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

GA 68b — 2 January 1910, Stockholm

11. The Secret of Death as The Key to the Riddle of Life

Report in: “Dagens Nyheter”, January 3, 1910

Life and Death. A Theosophical Lecture at the [Royal Swedish] Academy of Sciences. At the invitation of the Theosophical Society in Scandinavia, Stockholm, the well-known doctor Rudolf Steiner gave a lecture on Sunday at the auditorium of the Academy of Sciences to an audience that only half filled the room,

Even those who do not hold Theosophical views must have been carried away by the power, warmth and deep conviction with which the lecture was delivered. In clear and distinct German, with only the occasional error of endlessly long German sentence formations, Dr. Steiner gave his lecture without a concept, which, from a Theosophical point of view, presented the human state of sleep and wakefulness, his life and his death.

Dr. Steiner, a thin, clean-shaven man with an almost ascetic appearance, began his speech calmly, earnestly and sedately. His left hand played with the pince-nez hanging on a string, while the right occasionally pointed into the room. But as the lecture progressed, his voice became warmer and louder. His right hand was not enough for the gestures, so he spread both arms and used both hands to help him symbolically shape what the speaker wanted to illustrate for the audience. His voice rose and the speech picked up speed as it flowed without interruption in perfect, beautiful movements that only a born speaker can produce. And when the last words, a quote from Goethe, were thrown into the room with great pathos, the audience sat in silence for a while, completely enthralled, before the applause followed.

Man must learn to see something other than annihilation in death, the speaker said; he must work to see in death an opportunity for higher development. There is nothing that entitles us to believe that life alone is the visible world. When a person falls asleep, it is his invisible part, his spirit, his self, the astral being that leaves the physical body of life to gather new strength in the spiritual world for further development. When death occurs, the body has outlived its usefulness as a medium for spiritual activity; it cannot be further trained for something higher. Just as in childhood the spiritual self of the human being can only gradually develop all the possibilities of the physical body, so old age gradually drives the astral body out of a physical instrument that cannot be further developed. A human being's corpse is the physical body as it is without the life-giving, formative spirit. And after death, the spirit returns to the invisible world from which it came for development and to which it returns for further development in other forms of existence. Just as life can only come from life, the spirit-soul (the spiritual-soul) can only come from something spiritual that existed before. If we view death in this way, we can be glad that it exists as a possibility for further and richer development.

Dr. Steiner will give two more lectures here, touching on related topics and illustrating questions that arise from the views he has developed in the first.