---
ga: 69
title: "Death and Immortality"
date: 1912-04-18
location: Stockholm
words: 935
---
# Death and Immortality in the Light of Spiritual Science

## GA 69d — 18 April 1912, Stockholm

### 25. Death and Immortality

*Svenska Dagbladet (?), Stockholm, April 19, 1912. Translation*

Dr. Rudolf Steiner. A renowned lecturer before the Stockholm audience. [...] Yesterday's lecture: “Death and Immortality.” Dr. Steiner's lecture on Thursday evening was held in German and dealt with death and immortality. The hall was well attended, with an audience that included many members of the Theosophical Society. Dr. Steiner is known to be an important theosophist. With the power of his eloquence, Dr. Steiner held his audience spellbound for almost two hours. There is something commanding about his stature and his art of presentation, and his dark, ascetic face with its rapid facial expressions has a commanding expression. An excess of gestures disturbs to a certain extent the harmonious impression of the speaker's personality.

As in Giordano Bruno's time, the speaker said, the new worldview of man was based on facts that had been discovered and were in conflict with the perception of nature at that time, which was based on sensory impressions. Similarly, today, theosophy, or the science of the life of the soul, points beyond the limits of experience. One feels equipped in life to work and become a useful individual. One has a certain emotional perception of fate, and the external world of the senses touches one sympathetically or unsympathetically. Through experience, man becomes better and more mature. Will this maturity then dissolve into nothingness? That is the anxious question. Materialism speaks of the usefulness of personality for culture, but the human soul is not satisfied with this answer. The science of the soul, as rigorous in its methods as science, says that immortality is a characteristic of our soul and also attempts to prove it. There is a core of the human soul that is normally obscured by what it experiences. In the intermediate state between sleep and wakefulness, one can feel the innermost soul, and dreams reveal its existence. The soul works to transform our outer organism, and this work finds expression in dreams. It is not self-evident for everyone to be a researcher in the spirit world, but there are scientists who are far advanced in this field. Those who have found the center of their soul are armed against all worries and are masters of their own destiny. This is difficult, but necessary. For such people, it is not difficult to follow the life of their soul from birth and beyond. The forces associated with our lives lie as a growth force in the seed; life is a time of growth and blossoming, and when death comes, these forces have grown and matured and are ready to give new life. The doctrine of the soul entering a new body explains the continuity of its forces. The fact that human beings have no memory of a previous life is due to the fact that they do not concentrate their thoughts on the memory of that existence. However, there are people who have memories of previous reincarnations, although it is still not possible to prove scientifically that this is the case. There will come a time when education will focus on the science of the soul, and many problems will then be solved. The soul encompasses the worlds and is characterized by its compassion and love in connection with the worlds.

The lecture, which resembled a sermon on the eternal more than anything else, was listened to reverently by those present. In the evening, Dr. Steiner reads about Christ in the twentieth century.

*Unknown Stockholm newspaper, April 19, 1912 [?], translation*

Death and Immortality.

A lecture by Dr. Steiner on spiritual science Dr. Rudolf Steiner gave a lecture in German yesterday evening at the invitation of the Theosophical Central Bureau on the subject of “Death and Immortality.” The lecture, which took place in the auditorium of the Academy of Sciences, was attended by a very large audience. The audience showed great interest and listened with rapt attention.

The speaker began by emphasizing that those who are now engaged in research in the spiritual realm are met with the same incomprehension as the pioneering scientists of Copernicus' time. Just as it was difficult for people at that time to believe that there was anything beyond the vault of heaven that we can see with our own eyes, so now they find it difficult to imagine an existence that is not limited by birth and death. But, said the speaker, the most beautiful and noble things that individuals experience in the course of their lives cannot be passed on to others; they remain personal property. Should this then be destroyed and wasted by death? Physics teaches us that everything is indestructible and is only subject to transformation. This law, which applies to material things, also applies to spiritual things.

We notice, for example, in dreams that it is possible to connect with the spiritual world. This is when the subconscious emerges and we experience things that we never learn in real life. But even when awake, one can gain insight into the spiritual world by strictly abstracting oneself from the outside world and concentrating all one's thoughts, feelings, and will on penetrating the center of the soul. Just as the natural scientist conducts experiments with natural objects in his laboratory, so must one conduct spiritual field experiments with the instrument of the soul. The lecture ended with some predictions about the future, which the speaker believed would allow every human being to gain insight into experiences from their previous existences.