From a Fateful Time

GA 64 — 12 March 1915, Nuremberg

10. What is Immortal About the Human Being?

If it must always be close to the human soul and the human mind, and must be one of its most intimate concerns, to raise the question that is to be the subject of today's reflection, — in our time, when so many, many have to go through the gateway of death at a young age, it must be even more important for the soul to direct one's feelings and thoughts to that which is immortal in the human being. Admittedly, in our time, a consideration such as the following is met with prejudice after prejudice, especially those prejudices that come from those who, from their firm ground, as they say, of the scientific world view, regarding this question, either considering it as something that transcends the limits of human knowledge, or regarding it as something about which anything that is said must be in clear contradiction to the achievements of the scientific way of thinking. If there were to be a sentence tonight that could not stand up to the strictest criticism of the scientific world view, I would prefer to leave this consideration unsaid. For what natural science has to say about this question from its point of view must, from the point of view of the spiritual-scientific world view, from which this is spoken, - it must not only be anticipated by him, but, insofar as it proves to be justified in our time from the point of view of current science, it must also be recognized as fully justified. But those who raise objections to expositions of the following kind from a standpoint that appears to be a natural-scientific world view, always proceed from the assumption that even in our time one can still make do with the thoughts and ideas, or, better said, the thought habits of a world view that is drawing to a close, in the face of advanced spiritual science. And it is still extraordinarily difficult for people today to understand that anyone who wants to talk about such questions of spiritual world view must appeal to insights into the human heart, the human soul, the human spirit, that go beyond what natural science is able to produce, that, so to speak, enter the terrain of a completely different field of knowledge, but that, alongside and above natural science, can exist as fully as natural science. The spiritual-scientific world view wants to let that which it has to say flow into the spiritual development of humanity, just as that which we today call the natural-scientific world view flowed into this process of development three to four centuries ago. And just as this natural scientific world view was at that time contrary to the thinking and prejudices of a wide circle and yet found its way to the human sense of truth, so spiritual science will take this way to the human sense of truth, even if today, quite understandably — I say it explicitly — it must still meet objection after objection; and if something like what has to be said today must, quite understandably, be seen by many as a flight of fancy, as a fantasy.

Because that which can answer the question: What is immortal about the human being? can be answered, must first be drawn from the hidden depths of the human soul. A research method is needed that is based on intimate inner soul work, that rests deep within the human soul, that reaches for nothing but what is present in every human soul, but what eludes observation and the attention of this human soul in the everyday life of this human soul. What a person carries through the gateway of death, what they carry up into a spiritual world in which they find themselves when they have laid down their bodies, cannot be grasped with everyday powers, cannot be grasped with the powers of knowledge that one has for everyday life as a way of observing the world. A more intimate inner work of the soul is necessary for this. Already on repeated occasions have I been allowed to speak here in this city about this intimate inner path, the purely spiritual-soul path that man has to go through if he wants to enter the field of spiritual entities and spiritual realities. From a particular point of view, this path of the soul to the spiritual will be illuminated again this evening.

We cannot recognize from the everyday life of the person standing before us what belongs to the spiritual world about this person. Nor can we recognize this as we can see from the water that the hydrogen, which is quite different from water, is contained in this water. First chemistry must come and separate hydrogen from water by its laboratory method; then one obtains something that can come out of water and which shows quite different properties from those of water. While water is liquid, hydrogen is gaseous; while water extinguishes fire, hydrogen burns. But no one who only has water in front of him can know what the properties, the peculiarities, the essence of hydrogen are. Chemistry must first come and separate hydrogen from water. Just as little can one recognize in the human being who stands before us in everyday life what lives in him for eternity, for immortality. One would like to say that the spiritual-scientific method must come like a spiritual chemistry and separate from the body that which cannot appear in connection with the body. And however fantastic and dreamy, perhaps even foolish it may still appear to some today, there will be a science of the future that is clear about the fact that there are spiritual-soul methods that bring the spiritual-soul of man, the immortal part of man, out of its connection with the body, so that man can really know: “I now live with my soul outside my body; I experience myself in the soul outside the body!” And only through this research, which leads to a knowledge whereby the soul experiences itself cognitively outside the body, can one enter the realm in which the soul has its immortal members. But it is not external methods, not tangible methods, such as those used by external natural science, that can serve to, so to speak, chemically separate the soul from the mortal body, if the crude expression may be used, but rather intimate soul methods, inner soul experiences. Of these soul methods, these inner soul experiences, we want to present two in particular today.

The first method is called, I would say, using a technical term from spiritual science: the concentration of the life of thought, of feeling, of the life of will impulses. When described in this way, this concentration of the life of thought, of feeling, of the life of will impulses seems easy; but, to quote Goethe's Faust, “Yet the easy is difficult!” And what I have to describe concerns the soul's experiences of tremendous inner impact, experiences in the face of which we stand in recognition of a much greater inner tragedy, I would say, than one can ever stand in the face of physical death. That is why those who have been close to spiritual science at all times have always emphasized that the path into the spiritual worlds, the path into spiritual knowledge, leads to the gate of death. It seems simple — but this simplicity must be grasped with all intensity, with all energy — what one has to do to free the soul from the experience with the body. A thought, a feeling or a series of thoughts, a series of feelings, must first be fully grasped with the soul, making them fully present in the soul, then placing them at the center of consciousness, so that nothing but these thoughts and feelings, placed at the center of our consciousness at will by our soul, stand in this consciousness; that, as it were, the whole world around us, with all sensory impressions, with all other sensations and thoughts; and only that which we place at the center of our consciousness through our free will must merge completely with the soul and its powers, the soul must know itself to be completely one with that which it thus places at the center of consciousness.

This is a task for a long, long time. Depending on the person's aptitude for it, it may take weeks, months, years; even if he only devotes a few minutes to it during the day, it will take a long time to evoke in the soul that inner faculty capable of rejecting all other thoughts and perceptions, all other feelings and volitions, and of placing only a certain kind of thought at the center of consciousness. It does not matter so much what the content of the thoughts is, but it does matter that they place a clearly perceived sensation or thought at the center of our consciousness in such a way that we actually live only in what we are thinking or feeling, that we forget ourselves in doing so, that we know ourselves to be completely one with it. In this way we concentrate all the powers of the soul on this single sensation, this single thought. At first, however, a person must be clear about the fact that, as already mentioned, this seems easy; but the easy is difficult. Various things are important when practising the concentration of thought. Above all, it is important that we place such a thought at the center of our consciousness that we can fully comprehend it. With most of the thoughts we have, all kinds of inner sympathies and antipathies, all kinds of feelings, memories, play a role; they color our thoughts, so that we usually do not even know what is going on in our soul when we have a thought in everyday life and concentrate on it. Anyone who is grounded in psychiatry or psychology or modern science today naturally has a cheap objection to all this. He will say: When the spiritual researcher concentrates on a thought, he cannot know what is playing out in this thought from the subconscious depths of his soul and how he then lives in self-suggestion and fantasies. It is certainly quite understandable that such objections are raised from a scientific point of view; they are seemingly fully justified in a certain way, and the spiritual researcher can well see that they have to be made. However, what usually has to be observed in all these things is not taken into account. You will find a detailed and careful compilation in the two books: “How to Know Higher Worlds?” and in my “Occult Science”. But often one passes by what should be fully observed. It is important to place a thought or feeling at the center of one's entire soul life that can be easily surveyed, that cannot remind us of anything, that cannot evoke anything from the subconscious depths of the soul. Therefore, it is even better not to place in the center of one's consciousness an idea that is taken from some external reality, an idea that depicts something, but rather an idea that is purely allegorical, purely symbolic , in which it is only important that we concentrate the soul forces, that we focus all the work of the soul forces on detaching ourselves from everything else in order to concentrate purely on this one point. I will give a very simple example. Someone can immerse themselves in the idea:

“In the bright light the clear truth of the world is effective!” or ‘In the bright light the clear truth of the world lives!’ If he forms such a sentence, then anyone can, of course, if he is on the ground of external sensual materialism, say: Yes, such a sentence is pure dreaming; it means nothing; it does not depict reality. But that is not the point. What is important is what one does in one's soul while thinking and feeling such a sentence. And then, if one either meditates on such a sentence for a long time or if one alternates it with other sentences, one has a very significant inner experience. The one who has gone through this experience definitely knows that it represents something as real as any chemical or physical method with regard to external sensual things in relation to the human soul. So by concentrating on a certain content of consciousness, one comes to feel more and more strongly those soul powers that one can call the imaginative, the thinking soul powers. In a sense, by identifying with it, one feels more and more inwardly stronger and stronger, and while outwardly one is at rest with regard to the whole world with one's senses, with the external mind, inwardly one feels strengthened. In the depths of one's being, one feels something welling up that lies hidden in the soul, that one has not observed, but of which one is now becoming aware in direct experience. And by feeling the experience ever more strongly and more strongly, ever more brightly and more brightly within, one comes to a certain point. We shall see in a moment that this point is not actually to be fully reached by a regular spiritual development, as I shall describe in a moment, but has to be modified by something else. But if you would concentrate more and more, would execute more and more and more everything that is in the soul on the one chosen, then you would finally, by feeling your inner activity swelling more and more, you would come to feel that power as if it were paralyzing itself, feeling it fading away. It is a momentous experience to which one comes, an experience that represents an unforgettable inner experience for the one who undergoes it; because he has a very specific inner experience with it. He feels: now is the moment when, after concentrating all the powers of the soul, after gathering together everything that is otherwise hidden in the soul, when you let it flow into your power of thought, into your power of imagination; now that it goes out of you, — now that it flows out into the world, what you have brought up from the depths of your soul. It withdraws from you, it leaves your body, it flees from you!

And one would not be able to follow, one would feel how the soul, as it were taken out of the body, unites with the general spirit that blows and works through the world. One would feel estranged from oneself. Therefore, the exercise that is implied by this must be modified by another, which must proceed simultaneously with it. And anyone who takes the path to spiritual research as I have described it in my book “How to Know Higher Worlds” will thereby receive the individual rules by which he can really modify what I have just described, so that it does not happen that we feel, as it were, wrenched from the best part of ourselves. Something else must therefore be added. The first thing that separates the soul from the body was the concentration of thought, the intensification of the life of thought. Through this intensification of the life of thought, we are, as it were, snatched from ourselves.

The second contradicts the first, so to speak; it is something opposite, the other pole; but life proceeds in polar fashion, passing through opposites. Therefore, if one has a realization that is not to be a realization in abstract terms, but a realization of the laws of nature, of life, one must move through opposites. The second is what one might call a complete surrender of the will to the ruling, present, and active world powers. Just as, in the first case, we bring our sensory perception, our intellect, which otherwise plays according to the guidance of external sensory perception, to a standstill, so in the second case we must bring to a standstill every inner stubborn will, in a sense, everything in us that is will. Now there is a certain means by which one can develop the strength within oneself to make one's own will truly subservient to the general weaving of the world: this is when one acquires a completely new attitude towards what we call our destiny. How do we experience our destiny in our ordinary existence? Well, we experience our destiny in such a way that we regard what befalls us as fate in good and evil as something that befalls us; that we encounter it with sympathy or antipathy, so that we regard what is, so to speak, what befalls us, what happens to us, as something that comes to us, so that we stand outside of it, we see ourselves as the I-, the self-being, on which fate has an effect, to which it comes.

Even in ordinary life, it can be seen through truly rational reflection that we basically cannot relate to fate at all. If you look at yourself at a particular point in time in your later experience, you will say to yourself: what you are then, what you experience in your inner being, what you can do and achieve, is inconceivable without the ordinary destiny of life between birth and death. Just think about it carefully. Everything we can do in the present moment – if we trace it back to our ordinary life between birth and death, we have to say to ourselves: it is connected to something we went through earlier. The fact that I can do something now may be connected to the fact that the person who was responsible for my education once brought me into this or that sphere. What happened to me then united with me, became strength in me; now it is my ability. Whenever you really think deeply, “What am I actually, what is there in me?” you will see that what is in you or in other people at the present moment is woven together out of fate. And if one pursues this thought properly, one might say in one's soul, one comes to understand how one must, as it were, grow ever more together with one's destiny, how one must recognize that which one calls one's self as a weave of destiny. What one otherwise speaks of as a coincidence is now found within oneself, interwoven within oneself; one finds oneself as the result of fate. One grows so close to fate that one identifies with it. Just as in the earlier way of spiritual research one identified with a thought or a feeling, so now one must recognize oneself as identical with one's destiny through the circumstances themselves. What I am saying now must not remain merely theoretical, it must not be just an abstract consideration, but it must be lived through inwardly, felt in one's innermost being. Then we feel how we gradually see our will streaming out into our destiny, and we see how we say to ourselves: “You have so far regarded something as a twist of fate, but it was you yourself. That which is in you has brought this twist of fate upon you, otherwise you would not be this being, this I!

In essence, when one meditates on one's destiny for weeks, months or years, depending on one's disposition, one experiences an emotional surrender to fate. One learns to recognize that one must go out of oneself from the little room in which one has previously felt locked up. One learns to flow with the stream of one's destiny. When one thus recognizes how the self, the I, actually lives outside, how in what we call “happens” to us, in truth our will rests, how the I flows along in destiny, then this will is torn out of us again with us, as we surrender ourselves to our destiny. And that is the second. But it must be achieved, must be achieved in inner emotional and mental experience. It must fill the whole person, that is, it must be surrendered emotionally to fate. Then one feels how one grows together with fate and with spiritually effective world forces that permeate and interweave the external world. What seems to flee from us in the concentration of thought, what seems to take away our selfhood, is then followed — that is, the thought is followed — by an element of will, an emotional element of will. While we feel the thought flowing out of our head in the way indicated earlier, we now draw something out of our whole being. We sacrifice the will to the thought. And then the soul, the thinking, the feeling, the sensing, the willing steps out with the thought and we go with it.

What I have described is a real process, an actual stepping out of the soul from the body. It is something that can be experienced just as truly and intensely and really — one might say experimentally — as the hydrogen leaving the water, the hydrogen detaching from the water. It is like the soul detaching from the body, which then remains behind so that this body, with all its outer experiences, becomes an external object; the soul has stepped out of the body. As one otherwise regards the table or the chair in the sense world, so the soul regards its body, which it has left. And what is most important, it does not just experience itself in the abstract, but as truly as it develops an inner experience in the body, so truly it develops an inner experience outside of the body, of which it knows it is a spiritual-soul experience. Fully in the inner experience, so the soul experiences itself. And truly, just as people did not know for a long time that oxygen could be separated from hydrogen and had to learn it first, so the spiritual culture of humanity will learn that the spiritual-soul can be separated from the physical, however baroque, foolish, and absurd this may still appear to present-day humanity. A real spiritual science is that which the future will have - and through which the future of the human soul will bring that knowledge which the human soul needs when the forces that have been there from time immemorial have matured in it for such things. We await such a time. Only he can deny it who misjudges the signs of the time, who does not know the deepest longing that lives today in numerous souls, consciously in some, unconsciously in others, and that will take hold of all mankind: the longing to know about the spiritual. But when the soul seizes itself in the actual experience free of the body, then it becomes acquainted with powers within itself, which one does not have in everyday life, which one cannot unfold in the body. One power becomes known to us, which may be described in the following way:

When we live through our everyday life, in which the soul develops the power of imagination, feeling and will, we come to what is ultimately called memory. And anyone who reflects a little on memory knows what this memory means for the whole cohesive being of the human being. We could not develop a sense of self if we did not remember the experiences we have gone through since a certain point in time after birth. It is only because the stream of memories does not break off, because we know that it was we who have lived through this stream, that we are a self, a self. Even world views can only work with memories that the soul stores and can then bring these memories into a harmonious or logical context. We can therefore understand what the soul has before it in everyday life as its final experience, as memory. What is the basis of remembering, of memory? Well, from an external point of view, we can say that when we go through experiences, we form ideas, we feel this or that about the experiences. Then we have a picture stored in our soul, and when we have long since moved beyond the experience, we know that we can look back on the picture in our inner experience; the experience itself is not there, but only the inner picture is there, something is there that our soul is just weaving. In order to approach this image, to approach the essence of memory in general, we can now consider the following – I can only sketch it out in broad strokes, as it were, with charcoal lines, which you can then follow in detail in the literature of spiritual science.

If we want to approach this memory, we find that in the first period of life after birth, after entering the world, this memory is not yet alive. This memory only occurs in the earliest childhood; up to a certain point in early childhood, we remember back later. What happened before that must be reported to us by our environment, but we do not remember back. What is the basis for remembering back? It is based on certain powers that the soul can use to retain images, powers that enable the soul to store these images within itself. These powers were already there before the memory was there, they were already present immediately after birth, but they had a different task then. They had the task of still working on the delicate organs of the human being, on the nervous system and the brain of the human being; on the nervous system and brain they have to work plastically. They were still formative forces of the human organism, of that which is still soft, so to speak – roughly speaking, but it means a reality – that which must first be formed so that the human being is this particular human being. As formative forces, these still run into the physical organization in the earliest childhood. And when this organization has hardened — again, this is a figure of speech — so much so that these formative forces no longer flow into it, then they are reflected back from the physical into the soul. The physical works like a mirror. And what we then experience in our soul, especially what is stored up in our memories, are mirror images reflected back from our physical life. In truth, we remember because our body is a mirroring apparatus. Science will fully understand this when it continues on its path. Then it will also see through the contradictions that it still raises when such things are presented. It is as if one mirror were hanging on the wall after the other and we were passing by, we would only see ourselves as long as we were standing in front of the mirrors. The mirror reflects our own image. It is the same with our inner spiritual experience. The body is a mirroring apparatus; it reflects what the soul experiences. Through this, the soul itself experiences what were previously formative forces in the most tender childhood, what was used, so to speak, to build the mirror in the first place.

A further stage is this: Imagine the following – I present it to you as a comparison, but it means something very real – imagine standing in front of a mirror that gives you the opportunity to see yourself, to see what you yourself send to the mirror as a ray of light. You see yourself because the mirror reflects your physical image. In the same way, your body reflects that which is in the soul. But now imagine, if — in the soul — you were to acquire the strength to dispense with the mirror altogether, you would develop such great strength that you would, as it were, look into space at that which the mirror otherwise reflects as your own image. But this happens through the soul exercises that I mentioned: concentration of thought, immersion in the will - surrender to the order of the world, you could also say. In this way the soul powers are so strengthened that what would otherwise be reflected back from the body, which is only like a mirror image, emerges as one's own inner, soul experience, that it becomes inwardly alive through the soul's own power. Therefore, what the spiritual researcher experiences inwardly when he has separated his soul from his body is a higher developed, active memory work. While in ordinary life we only go as far as memory, for which we depend on the reflection of the body, the exercises suggested here now give us the ability to develop inner soul forces and to make our soul's inner life actively engaged, so that it radiates an inner reality.

When the soul reaches the point where it creates its inner forces, as it were, but in truth draws them from the deepest inner being, then it will notice that it not only unfolds these forces, but that with the unfolding of these forces, with the creation of the inner mirror image, so to speak, something else takes place that we can call: perception, direct grasping of a spiritual world. However, this perception is quite different from the perception of external sensory reality. When we perceive external sensory reality, we look at objects with our eyes, we listen to sounds with our ears, and we touch external objects with our hands. In this case, it is the object that we approach that has an effect on us from the outside. But when we develop what I have described as the inner powers of the soul, which really come to life so that the soul knows itself outside the body in a system of inner forces, then what is spiritual essence, spiritual reality, flows into these forces. I will use another comparison: When I touch this corner here with my hand, perceive it through the senses, the corner is outside of me; the corner touches my hand from the outside. It is not the same in spiritual perception, but rather, if this were a soul power, which the hand now represents, and if I do not let it work, then the spiritual flows into the hand from the rear, as it were. While the physical touches things from the outside, the spiritual does not touch from the outside; the spiritual flows into the soul forces, so that we have to acquire completely new concepts if we want to speak of this spiritual recognition and perception. We perceive external things; in order to enter into a relationship with the spiritual, it is necessary that we develop powers into which this spiritual world flows. That means that we must say: through soul development we experience the great and powerful that the spiritual world perceives us, that we become something like a thought, like a will impulse of higher spiritual beings that invisibly and supersensibly stand above us. The spiritual researcher must speak of these spiritual beings, which are invisible and supersensible in relation to the cognitive powers of the soul just discussed, in the same way that the natural scientist speaks of the mineral, plant, and animal kingdoms, and the physical human kingdom, as the four natural kingdoms that are outside of us. And just as we, when we stand before these beings of the four kingdoms, say: We perceive, we reflect on these entities - they are outside, and we make sensory images of them - so we must say: as we go out of our body with our soul we ourselves become — but in a much higher, in an inner liveliness and essentiality — we ourselves become thoughts, feelings, and volitional impulses of the higher spiritual beings. We are perceived, we experience ourselves being perceived by the higher spiritual beings.

From this you can see that anyone approaching the question, “What is immortal about the human being?” cannot ask themselves the question in the way that people still so often do today. They approach such a question and say: Well, I have acquired this or that concept. How can I be proved the immortality of the soul? Yes, with these concepts, which one has acquired in the outer life and in science, one cannot prove it; because these concepts relate to what the soul experiences in everyday life and what is only an inner reflection. Just as a mirror image does not remain when the mirror is no longer there, what the soul thinks, feels and wills in everyday life does not remain either, because it is only a mirror image of the body; even the memory in which it is stored is a mirror image of the soul. He who would prove the immortality of the soul by thinking, feeling and willing is on the same path as he who would prove the permanence of the mirror image from the picture in the mirror. Everything that is a mirror image must be admitted to the natural scientist — and nothing else is presented to him. All that which in ordinary life we call the soul does not pass through the portal of death. But the soul contains something — for what spiritual science brings up is contained in the soul — that passes through the gate of death, and passes through the gate of death in such a way that it can only be grasped in concepts and ideas that one does not have at all unless one first develops them. While for ordinary experience one must say that the human soul perceives, for spiritual experience one must say: the soul is perceived by higher beings. While in sensory experience one perceives oneself, for spiritual experience one must say: after death, the human being is received by the higher spiritual beings. When man incorporates his thoughts from external natural things into his soul, then the entity that rules over him supersensibly incorporates itself into him; he is remembered, he is carried away into the spiritual world. That is why it is so difficult to answer the question: What is immortal about the human being if you want to answer it with the ordinary concepts of the day, which do not apply to it at all.

And all philosophers who have tried to approach the immortality of the human soul, to answer the question of the immortality of the soul, have always come back to saying: there must be something fine and substantial that goes beyond death. We have seen that nothing of the substantial remains, but that the soul's powers are themselves a highly developed memory life, that it is a being perceived, a being born in the spiritual world. They all know that such processes in the life of the senses even have their symbols, their analogies. When one billiard ball strikes another, the physicist says: the state of motion of the first ball passes into the second. What has passed from one ball to the other? It is not the substance of the first that has passed into the second, but only the force passes.

Those who have thought about the immortality of the soul have always thought of it as something that is in ordinary life and passes through the gate of death; while what passes through the gate of death must first be sought, because it lies so deeply hidden in the soul that it is not noticed at all, that attention is not focused on it in ordinary life; but it is there after all. And when someone who has so truly, chemically, as it were, separated the soul and spirit from the body, then experiences this soul and spirit as it is sheltered in a supersensible world of spiritual beings that stands above it, then he also knows that in this of the soul — just as hydrogen is hidden in water —, that in this he has something that works very secretly, so to speak between the lines of life; which absorbs the finest powers of the soul, of experience, of the moral abilities of the human being, just as the small plant germ absorbs the forces from the whole plant in order to concentrate them. And just as, after withering, after the leaves wither and the blossom dies, the plant carries over into the following plant as a small germ what lived in the previous plant, what the plant has saved as a germ — so it is in the human soul. If you distill it out in this way, you realize that, in every moment of life, waking and sleeping, this human soul works in the depths of everyday life, working out everything we acquire in terms of abilities acquires is permeated, deeply permeated, by what it has done in the way of right and wrong, beauty and ugliness. And then one knows that what lives hidden in the soul goes through a life between death and a new birth – and then returns to earthly life. In the life between death and a new birth, man gathers strength from a spiritual world, but these become formative forces so that through a new birth he can unite with what he has received from his father and mother and from his line of ancestors. Thus the human soul does not live through one earth life, but successive earth lives.

The complete life on earth therefore consists of a succession of lives that take place between birth and death, and of the life between death and a new birth, which are longer than the lives on earth where the soul dwells in purely spiritual spheres, where it is active and occupied there – where it has grown together with the spiritual world just as it has here with the physical world. That the human soul experiences repeated lives in its universal, that each subsequent life on earth is the effect of previous lives on earth, is what spiritual science will gradually incorporate into the spiritual culture of humanity, just as the Copernican worldview has been incorporated into external culture. It is certainly still the case today that people often say: Yes, what you are telling me, contradicts what the five senses consider to be true! Well, people have even had to experience quite different things that contradict their five senses. For thousands of years, people believed according to their five senses that the sun and the starry sky moved around the earth. That it is the other way around, that the earth moves around the sun, he had to believe despite the contradiction of the five senses. Thus, what must now contradict the five senses, that man goes through repeated earth lives, will also enter into the thinking habits of men. But then man will speak out of a real science about what is immortal in the human being. He will seek this immortal, as it were, between the lines of ordinary experiences, will know within himself an inwardly working being, which is sheltered in a spiritual world, just as the thinking being is sheltered in the sensual outer world in our ideas and thoughts and sensations.

Then the human being will know himself connected with his eternal, his immortal, connected with the spiritual world. This is the destiny of the evolution of humanity. And we may truly remember this in our time, in the time of difficult but also glorious trials; we may remember how precisely German spiritual life — you will not find it incongruous if I mention this in the last part of my discussion — how precisely German spiritual life has been working for a long time to gain such a science. We need only recall Lessing, the great standard-bearer of modern German intellectual life, and consider the store of enlightened ideas for him and for humanity that he gathered in his soul. He summarized them, as if in a testament, in his beautiful essay 'The Education of the Human Race'. Of course, many people today, especially the very clever ones, say: Well, Lessing! He wrote and said many things throughout his life, then he grew old, his mental powers weakened, and then he also wrote such complicated stuff, in which he advocated something like the doctrine of repeated lives on earth, of intermediate lives between death and a new birth in the spiritual world! People consider it a crazy idea, and they forgive the great minds if they also come up with such complicated ideas, which are not seen as such in ordinary life, which can be grasped with the five senses. But Lessing said something very significant at the end of the work: 'There have always been people in the most ancient times who, through ancient clairvoyance, through ancient abilities of the human soul that were still closer to the spiritual forces of the world, knew something about repeated earthly lives. And Lessing says: “Is it to be denied that the soul of man has achieved something through original powers, before it was corrupted by the sophistry of school?”

Lessing was right. Spiritual science will show humanity that what was effectively there at a primitive stage of development will come at the highest level of truly developed scientific knowledge, when science has progressed to the point where it not only chooses as its tools not only external, tangible methods that can be grasped with the five senses, but when it allows spiritual-soul experiments as such methods — which has just been described as a kind of spiritual chemistry. And it is precisely German spiritual life that has always pointed to this intimacy of the soul life, through which the soul comes beyond itself into a higher life of feeling, which is not a mere life of memory but an immersion into spiritual reality. A higher life of thought, a higher life of feeling, a higher life of will. To achieve this, to strengthen the soul's powers so that it can leave the body, has always been the aim of German spiritual life; and this is one of the germs of German spiritual life to which I referred yesterday, which has yet to come to fruition as the blossoms and fruits of this German spiritual life.

We see, of course, how very remarkably inward-looking minds, such as the wonderful Novaks, how these German minds always and again, through the inner living contemplation, through the contemplative experience of their soul, arrive in direct contemplation at the knowledge that this as an immortal soul through the portal of death; and how they then arrive at concepts that seem foolish to ordinary experience, but which, because they do not fit ordinary experience, are precisely suited to an experience that goes beyond ordinary experience. He who in spiritual science wants to find only the ordinary concepts cannot come to it. This spiritual science requires an inner mobility, an elasticity of mind, so that one can come to new concepts. Most people would like to spare themselves this out of inner laziness. They believe that the spiritual world must be something like a finer copy of the sensual world; they imagine the spiritual world to be material and substantial again. But when you experience the world spiritually, nothing of what you are accustomed to remains in it; instead, something completely new awakens that you have not yet known, but with which you must enrich your soul in order to experience within yourself what is immortal in the human soul.

So when such people speak of the spiritual world, to which the soul belongs in the immortal, they must first form the words, the concepts. That is why I have to apologize to you, so to speak, for today's lecture. In a lecture like this, where one speaks of the spiritual world but in words that are coined for ordinary life, one has to struggle with the words. One has to demand that one's formulations use words that are uncomfortable for those who want to stick to the familiar. Time and again, critics come along and say: What you have said does not even exist! I know that. Of course, these gentlemen know an infinite amount, but when they apply their old concepts to something that must have completely new concepts, then their criticism does not apply to what they want to characterize. But in German intellectual life we have minds – Novalis is one of them – who know how to speak in a language that is indeed the German language, but which seems like a wonderfully living essence distilled from the German language to show something that is as real as the sensory world, that is the reality into which the soul passes when it walks through the gate of death. What such people say can have an effect on those who are receptive to it.

And now I will give you a remarkable example; it is too beautiful for me to withhold from you, because it shows how Novalis has worked. I will purposely relate to you his effect on a Belgian-French poet-philosopher who studied Novalis, who, as he claims, immersed himself completely in Novalis, and who received an impression that he describes in the following way.

Before I present this, I must say that another Franco-Belgian poet and philosopher, Maurice Maeterlinck, immediately after the outbreak of the war and repeatedly, found particularly harsh words about the German barbarians and launched a most outrageous attack on this barbaric culture. That is Maurice Maeterlinck, for whose fame in the world German intellectual life has done more than French. But gratitude is not something that needs to be demanded in this day and age. He really did insult and revile these German barbarians, much as the others I mentioned yesterday.

In contrast to this, there is another Belgian-French poet-philosopher, Novalis, who has allowed himself to be influenced by one of the most German of German poet-philosophers, with all that he has to say about what is immortal in the human being, and he then talks about this influence. He cannot but say: When one reads Sophocles and Shakespeare in this way, when one sees what Sophocles' figures, what Shakespeare's characters experience, what Hamlet even experiences, then what these people do and suffer is entirely earthly; it only interests the earthly human being. But if – so the Belgian-French poet-philosopher believes – a spirit were to descend from another planet, it would not be able to take an interest in what the characters of Sophocles and Shakespeare experience; these are only earthly matters. But in Novalis, this Belgian-French poet-philosopher finds a soul that has something to say that would interest even spirits who would descend from the universe to pay a visit to Earth; because Novalis speaks of the eternal of the human soul, which not only interests the human souls insofar as they live in the body, but must interest all beings that belong to the extra-terrestrial world. And with beautiful words, this Belgian-French poet-philosopher speaks of what he has experienced in Novalis, the German poet-philosopher:

“But if other proofs were needed, they would lead him among those whose works almost touch silence” – he means, the ordinary language of the day is for what is transitory; but what is immortal, one should actually remain silent about it or find another language for it —, “she would open the gate of the realm where some loved her for her own sake, without caring about the little gestures of their bodies. They would climb together to the lonely plateaus where consciousness is heightened by a degree, and where all those who are plagued by restlessness about themselves attentively circle the immense ring that connects the world of appearances with our higher worlds. It would go with him to the borders of humanity; for at the point where man seems to end, he probably begins, and his most essential and inexhaustible parts are in the invisible, where he must be on his guard unceasingly. Only at this level are there thoughts that the soul can approve of, and ideas that resemble it and are as compelling as itself. There, humanity has ruled for a moment; and these dimly illuminated peaks are perhaps the only lights that announce the earth to the spiritual realm. Their reflection truly has the color of our soul. We feel that the passions of the mind and body would resemble the tolling of bells in the eyes of a foreign reason; but the people I am talking about have come out of the little village of passions in their works and said things that are also of value to those who do not belong to the earthly community!"

Such are the words of the Belgian-French poet-philosopher. If he were to hear Maurice Maeterlinck railing against the barbarians, the same barbarians who gave rise to the subject of the Belgian-French poet-philosopher's words, would he not call him a useless brawler? Yes, but there is a catch, because the words were written by Maurice Maeterlinck himself – before the outbreak of the war, though!

These are the things we experience today; that is why I said yesterday: what we are experiencing in the world today is a characteristic chapter of psychiatry. For what follows from the incredibly paradoxical fact that the same Maurice Maeterlinck utters these words about the German Novalis – and then goes on to revile and curse the entire German people as barbarians? What follows from the fact that what he said years ago and what I have read to you is deeply untrue and false? It is indeed a peculiarity of our present culture that because it is so full of what has been accumulated through language and external influences, the soul can also produce very beautiful words, words that sound beautiful but which may be false on the inside. But it is precisely one of the soul's paths that lead to the spirit in the way I have described, that everything the soul produces and experiences is profoundly true, truly true, shockingly true. If only a single phrase, only a single lie is in the soul on the way into the spiritual world, then one cannot find this way into the spiritual world. This path of truth is a following of the one who said, “I am the Way, the Truth, and the Life!” — that is, the connection of the three. Such a path of imitating the one who said this is this path of truth. And if he is only a phrase, however beautiful a phrase may sound, he will not find the truth; he will only find the great deception, which can also penetrate into the soul where the soul wants to find that with which it is connected as with its immortal part. Inner truth alone connects the soul with what, as the Divine, permeates and permeates the world.

And when, again, the German spiritual life gives voice to the beautiful and profound words of Meister Eckhart, the philosopher, that there is a spark in the mind that ignites that which of the divine in the individual can live of the Divine in the individual human soul, one must say that the human soul can only experience authentically what is to be kindled like a spark in the mind if it is deeply inwardly true.

This, however, requires self-knowledge. But this self-knowledge is difficult to achieve in life. When a person, as I have explained, manages to rise out of the physical with his soul and spirit, then he has his ordinary earthly self before him, as he otherwise has external things before him. But he must be able to see his earthly self and, before he begins this spiritual path, must be able to acquire self-knowledge as an inner habit. But how difficult it is, a comparative example to illustrate: a rather famous contemporary professor, the Viennese philosopher Dr. Ernst Mach, who wrote various books that are highly esteemed today, gave a sample on the third page of his book 'Analysis of Sensations' of how difficult it is to come to self-knowledge, even in terms of one's physical form. He recounts: “As a young man, I once saw a face in profile in a shop window where two mirrors faced each other as I was walking down the street. I thought: what a person with a repulsive, even revolting face do I encounter here; and I was not a little surprised when I discovered that I had my own image in front of me, which was shown to me by the fact that the mirrors were arranged in this way.” And as a second example, the same professor tells the following story on the third page of his book: “Once, when I arrived quite tired from a journey, I got into a bus. I saw a man getting in from the other side, and I thought” — he says, he admits it, he is completely honest — “what a run-down, unpleasant schoolmaster is getting in there. And again I saw: it was myself.” And he adds: ‘So I knew the habitus of the species better than my own.’ A lady who had heard this, after I had said it in other lectures, related an example of such a lack of self-knowledge with regard to appearance, which she had observed in a relative. This relative went into a restaurant in a strange city. She did not know her way around. Then, as she walked towards the wall, she saw a lady coming towards her from the other side. “Well, what kind of ugly country girl is that?” she thought. She was a very elegant city woman. It was only when she spoke to the lady and the lady did not answer that she recognized herself.

These are examples that I would say are taken from the coarsest external sensuality. But if a person has so little insight into his external physical sensuality, he has even less insight into the soul in ordinary life. But this possibility of looking at oneself, of knowing oneself as an external object, is part of the real grasp of what is immortal in the human being. And anyone who really immerses themselves in the spiritual world and can then also follow what is real in this spiritual world, who can therefore follow the human being not only in their life between birth and death, but beyond death, knows that when he communes with the soul, the soul looks back at death, precisely in that it looks back at itself in self-knowledge, at what one has experienced between birth and death. Self-knowledge is, as it were, the eye of the immortal spirit. Through self-knowledge we must see the whole spiritual world in the time that we live through spiritually between death and a new birth. All this is really so that we can say: the seeds that must come to further development and evolution are contained in German intellectual life, and these must be grasped vividly in the course of time. Then real insight and real spiritual comprehension will emerge from this German intellectual life in the future.

If you take a brief look at the intellectual cultural history of modern times, you will also be led to recognize how the German spirit, in particular, is called upon to develop its idealism, which it has developed in its great philosophers, into spiritualism, into spirit-cognition, into spirit-experience, into scientific knowledge. One is tempted to say that the German spirit was pressed, suppressed and suppressed by the foreign spirit. We see how Goethe, who is rooted entirely in the German spirit, sighs under what is coming from France, especially in his time. While the German mind is actually geared to recognize more and more intimately the spirit that pervades and interweaves the world, the French mind is more geared to grasp everything that can be grasped by the intellect, to rationalize. This can even be seen in the peculiarity of French poetry. Reason, however, being bound to the brain, is basically only capable of developing materialism. Therefore, materialism is basically a genuine French product. Materialism is not inherent in the German character when it comprehends itself in its deepest intimate interior. This inner Frenchness, this inner materialism, must also be defeated by the German spirit in the course of time.

And if we follow a characteristic phenomenon of the development of world views in the British Isles, precisely in terms of the leading philosophy that comes from there, we can summarize it as follows: The British philosopher – and this can be proved in detail everywhere – starts from the same point as Locke, Hobbes and so on: only to accept what the senses perceive and what is combined from them, and to make the intellect only a servant of sense perception. This leads to external empiricism or to skepticism, to a search for doubt. But this has also deeply influenced the German mind, and that is also something from which it must free itself. After all, we are experiencing many things in our time, just below the surface of our soul. While England, with its world-view, was called upon to swear by mere sensory appearances, and France was called upon to cultivate man from out of rationalism, out of the intellect, to the point of the sentence 'Man as a machine', the German spirit, after it had emancipated itself from France, cultivated idealism, which is the predecessor of spiritualism, of the actual spiritual science. Idealism does not seek to stop at materialism, which is tied only to the intellect; it does not seek to stop at the empiricism of Englishness, which wants to hold only to the senses, nor at the rationalism of Frenchness, but seeks to grasp what lives in the soul. But by liberating himself from foreign influences, by the German fully relying on himself spiritually, German idealism will incorporate the living spiritual knowledge of the culture of the future.

If you try to do something for this living spiritual knowledge today, you will, however, initially encounter a great deal of resistance. If I may mention this here in a personal capacity: since the 1980s, I have been striving to establish Goethe's theory of colours and its depth against the materialistic English Newtonian physics. It is easy to understand why physics objects to Goethe's theory of colours; one can easily list all the objections. But the Goethean Theory of Colors is itself a living penetration into the physical reality of colors as a scientific product; and as spiritual knowledge will take hold of human culture, it will be realized how infinitely higher this Goethean Theory of Colors stands than the English one. Today, however, one is still talking to deaf ears; the corresponding writings are not yet being read – or only by a small circle. But it is always like that.

As the ancestor of true spiritual science, Goethe established a naturalistic world view of the development of living beings. I have been writing about this since the 1880s in an effort to show how this Goethean theory of development is a spiritual view. It is based on the fact that Goethe was able to make true what he was able to emphasize to Schiller, that he already sees the idea in reality. But here too, one still preaches to deaf ears; for the other is more comfortable. This Goethean teaching was inconvenient for humanity to accept. And when Darwin came along and presented all of this in a way that was more comfortable for the senses, in an outwardly sensual way of looking at things, in a way that the English mind so relishes, it was accepted, it flooded the world; and the difficult, uncomfortable, but spiritual Goethean teaching was ignored by people. When Darwin conveniently brought the theory of evolution, it was accepted.

And the great philosopher Hegel, who also has a lot to do with this city, has shown another example. He has shown how the German astronomical philosopher, philosophical astronomer, to whom science owes so much, Johann Kepler, has achieved great things in terms of understanding the world's context. Yes, it was indeed the case that Kepler was affected by Kästner's famous epigram, because he saw through the course of the stars, because he saw through all of this and expressed it in wonderful formulas, he had to lead a life of which the epigrammist Kästner says:

No mortal had ever risen higher
than Kepler rose – and died of starvation.
He knew only how to amuse the minds,
so the bodies left him without bread!

But Hegel goes even further and shows that Newton's famous theory of gravitation, on which, as every physicist says, modern physics is based, is nothing more than what the Swabian Kepler achieved, expressed in mathematical formulas. The real thing is Kepler's. One is faced with a historical lie when one speaks of the justification of Newtonism.

The German spirit will have to stand on its own. This will stand out from the many sad but also glorious events of our time as a marker of the historical development of humanity. However, what has worked so thoroughly from the west and northwest has worked on human souls in such a way as to make the path I have described, the path into the spiritual world, more difficult.

I will now say something, forgive me, that many will consider very stupid; but I know that it is a truth. Perhaps the time will come when this truth can be shown in detail. All that is needed is time. I can only state the fact that the opportunity for the free development of the powers of the soul, as indicated, to pave the way to the spiritual world, has been thoroughly lost to souls from childhood on. As a result, for example, the path has been lost – I am not speaking out of national chauvinism, I am speaking out of psychological, cultural-historical knowledge – the path has been lost because the poison of Robinson by Defoe still poisons and contaminates the lives of many boys and girls; and in this lies that which takes root in the soul in order to imbue it with the empiricism of Englishness.

Many internal victories, which are in the interest of German culture, will still have to be fought. But what is happening now is the great, bloody, but also glorious harbinger. And those who now go through the gate of death as heroic souls – especially the spiritual scientist must point this out, because he knows how souls go through death as realities and how those who are dead only live on in a different form – they will be among us in a high sense with their unspent powers. For in their soul-spiritual there is something that could have supplied the body with formative forces for decades to come — after all, these are young, flourishing human lives that are leaving the earth in our time —, that could have supplied the body with formative forces for a whole long life. But this will still weave and live in its immortal soul; it will be there in the spiritual sphere; it will be there and will help when humanity approaches it with understanding in the creation of a truly spiritual worldview, a worldview that is spiritual through and through, that is scientific in the fullest sense, in the strictest sense of the word. Spiritual science will thus be able to be something very much alive and real. For the spiritual scientist knows that when what he has to give as the result of research comes to life in souls, then these souls will become so immersed in earthly life that the great gulf, which today gapes as a materialistic world-view between the physical and the supersensible, will be bridged. In a much more real sense than one suspects today, people will live into a world view that, in addition to the directly present earth citizens, will also show them people in their effectiveness who have passed through the gate of death. But this is a world view that at the same time admonishes us for the large number of deaths that our fateful time has brought upon us. Much blood, much death, much adversity, much suffering and pain, much courage, much willingness to make sacrifices, tremendous greatness rushes and weaves through that which surrounds us in our fateful, momentous, and historically significant present. But it is particularly appropriate in this present time to point to that which points beyond all death, beyond all mere temporal life, to the hidden, to that which is immortal in the human being.

Not everyone will be able to become a spiritual researcher, just as not everyone can become a chemist. But times will come when just as what the few chemists have to give will be made fruitful for all, so too what the individual spiritual researchers have to give will benefit all of humanity and its coexistence. One need not be a spiritual researcher oneself to find the truth of what spiritual researchers discover; one need only be free of the prejudices that today's habits of thought put in one's way, and the things that have been hinted at today, spiritual science, can be understood. In order to discover the facts for oneself, to give just one example of what formed the main subject of today's discussion, one must follow the path of spiritual research oneself. In order to penetrate into the spiritual world, where divine spiritual beings, just as real as the things and beings of the physical world, dwell, in order to speak of these worlds appropriately, in order to really bring messages from this world and these beings, one must go the way of spiritual research oneself. To understand what is brought from the spiritual worlds, one really needs only to approach the matter with an unprejudiced sense of truth. People who are unable to believe this sense today, combined with what spiritual research says, do not realize that it is not the sense of truth, but the habits of thinking caused by prejudice. But when these habits of thinking have been done away with, as the old habits of thinking were done away with in the face of the Copernican world-picture, then spiritual science will bring something infinitely more fruitful for the soul and spiritual life than natural science has brought for the outer life. For what natural science brings relates to what surrounds us, to what we build for ourselves, to many things by means of which we make our life comfortable and pleasant, what is useful to us. But what spiritual science has to give is something that every soul desires, if only it becomes aware of the powers of this desire in the spiritual and soul; that which gives people the opportunity to develop in such a way that desolation, loneliness, disharmony of life, but what strengthens the soul so that the soul can also face life strongly, and that will demand more and more of the soul in the future. Spiritual science will incorporate something of the spiritual development that will evoke a living consciousness in the soul of what is immortal in the human being. And in this coexistence with the immortal part of the soul, man will become more aware that the world is more comprehensive than what the senses see, than what one experiences in time. The knowledge, which will not remain abstract or theoretical, will be concentrated in certain feelings that will inwardly gladden and uplift the soul, but will also make it industrious, strong and capable.

In conclusion, I would like to summarize in a few words what can be awakened in the soul through spiritual science. These words may fade away what I, as I said, could only say in brief strokes, like a charcoal drawing, about the question today: What is immortal in the human being? This may fade away into the words that are, so to speak, the residue of feeling of spiritual scientific knowledge and of the spiritual scientific confession in relation to the question of today's contemplation:

The senses of man speak:
The things in the vastness of space;
They change with the course of time.
Awakening itself, the human soul awakens
From the vastness of space
And unperturbed by the course of time
In the stream of becoming in eternity!