Death and Immortality in the Light of Spiritual Science

GA 69d — 7 February 1912, Vienna

7. The Essence of Eternity and the Nature of the Human Soul in the Light of Spiritual Science

Yesterday I had the opportunity to speak to you about two important questions from a general point of view, about death and immortality from the point of view of spiritual science. This evening I would like to be allowed to go into some special things that may shed light on these questions. Just as it was possible yesterday, in view of the two major questions discussed, to point to two important experiences of the human soul, which actually always raise these questions more or less explicitly or implicitly from the hidden depths of the human soul, so we can also today we can start from two experiences of our inner being, from two experiences which the human soul constantly points to that idea, which must actually make the mind dizzy when it tries to grasp it in any particular way: the idea of eternity. And when the human soul is often inclined to say that it has something to do with eternity in contrast to the transitoriness of the outer form of the body, it might seem as if such questions arise rather from the longings of the human soul, which desires to have a different fate from the one between birth and death. But here too we can disregard all wishes and desires, even all curiosity, and point to two experiences of the human soul that direct it towards the idea of eternity. These experiences are of the deepest, most inner sense of morality. For what could the human soul feel more deeply and earnestly than the invincible striving for everlasting perfection? One need only, as it were, truly and without prejudice delve into one's own soul and one will have to say that one would have to be dishonest with respect to what the soul wants to be if one did not want to say: an invincible striving for perfection, for a more meaningful existence, dwells in this human soul. That is one experience.

But the other experience, which can assert itself just as strongly, is that at no moment in our lives, even if we reach a very old age, can we deny how far we are from what can shine before us as the ideal of perfection, how much we feel imperfect compared to what we actually want to be according to the innermost being of our minds. The striving for perfection and at the same time the necessary confession of imperfection awakens in the human soul the longing for an eternal striving, for a striving that is unhindered by those external laws of arising and passing away, which we seriously cannot imagine as being able to offer any limits, inner limits to our striving for perfection. Thus we see that man, not out of any greed or desire, but out of the yearning to serve the highest moral order that he has in mind, to strive for the highest moral ideal of perfection, which he must present out of this highest moral desire, raises the question of the immortality of the human soul – but that is the question of eternity.

Yesterday, it was mentioned how the German philosopher Hegel said in a beautiful way: immortality of the human soul as a property that is related to the nature of this soul cannot begin only when man has passed through death; if there is something in the human soul from which one can recognize that this soul has a claim to an immortal existence, then this must also be announced in the life of the soul within the physical existence. Immortality cannot begin only after death; it must also be present in life - in this physical life. So then the question of the nature of eternity also points us to the investigation of the nature of the human soul, in order to recognize from this nature of the human soul to what extent it is conceivable, indeed necessary, to think of the soul as being lifted out of the laws of the perishability of the body. And if we want to examine this nature of the human soul, then, as was also hinted at yesterday, if we want to meet the real, if not the prejudiced demands of modern science, we have to separate this human soul from its connection with the body. For we were able to point out yesterday that it is also impossible, for example, to examine the nature of hydrogen as long as it is bound to water; we have to separate hydrogen from its connection to water if we want to examine its own nature. And so we know that in ordinary, external, normal life, the soul is connected with all that we can call the bodily organization, in that we feel through our body, look outwards, observe things through the external bodily sense organs, in that we think things through that thinking which is bound to the instrument of the brain, and, when we feel and want, we are also bound to our corporeality. Just as hydrogen is bound to water and cannot be recognized within water, the nature of the human soul cannot be recognized in the way it appears to us in normal life, where it is firmly bound and not detached from external experiences and those inner experiences that arise from physicality.

Now, as we said yesterday, basically every night when a person sleeps, a detachment of his soul experiences from the outer bodily life is evoked. In the course of today's lecture, however, we will be able to prove what was only asserted by spiritual science and logically proven yesterday, so to speak, by approaching it from the so-called spiritual scientific point of view. For the time being, however, we will accept it as it was stated as an assertion or logically proven yesterday, that the life we experience in our innermost soul is not something that, like the flame of a candle, , but something that, as an independent entity, emerges in the morning when we wake up, enters into the life of the body when we fall asleep and leaves it again, and thus relates to this bodily life as air relates to the lungs. But it was already mentioned yesterday that something, one could say with joy, makes it “literally” impossible for us to examine the independent soul life, when we have it before us or in us, from falling asleep to waking up. It is impossible because where the detachment occurs, unconsciousness also occurs. So we cannot do the examination in this normal life. We could only become independent of the physical if we became aware of the soul, when it flows away, when it withdraws from the physical.

But there is a possibility to consider an intermediate state, which is not discussed here in the sense of a superstitious dream science, but in the sense of the strictest science: it is the dream state, that strange state of dream life, in which we live in such a way that, on the one hand, we feel that ideas are being conjured before our soul, but on the other hand, the course of these ideas is completely different from the life that the ideas lead in their context in normal, waking daytime life. The dream state is an intermediate state between the waking state and deep, dreamless sleep. Perhaps we can – let us express ourselves in this way for the time being – learn something from the strange illusions of dreams about the nature of the human soul. In order to do so, however, we must proceed according to the same strict, logical and scientific laws of research in the study of dreams as are otherwise applied in the study of life. And so, in order not to extend this consideration too much, we would like to draw your attention to a very specific dream, from which we want to recognize, as it were, how strangely the dream life can have an enlightening effect on what actually goes on inside the soul. I just want to say in advance that when such examples from life, for example from the dream life, are told here, they are not made-up things, but things that have really happened - because only in this way can conscientious research proceed. The dream in question is as follows: There was a student at a secondary school who had a particular talent for drawing. As a result, in the last year of secondary school, he was given a very difficult drawing to copy. Everyone else was given easier templates. It had now become the custom at that secondary school for several such copies of drawings to be handed in at the end of the year. And it so happened that this particular student, precisely because he had a special talent for drawing and was given that difficult template, did not finish the whole year and also by the end of school. This made him very anxious, and this state of anxiety increased towards the end of school. And although the humane administration of that school fully understood that this was natural and did not harm the student, he still had this experience behind him, he had gone through the anxiety attacks. It is interesting to follow this person in the further course of his life. Of course, he continued to show his special talent for drawing. And, recurring periodically, a very specific dream occurred to him, which always lasted several nights and then passed. The dream was that he always felt transported back to the last middle class, where he felt he was trying to draw and draw and could not finish. And the anxiety he went through, so that he always woke up trembling, was so strong in the dream that it could not be compared to the anxiety he had actually experienced. After a break of several years, the dream always returned periodically. This will not be understood unless this strange dream experience is considered in the context of the rest of that person's life. The strange thing was that every time he had recovered from such a dream experience, this person felt that his drawing skills had improved in some way; he could draw better lines, could express what he imagined better, he had become more skilled. So it looked like a gradual perfection of his drawing skills, and each stage was initiated by the characterized nightmare.

You will not find it unnatural if spiritual science now attempts the following explanation of this dream. It is natural that something like an increase in drawing ability cannot suddenly occur in a person's nature, but it appeared as if it always occurred suddenly after that nightmare. This can easily be explained: first certain inner, bodily processes had to take place, finer rhythmic-physiological processes, because we have bound everything that relates to the outer world to the instruments of the body. Changes had to take place in the instruments of the body. These changes took place slowly and gradually through those periods in which consciousness had no inkling that increased abilities would show themselves. For a while, one experiences it in consciousness as if the same intensity of ability were present. But what was needed was being prepared from below, in the depths of the entire human organization, and then, as the heightened drawing ability rose up into consciousness, it became available to the person concerned. And how did what was fermenting and working down there show itself? It showed itself in that it first, in the moment when it was able to break through into consciousness, took place in the half-consciousness of the dream, lived itself out in images of the dream. Before the will was even able to make use of the abilities, it conjured itself up out of the hidden depths of the soul in the dream experience, which basically only bears an external resemblance to what develops in the depths of the soul. We can see two things: the transition from a working process in the subconscious or, let us say, unconscious bodily organization to a process of awakening, first to half-conscious ideas of the dream and then to an entry into full consciousness. Who could doubt that the same forces that later appear in consciousness as an increase in drawing ability are only the transformed abilities that previously worked below in the body's organization? They showed themselves, so to speak, in their half-transformation in the dream images. That is one thing that we have clearly and distinctly before us: the possibility of thinking in this field of spiritual science in the same way as a natural scientist thinks. Every physicist will understand that pressure turns into heat. It is part of the same way of thinking to say that what later appears in the consciousness as drawing ability has first worked in another form below, has itself first prepared the organs, and only when the organs were there could the ability be increased – as when a person must first work at the machine in order to then use the machine. What finally emerges as a usable instrument must first be prepared by the same spiritual power. What finally emerges as a result is itself, having first prepared the organs in the depths of the soul's organization.

The other thing is this: how the dream works in a remarkable way – and this is perhaps even more interesting for a deeper consideration of human nature. What does it have to do with what happened there with the transformation of soul forces at work in the depths of human nature into conscious ones, what is being lived out as states of fear in strange images that belong to a long-gone lifetime? One thing is certain: the emotional context is at work in this person, not the life of imagination. What the person has gone through, what he has experienced in his mind in terms of anxiety, is a force that is much more intimately connected with the soul, with the innermost self, than the powers of imagination, which in ordinary life are borrowed from the external world. But the dream shows itself to be more intimately connected to the life of the soul than the conscious imaginative life of the day, because it presents itself in images in such a way that we, so to speak, place images before us that are reminiscent not of an act of imagining but of an inner experience, of the life of the feelings. We can see that at all, how our emotional life works in its strange seeming connections, as in dream images. Everywhere the images that are conjured up in our dreams are the indifferent ones; they live and weave themselves out in a seemingly arbitrary way – arbitrary in comparison to the regular connections that we see outside.

For example, we may experience the following. A person in the distant past did not like another person because he could not particularly appreciate that person's activities, and had formed a certain feeling, a certain emotional experience about that person. Now he had long since forgotten those things that were connected with that person. After many years he dreamt again of that person, but now that person was not a person, but a little dog that barked unpleasantly, but then changed the barking to a language whose sound was reminiscent of that person's language. And in the dream the little dog could fit into a context quite arbitrarily. But there was something that turned out differently than one wished. One wished that this person was not completely offended. And so one said something to the puppy, and the puppy barked in such a way that it said: It was bad what you did to me, but it doesn't matter, it will be okay, it was just a misunderstanding. What does the little dog have to do with that person? If we consider logical thinking, all thinking that is trained on the outside world, then the little dog really has nothing to do with what is really going on. But if we consider the state of mind of the person in question, the way he related to that person, we see that it faithfully recurs in a much later “dream”. But in terms of the way we shape our imagination, our mind is free to transform what it feels into the symbol of the little dog, transforming dream consciousness into seemingly arbitrary images. But only what we call the logical causal connection, a connection that we have from the outside world, is arbitrary; but the interweaving of the perceptions, however different they may be from the outside world, with what our mind, our inner being, carries forward from the events of life, is entirely lawful. Thus the soul shows us in dreams that it is more in its inner being than when it is connected with the limbs of the body. When it looks outwards, when it is connected with its bodily organs, it lives with everything external, with everything we can learn from the school of life. In dreams, the soul does not adhere to what it experiences from the outside; there it forms its emotional states only in images, and these bear the exact seal of the emotional life. From this we can see that what we call our emotional life and then our will life is more intimately connected with our deepest soul than the mere life of imagination. And now let us apply what has been shown to us by observing the dream world of the person with the anxiety dream to a consideration of the whole human life from birth to death. There we see something remarkable: that in our coherent memory, in what we regard as the actual content of our soul life, we go back in ordinary life to a certain point in our childhood. Beyond this point, we cannot remember ourselves. What happened before this point can only be told to us by other people, parents, older brothers and sisters and so on. Without doubt, all that we know later was already there. It is the conscious content of our soul; it is the content of what we can think like the continuous stream of soul life, what is at work, weaving and living within, already present before. The fact that we become aware of our self from a certain point in time is no proof that it was not there before, that it has only developed from this point on. That we know something has nothing to do with reality. The fact that we only become aware of our self from a certain point in time has nothing to do with the fact that this soul life was already present before.

But now, when we look at the life of a child in a very special way, if we only look at it closely, we realize how it was present before. Is it not the case that we can say about the life of a child that sleeps and dreams that it has something in common with what we feel in the vague darkness of our conscious soul life? The human being sleeps or dreams, so to speak, into earthly existence: the way a child engages with its surroundings, how it carries over what it experiences into later moments, how it forgets things and lets new ones penetrate, this whole way of life of the child has a similarity to the life of sleep and dreams. The human being sleeps his way into life, the human being lives his way into this earthly life with a diminished consciousness, with a soul life that has been tuned down. But how much he owes to this tuned-down soul life! Jean Paul's saying that we learn more in the first three years of life than in the three 'academic' years is deeply true. But something else is also true: in the first years of life, when we have no possibility of calling our soul life to consciousness, we can observe how thoroughly work is done, first in the shaping and organizing of our physical body. The more delicate organs of the human bodily life are still indeterminate, as even the hard-nosed natural sciences have to admit. Indeed, for anyone who can perceive such things, it is a truly mysterious thing how a child learns the most important things in the first years of life. In a wonderful way, the child rises from one who cannot walk to one who walks uprightly, from one who cannot speak to one who is able to speak. But all this is connected with the preparation of our bodily organs, with their chiseling and plastic shaping. Is this not something similar on a large scale to what we see in our dreamer, who dreams his fearful dream?

As we were able to say in the case of the dreamer: During the dream period, what first emerges later in consciousness first worked in the organs, so the dreaming child soul first works on the shaping of the body, on the development of the life of the body - it is a transformation of what later occurs consciously into those forces that work in the unconscious on our bodily organization, so that we have to say: Everything that we experience later, that is the content of our soul, is consciously present in our memory as a continuous stream. It is subdued because it has other tasks than to evoke consciousness; it has to work on shaping the body. If we follow this in the sense of modern thinking, we see that we must regard the soul as the original: not as a result of the body's organization - as the flame is a result of the candle - but as that which works on the body's organization, which first shapes this body's organization.

Yesterday I already mentioned that it is only natural that today's scientists and those who blindly follow them do not admit this. But a truly unprejudiced consideration of modern findings shows that spiritual science is right in its assertions and that we are heading for a time when the results of spiritual science will be recognized. Today it is easy to say: Does this not show, in relation to spiritual science, that a certain area of our brain, for example, draws our attention to the fact that we are dependent on a material structure in our brain for our speech and language? But it is precisely this thought, when formulated correctly, that shows the independence of the soul life, so that we can recognize how it is the soul that works on the body, not the other way around. We just have to separate in the right way what lies in the mere line of inheritance, what appears in us as directly inherited. What we have inherited occurs in us even without our coming into contact with the outside world. We could transfer a person to a distant island; they would certainly get dentures because this is based in heredity, but everyone knows that if we separate them from human language, they will not be able to speak and think through their inherited traits. This can only be accessed from the outside by speaking the thought into the environment. So, the other way around: those brain convolutions that later become the tool basis for speaking are only formed through the influx of language as an instrument.

Thus, the fact that is expressed by the materialistic or, to put it more modernly, monistic world view can serve precisely as a pointer to spiritual science. Thus we arrive at the idea that the soul works in the body and that we have no right to regard this soul-life as a mere function of the bodily. And the deeper we go, the more we realize that this soul-life must work in life from the very first atomic or cellular formation of the body. This means that the soul must confront us as something that must have existed before the first atom of the body began. We look back on a life of soul, because it must be there before the physical life, must be there in a purely soul-spiritual life. We grant the eternal use of the soul, we see how we cannot think of the soul-spiritual as emerging from some physical-bodily, but from a spiritual, and must assume that our soul, before it enters the body, existed in a spiritual existence, lived through spiritual lands. This was the conclusion of all who were able to reflect on the matter without prejudice. And everything that leads to this conclusion is to be found, only differently expressed, in Aristotle. But Aristotle makes a remarkable leap here: the soul comes directly from a divine existence, detaches itself, as it were, from a divine existence, enters into human existence, from which it detaches itself again at the moment of death. This idea, that in every individual life a special soul has been wrenched from God, founders when confronted with an unprejudiced observation of life.

Let us consider how our soul develops in earthly life. No one will deny that our soul life, especially in its emotional content, in its moods, in its entire basic state, is always as it can be on the basis of previous experiences, as, for example, people who have been annoyed all day, then become grumpy in the evening for their surroundings, and the latter can often already recognize from the facial expressions, from the way the person enters, what has affected the person during the day. In this way, we see how our mood is connected to what we have experienced before. But when we look at our soul life, as we enter it into our present earthly existence, it turns out that there are, so to speak, already existing moods and wills of the soul. They are so distinctly marked that even a philosopher, Schopenhauer, who was wrong about this, believed that these moods and wills, the whole character of a person, are given at birth and remain unchanged throughout life. This is not the case. An unbiased observation shows that we can also progress in terms of our will and character formation. But Schopenhauer's error could only arise from the fact that man shows us a certain mood, which is expressed in the basic nuance of his character, which we do not find at all different if we only look at it properly, a mood that we acquire through the events of ordinary life. We enter the world in such a way that this character, this mood, is already evident, that we carry this mood with us through our present existence. It is impossible, if one does not fantasize but relies on real facts and serious observation, to think of the mood with which the soul enters earthly existence as anything other than a mood that we have acquired in life. When we look at a child, we see that it does not yet have a life of ideas, but in the way the child rejects something, feels sympathy or antipathy, how it moves and so on, we already see the basic mood that we also encounter in later life and of which we cannot think otherwise than that it does not cut itself off from a beyond, not from an immediate divine existence, but that it is the result of earthly life - just as it is a mood on a small scale - so that we can say: From the way we look at the soul, we can see that there is a concept of repeated lives on earth, of a law that says that, although we belong to ourselves at the innermost core of our being, we go through life on earth with that innermost core from life to life and that, between each death and a new birth, our soul is embedded in a purely spiritual existence. So the entire life of a person is such that on the one hand it is in the physical body between birth or conception and death and again in a spiritual world between death and a new birth.

These things could now be explained in detail, but that is not the important and essential thing today. But what is more important is that it is also shown how, so to speak, through spiritual experiment, it can be confirmed that the soul is an independent being that works on its bodily organization. However, this experiment cannot be done in the same way as external laboratory experiments. What Goethe prophetically said applies to this to a particular extent:

Mysterious in the bright day
Nature cannot be robbed of her veil,
And what she may not reveal to your mind
You cannot force out of her with levers and screws.

Those who would like to reinterpret Goethe emphasize the “not” as if it were not possible to reveal what lies behind things. So the spiritual experiment cannot be that we use our physical tools, but that we actually transform our own soul life, our own inner being into a tool. A more detailed account of this can be found in 'Knowledge of Higher Worlds'. Today, we shall merely sketch out how the soul makes itself an instrument for looking into the spiritual world.

We must be clear about the fact that the soul must first turn to its inner life and become independent of all outer life. For this to happen, it is essential that the human being should artificially reproduce what otherwise takes place naturally when falling asleep. Everyone knows that at this time the soul loses the power to use the bodily organs, can no longer see or hear, and so forth, but at the same time, in normal life, it sinks down into the darkness of unconsciousness. We must achieve the one thing and prevent the other from happening. The spiritual researcher must, through a special training of the will, which is possible, be able to truly enter into that inner calm of the mind, where, as in the moment of falling asleep - but voluntarily - he silences all that speaks to him through the senses, he also makes the ordinary thinking that he has developed through external observation fall silent. We must also suppress all that we can remember, insofar as our life is stimulated from the outside, through joy and suffering. We must suppress all of this artificially, to make the soul pure and free from all external impressions. And then we must be able to push something into the soul through our mere will, through our strong will, on which we focus our entire soul life in strict inner concentration or meditation. In this way, the soul is transformed into an instrument of the spiritual world. What can we put into the soul? Not ordinary ideas – they have the task of depicting the truth as it is outside. If we only acquire images of what is going on outside, we cannot properly detach them, we cannot make them the actual property, the inner content of the soul. We must therefore form ideas that are connected with life, but are put together in such a way that they arise purely from our own will.

Let us assume that a person who wants to make their soul an instrument of spiritual life says to themselves – and what is said here is feasible, and those who carry it out will see the success in their practical life: I will imagine what love is in the deepest moral sense. – Here we have to tie in with external processes, but we cannot actually see through the external. So we will not be able to think through the concept of love, but we can think of a quality of love. We will not just think of a quality of love, but we will make an image of a loving action, an image that appears to be arbitrary but is in a certain emotional context with what is present in us as an experience of love. We form the image of a glass of water that is not completely filled; we pour out the water in small portions, but each time the water does not decrease, but increases. An image that is fantastic, dreamy, almost crazy in relation to the external world – but we are aware that for us it is only a symbolic image. We cannot grasp what love is, but we can feel this one quality in love. The person who loves gives, and by giving, he becomes more and more capable of love. We give our best, but love makes us richer and richer. Precisely because we give more and more completely in love, it multiplies.

This abstract idea does nothing for the education of our soul. But by consciously doing what the dream does unconsciously, by transforming the human being into a puppy, and by placing this idea at the center of our consciousness in such a way that we now focus our entire conscious activity on such an idea, then such an idea reaches us. Such an image has something quite different about it than when we give ourselves a definition of love in abstracto. This is already noticed by the person who forms this image. It is precisely such images, which do not have the task of depicting the external, but which work through what we feel about them, through what they are to our mind, where the one is connected with the other not according to the laws of the course of the image , but of the life of the mind, [...] through the mediation of feeling, they must now live in our consciousness as representations, as images that fill our soul, and we must devote ourselves to such representations to the exclusion of all other life. This is often a long, inner life's work, but if we carry it out, then we become spiritual researchers and in no other way. The objection could justifiably be made: Yes, if it is often necessary to practice this unchangingly for many years and with great energy, then not everyone is able to become a spiritual researcher and convince themselves of the reality of the spiritual researcher's statements.

But how many people today are convinced of what is going on in the observatories? Outside, one only gets to know the external appearance; the essentials are fathomed by those who work in the laboratories, and from this the others form a world view. One can indeed carry out these things in every life, but depending on one's disposition, one will only get to certain degrees. But the spiritual researcher must, by means of such exercises, tear the soul away from the body. This brings him into a state that is similar to sleep and yet quite different, in that all the outer world is silent, all worries and concerns are silent, extinguished as if by sleep, but we are not surrounded by the darkness of consciousness, but experience something that we have not experienced before , of which we had no idea before; yes, we experience it so clearly that we now experience something within our soul, something without our bodily organs, yes, outside of them, so clearly that we go through an intermediate state that is even uncomfortable, that when we have taken it to a certain extent, we feel: Now you are experiencing your soul, now you are so within yourself that you experience what you do not experience from the outside, but now you experience what only arises in the soul – to use this expression of Jakob Böhme – what only exists in the spiritual. But one only experiences it and at first one cannot conceptualize it in the way one was accustomed to conceptualizing external perceptions. Why not? The inner experience shows us clearly how it is outside of the body; the brain has been formed only for the representations we are accustomed to. Now we are experiencing something new; the brain is not prepared to conceptualize this. We therefore experience it in such a way that we feel like fools, like a child who cannot yet express in words what he is experiencing.

And if you then continue such soul exercises in energy and with inner moral strength, with self-built energy, you first feel resistance after resistance, but now our brain itself, our whole body seems like a block that cannot keep up. And only by continuing, by continuing with great moral strength, do we feel how it gradually comes about that we can think what we have experienced ourselves; we can then also see it. We feel and see how something happens in us again during the spiritual exercises, which otherwise only happened in the first years of childhood. We form the tool of our soul in a plastic way, so to speak, we reshape our body, and when we feel: Now we have made the great effort that the child makes while playing with the awake body, now we have done something similar, we have worked on our body - then it happens that we can also tell what we have experienced, and only if it is told, it is spiritual science. And when it is told, then everyone can see it, as in life, through their common sense. This is the way to experience the soul in its independence through genuine spiritual experiment, so that we know: It is this soul that, out of its spiritual and soul content, always works on its bodily organization in the same way that we become aware that a child works on its bodily organization with the formative forces it has brought with it from its previous life.

And now we survey our life between birth and death once more, and we see it in an ascending and descending line. We see how the inner forces that we see coming over from a previous life gradually work their way up, how the indeterminate features form distinct features, and clumsy movements transform into skillful movements: We see this as emerging life. Then one part is released into consciousness, while another continues to work until we feel that life is moving in a descending line, until we feel that this tool of ours is moving in a descending line. Now, however, we feel that this life has continued to enrich itself, that we have taken in new things. So we feel that what is primarily shaping our present life, what our life puts into the basic lines of our character, comes from a previous life, but that we are powerless – because our life, our interaction with the outside world, comes from a previous life, because this life is given from before – to directly energize into life what we have received as enrichment. We then feel that it forms and forms as strength. If only our mind, our will, can grasp what we have gained, then when we go through the gate of death, we will be able to prepare our future life. We just need to grasp something correctly, namely that what we acquire in one earthly life is basically only what the intellect has, but that the basic direction of our mind, as it enters into life, must come from previous earthly embodiments. And so we see the confirmation of Lessing's statement that the life of imagination cannot enter from a previous life. Nothing we imagine can come from a previous life. This is because our ideas are expressed in language, and for many people, all imagining is just a daughter of language. However, we acquire language in this life, and language has to be learned anew. In any case, high school students would have to acknowledge that even if they were embodied in ancient Greece, it does not make learning the Greek language easier for them. That has to be learned anew. Only the basic direction of the disposition, the will, the character is the result of previous incarnations, is what is saved from the imaginative life of previous lives.

Friedrich Hebbel once wanted to write a drama, for which he wrote the first draft. In it, the re-embodied Plato was to appear as a student who cannot understand Plato. This could have shown how something that was direct imaginative life is not carried over from an earlier existence into a later one. What Plato experienced back then is transformed into emotional life, into emotional direction, into soul mood, and is thus carried over into a new existence. Therefore, it must be clear to us that the objection that one does not remember one's past lives in ordinary life cannot be accepted either. One remembers them in such a way that one's present life appears in its emotional content as a repetition of the past, but not in the way one remembers earlier events in one's mental life. For the mental life is what distinguishes the present memory in the one embodiment. Thus we see that especially in the face of a true contemplation of life, that which we must say the most enlightened minds have been driven to acknowledge appears to be confirmed: the fact of repeated earthly lives. One can, of course, argue with Lessing that he wrote The Education of the Human Race in the weakness of old age. One argues against greater minds, even when a work like The Education of the Human Race presents itself as the final result, as the ripe fruit of a rich life. Such minds then believe that the spirit of such a person has weakened. They just don't assume that they can't keep up with the point of view that they still recognize, to the point of view that the spirit of these people has risen to. But this excuse does not hold up in the face of another assertion made by Lessing in the full power of his life, in the “Hamburg Dramaturgy”, and which contains something that connects to what spiritual science must lead to if it continues to pursue the thoughts developed today and yesterday. The contents that we have in the soul between death and a new birth lead an independent, purely spiritual existence. But this is the recognition of the existence of a purely spiritual world. What modern enlightened thinker does not shudder when he hears that a spiritual world beyond the material one is assumed? And who would not declaim: Have such enlightened minds as Lessing and others worked to such an extent that we should go back to the old superstitious view of the existence of a spiritual world? But one could hold up the following saying of these same enlightened minds to them: for example, Lessing's saying:

We no longer believe in ghosts? Who says that? Or rather, what does it mean? Does it mean something like this: We have finally come so far in our insights that we can prove the impossibility of it; certain irrefutable truths that contradict belief in ghosts have become so common knowledge, are so constantly present even to the meanest man, that anything arguing against it must necessarily seem ridiculous and absurd to him? That cannot be what it means. We do not believe in ghosts now, so it can only mean: in this matter, about which almost as much can be said for as against it, which is not decided and cannot be decided, the currently prevailing way of thinking has given the reasons against it the upper hand; a few have this way of thinking , and many seem to have it; these make the clamor and set the tone; the greatest multitude is silent and indifferent and thinks one way now, another then, hears by daylight with pleasure mocking the ghosts and by dark night with horror telling about them.

This is certainly an uncomfortable passage for modern materialistic natural science. But we could also cite many a spirit in the course of the nineteenth century who, through an inner necessity, even if not yet on the basis of all considerations that have been cited today from spiritual science - because this was not possible at the time - came to the only possible assumption of repeated earth lives for the human soul. That is why Lessing emphasizes so strongly that this is the only possible assumption about the life of the soul beyond arising and ceasing. But with this we rise to a truly meaningful idea of eternity, because now life is not just a void into which we are placed by something outside of us, but now we feel: What we have brought into this life, we have brought with us from previous lives, we have worked for in previous lives. But what we experience now is transformed, it is processed when we go through the gate of death, so that we acquire the powers by which we can shape the later body again. We see that growing in this embodiment, which will be shaped alive in us in a next embodiment. Thus we see how eternity comes together as something concrete. We do not feel eternity as an infinite void from the beginning to the end, but rather, we experience what eternity will become as the soul lives into eternity, she repeatedly feels: “This is what I carry over from earlier stages of existence; this is how I utilize in later lives what I have acquired in earlier ones – it is what creates the form for me; and in the same way, through the present life, I can acquire an entitlement for the future.” And from these individual claims on the future, a concrete, real idea of the nature of eternity emerges. Because where we add future-proof work to future-proof work, we expand into eternity in terms of our hopes for life. We feel the real, true idea of eternity, not the empty idea that is so often presented to us. And the only way we can feel it is by looking at this whole inner life, not only in terms of ideas, but also in terms of the whole state of mind, the moods of the soul, and the life of the will. If we consider the threefold nature of the soul, how these forces transform into one another, how that which matures in the life of ideas passes over into moods of mind, in order to appear as such in the next life, to appear as a life of will, then we grasp the whole life of the human soul as a whole.

We need only fulfill one thing in order to lead what spiritual science can give us not only to a reasoned hope for eternity, but to one built on genuine knowledge. We need only look at the soul not in one of its aspects, but in its totality, and then we come to feel how true it is when we say: In thinking, in feeling and willing, in the whole nature of the soul, the world reveals itself to us insofar as we are grounded in it, insofar as we will be grounded in it for all future. What - let me add this once more - does not live in us as a theory, not as an abstract science, but pours like an elixir of life into our entire being, so that we not only fathom eternity but experience it - experience how it is built up from its individual building blocks , is expressed in the verse of the second mystery drama, where it is expressed what the soul can feel when it feels its own life, when it feels what it must carry over from one earth life to the next as a claim to eternity. Thus a true knowledge of ourselves, of our soul life, calls out to us when we grasp this soul life in true self-knowledge:

In your thinking live thoughts of the world,
In your feeling weave world forces,
In your willing work world beings.
Lose yourself in world thoughts,
Experience yourself through world forces,
Create yourself from will beings.
Do not end with what is far from the world
Through the play of thought
Begin in the vastness of the spirit
And end in the depths of your own soul:
You will find divine goals
Recognizing yourself within yourself.