# Death and Immortality in the Light of Spiritual Science

## GA 69d — 6 February 1912, Vienna

### 6. Death and Immortality in the Light of Spiritual Science

Two questions, which undoubtedly touch the interest of every human soul in the most significant sense, will be dealt with in the two lectures today and tomorrow. This evening, more from a general point of view, and tomorrow, the consideration of certain individual questions will be introduced. There is no doubt that the questions concerning the nature of death and what may be hidden in the word “immortality” must truly arouse the deepest, most sincere interest in every human soul, and one may say, must still be the greatest conceivable interest, if we disregard all the wishes and desires that attach themselves to the event of death and to the question of immortality for the human soul.

But all idle curiosity, even all that is called curiosity in ordinary life, can be set aside when considering these two questions. We can refrain from doing so because in every profound moment of our lives we are constantly stimulated – sometimes more consciously, sometimes more from the deepest, most hidden parts of our soul – by two things: the strength and confidence, the certainty of hope in our lives, to want to know something about these questions. There are two things. The first is everything that is included in the idea of human destiny. This destiny not only raises theoretical questions for us, but vital questions, and we know that if we cannot receive any information that can somehow satisfy us, this must mean a weakness, doubt, belittling of our soul. Human destiny mysteriously and enigmatically intervenes in human existence. One person is placed, seemingly through no fault of their own, in a position that can hardly give them satisfaction, a place where it is impossible for them to develop any significant powers for the good of others and their work. On the other hand, we see how, seemingly without merit, the other stands in a place that not only makes a rosy existence possible for him, but also allows him to develop the best talents for the benefit and good of others. Man, with his theories, asks for the causes when external facts occur, and there is a certain reluctance to search for the causes of human destiny.

When we look at our emotional life, with all the mysterious things that can happen in it, we realize that it is precisely the most intimate depths of our soul that raise the questions about the causes of our destiny. Perhaps the individual does not ask: What are the causes of this or that happening in my life – that would be a theoretical coloring of the question; but what we feel calls us to contentment or despair, to hopeful work or to dejection in the face of all activity. But the most important questions in this area are those that perhaps cannot even be formulated in theoretical terms, but which express themselves in satisfaction, in depression, in a feeling of abandonment and loneliness; they are questions that, only half posed in the soul, remain stuck before an open formulation, but constitute the happiness and suffering of our entire existence. If fate could intervene in our lives in such a way that we could say it promotes our abilities here or there, our actions, [or] hinders our progress, then the questions would not be so burning. But if we look more deeply, we find that everything we are in the innermost part of our being – how we live, how our value, our ability presents itself – is the result of our fate. Man says to himself that the whole being, the whole inner configuration of the being, is not so dependent on what appears to approach life from the outside and shape and form this life.

So it is the anxious question to fate, which, perhaps only half raised, goes to ask: Where does our whole existence actually come from? What is it that is mysteriously enclosed within us and is so dependent on what we have to experience as our outer destiny? We need only think of two facts, in addition to the countless individual cases: there we will find how our whole being, our innermost nature, is dependent on destiny. The first fact is that the human being is placed in some linguistic area, in a national context. Who knows how much of our intimate soul life overflows from the way language penetrates us. Or how much of our sense of confidence in life and our hopes depends on how our parents, our environment and our teachers respond to us in our early youth. How a rough treatment can harden our whole being throughout our earthly existence! One need only think how mysterious the connections of fate are in this area in particular. A case taken directly from life can teach us about this very area: a child who, in his seventh year, experienced a strong injustice at the hands of those around him, due to the way his destiny placed him in a community. Sometimes the child forgets it, seemingly on the outside, but in the depths of the soul it lives on and continues to have an effect in the deep layers of the soul, which has taken root as injustice in the soul. The child then becomes a middle school student. Something special happens in his sixteenth year. A strong effect comes from his teacher in the sense that the student has to experience a new injustice. If he had not experienced the injustice in his seventh year, the matter might have passed by without effect, as it did for his fellow student. But because the old impression continued to work in the depths of the soul, while it was forgotten for the outer being, it joined together with the experience of the seventh year, and a student suicide resulted. Thus we see how our whole being, the way we enter into life, is more deeply connected with the question of our destiny.

The second thing can be seen by reflecting on how one's life unfolds, how one gathers one's life experiences, how one becomes more and more mature as the years go by. This may be more or less the case for one person or another, but this maturing is evident from a close examination of life, and it is usually the case that we have to say to ourselves: we have matured in those things that we did imperfectly, from the point of view that we have to take after we have gained experience. If we were allowed to do them a second time, we would do them better. We learn things in life, but we learn precisely by doing imperfect deeds in this life. The most intimate life experiences result from making our imperfect actions our teachers. Then we look back from a point in our development and say to ourselves: We learn many things, we have become more mature, and this knowledge is within us. What happens to this experience when we pass through the gate of death? Does it disappear without a trace in the floods of nothingness? Yes, we do not always have to take such a life experience, we can say: What we do, learn to refrain from, has an effect that other people experience through it, either as support or perhaps as harm. We know that our value as a human being depends on whether we have harmed or helped other people. From this arises the other life experience, which is concentrated in the overall feeling, in basic sensations, in the need to do many things differently than we did in the past life. So we feel as if we have the sensation of having many debts that we can no longer repay. This is because we have created the debts in such a way that we have the actions in which we committed the debts behind us. These are the most intimate, deepest experiences of the soul. Does everything we have acquired, everything that makes us different from what we were at the beginning of life, does all this end in an indefinite nothing? That is the second thing. No matter what a person's nature may be, no matter how unexpressed it may remain, it remains a question of feeling and of life within him.

Now we can say: in our time, a period of human development lies behind us in which the noblest, most moral people, who were also scientific materialists and yet clung to moral ideas, came to terms with such soul questions in a very peculiar way. If one takes the standpoint of spiritual science, which is to be represented here, an attitude is required that is never unjust, even towards opponents. For it must be said that it was nothing short of heroic how materialistic thinkers found their way, especially in regard to a question such as the one that has now been touched upon. They said to themselves: With death, our inner soul life extinguishes, like the light of a candle when the fuel is used up. But then we have the awareness that what we have experienced lives on in the process of human historical development. Everyone gives to posterity what they have worked for, even if it has only been conquered and worked for in the smallest of circles. Many such thinkers have said to themselves that it is selfish to demand that human beings have their own personal immortality. But it is selfless in the highest sense to die in the full knowledge that the personal self perishes and what one has done passes into the process of humanity. One may say: this information is heroic; compared to much religious egoism, this heroism of materialism appears great, but it cannot stand up to a deeper understanding of the question, for the reason that when everyone looks at life, they must say to themselves: The most intimate part of our life experience is such an innermost good of your soul that you cannot simply give it to the outside world. We can give much for the outside world, but what we give does not belong to the most intimate part of our soul. The best we have learned is so tied to our individuality that it cannot possibly be handed over to the world. So the question remains: how do we cope with the sight of that which the soul has experienced, which has given it value in the way described, which makes it necessary that life is not closed off if this value is to be lived out, which it does not give up when a person passes through the gate of death?

These are the two things: the contemplation of fate and the contemplation of one's own development. These questions are to be answered in such a way that the answer can be called logical and scientific in the same way. To give answers, as answers are given in today's external science, is the goal of the endeavor that can be called spiritual science, which is entering into the culture of the present and through which something of this culture is to be incorporated as an insight into much of what life needs in order to become strong and powerful. It cannot be demanded that the suggestions given today and tomorrow be more than mere suggestions. Those who believe that scientific answers are only those that tie in with external events, with what can be seen with the eyes and grasped with the hands, will naturally not accept the answers as scientific. Only suggestions are to be given, but these are intended to show that the whole way of thinking, the whole way of looking at spiritual life, is the same as the ways of research in today's science. Modern man also demands information about the questions characterized in such a way that this information can stand up to strict scientific scrutiny. Thus, the answers will appear to be different from science in the usual sense, but anyone who delves deeper will see that the way of thinking in Theosophy is such that the scientific needs as well as the heartfelt needs of modern humanity can be satisfied.

The starting point must be that of real, true self-knowledge. Because fate shapes the essence of our “self” and because our “self” becomes more and more mature, we are confronted with these questions and can therefore hope that a true knowledge of our innermost being, of what we call our “self”, will lead to an answer. But it is difficult for the modern man to recognize what can be called self-knowledge. There are formidable obstacles to the contemplation of one's own nature. Only by overcoming these obstacles can he enter into self-knowledge, and from self-knowledge, through the connection of his own ego with the world, pass into knowledge of the world.

If we want to examine a substance in science, we cannot recognize its essence under certain conditions. Although oxygen is contained in water, we cannot examine it in water; we must first separate it from the water by a physical process, only then can we examine its essence. How different it is when it comes to us in water! It must be something similar if we want to examine our self so that this examination can satisfy us. Our self is, like the oxygen to the hydrogen, bound to the outer body in ordinary life. What we call our soul body, that in which we find ourselves as in our most intimate inner being, we always experience in such a way that we look at the outer world through our bodily organs, so that we learn to understand it through the human brain. Just as oxygen is bound to hydrogen to form water, so is the life of the soul bound to the life of the body, to what we have before us as human beings, as ourselves. So there arises the necessity that we first detach the life of the soul from the life of the body in order to truly examine it.

How can we do this? How can we present our soul life to ourselves in such a way that we can contemplate it in its truth? Now, according to the results of spiritual research, everyday life detaches the soul from the body during the night in the course of twenty-four hours. Let us accept this for the time being as an assertion; we will come back to it later. When a person falls asleep in the evening, the full human being is not contained in the body; what continues the external soul functions, as happens in the waking state, but not the actual soul life, which we recognize as our innermost being, as suffering, affects, drives and passions, is truly set aside during the night's sleep and in the morning reenters and submerges into the body, in order to use the bodily organs, the senses and the brain, the instrument of the soul. If we start from scientific prejudices, we will say that it is possible that the entire spiritual life, with all its sensations and feelings, with everything that takes place within, is nothing other than a result of physical life, just as the flame is the result of processes in the candle. But this does not hold up under deeper examination. It must be clear to us from common sense that there is something to it.

In the state that a person goes through from falling asleep to waking up, the processes that we can only understand as life processes take effect on his body. What flows from within as organic activity into the brain and other organs continues to have an effect. A comparison suggests a logical thought, which cannot be escaped on deeper reflection. If we compare our sense organs with the lungs, we find that our lungs, like our sense organs, are nourished from within and sustained by the organism. What we see flowing in as a life activity can be compared to what flows into the brain and other organs from within the body during the day and also during the night as a nutritional activity. But can something be identified that takes place within the body and supplies the activity of the lungs from within, through the nature of the air that must flow into the lungs? Could the activity of flowing into the lungs from within ever reach the lungs' goal if the air did not flow in from the outside? Does this inner life activity have something to do with the nature and composition of air? We cannot learn anything about air from within. It is the same with the soul. Just as the essence of the air that flows into the lungs is not connected with the activity that flows into the lungs as organic activity, so the content of our soul, which flows in in the morning and leaves the body in the evening, has just as little to do with what our inner bodily activity is, with what flows into our soul organs from our organism as nourishment.

If you look deeply into this comparison, try to think it through – you will not escape the logical thought that what we live in as our soul life, what flows into us, is just as foreign to the inner bodily activity as the air is to the inner bodily activity, so that the independence, the inner essence of our soul life appears well-founded. A person truly does not live with their soul life in such a way that they say: I live in my muscles, my brain. That is not their soul life, but rather: I live in my feelings, affects. That in which they live in this way enters their body in the morning like an inhalation process and leaves it in the evening like an exhalation.

In response to this thought, logical thinking can now raise the question: How can we observe soul life, which is so independent of bodily life, in itself? If we could observe it during sleep, we would be helped. But in normal life, although the soul separates from the body, we cannot examine the secret nature of soul life, because at the moment it separates, it becomes unconscious and eludes examination. But there is another way to penetrate to this soul life, which can be encountered by every person, and that is through a psychic experiment by the spiritual researcher who has obtained the instrument to artificially separate his soul life from the body; this is clairvoyant observation.

The first observation that can arise for anyone is the following. It starts from the question: What prevents us from observing our soul life separately from our bodily life? There are two reasons. Firstly, the moment we wake up, a connection is made through the senses and the thinking bound to the senses with the sensual outside world, so that we do not have our soul life to ourselves, we are not in our soul life, but in what is around us as a luminous, sounding world. The experiences of our soul flow together with what enters us through eyes and ears. Whenever we enjoy a sound, we always have, so to speak, the sound that enters from outside and the joy within us as two things that flow together. But we merge with the outer sound. We do not separate our soul life so that we lose ourselves in the outer sensory world. When we look up at the magnificent starry sky and contemplate the wonders of the rising and setting sun, everything that affects us from the outside, we feel it flowing together with what is happening in the innermost part of our soul, what uplifting and devotional experiences we have in our soul, what strength flows to us. We have never chemically separated our inner being from what penetrates from the outside world. That is why some philosophers say that there is no such thing as an inner soul life, even denying the inner soul content and allowing it to merge with those images that ebb and flow on the horizon of our soul life. For the more intimate observer, Goethe's words come true: What gives the numerous stars, all the glories of the celestial space, their true value? But only that everything that lives outside in the wide world is reflected in the human heart, is expressed, so that something is experienced that goes beyond ordinary expression. And if one proceeds to a thorough self-observation, one will find: The soul feels what is happening outside, it knows that it is experiencing inner things in outer events, that it has gradually progressed, that inner soul events have followed one another and a continuous stream has arisen from the present moment to the moment until which we can remember back, that this stream is something different than what merely affects us from the outside. The independence of our soul life seems convincing, and we wonder whether our soul life can detach itself from its surroundings when we are directly confronted with the external world and flow together with it. But when we look back on what we have not only seen but also experienced in terms of elation and despondency, and what we can remember, we find a stream of inner soul life.

This stream is precisely what was mentioned earlier. It is the experience of life. With this we stand at a certain point in our lives. No matter whether our life is short or long, when we pass through the gate of death we will find ourselves in the same situation. We will see the stream of evolving life, see what has welled up in this soul from the outer world, and we will ask ourselves the question when we take the great leap through the gate of death: Where to put what has developed as a continuous stream in our soul? So there is one obstacle: our growing together with the outside world.

Therefore, it is essentially a developmental success if we learn to isolate ourselves through a review, through an examination of the interior. But one thing comes to us when we isolate the soul life, that we say to ourselves: It is coherent, what flows there step by step. We look back to our first memory; what lies before, we can not remember ourselves, but older people can tell us about it. We remember what happened from that moment on, and we will make an effort to have moments like that again, where we artificially induce the state of sleep, but only on that side, whereby we exclude the external impressions.

When we close ourselves off from the splendor of the outside world and from the other stimuli of the outside world at such moments, then we secrete the inner life, as we separate oxygen from water. This is a matter of experience for which no theoretical proof can be provided, just as one does not need proof that whales exist if one has never seen one. If we always keep this inwardness in mind, we can say that the soul life lines up step by step, and we come to the point at which external memory reaches back. We can conduct a kind of experiment with our entire inner experience. If we see that this stream of soul life flows from the point just characterized and the later is added to the earlier, what is added to the point up to which the first memory reaches? We see how our soul life strives forth; but what caused the first moment that we recall? Now it is possible to evoke something within the soul life that only works in the soul experience, that can give something completely new, never before seen, to the human soul.

To characterize what this new, never-before-seen thing looks like, I would like to point something out. Hydrogen is a gas, oxygen is a gas; these two gases give water, something completely new from two different things. Just as something new and unlike anything in the world is created through the interaction of external things, so too, if we turn our gaze ever further into the stream of our soul life, all the way back to the starting point in this reminiscence, something entirely new can arise. Someone who had never seen that two gases produce liquid would not believe it. What provided the initial impetus in our lives? What we experience as our destiny presents itself to us as if of its own accord. Our destiny presents itself as an answer to this question. Why did it start from precisely this starting point? Why did it turn out this way? This question is answered by looking at our destiny and considering only that we have to consider destiny not with an idea, but with something completely different. What do we want to consider our destiny with? What we want to look at our destiny with, arises from the second obstacle, namely that we usually do not look at our destiny as we do now, when we have come to this point. The second great obstacle is self-love, self-will.

This self-will is a strange thing. Let us try to characterize it. What it is that makes us feel content with ourselves, that gives us satisfaction in our lives, does not need to be characterized. But this self-will has something peculiar about it: it breaks through something in our soul life. This will, it may accomplish whatever deeds, wishes, desires – if our reason is to remain true to us, we must admit that it cannot readily intervene on its own in the way that life experience has formed itself. We let life teach us, we go to the school of life and let life dictate what we have to believe. Whether we consider something to be true or false does not depend on our own will. It is precisely that which makes us mature in life, that which gives us knowledge, from which the will must be excluded! We may not summarize our experiences arbitrarily, but as common sense, the logic of the facts, dictates.

But this will is bound to our corporeality as a power of the soul in a different way than our ideas and perceptions, on which our experience depends, and in which we cannot distinguish between inside and outside. Our will is bound to our corporeality differently. We see very clearly how it continually intervenes in our corporeality. Let us consider what we learn in the normal course of life as fatigue. It comes from the fact that muscles or other organs are worn out. Nothing seems more obvious to the superficial impression than this. It seems credible that physical organs wear out, and yet it is not true. The physical organs that live in a very specific way in our organism do not wear out. How would it be if organs like the heart had to recover through sleep? The organs that are not influenced by the conscious will always remain active and do not wear out. Consider the lungs, heart, diaphragm, and even the inner workings of the nervous system; these forces are always at work. What wears out is what emanates from our conscious will. When we work to make our muscles move through our will, we become tired. No work tires us that comes from the organism itself, but remains within the organism itself. As long as the will is active, active itself, it does not wear out the organism.

Another fact also shows it. It is the same with the thought process: if we give ourselves up to the day's musings, we do not get tired, but we do when we intervene in the thinking with our will, in that consciousness, as an expression of our soul life, intervenes from the outside in our bodily organization, which we see works independently. The human will can only work as self-will by allowing itself to be stimulated from the outside, by feeling compelled by some coercion; this will wears down our organism, so that we can say: Everything that is the wear and tear of life, that consumes our body, springs from the will, which is forced by something, which does not remain in the being of the human being or within the soul's being, which is stimulated and determined from outside, which, as self-will, is in opposition to what must be from outside, which is a destructive force for our organism.

What is the opposite that builds up our organism? What actually brings it into its configuration? It cannot be a thought, not ideas, not feelings; it must be something that, like the will, intervenes in our organism. Our own will must not feel forced from the outside; it must be able to be completely as its own will. It can be when our destiny presents itself to us in such a way that we do not imagine it in ideas and concepts, but with the will, so that our own will does not come into conflict with itself. This can only happen if, however much we may quarrel and struggle with our destiny, we imagine that we would have wanted this destiny, as if we had ordained it ourselves. This can be carried out as a decision of the will. In this way we remove the obstacle of self-will. The will that regards fate as if we ourselves had placed ourselves in the community of language, in the family, has made a decision of the will, even if of a reverse nature.

These are not assertions, but so far we have only evoked certain moods of the soul. Then, as if we ourselves had willed it, our destiny wanders back to the first moment we can remember, like hydrogen wandering to oxygen. Then we have something in our soul that stands before us with certainty, as certain as we know that the flame is hot. Now we are really experiencing something new: the addition of our soul life. Our destiny enters into our soul life, and we have the answer to the question: What gave the first impetus? What we have set up as our self-willed destiny has given the first impulse, and only in this way do we come to a real insight into what we were when we began our present existence on earth, when we understand destiny as something self-willed and connect it with our soul life, which we get to know through self-observation. But then, when we have gained this inner experience, which removes the two obstacles, the outer world - Ahriman - and self-will - Lucifer -, through self-observation, then we penetrate to the realization that it is we ourselves who have shaped fate. The moment – and anyone can experience this moment – can be compared to the moment when we wake up, when we do not say to ourselves: You came from nothing, but: You are what you are now because you fell asleep last night. Those who seriously recognize their soul life in an observation that disregards external observation and destroys self-will come to an experience that is like waking up and remembering earlier lives on earth. His inner core comes across from previous earthly lives and has put together his own destiny; we come to a memory that we have gone through previous earthly lives. It is not an ordinary memory, but our life itself appears to us as a great memory. We come to the assumption of repeated earthly lives. This earthly life, which we go through between birth and death, is the result of previous earthly lives. A person has lived many lives on earth, and it is a given that, based on how the person is now, they will go through further lives on earth. We are dealing with an essence that penetrates into a spiritual world after death and then returns again to another life on earth.

What we can hope for in the time between death and a new birth also arises from introspection. You cannot intervene with your will. Your will and your thoughts, feelings and what you have conquered in the school of life are separate in your soul life. How strange the will is: we move our hand, but what happens from the moment of willing to what we then see as movement, we do not know at first in normal life. We see the will as it expresses itself in life in outer movements, gestures, deeds, but we lack any possibility of seeing how the will passes into movements and deeds. What lies before us, what we have acquired through our life experience, we have to keep at a distance in this life, because if our will were to interfere, it would be falsified by our will. But in the course of life we experience that we cannot let our will work. We cannot influence the way we are placed in this life. When we are somewhat outside of life, then our will need not be hindered from penetrating purely and powerfully through what we experience inwardly. When our body no longer forms the barrier between our will and our life experience, when these outer experiences can no longer form the barrier, then the will can grasp, penetrate and permeate our life experience. We do this between death and a new birth. Our will will permeate everything we have experienced so that we can give the first impetus in a new existence, which we have seen that we have grasped at the beginning of our life on earth.

Thus we see how, by establishing the connection with our ideas, the forces are formed that call us to a new earthly existence. Spiritual science thus arrives at the view of repeated earthly lives, which has become a matter of course for thinkers of modern times, so that they could not help but let their thoughts flow into this world of ideas, for example Lessing, who gave us the 'Education of the Human Race' as the fruit of his life. Then you realize what led Lessing to say that this view is the only way to understand death and immortality. This thought is perhaps despised because people knew about it from time immemorial, because in the past people were not yet confused by the events of the outside world and by what has taken place within human culture, as they are in this time. The soul of man has absorbed what India, Persia, Egypt and Greece have offered, what can be called the stream of human development. Does it make sense for a soul to die forever after absorbing all this? No, it makes no sense. When the soul carries over everything it has acquired into later times and new experiences are added, it is the souls themselves that carry the old cultural achievements over into modern times. Even in the nineteenth century, despite the fact that external scientific conditions were as unfavorable as possible, people came up with this.

But how spiritual science itself comes to an irrefutable conclusion through spiritual experiments by the spiritual scientist can be discussed tomorrow. It should only be explained how it comes about that such an insight is gained by processing the inner soul life. But through this it also has an effect on the inner soul life. On one side we look back at how we have placed ourselves in this life according to our deeds, thoughts and feelings from past lives. We feel that we also have to go through this life with everything that fate brings us, so that our school of life can continue. Feeling this, we say to ourselves: our life, as it unfolds in and around us, is the effect of previous causes that we ourselves have set in motion. This is the doctrine of karma, which for the new spiritual science is not an old law from Buddhism, but is derived from the modern soul itself, educated by science.

This life itself falls into an ascending and descending line. In youth, many forces from previous lives work in such a way that our physical organization can ascend. Our powers develop, becoming richer and richer, until the peak is reached, which gives us satisfaction. Then comes the descending life, where the face wrinkles and the body becomes tired. It is certain for everyone that it will come, and they need thoughts that give strength. But anyone who looks at human life in a spiritual-scientific sense, not just theoretically or rationally, will see that spiritual science gives strength, that it works almost like an elixir of life when we recognize its truth. We feel what flows into our confidence in life, our hopes, our life's work, and people will always feel it once our culture is placed in the light of spiritual science. There we feel how, in the descending life, that grows and must grow, which does not disintegrate in death, but is grasped by our will and, when the greatest resilience is reached, has the strength to enter into the spiritual and, after it has drawn the forces from the spiritual world, to build a new life.

We do not just theoretically consider the questions of immortality; we live and learn and feel the immortality of the soul by feeling the richness of our soul through an intuitive understanding of spiritual science, which tells us: Towards the end of life, you develop ever stronger powers that do not perish any more than the physical powers, which not only transform but are eternal and immortal. In the growth of your powers, in the real existence of your powers, you feel your immortality. Immortality does not begin when we are dead, but already during our lifetime. It is because the human soul is there and because a person can feel it during their lifetime in the body. Spiritual science is not theory, but lifeblood, and if we understand it correctly, it becomes vitality. Thus it does not drive us to speculate, but rather, immortality is something that the soul can feel as something substantial, physical, that enhances our powers and bears within it immortality as its deepest essence and [its deepest] quality. To feel and sense immortality as the source of one's confidence in life, that is what must spring from spiritual science. And so we may summarize in a variation of words how the insights of spiritual science become an elixir of life:

> The human senses speak to  
> the things in the vastness of space,  
> they change in the course of time  
> at the deepest core of their being.  
> The human soul penetrates, recognizing  
> the vastness of space, unlimited  
> and unperturbed by the passage of time  
> into the realm of eternity.