From a Fateful Time

GA 64 — 26 November 1914, Berlin

3. The Human Soul in Life and Death

In the first two lectures with which I began this winter lecture series, I tried to use the impulses that the great events of the time in which we live can give us to tie in with the essence of German spiritual culture as it presents itself in its great personalities. What I tried to elucidate through these reflections was that it is in the nature of this spiritual culture to become more and more imbued with the consciousness of the reality of the spiritual, of eternal existence. To a certain extent, I will try to give a special chapter from what spiritual scientific reflection has brought about in our time, in order to gain a basis for what should form the content of tomorrow's lecture: a reflection on the nature of the European folk souls. In doing so, I would like to suggest, at least with a few traits taken from spiritual science, what the latter has to say, from its point of view, to help us understand what is happening around us.

The contemplation that is to be undertaken today about the human soul in life and death is, after all, always close to man as one of the greatest riddles of life – in our time, especially so – where we see the question of life and death way, where so many are intensely affected by this question through the reality of existence, where we see that — as it were through the facts — the noblest sons of the people are confronted with this question in every hour of their existence. In the lectures I have been privileged to give here over the years, I have often pointed out that we are living in a time when questions such as the nature of the human soul, the fate of the human soul and of man in general, and similar questions enter into a scientific approach, into an approach that is demanded by the development of that other scientific field that has been so greatly perfected in the last two to four centuries: the field of natural science. To place what can be known about the soul-spiritual in a truly scientific way alongside what has been scientifically conquered for humanity, that has often been described here as the task of spiritual science; and it has also been said that it should come as no surprise if this spiritual-scientific approach is still rejected by the vast majority of people today. This fate is shared by spiritual science with everything that wants to enter human spiritual and cultural development as something new, and it also shares it with natural science itself, which in its time appeared in exactly the same way, met with opposition after opposition, and which first had to prove - but could only prove it after centuries - what it is called upon to achieve for human development. Spiritual observation must relate to what we call knowledge and science in a completely different way to that of natural science. In order for spiritual contemplation to be called scientific in the true and best sense, it must proceed differently, it must approach the human being in a different way than what constitutes the essence of the scientific approach. In the scientific approach, we first turn our gaze outwards to the facts of nature and life, and from the abundance of the manifold that comes to us, we recognize the laws of life. What reaches us through the senses becomes an inner spiritual experience in us, it becomes thought, concept, idea. But who does not feel that with this ascent from the full contemplation of external diversity to the clarity — but also to the abstractness — of ideas and natural laws, the human soul with its inner experiences actually moves away from what one could call reality? We have the fullness of nature before us; we appropriate it in science, but we feel how, in principle, we present concepts and ideas that contain the laws of nature for us, and we feel how thin, one could say reality-less, we are in the face of external reality. And so we ascend from the abundance of external reality, which is spread out before our senses, to the — I would say — ethereally thin soul experience that we have when we have taken possession of the laws of nature in our world of ideas. In a sense, we distance ourselves from nature and its abundance; but we strive for this distance because we know that we can only recognize nature and its laws by distancing ourselves from it. This is the highest thing we strive for in science: the inner soul experience in ideas and thoughts.

Spiritual research must take exactly the opposite path if it is to be scientific. The ultimate consequence of the inner experience of science in relation to external nature is preparation — merely preparation — for the knowledge of the spiritual, of the soul; and it would be a complete mistake to believe that spiritual science could proceed in the same way as natural science. What natural science ultimately strives for is the preparation for spiritual science: living in inner soul experience, immersing oneself in that which strengthens the soul inwardly and which it cannot obtain from external nature. In short, knowledge and science can only be a preparation for what one ultimately comes to: to beholding, to perceiving the spiritual world. One could say: in natural science, one strives for knowledge and science; in spiritual science, one prepares oneself through knowledge and science for what is to approach the soul, and everything that one can have in the way of knowledge and science remains, basically, in spiritual science an inner matter for the soul. But what the soul and spirit live through does not lead to something merely subjective, something that concerns only the individual soul of the person, but it leads to what is real, just as external nature is only real.

I have often pointed out the way in which this preparation for beholding, for the real inner experience of spiritual reality, is designed. I will do so again today from a certain point of view.

Only through this preparation can one lead the soul further and further, so that in the end what is spiritual reality spreads out around it. We leave nature; it is there. We go forward to the spirit. We must seek spiritual reality. We cannot start from it, it is not there at first; we can only prepare ourselves for its contemplation. But when we prepare ourselves inwardly for its contemplation, then it comes to us like a grace, spreading out of the spiritual twilight. We must acquire the ability to contemplate it.

The first thing needed to experience the human soul in its reality, so to speak, is an inner experience — not paying attention, not just thinking, but an inner experience of that which we otherwise have only as a reflection of external reality – the world of thoughts, the world of feelings – that which we otherwise feel within us when we confront the external world, and which we regard as a reflection of nature, as an image in which nature is embedded. We have to experience this intensely and powerfully by turning our gaze away completely from external reality, by making ourselves blind and deaf to external sensory reality; we have to experience it so that we allow it to be intensely present as the only inner reality in the soul. The natural scientist seeks to extract a law of nature as a thought from the outer reality of the senses. The spiritual scientist gives himself up to a thought, or to a thought imbued with feeling, in inner experience; he lets, as it were, neither the eye nor the ear send out into the outer reality, and lets the inner interweaving and interworking of the soul and turns his most intense attention to this inner experience; he forgets himself and the world and lives only in what he, as it were, lets rise in his empty but alert consciousness from the depths of his soul. And then the strange thing happens: the thought to which we devote ourselves with infinitely increased attention over a long period of time, this thought, the stronger it becomes through our inner strength, the weaker it becomes precisely in relation to what it contains; it becomes more and more transparent and transparent, more and more ethereal and ethereal. One could say: the more the spiritual researcher endeavors to be present in the thought, which is called inner thought concentration, the more the content of the thought fades away. The more we endeavor to make the thought firm and, as it were, visible by devoting ourselves to it, the more this devotion leads to the thought fading away more and more, as if dissolving in a fog, and then disappearing completely from consciousness. One could also say, expressing a principle of this inner experience: the more the thought is experienced in its sharpness in the soul, the more it gains in energy through our own activity, the more it dies in the soul. To put it in an epigrammatic way, we can say: in order for the thought to reach the goal of spiritual research, it must die in the soul; and in dying, it undergoes an inner destiny, the destiny that also has the seed that is sunk into the earth to rot. But from its rotting, the strength for a new plant arises. When thought dies in us in the concentration of thought, it awakens to a completely different life; and one does not discover this different life until thought has died in inner sharp concentration. One must stop thinking in order to let the soul plant, that which arises from thought, germinate within oneself.

And what then arises from the thought?

It is difficult to express in human language what arises from the thought, because human language is created for the external sense experiences and not for the internal soul experiences. Therefore, in a certain respect, one can only hint at the inner experiences that come into question. As the thought, made energetic, dies away, the soul inwardly feels a burgeoning power, a power of which it becomes aware and of which it knows at the moment it becomes aware : This is spiritual-soul power; this is something that is not tied to your body; something that you carry within you without the mediation of your nervous system and your brain. But in grasping not the thought but the power of thought, there arises, as if by an inner necessity, the question that presents itself like a flash of lightning: “Where has the thought gone? After all, it was basically you yourself, in that you gave yourself over to it in sharp concentration of thought. You lived in the thought, and when it dissolved and died, it carried you away with it. Where has it gone? And where have you arrived now?” — Here one must choose a comparison. Just as we carry the thoughts we have of external nature within us, just as we know we have the thoughts, so we immediately perceive a state in ourselves through which we say: the thought as you had it has died in your concentration of thought; but through this it has awakened to another life – and has taken you with it. You are now thought of in the spiritual world!

This is a harrowing, great, tremendously significant experience in the life of the spiritual researcher. For only in this way can one ascend into the spiritual world, by feeling itself grasped by it – as thought, if it were alive, would feel itself grasped by us. And basically, there is no other way to experience immortality than to appeal through our inner soul development to the invisible spiritual beings that always rule over us – just as the beings of nature visibly rule over us – and by appealing to our relationship with these spiritual beings, who begin to take the thought for themselves and think it for us the moment the thought fades. Now we begin to know: within the spiritual world there are beings whose existence goes beyond mere nature; as we human beings think with our thoughts, so our spiritual beings think, so these higher geniuses think the content of our soul. They hold us, they carry us; and through the fact that we are in them, our immortal being, which goes beyond our physical existence, is conditioned. We tell ourselves through spiritual science: If we cannot hold ourselves in death, if we lose what we have been able to create for ourselves in our existence between birth and death as inner experience through outer nature, then we pass through the gate of death and then see from the results of spiritual science that what is independent of us in the body is basically thought from higher beings.

It is not the case that what we call the spiritual world expands around us in a similar way to the external nature – which many expect. External nature stands before us; we stand before it and we look at it. When we ascend into the spiritual world, it is different. There the spiritual world penetrates into our own experience, which we have only transformed; there we do not think about the spiritual world, there we must inwardly experience how we are thought. We are in the same situation vis-à-vis the spiritual world as our thoughts about external reality are vis-à-vis our soul. This is basically the most surprising thing about the external reality. It is the experience of spiritual reality that is reversed compared to that of sensual reality, that we say to ourselves: in the face of spiritual reality, when we really experience it, we feel the way nature should feel in the face of sensual reality; we do not think about the spiritual beings; we experience that when we have risen to them, we are thought of and held by them. If you want to express it pedantically and scientifically, we become the object of the spiritual world. Just as we are the subject in relation to the outer reality of nature, so we become the object in relation to the spiritual world. And just as the outer reality of nature stands before us as an object, so we rise to an experience of spiritual reality in which we ourselves are the object; for the spiritual reality comes to us as a subject — or as a multitude of subjects.

This inner experience is very often, but always only by those who do not know it and who have no will to enter into it, presented as something subjective, as a purely personal matter. In a sense, the objection that is raised with this is quite correct. For what one can get to know in the first stage of spiritual research has a subjective character; this carries a personal nuance in all the struggles and inner conquests that one has to undergo in the process. And one can justifiably raise the objection that The researcher has the task of defining the limits of human knowledge, and he should be aware that what goes beyond the general limits imposed by external nature can basically only be subjective knowledge. The objection is justified, and none will recognize it as much as the spiritual researcher; but it is only valid up to a certain stage, and for the reason that in reality everything that one can go through subjectively, personally, is only preparation. In the moment when the preparation is sufficient, the objective spiritual reality comes to us as if by a grace that comes upon us as strength. What is experienced as preparation can basically be quite different for the most diverse people; but where they arrive in the end is the same for everyone. The objection is also often made that the spiritual researchers usually communicate what they communicate in a subjectively colored way; one says this about the facts of the spiritual world, the other that. That is quite right, but only right because many do not know how to communicate what presents itself through the grace mentioned, but because it is still their personal, subjective knowledge that they communicate, because they have not brought it to the point where the spiritual researcher arrives at a spiritual world that stands before him as objectively as the images of nature appear objectively before the human soul. The objections raised against spiritual scientific research — I have often said this here — are best understood by the spiritual researcher himself.

When the spiritual world is reached by the spiritual researcher after sufficient preparation, then this spiritual researcher knows himself as experiencing an invisible, supersensible world. Knowledge has ceased to have meaning for him. This knowledge has been completely transformed into direct experience, into the most immediate inner perception. And now the spiritual researcher experiences what becomes immediate truth for him. He knows: Now you live in the world in which you are always during the course of twenty-four hours; you now live in the spiritual realm, in the soul's existence, in which you are otherwise always unconsciously during sleep. Through spiritual research one gets to know the state of sleep, learns to recognize that in it the human soul is really outside its body, that it has the body before it, as one otherwise only has the objects of the external world before it. How does one learn to recognize this? By the fact that one is now really in a state in which one is otherwise during sleep, only in a completely opposite way. In sleep, consciousness is depressed and darkness spreads around us. But now, as a spiritual researcher, one can look at this state because one experiences it – but not unconsciously, as in sleep, but consciously. One knows: One is, by having come out of the body – for one consciously comes out of the body – inwardly united with the spiritual world; one has become one with the spiritual world. And now the question is answered: Why is it then usually the case that the soul is unconscious during sleep? Why is it outside of its body in this dull, dark state? This question is answered for the spiritual researcher by the fact that he can now recognize what has been removed through his preparation in his inner soul being, and what is there for the soul when it is asleep. For the spiritual researcher arrives at a battleground, at an inner battleground, through his preparation, and it is difficult to find words to express what comes to man with tremendous intensity, with an inner tragedy, when he wants to bring the thought to extinction and to rebirth in another sphere. What takes hold of the human soul and can lead to the human soul being torn apart is that, if you do not properly control yourself, an inner opposition, an inner rebellion arises against what you do inwardly. For at the moment when the thought extinguishes itself inwardly, one feels: the more one lives out of one's own consciousness into the consciousness of the invisible spiritual beings that rule in the invisible, the more inner forces are awakened that lead the most fierce opposition against this rising out of one consciousness into another. One senses something coming that does not want to be done. And that inner discord, that rebellion against one's own act becomes the tragic inner struggle that every true spiritual research has to fight intensely. All words are too weak to really express what has to be lived through. For when one is so inwardly absorbed, one feels as it were removed from oneself, when one is lifted up into another sphere, then that opposition asserts itself, which says: “You do not want to lose yourself, but you do everything to lose yourself. It is indeed death that you are preparing for yourself; you do not live with your being in you, you become the thought of another. You die within yourself!” And everything that can be mustered with an enormous will, in protest against inner action, asserts itself as an opposition to this absorption.

The next step is to gain control over this inner opposition, over what arises from the depths of the soul. One must first find it, which offers the possibility of getting out of this state. Once one has found it, the second step is to add to the concentration of thought, which, as it were, is subject to the second greatest spiritual law of the development of the human soul.

One asks oneself: What is it in you that rebels? What is it that rears up like a terrible rebel? And just as one builds on the thought by having it and making it disappear and resurrect in another sphere, so too must one now build on what one already has. And that which one has, which one must build on, is what one can call human destiny. This human destiny approaches us in such a way that we experience its inner blows – whether good or bad – as coming from outside. How far removed are we in human experience from taking what fate is as something other than what “happens” to us, what “coincidence” is in the best sense of the word? But one can begin to take it differently. And by beginning to take fate differently, one becomes a spiritual researcher. One can start by asking oneself: What are you actually in relation to your fate? You can look back into your past, which you can survey in your youth or in the years you have lived through so far, and survey your destiny; you can look at the individual events of this destiny, as far as you can grasp them, in retrospective investigation, and you can ask yourself the question: What would you actually be if this destiny with all its “coincidences” had not befallen you? And if you look into this question, which must now be a very personal one, very deeply, you realize: however the blows of fate may lie, whether they have turned out well or badly, what we are now, we are through all the good and bad blows of fate; we are basically nothing other than the result of our fate. One wonders: what are you, then, other than the result of this fate? If this or that had not affected you, it would not have shaken and stirred your soul, and so you would not be what you are now. And when you then survey your entire destiny in this way, you find that you, with your present self and all your experiences, are basically connected with destiny in the same way that the sum in an addition is connected with the individual addends and addents. Just as the sum in an addition is nothing other than what flows together through the individual addends, so we are basically nothing other than the sum of all the good and bad blows of fate we have suffered, and we grow together with our destiny by contemplating it. The first feeling we can then give ourselves over to is: You are one with your destiny. And whereas we used to separate ourselves from our destiny, whereas we used to stand apart as a special ego, now the special ego flows into the stream of these events of destiny. But it flows into it in such a way that it does not just stand there like a result in the stream of the present; but by gradually experiencing this flowing together, our destiny takes our ego – that which we are – with it, so to speak. We look back on the course of our destiny and, as we look at our destiny, we find our own activity in it; we grow into the becoming of our destiny. We not only feel at one with our destiny, but we gradually grow into our destiny to such an extent that we unite with destiny and its deed. And now it is again one of the most significant, great inner experiences that, looking back on a stroke of fate, we do not say to ourselves: it hit us, it happened to us by chance, but that we say to ourselves: we were already involved in this fate; through it we have made ourselves into what we are today.

Such a contemplation cannot be carried out only in thoughts, in ideas and images. Every step of such contemplation is filled with inner emotional, vital soul reality. The growing together with destiny is experienced; the I expands through destiny. And what expands – one learns to recognize it as something quite different from thought. As the other soul element, one learns to recognize it as present in us, as the will that is carried by feeling. We feel the thought as it concentrates, dies away and, as a force, rises up in a foreign spiritual world, from which we are, as it were, thought; our will, our will carried by feeling, grows back into the vastness of time, grows out of itself, so that it coincides with our destiny and becomes ever stronger. By feeling ourselves as one with our destiny, we do not experience dying in thought, but an ever-living and becoming-alive of the will. While the will is initially concentrated in the single point of our present, and we let it flow into our deeds and words, it expands, as from a small point of germination, in the stream of time to that which shines backwards, which, as it were, has created us ourselves. Our will – that is the second law that comes into play here – by giving itself to fate, by losing itself to fate, becomes stronger and stronger, more and more powerful. It moves from the state in which we usually have it to a completely different state.

The thought dies in order to be reborn in a new existence. With the will, we stand in such a way that at a certain moment it is dead to our destiny; it is dead to the vicissitudes of fate. If we guide the will in inner meditation about our destiny, it becomes stronger and stronger – by sacrificing itself and, as it were, becoming more and more devoted to our destiny, by recognizing that we ourselves live in our destiny. The thought passes from its strength to its dying away and to its revival in another sphere; the will passes from its momentary effect to an enormous breadth, in that it becomes the bearer of our entire destiny. And here is where experience really expands into a realm that is not accessible to outer experience. Outer experience is only accessible to the extent of experiences where consciousness has awakened, where outer memory begins: in the third or fourth year of a person's life. But when we really live through ourselves with our will, so that we no longer regard our destiny as something alien, as something that is “outside,” then we no longer remain — and with time this inner experience develops — with the consciousness of the soul in our present life. Then we look back into the far, far distance, look back to the states of our soul that preceded our birth or conception, look back to times when our soul itself lived in the spiritual world before entering into physical earthly existence, look back to a state of the soul when it prepared forces to take hold of our body. Thus, by preparing the will to undergo the opposite of what is experienced in the concentration of thought, we grasp our own life beyond birth and death. If we want to grasp the thought, we must detach ourselves from external reality, we must become blind and deaf to the external sensory reality, we must withdraw completely into ourselves; then the thought is transformed so that we ourselves are thought by higher consciousnesses. With the will, we must do the opposite: we must spread into what is otherwise only outside of us. With our thoughts we go within ourselves; with our will we go out of ourselves, go into our destiny and through the passage through our destiny we find the way into the spiritual worlds, where we, according to the reality of our soul, stand in the most comprehensive reality, in that reality which has already taken hold of us before we descended to physical existence. What I am expounding here, seemingly theoretically, is only a description of the inner experiences that the spiritual researcher has to undergo in order to ascend to the knowledge of the spiritual world, to come to the vision of the spiritual world. In relation to external nature, nature precedes and knowledge follows; in relation to spiritual nature, knowledge — that is, something that proceeds like knowledge — precedes as preparation; the vision follows. And now we recognize ourselves in what basically always lives in us, but which humanity will also have to look at scientifically if the development of culture is to continue spiritually; but in order for this to enter consciousness through the progressive forces of development, the scientific grasping of these processes must precede. Of course — one should not even have to mention this — we do not “make” the soul experience by grasping it in this spiritual-scientific way; but we perceive that which is always within us. But just as in the knowledge of nature, experience and knowledge develop out of observation, so in spiritual science, if human evolution is to progress, then the knowledge of spiritual processes must develop into an understanding of the spiritual world. And what one recognizes is that which is independent of the outer physical body, which, as it were, attracts it by descending from the spiritual world into the physical.

But even in our ordinary everyday life, we live out of our physical body, in that – for reasons that have been discussed here many times – we alternately enter into a state of sleep within the course of twenty-four hours. And when we consider the state of sleep, we can ask the question: Why does that which otherwise enters into spiritual consciousness become dulled during sleep? Why is there darkness around us then? And then, through spiritual science, we recognize precisely at the moment when the soul, through real preparation in concentration of thought and meditation, takes hold of itself powerfully, how this power enters the body, and we also recognize, because we then grasp the inner, immortal power, what obscures it in ordinary sleep, what makes it impossible to see spiritual reality in sleep when one is out of the body. When one examines this, when one beholds the spiritual reality, which is otherwise darkened, one notices: There is an excess of desire in the soul, an overgrowth of cravings, an emotional penetration of the most intense life of desire, a much stronger life of desire than is present when the soul submerges back into the body and wakes up. And what does the sleeping soul desire? This can be seen through spiritual scientific research: in sleep the soul desires to re-enter the physical body, into that which it has left, in an intense way. And because the desire to re-enter the body is overwhelmingly strong in the soul, this desire, like a fog that covers the clarity, extinguishes for the soul what it would otherwise perceive as belonging to the spiritual world: the consciousness of higher beings and their experiences, their — the soul's — inclusion in higher beings — and their inclusion in these before birth and death. But because the soul needs the forces that can come to it only from the spiritual world, just as the body needs the forces that can come from the world of atoms, it must immerge again and again into the spiritual world. But because it always desires to immerge into the body, its consciousness for the spiritual processes remains extinguished, even when it is free of the body in sleep. What a person experiences in his body, he will never be able to experience directly without this body. What he experiences in this body is that the little power he has in his soul to see the spiritual directly is overgrown in ordinary life by the desire for the body, and that this power in the body, where the soul has this power, becomes stronger and stronger. In the body, the soul learns to develop consciousness and self-awareness. That is the essence of this bodily life. The soul undergoes this life in the body, not as in a dungeon, not as a form of imprisonment, but as something necessary for its overall experience. For the soul can only become what it is meant to be through experience, and this experience changes from a dull to a brightly conscious one. But the conscious powers are first stimulated in the body. When the soul has, as it were, received its satisfaction, it devotes itself to being overshadowed by consciousness. This consciousness passes over into the soul as a power. And then — this is made especially clear by spiritual science — when the soul experiences 'becoming conscious' in the body, it retains the after-experience of this consciousness. Something comes into force that is higher than ordinary memory, but still similar to ordinary memory. In our lives, we remember through our ordinary memory what experiences we have gone through; we can call this up again in the soul. What the soul experiences in the body – this brightening of consciousness, this permeation with consciousness, this remembrance of self-awareness – occurs in the spiritual researcher when he undergoes what I have spoken of, so that he has the experience in his soul as in a memory. We must hold on to this.

The spiritual researcher lives in a higher spiritual world; he becomes, as it were, a thought of higher beings. But by permeating himself with what spiritual research can give, what would otherwise become rebellion becomes such an inner experience that he now, by living in the spiritual world, remains afflicted with a memory of his bodily life. Now he knows: this physical life does belong to you after all. And now this rebellion is stripped away by the memory that one has gained through the expansion of one's destiny. One knows: now one is not exposed to spiritual death in the spiritual world. For however much one may merge into the consciousness of higher entities, one lives oneself up in such a way that although the thoughts are grasped by the higher entities, we remain in the power of inner experience; we preserve ourselves, we retain ourselves when we live ourselves up into the higher consciousnesses, how the thoughts are preserved in the consciousness of the higher entities. What we keep in our memory as a memory is not reality until we bring it up from our memory. How it is down there in the dull subconscious is of no interest to man at first; there it has no reality. That is why I called it what the spiritual researcher then has, something like a higher memory, which is similar to memory after all. It is as if we live ourselves up into the consciousness of higher beings, as if all our thoughts retained independent reality, and the stream of our experiences is not just like a stream for our memory, which is there for us to draw up into our memory, but as if the experiences in their own spiritual reality are floating in it. Thus, through the experience that has been hinted at, through the memories, we live our way up into a higher world, but these memories are ourselves, grasping us in our own remembering. It is hardly different from a parable, but it expresses the fact when one says: by developing itself further through meditation, through concentration of thought and through outpouring of the will over fate, the human soul becomes something for those entities which it takes up in its consciousness and which it holds in the regions in which it lives after death and before birth. But just as thoughts only have an existence that is borrowed from us, so we live our way up into the “thought-being” of the higher consciousnesses, and in that they look back on us, they look back on us as on entities that have remained independent. By taking hold of ourselves in our destiny, we maintain ourselves in the consciousness of higher entities.

All that I express in this way is only the knowledge of the facts, which is always there for the soul. For what the spiritual researcher experiences is nothing other than the knowledge of what the soul experiences when it goes beyond the external reality through the gate of death. But as external natural events take place without our initially knowing about them, so too does death pass us by and makes the soul what it must make it. But in the course of human development, man must learn to know what death makes of the soul; through spiritual science he must acquire knowledge about what is called: the approach to the riddle of death. That is why what the spiritual researcher comes to in his inner soul development has been called, with a certain justification, “arriving at the gate of death”. From the observation made about sleep, it can be seen that the human soul, in its purely spiritual existence, is “dulled” by the desire for the body. When it passes through the gate of death and detaches itself from the body, it does not remain dulled by this desire. Rather, by withdrawing from the body, it is cured of the desire for the body; the desire pushes itself out of the soul, and the soul experiences being together with the spiritual world. The soul learns to experience itself in the spiritual world. But it would be dependent if it had not passed through death. The soul must pass through death because it is the greatest fact, the greatest experience for it. As we must enter the body through birth, so we must leave the body, pass through death, must die, in order to grasp ourselves as a self in the spiritual world through the experience of death and dying. We become a memory of higher consciousness by shedding the consciousness of the present that we have in the body; and after death, what our self gives us is presented to us in a different way than it is presented to us in the form of our self between birth and death. Between birth and death, we are so immersed in life that we lose our sense of self when consciousness is dulled, that we obscure what we experience in our sleep. Simultaneity exists between us and our body, but also between us and our self-awareness. After death, this changes. What in ordinary life between birth and death is, as it were, the ordinary spatial relationship to our spatial body, becomes after death a relationship to our being in time. After death, we look back on what we have gone through in our corporeal existence, and in this looking back, in this connection with our corporeal existence, we feel our self-awareness, we feel ourselves as selves. In time, the relationship to our self becomes. By looking at our spiritual surroundings, we merge into the higher beings in which we live. We retain our independence, our full self-consciousness after death, by immersing ourselves with our memories in the past life of the body — just as we immerse ourselves each day in the existence of space in order to arrive at our self-consciousness.

Thus the human soul passes through the full experience, which includes death, to which death belongs as something necessary; for to self-awareness in the spiritual world belongs the experience of death in the sense world. With this, we can at the same time suggest – but only suggest; in the following lectures this winter, this will be explained in more detail – how this experience of death presents itself. Of course, when a person passes through the gate of death, he will remain unconscious of what he is experiencing. But as he becomes more and more familiar with the spiritual world, he strengthens himself with the forces that can flow to him from the spiritual world, and purifies himself from the forces that, between birth and death, as the desire for the body; and in this inner purification from dullness, the retrospect into one's own self arises, and with it, the insight into the spiritual world arises. The experience after death occurs, so to speak, in such a way that the memory of the experience of death gradually arises in the human soul only as the human being penetrates into the spiritual world after death. But then, when looking back on earthly life each time, it is the case for the human being that his self-awareness blossoms just as it blossoms within the sensory world when he normally awakens.

What has been explained here cannot, of course, be proven externally. Therefore, it is very easy for those who do not want to engage in the true proof of the spiritual world to make objections. Anyone who demands that the spiritual world should be proved in the same way as the facts of external natural science and its laws, and who then, when that is not possible, is of the opinion that all talk about a spiritual world is only subjective talk, must be told: The spiritual world cannot speak to the general public in such a way that anyone can conduct the experiment, the observation. But that is why spiritual science does not remain mere subjective talk, but something that has value and significance for the general public; because there are methods, the workings of the soul, that lead every person to penetrate into the spiritual world when they go through them. Therefore, if someone says, “Your spiritual world is not clear to me; prove it to me according to the methods of external natural science,” the reply must be: You must obtain the proof for yourself by applying to your soul what is applicable to every human soul as the methods indicated by spiritual science!

What I have today only been able to discuss in general terms, about the thought, its dying away and its revival in another sphere, about the spreading of the will over fate, and how it must work there in detail, I have presented in more detail in my book “How to Know Higher Worlds”, which has now been extensively revised and is available in a new and I have also tried to present it in a different way in the book 'The Riddles of Philosophy', which has now been published as a second edition of my 'World and Life Views in the Nineteenth Century' with a 'sketchy outlook on an anthroposophy' as a result of the entire spiritual-philosophical development of the West.

Let it be emphasized once more: spiritual science does not give something that would not be there without it — just as natural science does not give something that would not be there without it. But the fact that man knows something presupposes that the facts of knowledge are there first. But when the facts are absorbed into consciousness, spiritual science will give the human soul what equips the soul with strength and power, as it will need it in the future. The soul has certainly had an awareness of its connection with the spiritual world in the past as well. But humanity continues to develop and evolve. And the results of spiritual scientific research will increasingly be part of what the soul will need for its inner strength, what will bring it to an awareness of itself, will be a real knowledge of the spiritual world, the world of the soul, which can only be imparted through research, just as knowledge of nature can only be imparted through research. Through this spiritual scientific research, the human soul is given what memory expands beyond the horizon, beyond which it can otherwise only roam. Today, this can only be hinted at. As the will expands to embrace destiny and the human being becomes one with destiny, and as the will in man grows to such strength that he grasps what blows of fate are in good and evil, and knows: I myself have formed all this —, memory grows back over earlier experiences, and also grows into those times that represent earlier human lives on earth. Only a hint can be given of what is to be explained in later lectures: intimately connected with the expansion of will over fate is the realization that man not only accomplishes one earth-life, but that this one life is the result of previous earth-lives, that this preparation of the will of fate has taken place in previous earth-lives. And so it presents itself in our consciousness that what we now grasp with our will is the cause for later earthly lives, and has an effect on later earthly lives.

Especially in the spiritual culture of Central Europe, the stages by which outstanding leader spirits have grasped this connection between the human soul's experiences and the spiritual world have always emerged in their souls. And if it has been said today that the human soul can, through the concentration of thought, cause this thought to die away and to revive in a higher world, then reference can be made to a spirit to which I have already drawn attention in earlier lectures: to Johann Gottlieb Fichte. He did not yet have spiritual science. But he was so immersed in German, Central European spiritual life that he saw the certainty of the human soul's place in eternity from the way he found himself placed in this spiritual life, as if from an elementary, impulsive consciousness. In many places in his works, Fichte has expressed what emerged to him, what he felt about the human soul's standing within the world of a higher consciousness; but perhaps there is no place where he expresses this connection of the human soul with eternity more intensely than in his appeal to the public, in which he defended himself against the false accusation of atheism. There he says – addressing external nature as “thou” and the I that comes to grasp itself as “I” – the following words:

“You are changeable, not I; all your transformations are only my spectacle, and I will always float unscathed above the ruins of your forms. That the forces are already at work now that are intended to destroy the inner sphere of my activity, which I call my body, does not surprise me; this body belongs to you, and is transient, like everything that belongs to you. But this body is not me. I myself will hover over its ruins, and its dissolution will be my spectacle. That the forces are already in effect which will destroy my outer sphere, which has only just begun to become so in the next points — you, you shining suns all, and the thousand times thousand world bodies that roll around you, cannot alienate me; you are doomed to die at birth. But when, among the millions of suns that shine above my head, the youngest will have long since exhausted its last spark of light, then I will still be the same, unharmed and unchanged, as I am now; and when so many new solar systems have emerged from your debris will have streamed together as many times as there are of you, you shining suns above my head, and the youngest among all her last sparks of light will have long since been emitted, then I will still be, unharmed and unchanged, the same as I am today."

These convictions are not merely theoretical realizations; these convictions are experienced. And that is what I wanted to bring to the feeling and emotion in the last of my lectures here, that precisely Central European, German intellectual life is the one that contains the best, the most beautiful, the most energetic seeds for this experience. Hence it is that out of this spiritual life itself there may flow the consciousness of its significance in the world, and that now, when in the outer life of Central Europe this spiritual life too is confronted with the question of being or non-being, this spiritual life can know from its own direct knowledge what its calling is and how it must live, and how it must not perish because it is necessary to form the bond between the human soul and the eternals. Then, especially from this spiritual life, flows that consciousness which sees, as it were, in an intense form when one now turns one's gaze to all – we may already say – heroic natures who stand between life and death in the stream of today's events. We look at the great riddle, at the great question of fate that is posed to us today by the epoch — also in this form in which it is posed to us by today's events: the question of life and death. And when we look from the point of view of spiritual science at what lives in the human body, lives in the knowledge that it is sheltered in the consciousness of higher beings, that it can believe itself to be preserved as a living, independent memory then, when this body is destroyed, — that which lives there, that is what must appear before our soul today, when we see so many bodies fall in sacrifice, in the great sacrifice of the time.

We ask ourselves: When viewed from the perspective of spiritual science, do the events of the soul really impose themselves on the soul of the one from whom death is demanded by the events of the time, mostly at a young age? We look up to the one from whom death is demanded in the sacrificial service of time, we look at what we grasp spiritually as a soul-like measure of strength, and we know: The thread of life is torn from that which lives in the body in the bloom of youth, at a time when the soul and spiritual powers could still experience for a long time. But truly, when we have recognized these spiritual powers through spiritual science, then we know that they remain alive, that they pass over into a spiritual world, into a new context, when they detach themselves from the old one. And when we then think how we ourselves become memories and thoughts in higher consciousnesses, then this death of the times, which appears so tragic to us today, will appear to us in a higher light. So that we see the forces that we see taken from the body penetrating into higher consciousnesses – and see these higher consciousnesses looking down on physical life on earth. With their strengthened powers, they have absorbed everything that man has sacrificed to them. And because it is the higher consciousnesses that offer us spiritual nourishment, the powers for the fertilization of the soul, the powers of preservation and life, just as physical powers offer us physical nourishment, we can look up to those who today, through the events of the times, go into the spiritual world with a sacrificial death, as something that in the future will look down strengthening and invigoratingly on what is taking place on the physical plane of the earth. It acquires a real, a true meaning when it is said: the sacrifice on the battlefield acquires a meaning through the whole development of humanity. And what is meant by this becomes understandable when we know: just as we, as physical human beings, face nature and it gives us its nourishment, so we give ourselves to the spirits and gods for nourishment; but they themselves give us what we need for nourishment and for strengthening the soul. And when young forces, who die on the battlefield or languish from the consequences of their wounds, leave the body, then these young forces are refreshment forces for the human evolution of the future.

It becomes very real when the one who sacrifices himself on the battlefield is imbued with the consciousness that he does not merely die, but lives in his death and will live differently than if he had died a different death, will live for the salvation and for the vigorous future of humanity. We look at the meaning of these sacrificial deaths by recognizing how the seeds are sown for the prosperity of humanity in the future, and by knowing how consciousness can permeate the warrior, that he experiences his death today, that he experiences his wounded fate today, but that he retains the strength through which he will remain united with that for which he dies throughout the future. Torn out of all sentimentality and placed in the simple reality,

reality, is placed in what otherwise could so easily only be taken symbolically or figuratively. Such a spiritual contemplation, as we have undertaken today, about the life of the human soul in the outer existence and also in the supersensible existence, I believe, in the right sense, creates right impulses in that which we experience today as the “fate of the times”. And if, in the context of a significant spiritual experience, a poet — Robert Prutz — has spoken beautifully of the ideal deeds of his people, then we may, from the point of view of spiritual science, give these words an even deeper meaning in view of current events. Regarding what the human soul experiences in life and in death, we may ask: What is the meaning of the death and suffering that are now demanded of us by the times? And today, deepening the meaning of Robert Prutz's words, we can say to anyone who will sympathize with and experience what is demanded of us today: what Robert Prutz said in the face of an event less significant in world history:

It is for the coming generation,
It is for the future dawn,
It is for freedom and for the right,
It is for life and for death!