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

GA 68b — 7 January 1905, Munich

3. Birth and Death in the Life of the Soul

Report in the “Münchner Neueste Nachrichten”, January 1905

Theosophical lectures. The Secretary General of the Theosophical Society in Germany, the writer Dr. Rudolf Steiner of Berlin, gave two theosophical lectures at Café Luitpold.

In the first lecture, he discussed the topic: “Birth and Death in the Life of the Soul.” He began by pointing to Plato's account of the death of Socrates, which offers a treatise on the immortality of the soul, in which the mystical conviction of the soul's immortality based on inner experience and the inner victory over death are clearly expressed. Like Socrates, the mystic feels independent in his true inner life from the apparent meaning of things that surrounds him. In order to recognize this true inner life, the essence that lies behind the phenomenal world, in one's own introspection, to seek the soul, one must, as mysticism teaches, seek to create within oneself that inner silence through contemplation and meditation, through which one can, for a longer or shorter period of time, become deaf and blind to the impressions of the outside world. The world of the spirit must become as real to his inner vision as the world of the senses is to his sensory vision. The mystic must learn to know directly, free of the senses, in contrast to indirect, sense-bound knowledge. When, in this heightened state of consciousness, he experiences the eternal in the conscious and willed elevation above the sensory world, it can be said of him in the traditional language of mysticism that he has crossed the narrow gate of death, in that he has died to the sensory world; for the mystic, death is the highest goal to which they aspire in their quest for higher knowledge. Just as the mystic, by immersing himself in his own soul, is reborn to knowledge free of the senses in the spiritual world, so too will the answer to the question of what birth and death are become clear to him in inner vision. Birth presents itself to the mystic as an externalization of the soul for the purpose of gaining indirect knowledge through the sense world, for indirect contact with it, according to inner urge, desire and longing, for the accumulation of experience through the sense world. Death is the means to liberation, to gradual rebirth in the spiritual world, after the desire has been fulfilled, and to the internalization of the collected experiences in the spiritual state, which is referred to as Devachan by Indian mysticism. The

soul, in that it is enriched by this, is born again into the sense world, and the internalized develops anew out of itself. Involution and evolution constitute the soul's life process. It must continually descend into the world of the senses and ascend into the spiritual world, in eternal becoming and dying – an eternal law to which the great mystic Goethe pointed with the words of the poet: “He who does not have this dying and becoming remains only a passive guest on this earth.”