Death and Immortality in the Light of Spiritual Science

GA 69d — 4 October 1913, Oslo

16. The Mystery of Death

The [mystery of death] belongs to a field of science that is not only unpopular, but can also be called unpopular. Many an inner, seemingly justified contradiction is illuminated there, appearing fully understandable to those within this field of research. Besides this, there is also another reason why it is difficult to make oneself understood. It is usually thought that the person who presents this matter in a short consideration wants to persuade someone to change their mind. The recently founded Anthroposophical Society has a field of research that is broader and more extensive than that of other research societies. Therefore, the intention is not to convince or persuade, but only to indicate the direction and nature of the investigations and how the solution to the riddles of life can be obtained.

Much stands in the way of unbiased judgment. The human soul, with all its interests and attentions, is involved in nothing so much as in the riddle of death. But nothing can cloud the search for truth as much as a very specific desire and an interest in a particular solution to the mystery. Does that which we call life continue after death? This question can be approached in an absolutely scientific way, but quite differently from what is usually referred to as science. Only someone who, with regard to the question of death, is linked to other interests [than their own] can proceed in a truly objective manner. Linked to the riddle of death must also be the riddle of life. If the question is asked out of an understandable curiosity or out of an interest that is close to the human heart, it cannot be solved.

The investigations into the question of death are also those into immortality. To discuss these questions, a certain transformation of the human being is necessary, a “spiritual chemistry”. It is not readily admitted that there is a spiritual science. But tonight it should be pointed out. When the chemist approaches the study of water, he splits it into hydrogen and oxygen. But if he just fantasizes about it, he knows that he will not be able to break it down. If he surrenders to dualism, that water consists of hydrogen and oxygen, he does not violate monism. Through ordinary science, he too can gain nothing about what is his destiny. What can survive the physical body is not present in ordinary life. Just as hydrogen and oxygen are not visible in water, so what is immortal in man is not present in ordinary life. A kind of spiritual chemistry must first be used to separate what is divine and spiritual. Over the centuries, man has had a kind of scientific education, not only through school and university, but also through general education, which makes it impossible for man today to get beyond the closest matters not only with faith but with knowledge. Not only curious personalities, but also serious and honest researchers exist. But the way the problem is approached today shows that in many cases the right path has not been found. Today is not the time to point out the important work that natural scientists such as Colonel Rochas have done in this regard, conducting experiments using the laboratory method. It is interesting to note how Rochas comes close to what is being proposed today in some respects, but he takes an impossible, unfruitful path. Spiritual science cannot and must not do it this way. Rochas takes a test subject like other sciences, only not external substances, but a medium. The external soul activity is thereby put to sleep, suppressed, so that everything that is bound to the external body is excluded. He assumes that only the soul, only the spirit, is now active. Through certain processes, the thirty-year-old [female] medium is put into a kind of sleep state; then he stimulates her consciousness so that she lives as if she were eighteen years old. She feels the pains or learns what she learned at that age, and only accomplishes what she was capable of at that time. Then she is transported back to childhood; she makes unpracticed strokes, as in the fifth or sixth year. Rochas is also able to transport this personality to the time before its birth. Such souls then stammer out of a spiritual environment, which, despite all imperfection, would be highly interesting if it coincided with spiritual research. It goes further and further back, until finally he believes that it is present from the time when it had another life. Rochas believes that he has obtained several life courses in this way. These are experiments of one of the serious researchers who want to stand firmly on the ground of science. They believe that only the method in which the object is physically present is justified.

Spiritual science cannot stand on this ground. Its methods are entirely spiritual in nature, purely inward, [they are] purely spiritual-soul processes. The spiritual researcher will never make use of a purely external object in space. But within this spiritual research, the same methods are used as in science. One may think: How can something be investigated in such a simple, primitive way? But it is not that simple; it is easy, but easy things are difficult. It is all based on psychological processes. One has to work for years in one's own soul alone to obtain reasonably satisfactory results, to enter into destiny through years of practice. Through years of self-denying work, one first comes to focus one's attention, and secondly to what can be described as “devotion”. What devotion means in ordinary life is only the very first beginning of the soul's possibility of becoming one with the spiritual world.

The attention must be turned entirely to one object, in which the whole life of the soul is concentrated. This attention also exists in ordinary life, because without it, man could not come to self-awareness, and memory is intimately related to the ability to pay attention. The thought may be weak, but one forgets less and less when one repeatedly focuses one's attention on something. Thought is the result of attention, of concentration. It depends on memory that the human being, with a certain sense of self, immerses himself in the physical. This enables us to deepen our inner life. In ordinary life, people develop attention in such a way that they allow themselves to be stimulated by something external. This is where the activity of the soul, which we call attention, begins. Self-observation is necessary; this is supported by very specific soul exercises. To learn what these are, you have to become independent of any external stimulation of attention, distracting the soul life from everything else, and focus it on a self-chosen content. It is not what you concentrate on that matters, but what you do that matters. Again and again, for a long time, over and over again, you focus on the content you have chosen. Then, little by little, you have an inner experience, then you discover what the soul does when it is attentive. And then it is attentive without content, attentive without paying attention to anything; that is what you develop as inner activity. Erasing the content, suppressing it completely, no longer thinking of anything and yet having the same state in the soul - then you know what attention is. The true clairvoyant method, which leads to spiritual research, is based on increasing the soul abilities that are present in every soul. Attention becomes stronger and stronger. This transforms the entire soul life. Then the person senses what the soul life is like in the central and other nervous systems. Then he senses an entity that is apart from the body in the person. In this way, the soul life is gradually separated from the body within. Finally, one feels: one is a duality. At first one thought that one was a product of the body. Then it is the etheric body of the human being that can be observed. One separates it from the physical body. Only then can one observe the etheric body. One experiences something like the following. It can happen in everyday life or when awakening from sleep. This experience can occur in a hundred different ways, but essentially it is like this: one can experience it in the middle of one's daily life or in the middle of sleep. The usual words for it are only stammering. It is as if something were happening in that moment, as if lightning were striking and destroying the body. When the body is separated, the soul life becomes independent. At that moment, one realizes what spiritual researchers throughout the ages have called 'coming close to death in the path of spiritual research'. You get to know the independence of the soul life, and now you have arrived at the stage where you live spiritually in the etheric body. What you then experience can only be described as a morbid soul life, as hallucinations and so on, if you do not know it. My book 'How to Know Higher Worlds' talks about this. It is not comparable to mere fantasy. What flows into the soul life is like images, a kind of dream image. But it is not important that you call it that, but that you learn to read in the world you are now entering. It is like a letter in which all the letters are known, but what you learn through the writing can be new. The spiritual researcher has a world of images in front of him, but he learns to read the spiritual world that stands behind it. It can only be said with a semblance of justification by contemporary dream researchers that one can have realities from the past in front of oneself and mistake them for new images. But the state of the soul, the mood of the soul, is different. It knows what the overall memory of ordinary life consists of: in an overview of life on earth up to a moment when one is confronted with all of one's life on earth or personal life. Then one recognizes: life has the urge to dissolve into the general etheric life.

If you continue to increase your attention to observe how life dissolves and has the urge to dissolve into the general, then you recognize what is peculiar to a person when he passes through the gate of death. Through further inner training, one not only recognizes one's own etheric life, but also learns to distinguish in the environment. This path leads, even if only for a short time and in a way that varies for the individual, to an overview of this life like a panorama. To progress further, the spiritual chemistry must be pursued ever further.

But not only attention is to be trained, but also the complete surrender of the soul life. The devotion consists in the person renouncing everything. What freezes by itself in the state of sleep: he must bring it about arbitrarily - the devotion of all muscular activity, of speech activity, of thinking activity, of judgment activity, which also occurs in the state of sleep. The devotion can be increased if it is practiced for years, if everything that is arbitrary is suppressed for years. Even what is not arbitrary can be suppressed: heart activity, respiratory activity, which are otherwise withdrawn from consciousness. One can bring the physical body into absolute inactivity. Then one does not feel transported into an external world, into something that wants to draw near, but one feels that one has entered into the depths of one's own soul life. What the person then gets to know is the human being's astral body. The sense of self, all thinking, feeling and willing then appear like mirror images. Now one penetrates to what they reflect, one penetrates into the astral body. What the person experiences on this path has nothing to do with ordinary desires and so on, one notices this. The path leads one, in full self-observation, out of birth and death, and shows us how an emerging world of ideas reveals memory as something that was not there before. This is linked to the breaking of desires that are connected with earthly life: satisfaction, joy, the desire to live through what is attached to the outer body. The desire remains for some time. But through the experience of the fact that the desire can only be satisfied through the body, for example, cravings of the palate, one learns what tasks the astral body has after death. Then one gains the ability to see the period of time, after decades, different for different people; then one learns to see what one sees in the future, now also to recognize in the past. There is much in life that hurts us, and we would spare ourselves this pain. So the spiritual researcher does not dream when he looks into the world before conception and sees that the human being has prepared this pain for himself, what is called, has made his own karma, that we have prepared this evil fate, the painful disappointments, ourselves. This does not correspond to our wishes now. One could be critical and hypercritical and still not get along with the ordinary, until one returns to a period where an earlier life on earth occurs, where we were in a different language, in a different environment, in very different circumstances. However unlikely and unpopular it may be, one also comes to see more like a past life on earth. This assertion can only be made under two conditions: either the person making such a claim has no sense of truth, or he must have a sense of truth as strict as in mathematics. Much nonsense has been done in this way. It is often said that a person was this or that in a previous life. But when real memory occurs, it is impossible that one could have an idea of previous lives through wishes. An image may come to mind: 'That was you, but in such a way that no one could object. This is how the riddles of life are solved: 'That was you, that is what you looked like, that is what you could do.'

But it occurs at an age where you can't do anything with it. There is nothing to be gained from it except knowledge. There is no comfortable “That was you.” You know then: some kind of retribution is necessary, but at that moment it is impossible to even out.

The paths and results of spiritual research have been attempted to be indicated here in a brief form. Not sensationally, to convince, but it only depends on encouraging. These experiences show that man recognizes that he has a spiritual-soul life core that has repeated lives as a result of previous lives; and so his fate is the result of previous lives. The present life is directed towards making up for what one has done to this or that person in certain deeds. The spiritual researcher first seeks what is immortal in man, and he finds that when he applies the methods for doing so. He recognizes this in a thoroughly important context; he recognizes earthly life in such a way that it lies like a shell over the deeper core of life. To do this, you have to train your memory, for example, to remember what you have experienced since birth. Man comes from a purely spiritual state and enters a purely spiritual state. We are in an intermediate state in the physical body. One should not ask: Is man immortal? – but seek out immortality. What the materialistic thinker sees of the soul is not immortal. Spiritual research is to be regarded as the path to human immortality; it draws attention to the results of feelings and emotions, to the bliss of religious inwardness. But it is also what makes life strong and powerful for the external arena.

It would be unchaste to speak about the effects of the life of the soul; but the path must be proclaimed. Especially those people who are completely imbued with the spirit often cannot recognize the path.

What science says about heredity is the same as what spiritual science says about repeated earthly lives.