Knowledge and Immortality

GA 69b — 24 May 1910, Hamburg

II. Knowledge and Immortality

Dear attendees! The word “knowledge” undoubtedly evokes in people the feeling that it is something that is purposefully and coherently connected with the whole human destiny in life. And intimately connected with this feeling is the realization that by acquiring knowledge, man provides himself with a position within his existence and within the whole of human development that corresponds to his true destiny, to his goals.

Now, in the fields of knowledge that are connected with the study of nature, and perhaps also with the study of certain branches of human life, we can very soon see that they provide us with laws, that they show us certain forces of natural or other effectivenesses, through which we are able to intervene in life. We need only consider how, in certain respects, our knowledge of nature makes us masters of the forces of nature, how the laws of nature that we recognize enable us to equip ourselves with tools and devices that enhance life and advance man in existence. And when we allow the most remote fields of knowledge to come to mind, we will feel the connection somewhere between the laws that we acquire through knowledge and the actions through which we enhance our lives in a useful, purposeful way. Thus, when it comes to knowledge that can be directly implemented in our actions and behavior, we readily understand that they do not merely satisfy our curiosity, do not merely correspond to a certain urge to act, but that they arise from the much higher urge to shape life and existence ever more perfectly and completely. Thus, we gain the feeling that these insights have a certain mission, a task in our lives.

Now everyone knows that there are other fields of knowledge in which, when we think of this mission, it comes to mind to an even greater degree, which we can call human dignity and human destiny, humanity and human fulfillment. But these are insights that – in the way just described – are not directly applicable to the purposes and goals of practical life. These are insights that one says one acquires for their own sake. Man feels that he has an urge to explore and recognize the secrets of existence; he feels that knowledge is simply enlightening. It is something that satisfies the soul even if it cannot apply this knowledge directly, so to speak, cannot forge it into external instruments and tools or into actions of daily life that are related to external human goals.

A realization for its own sake, a realization that grows out of a deep need of the human soul and that should satisfy the human being through itself - such a realization is sought by the human being, and he seeks it all the more the deeper the inner needs of his soul develop. He seeks it perhaps less when he feels immersed in a life that drifts from event to event, from sensation to sensation, from work to work in everyday life. He may seek them less when life distracts him and keeps him fully occupied by his external demands. But especially in those moments when a person - perhaps not even of his own volition, but through those events and experiences that tear us out of everyday life - can be still within himself, that is when the urge for such different insights awakens. There are perhaps hours in which man suffers great losses in life, moments when perhaps what is most precious to him is snatched away, when he believes he must see his hopes for life fail. These are moments when a longing awakens in the soul that can never be satisfied by the outer life. And it is people who have this need for knowledge who gradually come to deepen their soul life more and more. Such people then begin to realize, initially through mere feeling, through sensation, that insights that are far removed from the everyday can act as a source of courage and strength where a person becomes weak, indeed that such insights can act as a balm where the soul is desolate and full of pain. Yes, then the soul can develop to a point where it feels that it would not want to live without such knowledge, that existence seems worthless and bleak without such knowledge.

When pondering such an experience of the human soul, the thought may arise: If one already feels that everyday knowledge, for example knowledge of nature or knowledge of the laws of human coexistence or the like, only fulfills its purpose when it not only satisfies the curiosity of our brain, but when it also inspires the strength of our hands and cause us to stir our hands in earthly existence, then one might ask, with what tasks of man, with what goals, are the other insights connected, which one so easily thinks are there for their own sake and find no direct practical confirmation? Do such insights have no task at all, to intervene in human life and to stimulate something that leads to deeds, to actions? That is the big question that one can ask oneself about knowledge and its task in life.

If one is aware of how the soul, in its state of dissatisfaction with the external existence, feels the necessity of knowledge, if one thus gains a certain insight that this intimate knowledge can become necessary for the innermost being of our soul, then one will think that such knowledge, which extends beyond the immediate external life, must be connected with the highest qualities, with the highest aspirations of our humanity, in other words with the essence of the human being itself. And one will soon notice that one must seek the connection between what man calls knowledge in the higher sense and the actual essence of man. But then one will have to organize one's search for knowledge after such an insight has been gained. One will say to oneself: You have to organize the search in such a way that consideration is given to the deepest, innermost nature of the human being. Anyone who believes that all existence is exhausted in the external sense world alone, that all science is exhausted in the knowledge we gain through rational processing of external sense phenomena, in short, anyone who believes that external observation of life and science directed at external being can be the only science, will be ill-equipped to provide answers to the question just raised.

Another science, the so-called spiritual science or “theosophy” - if one wants to use this much-abused and much-misunderstood term - gives us the possibility to answer this question little by little. This science refers to the spiritual, to that which goes beyond the sensual world; it is dedicated to research that alone can lead us to the essence of man. With the help of this science, one can feel that the innermost being of man comes from the spirit and that what is best in us - our true governing being - is spiritual. Only spiritual science can explore this innermost part of our being, and so we can also hope that through this spiritual science we can gain knowledge of the real nature of man and that in this way we can find the mysterious foundation that otherwise only manifests itself in life through a dark feeling that says: I want knowledge that gives me something that everything else cannot give me.

Spiritual science certainly follows different methods and seeks different paths than ordinary external science, but in our time there is still little inclination to see it as anything other than the eccentric or sad aberrations of individuals. It is not yet recognized in wide circles that this spiritual science works with the same strict means of knowledge as the natural sciences, that it applies the same strict means of knowledge, but only to a different area, thus not to the outer natural life, but to the spiritual life. In the course of this lecture we shall be able to point out some of the things that lead man into the spiritual world and the methods by which man can gain insight into the other, the supersensible world. But we want to take the starting point from the everyday. Through rational ascent from everyday life, and thus also from mere reason, one can indeed get some kind of inkling of a possibility to gain knowledge of the spiritual world.

How does this manifest itself in the outer life of the human being? Let us take the human being at four significant points, two of which we are usually unaware of because we experience them as a matter of course. But there are two other things that intervene in each life, one questioningly and the other shockingly. These four things are referred to as waking and sleeping, as living and dying. In these four words lies basically all the mystery of human life. Those who are able to obtain satisfactory explanations will see that the darkness of life becomes light and clear. Waking and sleeping alternate in our everyday life. From waking up to falling asleep, impressions arise in our soul that we owe to our mind. We know that during the state of sleep we shut ourselves off from pleasure and suffering, from instinct and desire. Thus we see our life unrolling from waking up to falling asleep. Then, as we fall asleep, we see all the experiences and activities of the soul descend into an indeterminate darkness. All perceptions and representations sink down. We are as if overcome by a faint; we cease to be connected to our environment. We feel transported from the conscious into the unconscious.

What actually happens when a person experiences this moment of falling asleep? Only an opinion that does not follow the laws of logic can believe that the whole world that sinks into darkness in the evening is reborn in the morning, that everything that a person has left behind in the physical world is reborn. Everyone must ask themselves the question: Where is that which is thought, intended, and felt during the day, what is felt as the power to take action? It is not difficult to see that what we can describe as the actual inner being of a person, what we feel as an inner drive, cannot simply have disappeared [when we fall asleep] and has to arise anew [after waking up]. It is therefore not difficult to understand what the spiritual researcher must say based on his research. He says: That which remains in bed, this human being, is not the whole human being. This human being, who sleeps at night, has released from himself that which, during the day, constitutes the innermost being. How is it that one does not see and cannot observe that which goes out? Everyone can give themselves the answer: You can observe it just as little as a blind man can observe colors. He who maintains that there is nothing that leaves the body and is outside of it at night is like the blind man who says, “Ah, what are you saying about your foolish fantasies, about red and blue colors; that does not exist!” What you do not perceive does not exist.

Of course, only spiritual science can explore what eludes the senses. But a certain beginning is sometimes made by everyday consciousness, albeit only in certain abnormal states of human life. There are experiences that actually every human being could have, that he has more often than he realizes, but they only last for a short time and are therefore not noticed by most people because the external impressions have too numbing an effect on the soul. A certain practice and inner calmness of soul, a special training for spiritual research, is needed if a person is to have such moments. There are people who have such moments and describe how, at the moment of falling asleep, they can experience something that is not usually experienced. Just as chemists describe some chemical process, so observers in this field describe what they experience at the moment of falling asleep.

They experience, as it were, a kind of alienation from everything they do in their sensory life. They experience the powerlessness to move their hands, they feel the powerlessness to move their tongue; they feel how the senses gradually lose the ability to interact with the outside world. And then, in a particularly embarrassing way, the person feels, with severe self-reproach, all the mistakes and wrongdoings they have committed. And then comes the moment when a kind of experience occurs that is aware of being free from the necessity of external sensory perception, but which is not unconscious, but feels that the soul is in the spiritual world: this is a subjective feeling. There is a stronger light, greater clarity, than can ever be present in the external sensory life. A blissful moment of feeling free occurs. Then, for those who are ordinary observers, there follows what appears to be a quick twitch, of which one is aware: Now that which during the day had passed through the hands and feet to work, which had lived in the eyes, which had lived in the brain, has now detached itself. But then what one might call a transition into unconsciousness occurs. A brief, intense feeling arises, combined with the wish: Oh, if only this moment could last forever!

These experiences are just as much facts as any others. They should not be dismissed by saying that only a few people have such experiences, that they have a special subjective ecstasy in their soul because they have an abnormal mental life. These doubts cannot be refuted unless one says: Yes, but spiritual science, on the other hand, knows from its own means and methods that it is right when it says: I cannot prove it, only certain people experience it; you too can experience it yourself if you methodically try to spread inner balance in your soul through completely normal means of education. One would not get very far, however, if one could only cite such rarities of human observational ability. What alone can lead to research and science in this field is the methodical schooling through which man can really achieve what makes him capable of consciously experiencing falling asleep almost as if by chance. If such a science is to come into being, it must be possible not only to rely on such abnormal rarities, but also to really experience, systematically and with full consciousness of the soul, what occurs almost by chance. That is, it must be possible to see, perceive and explore this emergence of the real inner being of the human being, preventing the human being from being unable to observe it precisely when he wants to perceive what is free of his body, because he is unconscious.

So how is it possible to get to know what a person otherwise only experiences unconsciously – the spiritual world in which he finds himself [during sleep]? If what is presented comparatively like [the experience of] a blind person born who gains his sight through an operation could be achieved at a higher level, if it were true that there are forces in the soul that cannot emerge in the outer body but that man and that can be brought out through certain methods - self-discipline and schooling of the soul - then the moment of a higher, spiritual power of vision could occur, and then it could be that the human being could experience that of which he must say: I know that there is a spiritual world.

This possibility exists if a person continues to do what we have emphasized as a natural prerequisite: instilling calm and inner balance in the soul. And if we do more and more in our soul to enable it to have experiences that it does not receive through external impressions, then we enable the soul to perceive for itself. I can only describe everything here briefly, but in my essays “How to Know Higher Worlds” and in my book “Occult Science: An Outline of Its Principles” you will find a more detailed discussion. It is certainly no fairy tale, but can be confirmed by those who have achieved it, that the human soul is able to consciously experience the moment of falling asleep in the midst of everyday life. This can be characterized by the words: We can induce that moment when we consciously and deliberately suppress external impressions, when we withdraw with our perception from what makes an impression on us as light, color and sound, as warmth and cold, even as pressure and impact, as pain and joy. If we are able, through a strong willpower, to command all external impressions to stand still, then we are also able to make our soul consciously as empty as we make it empty when we sink into the unconsciousness of sleep. It is true that the one who arouses the strong will to consciously switch off external impressions comes to consciously live through a state in which, although it is empty of the expression of his soul, it is nevertheless permeated and interwoven on the inside by what we can call inner activity, inner awareness that we are something and that we can do something. However, what has been emphasized so far by such efforts leads to an empty soul, which is not unconscious, but whose consciousness is contracted into the basic feeling: You are there, but have nothing in you; you have yourself, but there is nothing in you.

A second step is necessary if man is to penetrate into the spiritual worlds. It is necessary that he should no longer remain empty in his soul. If nothing could penetrate into his soul, then there would be no means at all by which man could ever be brought to the conviction of a spiritual world in the scientific sense. If in such an experiment, which excludes external impressions, the soul remained completely empty, then that would be actual proof that the external sense world is the be-all and end-all of all existence. But anyone who wants to become a spiritual researcher continues this work of self-discipline and education of his soul, and now tries, through strong will, to evoke such ideas that can be called symbolic ideas, which do not depict external things but have other properties. When a person devotes himself to meditation and contemplation, he will feel and experience that these ideas evoke feelings and sensations from the depths of his soul just as external impressions evoke pleasure and displeasure.

When a person is alone with himself, when he allows strong, powerful images to live in his soul that do not mean anything external, then, with sufficient patience - sometimes it takes years - he can experience through experience that something is pushing into his soul that he knows for sure is reality. Then he begins to experience a different, higher world, then he enters the supersensible world. And he will keep going further and further with his observation. When he falls asleep, he can observe what now withdraws from the physical body and enters the spiritual world and reality and what, from the moment of falling asleep until waking up, is surrounded by the place from which man's original home originates – he is surrounded by the spiritual world. Then, through his methodical research, so regulated by his soul, the realization springs forth that man, with his actual inner being, withdraws from his outer man when he falls asleep, that he lives on in the spiritual world and that he, when he wakes up, again descends into the outer physical body.

When spiritual researchers present us with these facts, just as a chemical or physical truth is presented to us, we may ask: Is there nothing in life that can make the matter clearer and more distinct? Let us examine life to see if it confirms what the spiritual researcher says. Certainly, the majority of people today have the right to say: Well, we are not spiritual researchers; there may be some who can claim such a thing, but one would still have to find confirmation of what has been said in life. Therefore, let us examine life, assuming that something could help to confirm the researcher's statements.

We see that life proceeds in such a way that a person comes into existence through birth and leaves existence through death. We see that life alternates between sleeping and waking. We ask: Is there an inner meaning, a lawful significance, to the fact that a person always alternates between waking and sleeping? Well, ordinary phenomena of everyday life could make a person aware that it must have a significance. I do not take into consideration the hypotheses of natural science, but neither am I opposed to natural science. That which is to be derived from spiritual science is in perfect harmony with the facts of the most modern natural science. This the spiritual researcher can always show. One must only not confuse opinions of natural science with facts of natural science. Opinions are often in sharp contradiction to facts. Unfortunately, there is not enough time today to go into this in more detail. One phenomenon that can point to the meaningfulness of sleep is clearly evident to us every day: the phenomenon of fatigue. People tire and feel in their fatigue that their strength is waning. When they wake up, they feel how, as it were, the forces that enable them to live their lives from the moment they wake up until they fall asleep draw in and flow into them. Man could never make up for what he has lost through fatigue if he always remained in his physical body. Only by entering into another world in the evening, into the original home of his soul, can he draw from this original home the forces that he pours into his physical body in the morning, through which he balances out the forces he used the day before. The scientific hypothesis regarding fatigue will not be touched upon here. It is spiritual forces alone that we must pour into ourselves if we want to balance what we lose in the physical world, the sense world. We can never find these forces in the sense world itself. Man can fatally make acquaintance with the fact that he can never get the forces out of the sense world when he realizes what it means when sleep does not have a balancing effect. So we need sleep to dive into the spiritual reservoirs from which we draw the strength to live.

We have seen what a person brings with them when they wake up from sleep. But what do they take with them into sleep? These are the facts that take place between birth and death and which we include in the word: we develop into ever new states, into ever different abilities. What enables us to develop new abilities in later epochs of life? Take the fact that we can write, that we can express our thoughts in writing. Do we remember how we acquired the ability to hold a pen, for example? It would be bad if we were to consciously remember all the practice that was necessary to achieve this. We have a whole sum of experiences behind us that are no longer present to us, only in the form that they have enabled us to write as a result. The experiences have poured into the ability to write. What we have experienced in the physical world has - contracted - formed the ability that now wells up from within. What has happened there?

This can be gauged from a simple phenomenon that manifests itself in someone who, for their job, has to learn a lot by heart. Everyone will notice that they can only learn very poorly if they try to memorize and cram as much as possible in a row. But it will go better if a healthy sleep interrupts it; this will have a strengthening effect and will expand what we have learned and what we have acquired at an earlier point in time. When it comes to something as close to our soul as memorization, we notice how significantly the state of sleep is involved. Anyone who observes this will no longer be able to doubt what the spiritual researcher says. During sleep, what has been experienced during the day is transformed into ability and strength. The spiritual researcher shows us how this is the case in all areas of life. We would not learn to write if we were not able to draw the experiences of learning to write into ourselves again and again and to transform them into abilities during the state between falling asleep and waking up. In his primal home, the human being finds the strength to transform life experiences into abilities, to weave them around.

We see that the human being does indeed take something from everyday life into his sleep. He takes in what he appropriates in the sensual world so that he can activate his strengths, so that he can work fruitfully, because that is where experiences are woven into abilities. Today we know little of such things. But there were times in the development of humanity when the guides of humanity knew such secrets and expressed them in those poems that are not everyday poems but prove their worth by their effect over thousands of years. In art that is truly worthy of the name, the deepest, most truthful knowledge is at work.

Let us assume that a poet, knowing that the experiences of physical life are transformed into abilities during sleep, had wanted to express how someone prevents the soul from acquiring a certain ability, a certain power. He would have wanted to show, for example, how one could prevent the ability to love from developing. He would describe a person who ensures that what the external experiences of the day send into [the sleep] and what is woven into the night is again undone, dissolved. Homer wanted to give such a description when he showed how Penelope, Odysseus' wife, was surrounded by suitors who did everything to make her develop the ability to love them. But she prevented it by undoing what she had woven during the day at night.

I know full well that a light-footed contemporary aesthetic, which believes that it can grasp all the secrets of art from a certain obvious understanding, will perceive this as the pinnacle of interpretation. But that is not the point. Rather, it is about something else: anyone who penetrates the human spirit will recognize that the great artists have placed great secrets in their works of art and that these works of art have had an effect on the souls and hearts of people from era to era. So much for the illustration of what has been said about the meaning of waking and sleeping.

We must therefore say that a person progresses in life when he is able to develop abilities through sleep that he did not have before and that he can now utilize in the sensory world in order to live a meaningful and spirited life; thus, the human being is endowed with new abilities for his activity. The experiences are transformed by the fact that he can move into the spiritual original home of the soul, which one enters through the gate of sleep. All perfection depends on the human being transforming the experiences of the sense world into abilities through his connection with the spiritual world, in order to then pour the experiences into his outer being in the morning.

Everything that has been described now naturally has limitations. We can bring these limitations to mind when we think of certain tendencies and qualities that a person brings with them into existence at birth for their outer physicality and corporeality. In relation to certain forces that are connected to our innermost being, we can perfect ourselves through what we experience. However, the nature of our body sets a limit to this. And no matter how high our abilities become through our experiences, we cannot transform these experiences if we find limits to our outer body, because it is part of this process that abilities developed by the soul as powers connect with the whole configuration of the body. After all, the body is always the same when we wake up in the morning. We can only express the abilities that relate to the external body. We can influence these to a certain degree.

You can realize this if you consider what becomes apparent when you observe a person for ten years and follow how they work through ten years of insights [into the physical body]. Everything that can be called inner battles and victories and sometimes also inner decline or downfall lives in this. In someone who, for example, has completed the realization in himself over ten years, you can see how such realization, how such transformation of the soul pushes into the outer body, how it comes to expression in the physiognomy, in the gaze, and how, in fact, the person is able to process this into his body where the soul permeates the body so strongly. But if one sees that someone has had the opportunity to have experiences in the field of music, and [believes] that he could simply use these experiences to advance not only in terms of musical feeling but also of musical understanding and musical activity, then one must say that it is impossible for him to infuse this ability into his body from the experiences if he has an unmusical ear organization. Here we see the limits set to us in the fine structure of the organs of our outer body; they exist because we depend on descending into the same body every morning.

The question must be raised: Are such experiences, which find their limit in the transformation into abilities in the outer body, without significance for the life and development of the human being? We cannot answer this question if we stop within the life between birth and death. We can only answer it if we go out with the deep insights of spiritual science to what lies beyond the mysterious gate that we pass through at death. And just as we have tried to make plausible to ourselves from spiritual science that man does not go into a nothingness of unconsciousness [during sleep], but into a spiritual world, so we can ask: What happens to man when he passes through the gate of death and does not return to his corporeality? External science will not be able to pursue him; but spiritual science can. It arrives at a lawful connection which even today affects so many people that they regard it as fantasy, as folly, perhaps as madness: the law of re-embodiment, of repeated lives on earth - which is nothing other than the development of the realization that the soul and spirit can only come from the soul and spirit.

A few centuries ago, learned researchers still claimed that earthworms and fish could arise from river mud. With the same certainty, it was taught even earlier, in the 6th and 7th centuries, that new life would grow out of matter in a putrefying state. If you beat a horse carcass until it was mushy, then the matter would be able to grow bees out of itself, and if you did that with an ox carcass, then it would be able to sprout hornets and wasps out of itself. It was only in the 17th century that Francesco Redi taught that living things can only arise from living things. And that means nothing other than: If someone claims that living things arise from river mud, this can only be claimed as a result of inaccurate observation. But it must also be said that it is only due to inaccurate observation when we see a person come into existence through birth and believe that he acquires all the characteristics and traits from his ancestors. A close observation shows that the soul and spirit only comes from another soul and spirit, which struggles into existence and attracts the substances and fluids of its surroundings, thereby developing. Thus, the soul-spiritual comes from another soul-spiritual and has nothing to do with the inherited characteristics of the body. So when a child comes into existence, its soul-spiritual must be traced back to another soul-spiritual. It has nothing to do with the line of ancestors. The child receives its facial features and so on from its father and mother. But in the same way, we are led from the spiritual soul of the child to an earlier spiritual soul, because we will not be led from the spiritual soul of the child to the characteristics of the ancestors. Thus, spiritual science points us back to our own previous life on earth.

So we are talking about repeated lives on earth. This present life is the repetition of countless previous lives and is a prerequisite for the future. This law of repeated lives on earth plays the same role today as Redi's law did in the 17th century. At that time, Redi narrowly escaped the fate of Giordano Bruno. Today, anyone who speaks of the law of re-embodiment is considered to be just as much a heretic as Redi was for those who wanted to hold on to the old ways. At that time, burning heretics was fashionable. Today it is fashionable to condemn as fools and fantasists those who teach new laws. But it will be the same with the law of repeated earth lives as with the law of Redi. There will come a time when people will not be able to understand how anyone could ever have believed that a person inherited his abilities only from his ancestors. Goethe says about himself:

From my father I have the stature,
the serious conduct of life,
from my mother the cheerful nature,
and the desire to tell stories.
[...]
What then in the whole creature
can be called original?

Try to see if you can separate out what is original and what he has acquired from the line of inheritance, in order to preserve those qualities by which he means something to humanity.

Thus we see that we have the prospect of a law that seeks to incorporate human culture and human education – a law that may still be called fantastic today, but which will later be said to be: It cannot be grasped how people could ever have believed that something other than the development of humanity existed in the sense of this law. If we understand life in this way, we can ask: What do we do with the experiences that we cannot transform into abilities within the limits of our physicality? What do we do if we have wanted to acquire musical abilities through musical experiences in life and have found limits to an unmusical ear? When we pass away, we discard our physical body and live in a purely spiritual world, where we now spend the entire time between death and a new birth preparing to be able to bring completely different, higher abilities into life through the new birth. Now we have the opportunity to build a new body for ourselves, to work with it and to shape it plastically into our new physicality. Then, with regard to the new birth, we must now make provisions for the shaping of our new body in such a way that we convert into abilities in the new life what was neglected in the previous life, and that we convert into ever higher forms through changing conditions that which we cannot use for our perfection. Thus we truly progress from life to life. Although we may suffer setbacks due to other influences, life as a whole is still ascending, and what we utilize in later lives is productive, creative and constructive for our being.

We may ask: What are the most important, meaningful abilities that a person can acquire? We look at the lives of those individuals who stand more clearly visible to humanity than others. Consider the creations of a great artist, a Raphael or a Michelangelo. Such creations have arisen through interaction with the external world. It is the victory over matter that speaks to us from the walls, elevating our souls and bringing us satisfaction. But then we turn our gaze to other facts, for example to Leonardo's painting “The Last Supper”. Goethe saw it in all its beauty in his youth, but now it has been destroyed. When we consider this, the thought that is undoubtedly true will surely suggest itself. Everything that great men have conjured into such works is doomed to destruction, condemned to the fate of descending. And a time will come when all these works will be crushed to dust. But if everything is doomed to destruction and will have disappeared, will nothing of what held sway on earth be saved into eternity?

We need only realize that Raphael and Michelangelo became different after they had conjured up these works. Not only does something arise that is communicated to the outer world, but something also enters the human soul. While working in the outer world, something connects with the soul and transforms it. What is reworked is connected with this soul, and if we really penetrate the principles of re-embodiment, we say to ourselves: May the works that Raphael has conjured up into the physical world disappear – the ability remains and will ignite new abilities in a new existence, and these will lead people ever further from step to step. Thus we see that the fruit of our labor extends through various embodiments. Even if our outer work disappears, what connects it to the soul will live on with that soul. Souls will preserve the fruits of their creations. The creations will perish, but the soul fruits of these creations live on in the souls. But what are the deepest, most intimate abilities? They are those that enable people to conjure up what gives millions of souls pleasure and can be transformed into works of art and of life. Such abilities are connected with the outer aspects of our lives.

But there is something in human life that is interwoven with the inner essence of our soul; there is something that we know has a different effect on us than what could be called an urge or an impulse, for my part the impulse from which Raphael painted his pictures. Instincts work in us, but we feel that instincts also have something in them that can be called talent. Instincts are changeable, something indefinite for man, where man is not completely there. No one can become a painter unless he has accumulated special abilities. But there is one thing that cannot be acquired: it is something that comes from our deepest, innermost being. This drive cannot be limited to external realization, but must be drawn from the spiritual itself, and that is the urge for knowledge - an urge that lives in us [deepest]. If the soul wants to work [in the world], we need external materials; for what we call the urge for knowledge, we need only life itself. And only this urge can spur us on to develop that power of thinking that allows us to penetrate into the world of imagination and thought and to unite its secrets with our being. Here we feel the transition between thinking and imagining on the one hand and recognizing on the other.

The person who believes that mere thinking can lead to knowledge is greatly mistaken. Only those who fill their ideas with a content that is not given in the external world will come to know what is behind the external world. What one has acquired in life connects with the innermost self, which is the same as the innermost being of our self. The spirit [in the world] is the same as the spirit within ourselves; the spirit outside in the world connects with the spiritual that we carry within us. There we draw the highest fruit from what we can acquire in our waking life. Knowledge is the human activity through which we draw the highest fruits from our experiences; it is the human activity that transforms into abilities in life, for which we find limit after limit to express them outwardly in life. But knowledge causes us to carry these abilities over through death [into the spiritual world]. And in death, because it is a central spiritual faculty, knowledge not only gives the certainty that we carry over the fruits of our present life to perfections that must be awakened again and again, but it also gives the certainty that we acquire abilities that last as long as the spirit itself - that must last as long as the spirit itself, because they have the same characteristics as the spirit. In knowledge we connect with the spirit, and from this connection arises not only the certainty of knowing immortality, but also the power to establish immortality - to establish it in ourselves - so that with knowledge we acquire the power to carry our essential core through the incarnations. Thus, the acquisition of the powers we regard as immortal is intimately connected with what we call knowledge. It is the activity between birth and death that gives us the immortality of our most individual being, our ego, precisely beyond death, for it is this most individual being that must acquire knowledge through its innermost, self-chosen urge.

For human beings, knowledge and immortality are inwardly related. It is true what spiritual researchers have always handed down from time to time: Man has a life that flows into eternity, but only through all the [forces] that have been laid in him [through life in] the material world. It is true what the spiritual researchers say: Nowhere out there in space can you find anything that can guarantee you this immortality. Only when you penetrate through knowledge to that which lives in you as the center, as spirit, do you gain in you the intimate connection between what you strive for in the noblest sense and what, in knowledge, creates in you for the ever-lasting elevation of your being. Thus we see from knowledge that it not only satisfies curiosity, but that it works on our soul, that it transforms the soul, just as external knowledge transforms the forces of nature. Knowledge is precisely that which makes true what spiritual research passes down to us in the following words:

Being follows being in the expanse of space,
Being follows being in the course of time.
If you want to penetrate from the realm of transience
into the realm of the eternal,
then make a covenant with knowledge,
For only so you will find the eternal
in you, the eternal outside of you
Beyond all space,
Beyond all time.