Spiritual Science as a Life's Work

GA 63 — 27 November 1913, Berlin

4. On Death

Having taken the liberty in the first three lectures of this series to speak about the nature and spirit of spiritual science in general, I would now like to discuss specific topics from the field of spiritual science in the following lectures; and I would like to note from the outset that today's lecture and next week's lecture, “The Meaning of the Immortality of the Human Soul,” which together form a whole, will deal with questions of human soul life that are connected with death and with what follows for human beings after death, and which I would like to describe with the words: the meaning of human immortality. It should be noted from the outset that it is generally not easy to speak about the subject of this evening's lecture in our present time, for there are many external and internal obstacles.

It should be noted at the outset that it is generally not easy to speak about the topic of this evening in our present time, for there are many external and internal obstacles in the current state of affairs to the consideration of what is connected with the word “death.” Above all, in order to avoid misunderstandings in our reflections this evening, it must be pointed out that spiritual science is, in a sense, not as well regarded as many other scientific fields today. Spiritual science is dependent on analyzing the areas it addresses in the strictest sense, considering them in the strictest sense logically distinct from related areas. This must be said because the discussions that are to take place today and next time are only relevant to human experience, and because a more naturalistic science of the present day will be very inclined to extend what is understood by death to everything that lives. Now, it is precisely through spiritual science that it becomes apparent that what is outwardly the same for different types of beings can be very different inwardly, and there will probably also be an opportunity in the course of this winter's lectures to draw attention to what death means in the plant kingdom and what it means in the animal kingdom. In this consideration, the intention is initially only to speak of death in relation to the human being. But there are also many other obstacles when it comes to discussing our topic from a spiritual scientific point of view. Without going into a general description, we would like to show, based on the spirit of spiritual science, how these obstacles are constituted.

These obstacles lie in a fear of the problem of death that does not clearly arise in human consciousness. One need only consider how this fear manifests itself, even in the most enlightened minds of the present day. One could point to many, many of the most enlightened personalities of the present day: one would find the same thing. Today I want to do so with regard to the great religious scholar and Orientalist Max Müller. When one looks up what he has said here and there about death in his writings, one notices above all what we encounter in numerous personalities of the present: the reluctance to even think about the possibility of being able to research anything about death. The truly significant Max Müller managed to say that all human thoughts that wander beyond human life, which lies between birth and death, even if they are expressed by a poet like Dante in the Divine Comedy, are nothing more than childish fiction. Yes, says Max Müller: if an angel descended from the heights of heaven to earth and wanted to tell humans something about the conditions of human life in the world after death, humans would understand these statements of the angel as little as a newborn child would understand anything if one were to give a lecture on the conditions of present life in any human language. So even among the most enlightened minds of the present day, there is a certain reluctance to talk about these things at all. Yet Max Müller is not a negative spirit when it comes to matters of human immortality; he himself is imbued with a certain certainty of faith in life after death. He simply does not want to acknowledge the possibility that humans can gain any insight into what lies beyond death. He wants to emphasize again and again that humans not only cannot know anything about the realms that lie beyond death, but also should not know anything about them.

Does this fact show one might say symptomatic of the difficulties that exist in the present with regard to our theme, but one can also say that the scientific way of thinking of the present, which has become so significant, as mentioned repeatedly in earlier lectures, distracts people from thinking about gaining any knowledge of what lies beyond death. In the three previous lectures, this scientific way of thinking has been spoken of so appreciatively and what it has brought to light has been so approvingly acknowledged — provided it remains within its limits — that I will not be misunderstood today if I now briefly introduce why it is difficult for the scientific way of thinking to admit that there is a possibility of penetrating into the realm beyond death. What is this scientific way of thinking based on? How did it become so great? It became so great because it established the principle of human sensory observation and the application of intellectual activity to this sensory observation in the strictest sense of the word. Now, one thing is easy to see. If one makes the principle of sensory observation, the principle of investigating everything that the intellect can gain from this sensory observation, the exclusive principle of research, then one undoubtedly wants to investigate what human beings develop through their physical education by their birth into physical life. That which one might refer to as something “immortal,” which has a spiritual life beyond birth, conception, and death, clearly cannot be included in the realm of sensory observation and intellectual research, which is bound to the senses. With their body, human beings certainly receive what surrounds their being, what organizes their senses and what organizes the intellect that is bound to the senses. That which researches, which researches in the most eminent sense in the scientific manner of our time, is undoubtedly acquired by man in the realm of temporality; it belongs to the realm into which our being dissolves when we pass through the gate of death. Natural science in the present sense therefore undoubtedly works with tools that, just as they come into being with birth, pass away with death. And how could it not be easily recognized, when working with these tools is made the exclusive principle of research, that one cannot investigate that which these tools certainly cannot reach? Therefore, nothing seems more foolish than to assume that the research methods of natural science could ever penetrate the mysterious realms that lie beyond death. This is why it came to pass that truly not the worst minds of the nineteenth century came to deny life beyond death, precisely from the standpoint of natural science. Truly, they were not the worst thinkers! For among the many extraordinary praises that must be accorded to the scientific way of thinking, as it has developed over the last three to four centuries and as it dominates general education and thinking today to a much greater extent than some are willing to admit, among all the praise that must be given to this scientific way of thinking and research, it is undoubtedly also justified to say that this scientific way of thinking has trained people not to let their prejudices, their wishes and desires — that which lives in their subjectivity — have a say when it comes to determining anything scientifically. One gains precisely that great respect that one can have for the scientific way of thinking when one really sees its efforts and goes through them with it, in the experiment: to proceed strictly objectively in observation, so that everything that human beings would like to be, everything that flows out of the human subject, really plays no role in research. And how could it be otherwise with regard to the question of death! But has it not always been the case that human emotions, desires, and cravings play the greatest role in the answers people give themselves about what lies beyond death? By weaning themselves off allowing these things to play a role in scientific research, it was precisely the most ethically sound personalities of the nineteenth century who came to reject life after death.

If one searches for the reasons why these minds came to such a rejection of life after death, one finds that, basically, their motives were noble. That must be readily admitted. Many among the materialistic thinkers of the past century said that it was part of human egoism, of the impulses of human selfishness, to wish that one's little self, with all that one experiences and is as a human being between birth and death, should continue beyond death; Many, especially ethically valuable materialistic minds, said that it was nobler for human beings to allow what they have worked for and acquired between birth and death to merge into general human life, into the stream of historical becoming, to surrender themselves to the whole; to lay what one's ego has brought one into the grave, but to allow what one has experienced spiritually and emotionally to flow into general human life and to know that this ego does not preserve itself, but sacrifices itself on the altar of general humanity. In such sacrifice, in such dissolution of what one has acquired in life, some people who were not morally shallow and who were scientifically trained saw what can be said about the death of the human being.

Now, there is certainly much within human emotional life, within human desire, that rebels against such a flowing into the general stream of humanity. In a truly insightful answer to our question, none of this should play a role. But there is one thing that can lead people, if not to an answer, then at least to the right question regarding death and the passage of the human being through this death. Even if we disregard all the desires and fears that people have about death, if we disregard everything they would like to have as an answer about the afterlife, and if we look only at what it is justified to look at: the economy of the universe, then the answer – and I only want to raise a question here – is something like this: If we consider the most valuable and most significant things that humans acquire internally in life, the things that live in our souls as our innermost treasures and as treasures in relation to what we can do for ourselves and our environment out of love, devotion, and other impulses, and if we ask ourselves: What is the most valuable thing? — it is something so intimate, so individual to each human soul that, because of its intimate character, it cannot be given to the stream of general existence. Truly, no matter how much we can give, no matter how much we can give so that what we have to give is further processed in the general stream of existence — what is most valuable is so closely connected to our soul that we would not give it up, that it would necessarily sink into the general grave of nothingness if we did not pass through the gate of death as something. For without a doubt, what is most valuable, achieved and developed by the human soul, would be lost to the world economy if human life ended with death. But that would contradict what we otherwise perceive everywhere in the universe. Nowhere in the universe do we perceive forces developing to a height, to the utmost height to which they can initially develop — and then flowing into nothingness; rather, everywhere forces are generated only in such a way that they transform themselves, that they continue to work in the world. Should human beings alone be called upon to work out something that would not be further processed in the universe, but would have to dissolve into nothingness?

This is not remotely an answer, but rather the posing of a question from a perspective that is completely independent of what humans would like to have and what human desires are: In terms of a general world economy, which is so clearly evident to us everywhere as an example of general observation of nature, how could it be possible that what human beings develop in their souls between birth and death should sink into nothingness? However, it is not really possible to go further than posing this question with external means of research. For undoubtedly, what can be called immortal in human beings must be sought beyond external experience. External experience comes to us through the senses, and a little experience shows that everything that can be achieved through the intellect also belongs to external experience, and that all of this, as it exists in external life, can only develop within the physical body that is given to us through birth or conception and which dissolves with death. Within all that we can have through our physicality, we will not be given the tools that make it possible to explore the problem of death.

Now, we have already spoken in the introductory lectures about how human beings can, through spiritual scientific methods, develop their souls in such a way that they detach themselves from physical experience as if through a spiritual chemistry, so that they actually rise to a point in life where they can express, not merely as a phrase, but as an immediate inner experience: I know what it means to develop within myself a spiritual-soul activity that does not use the body as its instrument. Can we hope—which would be necessary if we were to investigate death—that something can be said about death through something other than investigation by means of external experience, namely through the powers of knowledge awakened in the manner described? Especially when thinking scientifically, one must say: what is to be investigated must be experienced. But death cannot be experienced with any external tools, since it is precisely death that takes away our external tools. Thus, research into death can only take place on the one condition that such research is possible with tools that do not lie within physical life.

It has been pointed out that through certain inner, intimate soul exercises, human beings are able to bring about such a strengthening, such an invigoration of their soul life that something actually occurs for them like a detachment of the spiritual-soul from the physical, similar to the separation of oxygen from hydrogen when water is decomposed. Thus, through the exercises indicated in the previous lectures, the spiritual-soul life of the human being is detached from the physical and the human being is led to experience the spiritual-soul life inwardly. When a person experiences spiritually and soulfully in this way, when they still have a life without a body and have come to see their own physical body as an object outside themselves, then they become aware of what it has meant to spiritual researchers throughout the ages to bring two experiences close together: the experience of so-called initiation and the experience of death.

We must simply note that what is called spiritual research has existed at all times. Spiritual research was already being pursued in the earliest times of humanity, in the historical development of humankind on earth, in the so-called mysteries. Anyone who would like to learn more about this can read about the mysteries of antiquity in my book Christianity as Mystical Fact. However, spiritual research at that time could not be conducted in the same way as it is today. Human beings change considerably in the course of historical development, and before I go into this further, I would like to point out that in the ancient times of human development, completely different forces had to be developed in the soul so that human beings could be brought to a place that was, so to speak, a middle ground between art, science, and religion, where the spiritual world could be presented to them in its essence through the development of their soul forces.

In our times, different forces than before must be developed in the soul, since in recent centuries the soul has been educated in the natural sciences. And so spiritual science in our time, where it must be a continuation of natural science, must also be something different than it was in ancient times. But it has always brought souls two experiences: the development of soul abilities that allow them to experience the spiritual world independently of the physical body, and the experience of death. Again and again we find expressed in various writings that the human being who has been brought into the mysteries to experience the spiritual world, its processes and beings, has approached the “gate of death”; that is, that in their experiences they have experienced something that they know immediately to be similar to the experience of death, or that it is something in which one can also know, when one recognizes it, what death is all about. Those who underwent initiation knew that they had to approach the threshold of death. That is what has always been said. And in my book “A Path to Self-Knowledge,” I had to cite an experience, which I have already mentioned here, that people come to when, through years of practice, they allow what is called meditation, concentration, and so on to take effect on them. I wrote there: When a person undertakes that development of their soul through which it grows out of the body for short periods of time to a body-free experience and living, then the person comes to an infinitely significant moment, a moment that is then shattering for the soul when it occurs for the first time. It must then be repeated more often for the spiritual researcher; but when it occurs for the first time, it is an experience that profoundly affects the soul life. When one increases that soul activity, which in ordinary life is otherwise referred to as attention or devotion, to the infinite, the soul forces independent of the body become so strong that a very specific moment occurs in the soul life. It can occur in the midst of the hustle and bustle of daily life; it does not even need to be disruptive if one ascends to such an experience through a legitimate development, as described in the book “How to Attain Knowledge of Higher Worlds,” and the ordinary experience of the day can continue as usual. Or this moment can occur in the depths of nighttime experience, in sleep. One then suddenly feels, or one feels during daily life, an inspiration or intuition flowing into general life. I would like to describe what one experiences in this way in typical terms. It can be different in hundreds and hundreds of ways for different people, but it will always have something of what I now want to describe. I will try to put it into words, but in doing so, I am aware that it can only be expressed imperfectly with words borrowed from the sensory world.

One feels as if one has been torn from the middle of sleep, and one has the feeling that something is saying: What is happening to me? It is as if lightning were striking the room where I am, and as if it were shattering the vessel of my outer physicality. In such a moment of heightened awareness, one not only feels something creeping up on one that destroys one's outer physicality, but one feels oneself thoroughly permeated and pulsated by this destroyer of outer physicality. One feels that one can only sustain oneself in this experience through the strengthened inner soul forces, and one says to oneself: Now I know what can exist in the outer world to detach the physicality in which I am trapped from myself. From this moment on, through what one has experienced, one knows that there is something spiritual and soulful in human beings that is independent under all circumstances of the physical body, to which this physical body is attached like an external vessel and tool.

From that moment on, one knows in image what death is. Admittedly, it is initially an indefinite knowledge, an indefinite experience; but it gives the soul that inner mood, that emotional tone, that inner grasp of a spiritual reality, through which it becomes capable of engaging in what enables it to penetrate into the realms of spiritual life. It is an intimate experience that I have spoken of; but it is an experience of a very general human nature — of a very general human nature because it is so serious that it detaches one from what is strictly connected with personal desires and will, and acquaintances one with what otherwise always lies behind life. But it also shows you something else very clearly: the difference between the attainment of actual spiritual scientific knowledge and spiritual scientific insight — and any other external knowledge and external insight. External science, external insight is attained by learning this or that, by engaging in this or that pursuit; then you have attained what you desire to learn. Through work, one acquires what one needs to know. This is not the case with spiritual scientific insight. It is not that anyone should believe that spiritual scientific knowledge is acquired when enlightenment comes to the soul, which then sees into the whole realm of the spirit. Some people imagine that spiritual scientific knowledge is acquired without any effort. But that is not the case. And if someone were to say: Spiritual research says many things that historians can only bring to light with great effort in years of work with documents and sources, and then the spiritual researcher comes along and says something without realizing that such a thing can only be said after years of research; that is presumptuous, then it must be replied: Not only must the spiritual researcher expend the effort required for such years of document research and experimentation, but he must also carry out all the necessary work on himself for years. But this work has, in a certain sense, a different goal, a different character. What one can do as a spiritual scientist is not actually what leads to knowledge, but is only the preparation for it. And everything that is said in my book “How to Attain Knowledge of Higher Worlds” is only a description of what the soul has to do in order to prepare itself for that moment when the spiritual world becomes apparent to it. Preparation, not elaboration as in external science, is what the spiritual researcher must first undertake. However, one also learns to recognize this when one can connect a meaning with the words: I experience myself as a spiritual-soul being within the spiritual world.

Then one connects meaning with something else, namely with what does not seem as important as the question of death, because ordinary consciousness is accustomed to it: with what enters life every day as sleep. One learns to recognize what sleep is and how, each time one falls asleep, the human being leaves the physical-bodily entity in relation to his spiritual-soul entity, just as hydrogen leaves oxygen in the chemical decomposition of water — except that when human beings are out of their physical bodies during sleep, they are not strong enough for the normal life of the soul to maintain consciousness. In normal life, humans are only able to maintain their consciousness when they submerge their spiritual-soul being into their physical body, which then reflects their soul experience back to them as if in a mirror. They can only have this experience in their soul consciousness as if in a mirror image. It is as if human beings could only have their consciousness by passing by mirrors, as it were, and, looking into the mirrors, coming to feel and sense themselves. But when human beings see themselves in the mirror in ordinary life, they know that it is not the mirror that is the cause of the image, but the one standing in front of it. So it is when a person undergoes spiritual research development in their soul: they begin to know that what they imagine, feel, and perceive in ordinary life is like a mirror image, and that in spiritual experience they are a being who perceives themselves as in a mirror image when they submerge themselves in physicality. The body makes the soul strong enough to perceive itself; but when it is outside the body, it is not strong enough to know itself. When a person comes to sense, feel, and experience their independent spiritual-soul experience, they know what they really are behind the mirror of ordinary consciousness; then they begin to know, not just as a phrase, but through direct experience, that from falling asleep to waking up, they are inside their real spiritual-soul being and experience in it what they cannot become conscious of in normal human experience.

The spiritual researcher learns to experience what one experiences in sleep, but with the enormous difference that in normal sleep life one is unconscious, while the spiritual researcher consciously experiences his inner being by preparing and strengthening the soul in relation to physical experience. The spiritual researcher then gains experience in relation to this independent experience of the spiritual-soul core of being. One experience is of particular significance here. One might call it the “change with the I-experience.” For it is the I that we must carry through life if life is to flow normally. It has often been mentioned that from a certain point in childhood experience, the I lights up. This is the point to which we can remember back in life. And if we can remember back, then we know how everything we have experienced is connected to the I. We sit down, as it were, next to our I and know that we are connected to all our conscious experiences. Only by feeling connected to the I with all our soul experiences is our I-hood guaranteed. When the spiritual researcher truly succeeds in extracting his spiritual-soul core from his physical body, a great transformation takes place in his I-experience, a transformation for which one must be prepared so as not to be dismayed by it. Much of what is described in my book “How to Attain Knowledge of Higher Worlds” is intended to prepare the soul for this experience.

What happens at a certain point in time when the soul becomes free of the body? What happens then, what becomes immediate experience, can be described approximately in the following way, and I would like to take the following approach.

When we take the human body as it is researched by external science with its external instruments, it should already be clear from external logical reasons that this human body must be permeated by something so that it does not follow its own laws and its own inner necessity. What are these laws and necessities? Well, they reveal themselves in death, when the physical human body approaches dissolution. Then it is left to its own laws. From what has been said here, it can be deduced by a certain logic, which I have already explained here, that there must be something higher in human beings than this physical body; but such logical considerations always leave a certain residue that makes objections possible, unless there is a healthy sense of truth from the outset for what spiritual science is able to explore from the primordial grounds of existence. But what is it when that event, which can be called initiation, actually occurs, through which the spiritual researcher experiences himself inwardly independent of his physical-bodily being? Then he really has his physicality outside himself, knows himself to be outside this physicality, does not have it around him; and how does it appear to him? One must not believe that it is so nice and pleasant to float outside one's physical body and see one's body lying in bed, unharmed and reassuring. It is not like that. Rather, what one perceives, if one has prepared oneself in the appropriate way, is something very strange. It is that one does not get to know the body in the forces in which it lives; rather, one gets to know it in the forces that are already present throughout life as the decomposing, death forces, one gets to know what works on the body's destruction throughout life. If one wants to express oneself scientifically and learnedly, one can say: one gets to know the death that is latent in the body. Everywhere one gets to know the tendencies of the body to scatter, to integrate itself into the elements of the earth; one gets to know the body as it wants to dissolve. One can express what one experiences in relation to one's body by means of a comparison; but this is not meant to be a mere image, rather it is used to express inner experiences that must be made.

Consider a candle flame. The candle burns down. The fuel is destroyed. As long as the fuel is still there, the flame can remain. But what is it that makes the flame exist, what alone makes it present? Solely the fact that the fuel gradually burns down, that it dissolves. If one wanted to prevent the fuel from dissolving, one would have to extinguish the flame. One cannot demand that the candle remain intact and yet the flame continue to exist. One can only enjoy the sight and benefit of the flame by allowing the fuel to be consumed.

In comparison, one's own physical body appears in the supersensible view as such a burning flame in its consumption. The body appears like the fuel that burns down, and the flame also appears. One knows what is happening through what is present in the body, that there is always a tendency in the body to consume itself. Just as the flame is created in a candle by the consumption of the fuel, so in human beings, what we call ego consciousness in ordinary life is created from their death forces. One would never be able to experience this ego if one did not carry death within one's body. That is how it is for human beings. Imagine hypothetically a human body that was so integrated into the world that it could not die, that in addition to the forces that make it grow and become large, it also had the forces that consume it with the same certainty as the flame consumes the candle: its ego would be extinguished, the ego would no longer be there! This is the impressive insight that one gains as a spiritual researcher, that impressive insight that must be summarized in the words: We carry not only the forces of growth within us, we also carry the forces of death; and the fact that we carry them within us, that we have the tendency toward death within us, gives us the possibility of ego consciousness for the life between birth and death. One notices this in a very specific inner process, in the process of feeling a transformation taking place in the ego when, as a spiritual researcher, one is now outside the physical body. The ego becomes something that one does not like it to become. From a thought that otherwise always accompanies us in life, without which we are not even awake, the ego, this ego that we otherwise have in normal life, becomes something that we no longer have within us, something we see facing us, really as if emerging flaming from the image of physical death: the ego becomes a memory. This is the significant transition from extra-spiritual recognition to spiritual recognition, that one has the ego within oneself as a mere memory, which one knows is there, one can look at it as a memory, but one cannot have it within oneself now. — In this way, one learns about death and its connection with the ego, as it is in normal human life, through spiritual science.

Now spiritual research can go further. What we experience in the soul can be divided into three groups of soul experience. Two groups of this soul experience should first be emphasized as particularly important and significant: imaginative thinking and willing, the will. When we are in everyday life, we must accompany this everyday life with our thoughts. What would we be as human beings if we did not go through the world thinking, if we could not think about things? What would we be as human beings if we did not have the impulses to do this or that, to accomplish this or that? Will and thinking are the forces in the soul life that always accompany human beings through their everyday lives. If one advances in spiritual research to the body-free experience in the soul, one makes the further discovery that one cannot take into the body-free experience that which actually makes one feel like a human being in ordinary experience: thinking, imagining. Everyday thoughts, even the thoughts of ordinary science, which are based on the experience of the outer senses, must be left outside; they fade away, I might say, as one enters into body-free cognition. It is therefore perfectly understandable to the spiritual researcher when someone who wants to rely solely on the life of imagination as it is gained from outer life says, as Professor Forel does: Consciousness will very soon fall asleep if it has nothing more to imagine from the outside. This is understandable for a consciousness that wants to rely only on the outside world, for the impressions that come from the outside world can be taken into neither the life of sleep nor into spiritual research. For those who become spiritual researchers, this causes something extremely oppressive, something that makes them feel separated from everything they are attached to in outer life, everything they consider valuable in outer life, everything they might even say: in normal life, you fall asleep if you don't have it. As a spiritual researcher, one must enter a life where one cannot have this, where one must lay down everything one has been accustomed to thinking in ordinary life. And what does one then experience in relation to what is expressed as thinking in normal life, when the thoughts that one usually no longer has have faded away, when they have remained at the threshold upon entering the spiritual world? the spiritual world, what does one experience then? I would like to express what one experiences then:

First, one experiences what sleep does. It is already a significant experience to know what sleep does. One now learns, even in a very modest way, to agree with the materialistic thinker who says: The brain is necessary for thinking, and a thought must be based on certain movements in our brain. Quite true, absolutely true! And any objection to materialism that would say that thoughts can exist without the brain is to be dismissed. For thinking is not what enables us to settle into the spiritual world when we, as spiritual researchers, enter the spiritual realms. We do not find thoughts there. But we find the other thing, through which thought first arises in the brain. But what causes the brain to make very specific movements so that it becomes a mirror of thought? It is the spiritual-soul forces. Behind thinking, not in thinking, the spiritual-soul forces work, which the spiritual researcher finds. Therefore, he agrees with what the materialistic researcher can say when he remains within the limits of his field: that everyday thoughts are consequences of the brain. But what goes on in the brain, whereby the physical body is first formed into a mirror, and indeed each time into a mirror of thinking, is the work of the spiritual-soul behind it. As spiritual researchers, we truly go beyond everyday life into the creative realm of the world. This enables us to understand sleep life and participate in how what lies behind sleep repairs the worn-out parts of our brain during the night. We become observers of this regenerative work on the body and learn about the activity of sleeping. As spiritual researchers, we get to know the thoughts that confront us during the day from the other side; and every time a thought arises and appears as a mirror image in the brain, we get to know it from the other side, when the body sleeps at night, when it works and lives within the brain and stimulates the brain to activity during the day. In this way, one gets to know thinking from the other side. That is one part of how one gets to know thinking.

The other part of how one gets to know thinking is now something that becomes so much a part of spiritual research that, unless one is well prepared, it is impossible to feel sympathy with what is coming. You learn about the inner working, the inner feeling, the inner experience of the soul. You learn to know the soul as something that is internally mobile; you learn about an activity of the soul about which you can say: what does this activity want? It wants to form thoughts. But as it appears, it cannot form thoughts. You learn about a part of the soul's activity that is used to repair the tired brain during sleep; you can be satisfied with that. You learn about another part of the soul's activity, with which you touch the whole physicality of the brain from within, about which you can say: You have it now. And when one goes into it more closely to examine: How did you get it? it becomes clear: You got it through what you have experienced since birth and processed in your soul; but it has become something that, as you are, pushes against your brain; and that does not allow what wants to come about as ordinary thoughts of everyday life to come about. Thus, the spiritual researcher lives in a state where he feels imprisoned in his body, which is his admirable spiritual tool of thought, as if in a chamber, as if in a prison. And he feels so affected by this that he says to himself: now you could form thoughts from your inner activity, if your brain did not lie there like a heavy substance and did not want to be stirred up to what the soul wants.

It is often said that the methods which the spiritual researcher has to go through lead to a certain suffering. Suffering always consists in something that one would like to do in the soul being prevented. Even physical pain consists of this, but we can talk about that later. Suffering is what the spiritual researcher grasps in his becoming and what wants to become thought but cannot become thought, for the brain is only good for the thoughts that are achieved in normal life. Perhaps at this point it will be understood that research into the problem of death does indeed become an inner martyrdom of the soul, that it can only be undertaken because human beings have within them the necessary urge to discover the secrets of life. Yes, one will also understand that this research is not undertaken so often because, in fact, when one becomes familiar with the areas of life where one encounters something of this mystery, one can only make progress if one is able to go beyond everything that one otherwise loves and finds appealing in life. It will therefore not be easy to speak about what has just been indicated without a certain tone of melancholy and deep seriousness. And then one gains more and more the ability not only to see the deficiency in one's spiritual and soul experience, but one learns to renounce the desire to form thoughts through the body from what one experiences in this way. This “learning to renounce” is easy to say, but this renunciation is one of the serious, profound matters of life. It is a renunciation that can only be achieved through certain bitter experiences, which are justified only insofar as they lead to insights. Once one has experienced this—being unable to find expression in thought for what one has achieved—then one experiences it inwardly. And what does one experience then? One experiences that which is not yet capable of entering the body, because the body prevents it, but which forms a seed for a new physicality that we build up for our next life on earth, after we have passed through a life in a purely spiritual world after death. What one experiences in the time between death and the next birth will be discussed later.

Through the inner experiences that the spiritual researcher has with his thinking, I have tried to show how he experiences his inner, spiritual-soul core, which, through its own peculiarities, must blossom in the next earthly life as surely as a plant seed that develops must blossom into a new plant. For it is not by speculating that one learns about what in human beings grows beyond death, but by recognizing what in life prepares for a life beyond death and thus for a new earthly life; by seeking what cannot be seen with the senses or thought with the mind bound to the senses. Spiritual science does not want to speculate or philosophize about immortality; rather, it wants to prepare the human soul so that the immortal core of being truly lies within it, one might say, “spiritually prepared,” just as one examines something in natural science by removing it from its environment, in which its peculiarities cannot be explored. This applies to thinking.

Things are different when it comes to the will. Here, too, one experiences a change. One then notices how much the will that one expresses in the outer world depends on the condition of the body, how what one calls a strong will in ordinary life is enormously connected with the whole constitution of our body. With every impulse of the will, we put our body into action, so to speak. But now, on the basis of spiritual research, we must have the will without the body. The will immediately makes itself felt by showing that it is now present in a way that we are not accustomed to. Otherwise, when we have an impulse of will, we are accustomed to putting our body into action; when the body lies inactive in bed, no impulse of will arises. We always experience impulses of will in connection with the body. But now the soul, which wants to penetrate the spiritual world, is beyond the body; the body also plays a part in the impulse of will. This causes a certain inner tension, as if the will were limited on all sides, enclosed in an impenetrable eggshell, as if one were prevented from thinking, imagining, feeling and perceiving, from walking, standing, from everything. One feels the will in its self-containedness, but as if everywhere coming up against walls through which it cannot pass. And one must again pursue the inner spiritual exercises to such an extent that one not only notices this negative aspect of the will, but that one can experience the inner self as now pressed into the will. Then one notices: one wants something again, which must be said to be something one does not like to experience. When one applies the will in the outer world, one has, on the one hand, the impulses of the will and, on the other hand, the moral-social order. One imposes duties on oneself in life, or one has duties imposed on oneself by the moral-social order. One distinguishes between good and evil will, between what is right and wrong; in the outer world, one distinguishes between moral rules and impulses of the will. That is quite right. Now that one has withdrawn from the outer world, the will remains in a very similar way to how the ego was before: what one wanted remains as a memory. I am describing how the experiences arise. In this case, one must describe the imaginative view; this may seem fantastic, but things must be presented in this way. Then, in one's suppressed will, one experiences something like a morality inherent in this will itself. An action that must be considered evil by our external sensory consciousness is experienced in this will as belonging to what one must balance out oneself. One thus experiences the will in one's memory in such a way that the power of compensation, which must happen because the immoral action demands it, is contained within the will. One cannot help but say: What you have done wrong must stand beside you like a ghostly enemy, remaining there until you have removed it through compensatory actions. Those who experience the will within themselves and experience in their memory what they themselves have wanted, will with absolute certainty be confronted with their wrongs, which will continue to have an effect until they have removed them through compensatory impulses of the will. In this way, one experiences what is often referred to by an Oriental name as the inner working of karma. One then knows quite precisely: when one experiences an act of will that one has wanted, one experiences it in such a way that one sees: it is done; for every act of will, like thinking, belongs to memory. One then knows: it is done, and at the same time it has contributed to our progress in our development; something also pours out over our consciousness, which can be described as a luminous clarification in relation to what has been done. But everything that has been done has the effect of showing us how the moral and the mechanical, which are separate in physical life, are connected, and how an injustice or an immoral act remains effective until we make an effort to erase it to a certain degree in our outer life, until we have found the strength to erase the injustice, that is, to make amends for it. We know, when we experience the will in body-free cognition, that it has its inner moral impulses under all circumstances; we know that what is called karma is a continuing force in the world. — And now the painful part comes: that we must recognize that there are many, too many, of course too many deeds in our present life for which we lack the means of compensation! Now that we see them in their reality, we know that they will accompany us into our next earthly life and contribute to our destiny there.

What I have tried to suggest can be called exploring death, because it means experiencing what passes through the gate of death as the immortal part of the human being. From all this, we can see that true research into death is an intimate, inner research, but that it is all the more a universal human research because it reflects on what can be found in all human beings. For truly, what makes us this particular personal human being in life between birth and death comes from our outer physicality and from the outer world; it does not pass through the gate of death with us. What passes through the gate of death with us is what lies behind the physical-sensory, what evokes the physical-sensory and brings it to external and our own appearance for the experience between birth and death.

Now we ask ourselves the question: Why do we notice nothing of our immortal soul in ordinary life? Why is that which can reveal the mystery of death to us shrouded in such darkness?

It is shrouded in such darkness because we live from this darkness for the ordinary soul life between birth and death. We must erase our immortality from our consciousness in order to live in the body, to live with the external physical sensory world, to grow fond of this external sensory world, and to carry out our mission in it. The moment we want to reach our immortality, we must erase our physical-sensory experience, our everyday life. So if we have to erase our immortal nature from our ordinary consciousness in order to have ordinary physical and sensory everyday life, and since we can only have ordinary physical and sensory life by erasing the immortal for a time, we need not be surprised that we cannot find what can enlighten us about death within everyday life, for which the mystery of death must be covered up. The spiritual researcher can also show why the mystery of death cannot be found in ordinary life. For when we bend down with our spiritual-soul part from spiritual heights to what is given to us in the line of inheritance from father and mother, when we connect ourselves with the physical-material substances and immerse ourselves in them, finite consciousness must extinguish infinite consciousness. And with death, when infinite consciousness reappears, finite consciousness is extinguished, and what can remain of it remains as memory. But the life that begins when a person has passed through the gate of death is guaranteed by the spiritual scientific development of the human soul, when it applies those methods through which it already penetrates the spiritual world in ordinary life and crosses the threshold of death in full consciousness and develops a life of which we will even give a special description when we come to the corresponding lecture, unhindered by the timidity that prevails in this regard today.

Next time, however, we will describe what can be said to be the immediate consequence of what we have attempted to discuss today from a spiritual scientific point of view as the mystery of death, which is already present during life and to which we owe what ordinary consciousness makes possible. Yes, there is an aversion to these things in the present; people do not want to explore them. And even good, brilliant thinkers shy away from entering those areas that have been pointed out today in connection with the problem of death. Thus it happens that a man as distinguished as Maurice Maeterlinck, in his recently published little book “On Death” — which, precisely because it is so brilliant, should be read alongside everything else that is important in this regard — puts forward the most mistaken views on everything related to the problem of death. He, who is able to speak about all other areas of life in a very spiritual way, had to fail in this matter because, as can be seen everywhere, he has a special way of approaching things: describing death with the same means of knowledge as external things. He is not a spiritual researcher. He therefore does not know that these means must be abandoned if the areas that are relevant to the problem of death are to be explored. Maeterlinck is in the same position as mathematicians once were with regard to the problem known as “squaring the circle.” There was a time when people in math circles would always send in solutions on how to turn a circle into a square. However, the solutions were all unsatisfactory, and today anyone who still concerns themselves with this problem is considered an amateur, because it has now been rigorously proven that the problem cannot be solved in this way. So while in the past one could still be considered a genius if one wanted to solve the “squaring of the circle,” today anyone who still wants to try is considered an amateur. With regard to the question of immortality, people's views will also change, just as the views of those mathematicians have changed. For today, someone is still trying to find a solution to the “squaring of the circle” in another field; but one would have to say to him: You are demanding that the secrets of death be proven by the means of ordinary life. But when it comes to proofs, the most important thing is that they are understood. And so it must also be understood that proofs that seek to prove the mystery of death and immortality by means of ordinary life are impossible, because it is precisely in our everyday life that we have concealed the powers of the immortal, so that we may become self-aware human beings in the mortal realm.

But there is another special characteristic that can be seen in Maurice Maeterlinck. After talking around the issues everywhere — sometimes in a highly witty manner — he comes to the conclusion, somewhat more brilliantly and more literarily than Max Müller, who did so in a somewhat more professorial manner: So the soul should get used to the fact that it can never truly explore the mysteries of existence in this life or in any other. He then goes on to say: It is probably a good thing that they cannot be explored. And he adds: he would not wish even his worst enemy to be able to explore the real mysteries. For he fears that the world would become “mystery-free” if they were explored, that it would lose all its mystique if one penetrated the mystery of death. He considers it valuable that mystery remains “mystery” so that one does not dissolve the wonder in one's soul when one discovers such a mystery. That is why Maeterlinck says that he would not wish his worst enemy to explore the real mysteries, even if that enemy had a mind much greater and more powerful than his own. I have already mentioned in another context that mysteries do not become any less mysterious when we encounter them in the way that spiritual science can discuss them. For it is precisely what we explore in mysteries that makes life not more superficial, but deeper, ever deeper. For when we look into something from our previous earthly life, it does not solve the riddle of life in a superficial way, and it certainly does not rob the mystery of life of its splendor, but only makes it even greater, even more brilliant. Spiritual research does not penetrate things in such a way that the mysteries of existence are stripped of their admirable character, but in such a way that admiration can increase even more by exploring the reasons behind things. Therefore, one must respond to someone who, like Maeterlinck, speaks of death and says that he would not wish its secrets to be explored even on his worst enemy, that the mysterious nature of life is not taken away by seeking to explore it. With a trivial phrase—but it is not trivial, it is meant quite seriously—one could express what one would like to say to a person who wants to preserve life in such a way that it is considered “inscrutable.” One could ask him: If you were certain that someone was born blind, would you advise him that what is around him should remain a mystery, that he should not have surgery, and that the world should not shine into his inner being in all its splendor? Would you then object that you would not wish even for your worst enemy that the mystery of the world and its wonders be stripped away by surgery? Anyone who answers this question in the affirmative, that the world would lose its splendor for the blind-born if he were to undergo surgery, could also answer in the affirmative the question that Maeterlinck poses at the end of his book: that the world would lose its splendor if its mystery were explored. Spiritual scientific research will show that this is not the case when the secrets of the world are explored. And it is precisely our emotional life that, by exploring death, will come to the realization that death is a necessary part of life as a whole, and that not only is Goethe's statement true, that nature invented death in order to have much life, but that the following statement is also true for human life: Nature needs death in order to bring forth ever new and new glories from the seed of life.