The Circular Flow of Man's Life within the World Of Sense, Soul And Spirit

GA 68b — 16 May 1904, Hanover

2. Birth and Death in the Life of the Soul, A Theosophical Worldview

Report in the “Hannoverscher Courier,” May 19, 1905.

Birth and Death in the Life of the Soul. On Monday evening, the local Theosophical Society held a meeting at the vegetarian restaurant “Freia”, at which Dr. Rudolf Steiner from Berlin gave a lecture on the topic “Birth and Death in the Life of the Soul, a Look at the Theosophical Worldview” in front of a large audience.

The speaker emphasized at the beginning of his remarks that the riddle of birth and death has always occupied all people equally, the simplest as well as the educated. The question of the meaning of life can be broken down into two basic questions, namely: 1. “Does our human life have no other meaning than that between birth and death, or does the human being have something in him that outlasts the body?” 2. “What is the meaning of evil in the world?” These two questions can only be answered in the context of each other. One cannot speak of good and evil actions in animals, since their lives are limited by birth and death, but humans have an awareness of responsibility within themselves and thus also a sense of good and evil in their actions. But it is precisely this circumstance that proves that something higher and eternal dwells in man, something that is independent of the short life between birth and death. The speaker then developed the further course of his lecture on the basis of Plato's ideas about death and life, which essentially aimed to demonstrate the immortality of the human psyche. In doing so, he tied in with the ideas familiar to antiquity, that this immortality is to be conceived not only forward, beyond death, but also backward, beyond birth. The spiritual core in man, he said, is striving for development; however, this is not possible during a single existence, but only during a long series of existential states; the spirit must therefore continually incarnate, that is, create a body as an instrument until its development is complete. Only by recognizing the human being as a creature whose life between birth and death is only one link in a long chain of lives can the seemingly unjust fact be explained that happiness and suffering are so unevenly distributed among individuals; the individual lives are linked by hidden causal connections, and in one life one reaps what one has sown in the previous one. Finally, the speaker emphasized that an understanding of these spiritual truths requires a certain spiritual development, and the purpose of the Theosophical Society is to promote this. The theosophical movement represents a reaction against the materialistic spirit of the age, as indeed all the signs indicate that our one-sided material culture will be followed by a period of predominantly spiritual culture.