be drawn upon and refined - a right contemplation of the immediate events of our soul life itself. This should be the main focus when judging what is referred to here as spiritual science: the way in which life is observed, the way in which the phenomena of direct soul life present themselves through the unique thinking brought about by spiritual science. If we observe carefully, we find that spiritual science regards the phenomena of the immediate life of the soul in connection with the outer life of matter in such a way that the great riddle of existence, as indicated, can be answered from the direct observation of life.

It has been suggested here several times that spiritual science today is in a similar situation to that of natural science in the days of the dawn of modern education, when, for example, Francesco Redi expressed the great truth that is now generally accepted and recognized: living things can only come from living things. This meant that a powerful prejudice had been combated, a prejudice that was not limited to lay circles at the time, but dominated all of science at that time – and this time is only a few centuries ago: three centuries ago, for example, when Francesco Redi appeared, it was still believed that lower animals, such as fish, earthworms and the like, could arise from river mud through mere combination of the external material. Francesco Redi showed that this was an inaccurate observation. He showed that nothing of living existence can arise without a germ of life, originating from a similar living being, being placed in the unorganized matter, and he established the proposition: Living things can only arise from living things. Within the limits of the application of this law, it is recognized by all, from Haeckel to Du Bois-Reymond. It was not recognized at the time of Francesco Redi. He first had to show how it is based only on an inaccurate observation when one believes that inanimate matter can form itself into a living being.

In the same situation is spiritual science today in relation to the spiritual, as it was in relation to living things for Francesco Redi. Today, spiritual science shows, through the way it is able to consider the phenomena of the soul, that it is based on inaccurate observation to believe that what enters into existence with a person in terms of inner soul life could, for example, come from inheritance, from parents or grandparents, etc., or could only come from what the soul of the person absorbs through external experience, through external experience of the environment. Spiritual science has to show that the belief that it could be so is based on inaccurate observation just as much as the belief that a formed living thing could be formed from inanimate substance. Just as inorganic matter can only be gathered together by a living germ, so everything that is formed in the human soul in the way of inherited traits and qualities, everything that it absorbs from the external world through the senses and the intellect, can only be joined together to that which lives and weaves in us as a living soul being, if there is a living spirit-germ, a spirit-germ that joins together within itself both the inherited traits and everything that is taken in from the external environment.

Spiritual science focuses on this spirit or soul germ, and in doing so it certainly confronts a very, very widespread prejudice of the present day. When we speak today of the character of the human soul, when we speak of everything that a person experiences, then we will - and this has been done through the most conscientious research, which should be fully recognized in its own right - point to this or that, which is “inherited” from one's ancestors. We shall always be tempted to see what lives in the human soul and what the human being develops, so to speak, assembles through these or those causes that lie within the line of inheritance, on which we only want to influence what once storms in from outside to the human being for the overall shaping of the human soul.

A certain harmony between natural science and spiritual science will come about in this field when consideration is given to a question that must always be in the mind of the spiritual scientist when speaking of the core of the human soul and inherited tendencies: the question that is linked to the preservation of the human species as a whole. Within the life of the species, within that which is inherited in the being of generations from grandfather and father to son and so on, we do see characteristics passing from generation to generation. But one thing confronts us as a question when we consider this succession of human existence over the course of generations: that man reaches, so to speak, the age of fertility, sexual maturity, at a certain time, and at the time when he has reached this, he is in a position, so to speak, to bring a complete human being into existence again in the generative sense. In other words, having attained sexual maturity, the human being is capable of producing his own kind, and thus has the abilities that are necessary to produce his own kind.

So human development up to sexual maturity is such that the human being develops within himself all the abilities that make it possible for him to produce a being of his own kind. But the human being continues to develop after sexual maturity. New formations, new soul content also arise after sexual maturity, and it is impossible to relate what the soul undergoes in its development after sexual maturity to the whole development of the human species in the same way as what the human being undergoes to establish the human species until sexual maturity. A sharp distinction must be made in man's whole attitude to the world in relation to his development up to sexual maturity, and in relation to the time after that. This is a question that, as we shall soon see, can only be properly addressed by spiritual science.

Another significant question arises from this, but it shows how what is meant by the term “inheritance” is to be understood, in contrast to what actually takes place in the human soul and belongs to human development. We can see what occurs in man and clearly shows itself to be a product of heredity within the human species in a radical case where heredity occurs under all circumstances, simply because man is human and descends from a being of the same kind, a being of his own kind. One such thing, for example, is the change of teeth at around the age of seven. This is something that lies within the powers that man has inherited, that occur under all circumstances, even if we remove the person from the human community and place him on a lonely island, where he would grow up wild.

This is the case with all characteristics that are actually only based within the line of inheritance. But let us take something that is as intimately connected with the human soul as language, and we immediately find that the concepts of inheritance let us down. Where it is justified to speak of inheritance, the inherited characteristics will appear as with the change of teeth. But if we take a person to a lonely island and let him grow up wild, so that he hears no human sound, then language does not develop. That is, we have something that shows us that there is something in the human soul that is not bound to inheritance in the same way as the forces that we have to address in the eminent sense as inherited.

We could cite many more examples that show how little we can get by with the forces of inheritance to explain the whole being of man. But when it comes to the spiritual side, where one starts out with a prejudiced approach, one makes mistake after mistake, mistakes that simply turn out to be logical mistakes. For example, it is repeatedly believed that spiritual science wants to rebel against something that natural science has to say, while it actually holds the achievements of natural science in the highest esteem.

For example, one might think this when spiritual science asserts that what we call the human soul core does not merely come from the parents, grandparents and so on, but as a spiritual and soul core goes back to a previous, far-distant life of the person, going back so far that spiritual science has to say: The life of man on earth is not a single occurrence but a repeated one. When we enter earthly existence through birth, a soul core comes into existence that has absorbed certain peculiarities and certain forces in previous lives. Because it has absorbed these forces in previous lives, so to speak, concentrated them within itself, it enters a new body and a new physical environment in a certain sense. Just as the living germ in the physical life places itself in its inorganic surroundings and absorbs the inorganic forces and substances from there, so the human soul nucleus, coming from previous earthly lives, approaches the inherited traits, binds them, concentrates them, takes what the external world can give, and thus forms and shapes the new life that we then live through the time from birth to death. The present life is again such a contraction of partly inherited traits and partly of what the outer life offers us. And when we pass through the gate of death, then this soul core is most concentrated. Then, in the time between death and a next birth, it passes through a purely spiritual existence and, if it has continued to mature in this, enters a new earthly life through a new birth or conception.

Unfortunately, it is only a popular prejudice that anything of what today are conscientious and well-researched scientific results should be opposed or even touched by such views of spiritual science. Spiritual science is fully understood - this has already been mentioned - when the natural scientist comes and shows how, through the mixing of the paternal and maternal germ in each individual case, a special individualization of the child's germ takes place, so to speak, and how the individualities of the individual children can be different simply by this mixing of the paternal and maternal elements. Spiritual science in its depth does not engage in the trivial assertion that it is proof of a special human individuality that in one and the same family the children are different from each other, because this individualization can be understood from the different mixing of the paternal and maternal elements. If, on the other hand, the natural scientist comes and points out how what man experiences in life could point to this or that organic constitution, to this or that formation of the brain, and so on, then spiritual science is in complete agreement with this, and it remains amateurish in spiritual science if one does not want to go into it. But if what natural science has to say in this field, and quite rightly so, is to be an objection to the results of spiritual research, then a logical mistake is made that can be characterized something like this: Despite all the results of natural science research, the human soul kernel first draws on the inherited characteristics to shape a life.

Let us assume that a person sees another person breathing healthily in front of him and says: “The fact that this person is alive and standing before me as a living being is due to the air and lungs that are present.” Who would dispute that this is completely true! Just as little as this can be disputed by any spiritual science, just as little can it be disputed when the natural scientist comes and considers the material conditions from the line of inheritance in order to explain the individual form of the soul's life. It is just as true as when the natural scientist says: There stands a man before me who lives at this moment because there is air outside him and lungs inside him.

Can the natural scientist therefore consider the spiritual scientist to be refuted when spiritual science says: Despite everything that has been said, what happens to your soul is determined, spiritually and mentally determined, in a purely spiritual way by what the soul has experienced in previous lives. Despite all this, is the whole destiny of man determined by the fact that man himself has prepared this destiny in previous lives? No, the naturalist must not consider the spiritual researcher who makes such an assertion to be refuted. The naturalist who says, “The man standing before me lives at this moment because there is air outside him and lungs within him,” must not consider the spiritual researcher to be refuted, just as he who says to him: No, that is not why he lives, but he lives in this moment through something quite different; this man once wanted to hang himself, and he would most certainly have died in his then attempt at hanging if I had not intervened. But I cut it short, and that is why he is now alive.

From this we see, then, how the objective truth that the other person only lives because there is air outside him and lungs inside him does not contradict the fact that he only lives at this moment because the other person cut his rope! Just as this latter irrefutable truth does not contradict the natural scientist's realization that a person lives because air and lungs are present, so what natural science has to say does not contradict what spiritual science has to offer: that the ultimate, spiritual reasons for a person's existence lie in repeated lives on earth.

The important thing here is to direct our attention to the right thing in the right way, and here we can look at language as a good example. Every spiritual researcher who penetrates into the depths of things and understands natural science can grasp that one can easily be tempted to say: Man can speak because he has a speech center in his brain. That is certainly true. But it is equally true that this speech center of the brain has only been formed into a living speech center by the fact that a language exists in the world at all. Language has created the speech center. Likewise, everything that exists in the formations of the brain and the entire organic apparatus of the human being has been created by the spiritual and soul life. It is the soul that has impressed upon the human material the reality of spiritual life. Therefore, we must seek the true creative power in the human soul, in the spiritual-soul. We must not regard the spiritual-soul as a product of the brain, but rather the reverse: the brain, with its delicate formation, as a product of the spiritual-soul.

When we consider human life, we find that this is the case in every respect, so that a healthy consideration of life confirms what has just been said. Let us consider for a moment what we can call human development, going beyond the generic, that is, what still develops in man even when, so to speak, the forces within the inheritance are fully developed, when he has become manly, in order to carry within him the forces that can produce his own kind. The soul forces that constitute human development present themselves to us in a completely different way when we contrast them with those forces that are present throughout human life and express themselves, for example, in the preservation of the species and in reproduction. Within the sphere of the powers of reproduction we see how everything unfolds from the inside outwards, so to speak, how man brings forth beings like himself beside him through the powers that play in this sphere, that is to say, how what is within him makes its way outwards. The forces that belong to inner human development take exactly the opposite path. One must be able to see the spiritual as real in the first place. Then one will accept the consideration that is to be given now as a justified one from the outset.

How do we live our lives when we consider the inner soul? We live our lives in the opposite way to how we live life within the species: in the species, all development takes place outwards, in the individual life, all development takes place inwards. This happens in such a way that we absorb what comes to us from the outside, process it within us, and do not push it outwards as in reproduction, but rather we concentrate what we live through in ourselves more and more intensely, stripping it more and more intensely, so to speak, of its character as the outside world and making it the content of our own ego.

Anyone who looks at human life impartially will find that it would be impossible, for example, for our soul life to ever have everything that the soul has lived through, everything it can remember, really in its memory at any given moment. Let us imagine that any one of the people sitting here at this moment should have alive in his soul everything that has ever lived in the soul in terms of concepts, ideas, sensations, affects, and so on. That would be a pure impossibility. But has what we have gone through in the past, what we have inwardly taken in soulfully, been lost because we cannot remember it at this moment? It is not lost. If we compare our soul life in successive moments of time, we will find that perhaps more important than what we remember is what we seem to have forgotten, but what has worked on us and made us a different person.

In the course of our development, we are always a different person, feeling imbued with ever-changing content. If we observe ourselves as we are now and compare ourselves with what we were, say, ten years ago, we will not be able to deny that we are a different person and that what has brought this about are the processed experiences, what has flowed into us, been absorbed by us and taken the opposite path to the forces that serve reproduction. We destroy, as it were, with our looking at things, with our remembering in our imagination, that which we experience, but we take it into our I instead. Our I is continually changing. Therefore, we can say: a precise observation of life shows us how this I changes throughout life, and how it has changed through the experiences it has taken in. We feel how the I becomes inwardly fuller, permeates itself more and more, becomes richer and richer than it was when we entered life as young people. This is based on a very significant phenomenon of life, which is usually not given enough attention.

Goethe, the profound connoisseur of life, who above all saw life as it presented itself to him in his own personality, uttered the sentence: In old age we become mystics. What did he mean by that? What does it mean to become a mystic in Goethe's sense? We must remove from this sentence what is unclear and nebulous about it. What Goethe meant was that as man becomes ever more mature and mature, he has less and less of what the world offers him externally, but draws the forces of experience from the wells of his own soul, into which he has let them descend. “Man becomes a mystic” means: his soul has become fuller and fuller, has contained more and more forces within itself.

If we take a closer look at what our soul core has united within us, how it has absorbed what it has experienced and what it has made of it, then those who have become mystics independently of any age can help us to understand a little better what actually happens in the human soul. Let us ask the mystics! What do the mystics talk about most of all? About a “second self”, about a “higher human being” in man, about the fact that in this human self, which grows up with us from youth, a second self can take hold, which many mystics interpret as a “divine” one. But that is not what matters, but how they felt that as a person grows up, something matures like a second person, which he holds fast, which is concentrated within him. We see the exact opposite of what happens in reproduction: that a second person is born alongside the first, that the second is rejected. What becomes the “second self” is not something that the person rejects, but something that he concentrates more and more within himself.

Thus we can indeed say: by living his life, man shapes something in his individuality that takes the opposite direction from that of reproduction. He does not give birth to anything out of himself; he concentrates something within himself, does not let something emerge from his ego, but imbues something within himself, which the mystic quite well describes as a second human being, which develops, as it were, within the skin of the first human being and acquires more and more spiritual and soul-like determination. This is more or less evident in one person or another; but the sense of the developing human being is based on the fact that we undergo an opposite germination process, where we do not unfold, but on the contrary concentrate something within us. If we call the direction of reproduction an evolution, a development, then we can call what the I undergoes an involution, a wrapping up, an inner shaping of the experiences. And it is self-evident that the inner resilience that the I, having grown up, carries within itself as a second I, is greatest when we are at the end of our physical life, when we pass through the gate of death.

If we examine this once and take a closer look at what has developed as a second self, then we have to say: the human being is not always inclined to take a closer look. Life takes up a lot of his time and he does not pay enough attention to the second being that he is developing. But if he pays sufficient attention to it, he will find that this second being has very definite qualities, and above all bears within itself a significant urge to be independent and free in relation to what we can take up in our further life. In our further life we live in a certain linguistic context. As a result, our concepts always have a certain coloring from this linguistic context. But what we have developed within strives to free itself from what only a particular linguistic context can give, and to shape an outlook on life that is free and independent of any linguistic context. We want to grow beyond what a particular linguistic context can give, and in doing so we also grow beyond what we have grown into from our youth. From our youth on, we have to develop a certain ear, for example. We notice that what we develop within our I is something that wants to become ever freer and freer from our outer physicality. We form a new human germ that is independent of the one that has formed out of our outer physicality when we are adults.

This is what spiritual science wants to direct the soul towards: that a second self develops out of the human self in the course of life, the essence of which consists precisely in feeling more and more fully and intensely, the more independently it can feel from what has grown since youth. And if we take a closer look at this second self that has been formed in our self, we will see that it has such inherent strength that we can characterize its whole nature by saying: this self contains the strength to form a new, different human being than the one through which it itself was formed.

It is not an analogy, but only a clarification, when we say: the I that we have within us can be compared to the plant germ that has developed from the root through the stem and green leaves to the flower. Then it is most capable of life and can provide the basis for a new plant. The whole nature of the plant is concentrated in the germ, and when the germ is ripe, what has grown in the way of stem, green leaves and blossom dies off. In this way, a spiritual-soul core matures in us. Just as the germ of the plant grows more and more, even when the leaves wither and the outer physical form of the plant is approaching death, so the spiritual-soul core in man matures, while the outer layer dies more and more, as the sheaths of the organs gradually wither and approach death. Hence, when we observe our soul properly, we see the remarkable fact that the inner powers of a new ego are strongest when we pass through the gate of death. Then we carry the systems of forces, the interrelationships of forces, through the gate of death into a world that cannot have anything to do with the world in our body.

Even if we do not want to pursue further — which the following lectures will show us — how the spiritual researcher can also show us what happens to these spiritual-soul cores, formed in the I, in a purely spiritual world, which the man experiences in the time between death and the next birth, we can still say: in the same way that the natural scientist goes about understanding the plant, we can go about understanding the human being. The natural scientist turns his gaze to the germ of the plant and sees how the germ can now bring a new plant life to flourish. In this way, he seeks to understand the new plant from the germ, how the remaining germ appears again in a new plant. In the same way, the spiritual researcher can also look at the human being as he enters into life through birth or conception. There we see how the human being initially shows nothing externally other than that his organs develop in a certain way. Then the soul life appears, which we have already characterized by saying that when it appears, the moment also comes for the human being to remember back to later. For he will say to himself: I was obviously already there before this point in time, but I can only remember back to a certain point. It is the point in time when the human being is able to feel himself as an ego; but there is no doubt that he already existed as a spiritual-soul being before that. Why, spiritual science may ask, does the possibility of remembering the past only arise from a certain point in time? Were the inner powers that bring about remembering the past not there before? It would be completely illogical to think that the soul and spirit only begin at the point in time to which man later remembers. Everyday sleep can teach us how the soul and spiritual forces live in us before remembering the past awakens.

Today, people have all kinds of strange ideas about sleep. The correct idea about it has already been partially brought to light in the lectures on waking and sleeping. For example, today people have the idea that sleep is only what can be called sleep if it is brought about by fatigue. I would ask the listeners to the earlier lectures to bear in mind that spiritual science wants to speak precisely. If someone wanted to say that spiritual science itself says that sleep comes from fatigue, that is not entirely correct, because it was said: sleep is there to remove fatigue. In spiritual science, it is always important to understand things very precisely, because the aim must also be to present things accurately.

Can fatigue be the cause of sleep? Anyone who claims this is refuted by life itself. Anyone who claims that people only need to sleep because they are tired is already refuted by looking at himself or considering how the often not at all tired pensioner falls asleep in his chair in the afternoon, even though he is not at all tired. And it is especially refuted when he considers when most sleep occurs: not when one is most tired, but in childhood one sleeps most. Things must only be considered correctly.

Spiritual science now shows that during the ordinary state of sleep as well as during the dull state of consciousness of the child, those forces that are used for conscious experience are sent into the organism and work there. The forces that we use from waking to sleeping to form perceptions, sensations and so on, these same forces work on us during our sleep, but in such a way that the used up bodily forces are replaced, restored. There they regenerate us, repair what is worn and used up, that is, they form, they shape. While they deform in the waking day life, dissolve the design, and while the waking day life consists precisely in the fact that we dissolve the design, sleep is there to restore the form, that is, to work directly on the human structure. Because we often use our powers of consciousness during sleep to build up certain decayed powers, these powers elude us and we sink into unconsciousness. Because at the beginning of life, before the moment occurs that we can later remember, we use the same forces that live in us and fill our consciousness to refine and shape the brain organization and blood circulation in the first years of childhood, they therefore elude the conscious ego. The self is present during childhood, and it is a strange thing today when the way the self first appears is considered decisive for the study of the human being. Again, a grandiose logical error!

Today you can go through entire works in which it says: We see how self-consciousness arises, how it is formed in man. You cannot imagine anything more wrong than this, and in every other field you would strictly reject such a consideration, as you would, for example, reject someone who would only gain knowledge of a clock by paying attention to how the clock is created. This is not the case in any other field. In the same way, when it comes to self-awareness, one should show, when one wants to trace how representations arise, how grandiose mistakes are made in this regard. This can only be done by someone who engages with things in a more precise way, from a spiritual-scientific perspective. Otherwise, it cannot be recognized. The way we experience our sense of self and self-awareness is such that our gradual knowledge of the self and how it develops has nothing to do with the reality of the self itself. Rather, because the self, the human being, continuously develops from the times when it is not yet conscious in the child to the times when it is then consciously experienced, we cannot say: it is not there! It is there, shaping the human being in his finer structure. Yes, much more: it shapes the human being in his connection with the whole of human life, which we only notice when we enter into human life in a more or less selfless way.

In the usual way in which people look at life, they can say about their fate: this or that happens to me. One of them I find pleasant, the other unpleasant; one of them I regard as good luck, the other as bad luck; one of them as an acceleration, the other as a deceleration of my life. But that is only a superficial consideration, because a person could convince himself that at every moment of his life he is nothing other than his concentrated destiny. What is it that makes me speak to you now? It is my concentrated destiny. It is my life experiences that speak to you, and I am nothing but my life experiences, my destiny. If I wanted to extract my destiny, I would have to cut a piece out of myself. Man is what he has made of himself, what his destiny is, what he is at a given moment. We cannot separate our self from us, from our destiny, and see the self as something different in terms of content from destiny.

Now, however, we see that we are placed in a certain context of life as a child, and that we are not only determined by our abilities, by our self, even if we are not yet aware of it, by our self working on our blood circulation, and by developing very specific talents and so on, but we also see that we are placed in a specific national context, that we are children of a specific pair of parents, grow up in a specific climate and have to live together with these or those people. This is how we see ourselves as destined for our whole life. If we examine what we can consciously pursue and address as our destiny, it is self-evident that we must address this as the destiny connected with our ego, as we are placed in a life through our circumstances, which is either laborious and laden, or surrounded by caring hands. Not only our later destinies are connected with what we have done ourselves, but also the blows of fate that come to us from the unconscious, and which we cannot follow with our consciousness.

Thus we are led to the spiritual and soul essence of man, which contains within itself all the systems of forces that developed the brain, shaped the blood system and so on, and thereby determined us. But we are also determined by fate by the same I, which places itself in a particular context of life. In the field of nature observation, everyone admits this when they say, for example, “When I look at an Alpine plant, I know that it belongs to the whole Alpine nature, and that is why the Alpine plant cannot grow in the plains.” What everyone admits in the observation of nature need only be transferred to a spiritual-soul core of being. Then one will see that the spiritual-soul core of one's being, which provides its physicality with very specific abilities, is adapted to its physicality on the one hand, seeks out this physicality, enters into it, but on the other hand also seeks out its destiny.

If this destiny is perceived as hard and then one is told: you have created this yourself, you have brought it with you through your spiritual and soul essence. If you ascribe the blame for the hard fate you feel to the person as a whole, then this feeling is based on a short-sighted observation. A deeper principle judges differently, and we can understand how it judges if we take an example from life to illustrate it. Let us imagine a young man who, because his father was wealthy, lived in such a way that he lived out of his father's pocket and did not have much to worry about. Then his father loses all his wealth through some misfortune, and the son can no longer live as he did before. He may say: What a bitter fate has befallen me! How unhappy I am! But if he learns something, if he is huffed and puffed by life and has become an able person, will he say the same when he is fifty years old? No, but now he might say: That twist of fate was quite good for my personal life, because otherwise I might have become a good-for-nothing; my father's misfortune contributed to my happiness.

What can be said from the standpoint of eighteen years of age is not particularly far-sighted; at fifty years of age we shall see further. That which is the deeper principle of life in us seeks misfortune, seeks adversity and misery, because it is only by overcoming the obstacles in adversity and misery that we have developed ourselves further towards a happiness and have become something that we would not otherwise have become. Seen from a higher vantage point, and as soon as we admit that a deeper core of being lives in a person, which passes from life to life and makes it necessary for us to look at life from a higher vantage point, much immediately presents itself to us as understandable.

If we can look at a person in such a way that, as they age, they develop a system of forces within that is directed towards a new human being who is virtually independent of what the person has developed externally from their previous life or from the circumstances of his present life, and when we see how he carries an inner tension of forces through the gate of death, then we can say: This person cannot possibly enter into existence again immediately after death. Why not? What would happen if he did enter existence again immediately? He would still find the outer environment similar to the one he has just left and from which he wanted to free himself by developing the inner core of his soul. Just as the inner soul-core has no direct relationship to itself in the sense of immediately wanting to be “itself” again, so too man cannot embody himself again immediately after death, for he would grow into himself. But this means that the inner soul-core can only re-embody itself after a certain time. During this time it lives in a purely spiritual atmosphere, not in the physical world. What has developed as a spiritual core, in the same way that a plant germ develops within the stalk, leaves and blossom, lives in a spiritual world, and will only feel drawn to to outwardly embody that which it has developed only when different conditions have arisen; that is, when the earth has changed so that the human being grows into different conditions so that he can continue to develop.

That is why so much time passes between death and the next birth, so that, for example, we are not born again into the same language area and so that the other circumstances around us have also changed. We know that conditions on the outer earth change over the centuries and millennia. But what has happened in the meantime, purely externally in culture, we learn through teaching, through education. So we step out of a certain epoch with our spiritual and soul cores, with the forces that we wanted to free, and wait until new conditions on earth are brought about. But what we have not been able to participate in during the intervening period, we have to catch up on through education and teaching. Therefore, education and teaching must be added to what we have in the way of special aptitudes and abilities, which we bring up from the fruit of earlier lives.

In the relatively short time available to me, I was unable to develop anything other than what could be called a way of looking at the human soul in such a way that this observation is, on the one hand, strictly scientific, but, on the other hand, sees something real in these spiritual and soul experiences and that it is seen how, in fact, in the person as he lives before us, what occurs in a next life is already developing as a germ, which draws on the forces of heredity as well as the forces of the environment to develop further.

A world view such as that arising out of spiritual science can have an eminently healing influence, not only on the theoretical questions of life, but also on strength and security and on the power of life. Of course, anyone who does not want to familiarize themselves with spiritual science will not understand that a healthy outer life is in many essential respects conditioned by a healthy soul life, that the healthy soul life radiates its forces into the physical body, and that when the soul is desolate and cannot draw out of its own depths that which fills its consciousness with satisfaction, then the dissatisfaction, the incoherence, the mystery of the soul life is imprinted in nervousness and so on as an unhealthy influence right into the physical body. Those who do not understand this may experience it. Life poses the greatest riddles, and in cases that are meaningful to everyone, what can be expressed by asking: Where else do certain symptoms of a life that is not satisfied with itself come from, if not from the fact that the soul life is not healthy, not complete, and therefore does not radiate health to the body? But anyone who is willing to consider the healing influence of a healthy soul life on the body will also be able to say the following: If in our time we repeatedly point out the inherited characteristics and, for example, with regard to what we feel as a predisposition to illness in us, repeatedly say to this or that person: “We have inherited this from our ancestors, we cannot change it”, then this thought means something that must weigh heavily upon our innermost soul life and must mean a depression of the soul life, which will very soon exert an unfavorable influence on the outer life of the body and must be felt by the person concerned as something depressing that cannot be changed because it lies in the purely physical line of inheritance. But anyone who, on the basis of spiritual science, can gain the conviction that what lives in him is not just a combination of inherited traits and inherited powers, but something that goes from life to life as a spiritual-soul core, can, if spiritual science is not just a theory for him but something that can constantly remind himself that, in spite of all inherited traits and powers, his spiritual and mental core lives, from which he can draw the strength to become a victor, no matter how much the line of inheritance may point to decadence.

The consciousness that can be gained from spiritual science not only answers life's riddles that are theoretical, but answers all questions that reach the whole mind as riddles that we must have answered in order to live in our soul. If we know nothing of that spiritual-soul core that hurries from life to life, then we feel oppressed and weak under the yoke of heredity. We only feel strong and vigorous and live as spiritual-soul beings when we stand upright in the constitution of our spiritual-soul core and can say: The powers of our spiritual-soul core are inexhaustible, for they alone are the sum of what is given to us in the line of inheritance, and through them we can bring what appears to be doomed to decline, from the center of our soul, to ascend again. In this way, the solutions of spiritual science are written into life itself. Only then will spiritual science bear its true fruit, when it can be integrated in this way into the whole of the soul's attitude and mood, and when we become strong, not just clever, through spiritual science. But we also become more proficient in our thinking, especially with regard to certain finer distinctions in life, and we gain in strength and judgment for a finer conception of life.

Just one example of this! When those who like to attribute everything to heredity examine any significant person in relation to his line of ancestors, they may well say: “You can see that of what this person shows in himself, in one ancestor this quality is found, in another that quality.” And then it is said: This has added up and been inherited, and then the inherited traits have merged into a soul being. — One then coins the sentence: So you can see that genius stands at the end of a line of inheritance and has been inherited from one's ancestors.

Expressed in this way, a thought is, so to speak, crossed. For who would have proved anything by this line of thought? One would only have proved something if one could show that the genius was at the beginning of a line of inheritance, but not if it showed itself at the end of it. For if it occurs at the end of a line of ancestors, this proves nothing other than, if one may say so: if a man has fallen into water and comes out of it, he is wet. It only proves that he has passed through a certain element and has absorbed something from it, just as a person is wet when he is pulled out of the water. If one wanted to prove something through the line of inheritance, one would have to show that genius is at the beginning and not at the end of a line of inheritance. But one will leave that alone, because the world speaks against it.

To put the questions correctly and answer them everywhere, that is what follows from spiritual science. Then one will realize that spiritual science does not contradict natural science, but also that a scientific answer to the great riddles of life is not enough. The greatest wisdom will probably be drawn from spiritual science when one day all human education can be placed in the light of spiritual science, when man grows up in such a way that his growth means becoming aware of the spiritual-soul core.

Then the spiritual-soul core of the being will grow with the human being between birth and death in such a way that not only does the soul enter into reality with the full content of which was spoken earlier, but that the soul also becomes aware of the second I, that germ that concentrates more and more. Then the consciousness will pass into another form of life. Then man will indeed see the time approaching when the hair turns white, the face wrinkles and the strength of the bodily organs diminishes. But he will then look up at what he has seen growing from youth, which is the remainder and inheritance of a previous life, and will feel as one feels with a plant germ when the falling leaves announce the end of the plant's form, but the germ grows stronger and stronger. Thus man will feel himself as the germ of a new life and say to himself: What falls away from you must pass through death, for you cannot remain in that; for it must be something else that can be your covering, you must build yourself another body, for you have already prepared it within you. Man will feel the life ripening within him, which he will have to live through again in distant times.

That the repetitions of life are not without beginning or end, and how the question will be answered as to what extent these incarnations of the human essence have a beginning and an end, will be answered later.

When man thus regards life as the germ of a subsequent life, he will also see how this again develops a germ. Then he does not cling to a doctrine of immortality, which he examines philosophically, as it were, but then he puts life to life, which he sees flourish and thrive, and imbues himself with the consciousness of immortality, because he knows that a new germ of life must arise from every life. In the ever-growing and hope-inspiring spiritual and soul life germ, man answers the questions about the riddle of life and death. He answers them not only theoretically, but in a living inner experience he grasps, comprehends, and experiences immortality. He does not merely say, “I have grasped immortality,” but he grasps the soul in its essential nature as a being that cannot be other than immortal, because out of every life it develops a new germ of life. Man beholds inwardly the maturing of this new germ of life. Therefore we may say: spiritual science does not only answer the question about the riddle of life and death in theory, it does not only give a theoretical certainty, but it can inwardly transform our life in such a way that we gather strength and feel what goes from life to life by grasping immortality, and thus go through all lives.

In this way, theory is transformed into life practice, the immortality puzzle into an understanding of the question of immortality itself. This is always the best fruit of spiritual science when it transforms itself from mere contemplation into something that then lives within us. And it may be said that when spiritual science is grasped by man in this sense, then it is not only something that makes him understand something, but something that sinks into his own soul like a life force and lives in him.

Therefore, we may summarize today's reflection by saying that spiritual science teaches us by also vividly verifying for the human soul what a view of the whole rest of the world teaches us, the great contemplation of the perpetual transformation of life, but at the same time also of the permanence in all change that shows itself to us over and over again; it teaches us the eternal in all that is temporal. As if written in iron tablets, the great law of life is graven on our soul: Everything that lives in the universe lives only by creating the germ of new life within itself. And the soul surrenders only to aging and death in order to mature immortalized into ever new life!