The Human Soul, Fate and Death

GA 70a — 16 February 1915, Stuttgart

4. What is Immortal about the Human Being?

Dear attendees! There is no doubt that it is always important for people to devote themselves to the necessary reflections on the great question of the soul and human destiny. And basically, it is these questions that should also form the basis for tonight's reflection. But in our fateful times, when death and fate itself are taking such a powerful and tragic hold on the world, it seems particularly appropriate to incline the human heart, incline the perceptions and reflections, towards this enigma, which is so incisive in the life of the human soul.

Now, as I have often been allowed to make such observations from the field of spiritual science here, it has been pointed out that the nature and aspects of spiritual science still go against what has been recognized and thought possible in our time through centuries-old habits of thinking and feeling. Spiritual science still finds no support in what is today external science, and especially not in what has developed out of this science in the broadest circles as a kind of creed. For all habits of thought, all [research practices] that have developed in the way indicated seem – I say expressly, seem – to directly oppose what spiritual science has to say about the great riddles of human existence.

However, as has been mentioned here often, the change that has to take place in human thinking from the present point of view to that of spiritual science will be no greater, relatively speaking, than that which had to take place when the dawn of the natural scientific way of thinking arose; when, so to speak, all concepts, all ideas and notions that people had about the structure and interconnection of the world and the nature of the human soul and the weaving of human destinies were subjected to transformation. Just as it certainly seemed to many people at that time, how the solid ground of the life of ideas on which they stood was shaken, so it may be for many people in our present time with regard to spiritual scientific ideas. But the human soul is changeable, the human soul is born for progress. And just as the scientific point of view has become interwoven with human development, so the spiritual scientific world view will become interwoven with it.

Now, it must be said that, when considering the question of what is immortal in the human being, the habits of thought in the present day resist in the most diverse ways the recognition of the truths that spiritual science has to give from its foundations. Above all (and we shall find further confirmation of this in the course of today's lecture), the whole character of those truths that relate to the immortal human being is quite different from the character of those truths that relate to external, sensual things and to the scientific summary of these sensual things. Man has become so accustomed to ascribing reality to that of which he can say: the matter has been confirmed to me by something outside of my soul life. But spiritual-scientific truths cannot be recognized in this way. It is impossible for them to invoke something, as scientific truths do, that gives the impression of truth from outside and to which we only have to surrender, so that we can say: the matter is true because it presents itself to us in this way in our observation, independently of our soul life. That which presents itself as spiritual scientific truths, especially as truths about the immortal human soul, must be grasped inwardly. And for this grasping there are no external points of reference, there is no relying on anything that proves itself independently of the human soul.

Therefore, as was already mentioned yesterday, spiritual science must say without arrogance: it must be a kind of brave science; a science that courageously dares to experience the impulses of truth not through intuition but through inner experience. Therefore, spiritual science cannot passively indulge in world contemplation, but must arise as the soul actively develops hidden powers within itself, as it brings up from the depths that which is hidden in its depths, that which the power of truth includes within itself. This is one of the reasons why spiritual truth is so opposed to current ways of thinking.

The other, esteemed participant, is even closer to the contemplation that is to be undertaken today. We shall see that spiritual science, as something immortal in the human soul, presents something that is so fundamentally different from all that the senses convey to us, from all that we think, feel and want in everyday life, so fundamentally different from all that, that in this everyday life, man actually carelessly passes by what is eternal and immortal in him. And he passes it by all the more carelessly for the reason that he is inclined not to ascribe reality to what confronts him just as the being in his own inner being, which finds the way through the eternities and through births and deaths. There is something so light and fleeting in everyday life that is immortal in us that we are not at all inclined to ascribe the most intense reality of life to this very light and fleetingness.

How this immortality is found in the human soul has been the subject of my frequent discourses here. However, this search for the immortality of the human soul must be discussed again and again and from different points of view for the simple reason that the spiritual-scientific investigations are more complex and diverse. And only when they are characterized from the most diverse points of view is it possible to gain a true understanding of them.

If one now says that what is immortal in the human being must be grasped through the development of such soul forces, which are initially hidden in the deepest interior of the human being and in the inner soul [experience], if one says this, then the person of the present has the belief that basically only something subjective, something that has personal value, can be achieved.

The beginning of spiritual research is indeed subjective; it is an inner experience and inner development of otherwise hidden powers in the soul. It is a process of overcoming, an inward journey, a working of one's way out of darkness and into the light, which must be experienced by people's souls in a wide variety of ways. It is certainly subjective at first. But this belief can only exist because most people do not have the patience to go far enough with the spiritual researcher. For even if all beginnings of spiritual research are steeped in subjectivity, so that they develop out of the most personal of personal things, it is precisely through inner conquest, through inner struggle, that the soul is driven to overcome the inner itself within. And by inwardly working out an objective element that lies within it, it can gain entry into a new world, which, alongside our own, arises as if, roughly speaking, a new sense were to awaken in our physicality, and a completely new area of the external sensory world were to open up for us. But the urge from the subjective to the objective in spiritual struggle and spiritual research is an intimate one; it is such that it makes it necessary for the human being to acquire soul habits within himself that otherwise do not occur in everyday life. I have also already emphasized that inner activity of the soul which so transforms and transforms this soul that it can make its way into the spiritual worlds, which always surround us and which remain hidden only to the unprepared soul.

The first thing that the soul must practise in order to get to know its own nature truly and scientifically, not merely by faith, is what can be called technical sharp concentration of thought, such concentration of thought that does not merely appeal to the inner power of thinking, but which appeals to the application of inner willpower in thinking and imagining. Those thoughts that come to us as a result of the external world making an impression on us, and that are fixed in us as a result of them entering us through the senses, that they arouse a sensual process in our body and that this sensual process fills us in our inner being , that reality is guaranteed by these thoughts, which are carried as reality through the effects of the external sensory world within our own body, so that we believe in their reality. These thoughts cannot help us if we are seeking the immortal essence of the human soul.

These must be other thoughts, thoughts that are basically quite similar, at least superficially similar to such spiritual images, such inner experiences, ladies and gentlemen, which all too easily succumb to a very special inner fate, the fate that they come and go as quickly as dreams, which easily succumb to the fate of being forgotten. We know this fate of being forgotten in a general human experience, in the experience of dreams. We know that what flits through our soul as a dream experience is quickly forgotten. Why? Because the dream takes hold of our whole physical being in a much less intense way, and thus creates much less within this physicality the conditions by which we inwardly sense, sense reality precisely in the embodiment of thoughts, and then also permanently retain reality. In a sense, the thought experience does not pass over into the physical one and therefore flits by.

It is similar with thoughts that we, as it were, allow to be drawn by the soul as thoughts that we have formed independently. We often observe them and call them daydreams; they are quickly forgotten and quickly fade away. And yet, the further one progresses, the more thoroughly one trains oneself to unfold precisely those powers within oneself that can receive formed thought experiences in the soul, as otherwise only appearances based on external sense impressions are received, the more one progresses in this unfolding of soul activity within the soul, the better one trains oneself for spiritual research. This is the basis of what is called thought concentration in the true spiritual sense of the term.

The thoughts that are least suitable for this concentration are those that are images of external, sensory reality. Images that we form ourselves, that do not directly depict anything, but that we freely form in our minds, and to which we then surrender, are most suitable. I have described such [meditative inner soul processes] in the book “How to Know Higher Worlds”, [for example]. If one wants to hold on to such thought-forms, which are freely created spiritually, one must apply a stronger, more powerful inner will to hold on to them than one usually has in one's outer life.

In the external world, we have a firm support in the life of the soul precisely because thoughts cause a real material process, make an impression [and cause real changes in the body]. Based on these changes, the experience is so strong that we need to muster little will, little inner soul will, to hold on to such thoughts. But to form thoughts freely, without being forced to do so, and to recognize them from the point of view that we simply give ourselves to them to strengthen our inner soul power, to hold on to such thought-forms or feelings or even impulses of will, requires a strong tension of the inner power of the soul, requires a far stronger will than for everyday thinking. But it is precisely on this that the schooling of the spirit is based, which is necessary for [exploring the spiritual worlds,] that inner strength and inner energy are released, as it were, which would otherwise remain unused in everyday thinking.

This is why people who need the aforementioned support for their thinking all too soon tire in this concentrated thinking, all too soon fall into a state not unlike falling asleep. But only by tensing the inner forces of will, which relate only to the inner movement of thoughts, do we attain the stronger forces that we need in the soul to grasp not only the transitory but also the immortal of the human soul.

And now it becomes apparent when a person, one might say, has developed thinking and feeling through faithful inner schooling for a long time, that the person is then in a position to have a truly inner experience of imagination, that he is completely absorbed in this inner experience of imagination, that all his powers are gathered in this experience of imagination and the rest of his life seems to fade away. The spiritual researcher must bring it about that the world is, as it were, distracted on all sides and the soul becomes completely one with something that it has placed at the center of its soul life in the healthiest way, [as I would like to emphasize]. All willpower must be directed towards that which is at the very core of the soul's life. Only then does a person realize what the power of thought is and how thought, if it is to be allowed to rule freely in the life of the human soul, must be supported by strong willpower.

And then, [my dear audience], the spiritual researcher makes a very specific discovery, one that we must indeed bear in mind. The experience comes at a very specific point. The exercise I just discussed must be carried out for long months, for years. Again and again, we have to come back to it, just to evoke thoughts and ideas in our consciousness through the inner willpower of our soul. And again and again, we have to develop this direct thought life. Then, after some time, we have a certain experience based entirely on this experience. At first, the spiritual researcher is able to concentrate his thinking [ever more brightly and clearly], ever more intensely and ever more intensely, to be in the thought experience within it. And he notices that the thought experience intensifies, becoming ever more powerful and mighty. Indeed, he feels how his entire consciousness of being, in uniting, in generally uniting and becoming identical with the concentrated thinking, is increasingly shaken and shaken.

But then there comes a very definite critical point, which consists in the fact that just when we have arrived at the experience of the strength of the thought, this thought shatters as if within itself in our soul, dissolving as if within our soul. One would like to say that the critical point occurs when the thought, when it is carried to its highest energy, darkens, darkens, ceases to be present for us. And we, who have followed thought, as it were, identified ourselves with thought, we feel how something, how our whole being goes along with thought. And that is a significant, an extremely significant experience.

When you put it that way, it might seem simple; it is not simple, the experience I am talking about. It is an experience that shakes up all the human powers of the soul, that calls into question everything that one has felt until then, everything that one has acquired as valuable for the soul in this or that sense. And what particularly resists moving closer to this experience, what repeatedly and again stands in our way, getting stuck earlier, not going so far that this experience arises, which, as it were, does not allow us to approach this last experience, these are the forces of human egoism associated with the depths of the soul.

What is meant, esteemed listeners, is that if we do not harness all our energies, all our inner willpower, we will simply get stuck sooner, we will not get to where the thought, as it were, splinters. We do not do this consciously, but it happens entirely through unconscious volition. It does not let us go because we are afraid, inwardly afraid, without being conscious of it, that something much worse than even physical death could happen to us.

When I speak of this fear, it is of course a small thing for someone who wants to hold on to materialistic ideas to say: Well, the experience will not be as bad as physical death. But it is indeed an experience that does not enter into ordinary consciousness, but it does take hold of the soul's life as a force, as an impulse, as an impulse that acts like unconscious fear: not only of the destruction of the body, but of the absorption, of the outpouring of one's entire being into the cosmos, into the whole environment. You don't want to pour out like that. (You haven't consciously felt that in your soul, but you don't want to approach the experience.)

If you overcome all the inexpressible feelings, which can, however, be called feelings of fear, if you overcome all that, then, dear attendees, there comes a time when you know exactly, know through inner experience: now you are drawing something out of your body through those powers that you have developed in this way through concentration of thought. But precisely this drawing out of a spiritual being that otherwise - as we now know - permeates the body, this drawing out always seems particularly dangerous: because this drawing out is precisely connected with the feeling of having to dissolve and of something is stuck in us that we cannot draw out in this way, but which must be drawn out of us if it is not to fall prey to the dissolving Nothing that is to be drawn out in the way described. We have the clear consciousness: Now, something else must be drawn out of us, [if we want to draw the whole inner man out of us.] It is not enough with the concentration of thought alone. That draws out a part of us. We have the clear consciousness.

Now, dear audience, if you want to understand why it is so difficult for a person to have experiences like the ones I have described, then you can start from everyday experiences that are not noticed at first. What has been described exists in a relationship of attraction that a person has to himself. It presupposes that the human being has the inner strength to approach his own nature, so to speak. But nothing is as questionable in ordinary life, esteemed attendees, as a person's relationship to himself. In ordinary self-knowledge, this relationship of the human being to himself is only expressed very, very imperfectly, even in everyday life.

I would like to give an example that seems to have been taken from something quite different to the things I have been talking about. A well-known contemporary philosopher wrote a book about the “Analysis of Sensations”. On the third page, he talks about a strange experience that he had twice. He was a philosopher and a university professor. In his own way, he had also struggled for a worldview: Dr. Ernst Mach.

He says:

As a very young man, I was once walking down the street when I saw a man coming towards me with a face that I found extremely unappealing, even repulsive. I was quite shocked when I realized that it was my own face in profile, which appeared to me because I had passed a set of mirrors and the mirrors were placed against each other in such a way that I saw my own face.

Not only the man, but even the philosopher, knows his own figure so little! But there is a second, similar experience, which happened to the person concerned not as a very young man, but in very mature years, he says. He says:

Not so long ago

• in the nineties -

I got on a bus after a very exhausting train journey, very tired, and noticed that a man was also getting on the bus from the other side, and I thought to myself: what kind of down-at-heel schoolteacher is getting on there? It was only then that I noticed a large mirror on the back wall that showed me my own image!

He adds:

So the habitus of my class was more familiar to me than my own personal habitus.

He knew so little about himself that he was amazed at his own appearance. [Well, he knew what a down-at-heel schoolmaster looked like, but he didn't know exactly what he looked like himself.]

[Yes, my dear attendees], it is of course very easy to laugh at such things, but they are deeply, deeply significant if you want to get an idea of how questionable the relationship is that a person has with themselves in ordinary life. But what prevents us, esteemed attendees, from coming into a relationship with ourselves in our ordinary lives that leads to self-knowledge, all of that is at the same time a sum of forces that prevent people from bringing their concentration of thought to such a development, as described above, to the point of bringing out a second person inside the person. One sees that the forces that prevent man from detaching himself from his inner self, from what this inner self is connected with from birth to death, are stored up in the very existence of man. But this detachment succeeds through what has been described. But in such a way that we are not so far through this obstacle that we bring our whole being out of ourselves. Something else must be added to the concentration of thought. Not only must we develop a more energetic relationship to our thoughts than is the case in our everyday life, but we must also develop a completely different relationship to our destiny, to the destiny in which we live, than we do in our everyday life.

How do we relate to our destiny in our everyday life? We see what we call our experiences of destiny as they come at us, whether we like them or dislike them. They affect us as “coincidences of life”, as we say. We regard what befalls us as fate as something external, as something external to our being, and we grow up and develop from birth to death with the idea that fate befalls us in such a way that it is something external to us. But even a simple reflection, one that extends only over the life between birth and death, can teach us that what must be called fate is by no means something so external to man.

If we look at ourselves at any time in our lives, at a later, more mature age, and take a look at what we are, what we can do in life, then, if we do not want to close ourselves off from a real knowledge of human nature, then we will come to the conclusion, dear Dear attendees, we would say to ourselves: Yes, I would not be able to do this or that now if this or that had not happened in my life eighteen, twenty, thirty, thirty-five years ago, if I had not had to go through this or that to encounter this and that. I am the result of what happened to me in my life as an experience of fate, and if it had not happened, I would not be the me that I am today.

And if we take this whole bundle of talents, strengths, habits, and the nature of our soul life, we can see how it develops between birth and death from the fateful experiences that have affected us, how we would be quite a different person if fate had not made us what we are. We are already our coiled, twisted fate in ordinary life. One does not look at oneself abstractly, but concretely in all that one has become as a fifty-year-old person; and one wonders what one can do, what one is, coiled up from the experiences of fate, whether one can trace the whole tangle [that is coiled up there] back to the experiences of fate.

[But what happens when you take such a contemplation seriously, that seriousness that is truly not all that common in everyday life, but which, when developed, becomes a second means of spiritual research. When one takes such a contemplation seriously, one comes to say to oneself, yes, fate is not something external to me at all; I am immersed in fate. The experience that has approached me has now become my self. And when I survey my entire fate, my self is in it. I step out of myself, as it were, with my consciousness and pour myself out into the whole stream of my fate. But this must be considered in a deeply serious way, it must become methodical, so to speak. Then, through such an activity of the soul, the opposite of what has occurred through the concentration of thought occurs, so to speak. With our thinking, we are otherwise inwardly absorbed. We usually have thoughts that are based on external impressions and that therefore have their basis and their power in complicated inner relationships. But when we concentrate our thoughts, we go out with our thoughts so strongly that our inner being goes with them and we believe we are losing ourselves there. When we immerse ourselves in our destiny, we undergo the opposite process. Then we go out of ourselves, but into something that we [otherwise] believe in the external, that we believe flows to us from the outer stream of life. We step out of ourselves and into something that we only now recognize: [this is what generates and makes us; we grow together with something that we believed externally].

If we do this with intense seriousness, if we go out of ourselves with our will and know how to say: what I have experienced as fate, I am already in it, I have brought it about myself, because I am connected with my ego in it. [When we make this a habitual inner activity], then we come out of ourselves again, but in such a way that we draw out the other part of our inner being, which is as it were torn off, that which has not been brought out [is] through the concentration of thought , that we now follow up on that and that it connects with what has been brought out first, and now a whole, initially hidden inner man is drawn out of us, an inner man in whom we then know ourselves to be alive, in whom we know ourselves to be so alive that we now look at this outer, this physical man, as we otherwise look at the outer surroundings, tables and chairs.

I have thus indicated to you two means that are just as much technical means of real spiritual research as the work of the laboratory or the physics cabinet or the clinic are strictly distinguishable means for external natural science research. The only difference is that when one wants to research the spiritual, one cannot do external [experiments] but only inner soul experiences, which bring about a transformation so that the soul withdraws from its body in its essence.

Not even in the abstract does spiritual science today need to speak of the fact that man's spiritual being is something real that separates from the body; but, one would like to say, through spiritual experimentation, spiritual science today knows how to separate the physical and the soul, just as one separates oxygen from hydrogen, in order to show that the oxygen is contained in the [water]. And the spiritual-soul substance is in it and can be drawn out through strictly observed procedures. Only, however, while we are experimenting in the laboratory, we face things externally with a certain indifference.

The tasks the spiritual researcher has to undergo are such that they represent, as it were, inner soul tragedies, overcoming and inner wrestling, inner bliss, inner disappointment, inner standing on firm ground, and again feeling like the bottomless; all this in often gruesome, often blissful concreteness of the inner soul experience. But then, when the spiritual researcher has succeeded in separating the real inner self from the physical body, he knows that the physical body, which he now observes with the being that is now outside the body, contains all the forces that begin with birth, or let us say with the birth and which are handed over to the earthly element at death, and he says to himself, that what he has withdrawn is working on this earthly-physical body, that he has grasped the eternal soul core in what he has withdrawn from the human being, and that he has grasped it simultaneously with fate. Now he knows that what separates from the physical body remaining in bed every night when falling asleep is this eternal essence, which is in the spiritual world from the time of falling asleep until waking up and can only not perceive itself because in ordinary life the person does not have the inner has the inner strength to bring about this interpenetration and interweaving of the soul that is outside the body, and also to make it shine and resound – spiritually speaking – so that one perceives it for oneself and has the strength to look down again [at the external, bodily level].

[But then, having explored what lives in the body, one has at the same time grasped that which goes through birth and death. And by grasping the soul as united with its destiny, one has grasped that which was present in the spiritual world before the human being was born or conceived, which represents the sum of the forces that themselves first sink to that which is given through the father and mother as a physical body, and become incorporated into it, in order to use the body as an instrument, to be the inner formative power through life, to work in the material world and also to wear away the body in the process, and to become stronger and stronger inwardly, in order to then pass through the gate of death back into the spiritual world, in order to prepare oneself there for a new bodily life.

Something else comes to life for the spiritual researcher: he is able to explain why this eternal, immortal core of being is not perceptible in ordinary life, why we know nothing of it. When we live between birth and death, we do indeed work all the experiences of life, [all sensations, feelings and thoughts], everything that life offers into this immortal core of being. But because we are accustomed to perceiving and working with the two eyes of the body for our daily lives, the labor of the physical body continually obscures these inner educational forces, which are immersed in the body and, when they are worked in the body, , but instead of being able to become the power of knowledge, they are eternal formative forces of the body, used for something else, similar to what the development of the outer physical existence represents. But we get to know this power so that the present body, which we carry between birth and death, is not its cause, as materialism believes, but on the contrary is its effect: [As it presents itself in life, it is the effect of that which has descended from the spiritual world, indeed, that which carries within itself the fruit of previous earthly lives. That which emerges from him, that which has descended from the spiritual world, indeed, that which bears within it the characteristics of previous earthly lives. For as soon as one comes to observe that which lives in the body and can be lifted out of the body in the manner described, one knows at once that that which lives in the body is as it is now because it is not the first time that it has lived in the body; one sees spiritually that it bears within it fruits that it has acquired in previous earthly lives. And in direct vision, the entire life appears to the spiritual researcher in such a way that it is composed of what has been achieved in the spirit, and this is transformed in such a way that it can in turn form a new life.

Thus spiritual research, dear attendees, does not arrive at the eternal, indestructible core of a person's being, how it goes from earthly life to earthly life and forms destiny, through fantasy or by making some kind of vague philosophical-abstract considerations, but rather in a spiritual experimental method that is actually modeled on natural science, so that one can say: What you are experiencing now, what is penetrating you now, will become strength in your immortal self, will pass through the gate of death, will transform itself so that in your next life it will enrich your self, your self working in your destiny. It is you yourself who, in your destiny, has brought over from a previous life and carries into the now; it is you yourself in your immortal essence.

Of course, esteemed attendees, it will take a long, long time in the development of human spiritual culture before a larger number of people will participate in spiritual science, which is described here as something positive. But this spiritual science will become a truly real part of spiritual human culture, just as chemistry or physics, or any other branch of external natural science. And just as the external natural sciences have brought progress to man in the external material sphere, so to speak radically transforming earthly life as far as man and his circumstances were concerned, so spiritual research will intervene in human life. And spiritual science will intervene in a transforming way in that which is moral impulse, in man's consciousness of his own essential being, in life in its true essential being, when only once those prejudices are overcome that today quite understandably still stand in the way of this spiritual science. These prejudices will be overcome as truly as the prejudices against natural science were once overcome.

Anyone who believes that spiritual science, as described here in a small part, is something completely dreamt up, fantastic, knows that those who are able to grasp the inner essence of this spiritual science live in the same error as he who belonged to those who said that this fool, Copernicus, imagined that the Earth revolved around the Sun, whereas everyone with healthy five senses could see that the Earth stood still and the Sun revolved around it! People in those days said, “Anyone with healthy senses cannot believe the fool Copernicus, that both of them of the external cosmic world contradict the appearance of the healthy five senses.” So, of course, people today must also say: anyone in possession of their right five senses cannot truly believe that one can develop one's thinking to such an extent that one first draws something like a piece of the inner human being out of oneself and then pulls the other after it by immersing oneself in destiny. But human history strides beyond such prejudices. And if humanity has already learned not to trust appearances with regard to the course of the stars, it will have to learn not to trust appearances with regard to what passes through the human soul through birth and death, and withdraws from appearances again when it leaves the realm of appearances through the gate of death.

There is, dear honored attendees, a stronger power of holding something to be true than the one that many still invoke today – and rightly so, when one considers contemporary history and conditions – and the one that those who refer to the so-called healthy five senses and to research recognized as valid today draw upon. There is a stronger force. But this force is connected with the deepest impulse of all human progress towards truth. And this must be developed within oneself to some extent if one wants to profess spiritual science today: this trust in the progress of truth of humanity. But this trust is also something that impresses a strong moral force into our soul. And just in this lies a gain in life, that man is able to bring himself to appeal to the powers of realization within him, which he must bravely bring forth through the strength of his soul, and which carry the truth through the world on their own wings, and do not merely need to borrow it from what presents itself to the external senses. But it is the strong inner experiences of fate that the human soul must undergo if it wants to deal with the immortal core of being, which, one might say, is naturally ignored in everyday life. With that, it may be said that today we have reached the point in the development of humanity where science must become what could not previously be science.

Of course, dearest ones present, what the spiritual researcher, as it were, distills out of the human being and presents to the intellect is always within the human being; it is the immortal within the human being. The spiritual researcher does not grasp it; the spiritual researcher only calls it forth into the horizon of knowledge.

And of course one can raise an objection here, an obvious objection, which is particularly obvious because it is so closely connected with our inner soul life, with our inner soul laziness. One can say: Why make an effort for this eternal core of our being? We will come to it in eternal life when we have discarded our body. Why make the effort for it? [It is eternal, after all, we will see after death!] We can quite calmly abandon ourselves to life and, for the rest, leave to the world spirits what they want to do with our immortal core! Two things must be said against such a cheap objection.

Firstly, it is about the fact that people need to be active, not just to know this or that, to see this or that, but to be active in order to advance the general process of evolution and development of humanity on Earth. Just as the laws and ideas of natural science were once unknown and had to be brought out of the [unknown] darkness into the light of knowledge, so most truths are first unknown and must be brought out of the unknown into the known. All human progress is based on this bringing out of what was previously unknown. And anyone who does not want to participate in this human progress, so that spiritual truths are also incorporated into this human progress in the future, just as natural science had to be incorporated in the past, should just admit that he is basically indifferent to all human progress, in which he is, after all, involved. That is the more abstract path, even if it is important.

But the other is that not only such abstract progress takes place in the development of humanity, but a very, very concrete progress takes place. It is only a superficial consideration of human development on earth to believe that as long as there have been people on earth, they were essentially the same. They were not essentially the same at all. We allow ourselves today to judge a Greek soul, a Roman soul, a soul originating from ancient Persian history, because we have no idea how much the souls of people in ancient times were different from those of people in the present. When we look back into ancient times, we find [at the bottom of the soul, everywhere] an inner, clairvoyant consciousness that originated in primeval times and ancient regions, through which the souls had their connection within themselves with the divine-spiritual forces of the world. But the very fact that human beings have the ability to withdraw to freedom in the course of developmental history, to extract themselves from this original dream-like clairvoyance, is precisely what constitutes their independence. The possibility of today's purely external knowledge is also based on this, and now, however, after man has attained the stage of detachment from spiritual life, he must in turn be grasped by spiritual life, the substantial spiritual life must be poured into his soul through spiritual science.

Today, however, we as human beings are still mostly at the stage where we can say that we still have so much inherited strength that our soul will not be darkened and [dawned] when it passes through the gate of death. But man, as he progresses from life to life, undergoes a development. The inner spiritual powers are being tested and tempered. And when a person passes from the present into the future course of life, he is dependent on developing within himself, consciously and out of inner freedom, that which fills him with conscious connection with the astral world , with such forces that can only be released in the soul itself, so that he does not go through the time between death and a new birth in dullness, but in bright inner feeling and experience.

The fact that spiritual science is currently entering our human development is connected with the whole meaning of earthly development; it is connected with the fact that man could only become free by, in a certain way, breaking the thread that bound him to the spiritual worlds. But out of freedom, out of free consciousness, he must now tie this bond again, which holds him together with the spiritual worlds. It is impossible that little by little, from the present time on, more and more people will not recognize the necessity of incorporating knowledge of the spiritual world into consciousness, knowledge of the eternal essence of the human being.

Therefore, where spiritual life has become more intense in recent times, where it has felt more dependent on gaining certainty of life and destiny from within, the idea of repeated earthly lives arises. It comes to us, for example, in the eighteenth century through one of the leading spirits of German intellectual life, Lessing. I have already mentioned here that Lessing left his most mature work, 'The Education of the Human Race', as a testament to humanity. And the basic idea of this most mature work of Lessing's, this testament of Lessing's, is the idea of repeated earthly lives and the intervening purely spiritual lives. I have already mentioned that very clever people today still treat spiritual science in such a way that they say: A person with his healthy five senses cannot understand it, such people say: Well, Lessing was a great man; throughout his life he really wrote reasonably or ingeniously; in his old age he just got a little weaker, and then he had the complicated idea of repeated lives on earth.

It may well be that these very clever people today can still feel a right to rebel against such a seeker as Lessing was, who felt something of the time that needs stronger soul power than the mere passive of external natural science. What has thus been established in German intellectual history by a mind like Lessing's, in turn, forms a kind of predisposition that must be developed; and in particular, it must be felt in all that lies within the realm of the German national soul - it will be felt - and which will lead to the fact that, in particular, from the realm of the German national soul, [not ] from some Central European culture, that which is also developed by such a clear mind as Lessing, in order to slowly enter into the stream of spiritual scientific research, which sheds light on the nature, on the true nature of the immortal human soul, as has been hinted at today.

This concept, however, was deeply rooted in what was said yesterday, that Johann Gottlieb Fichte perceived as the actual source of Germanness. Today, we would like to draw your attention once again to something that Fichte emphasized time and again, and always succinctly.

Fichte said: Not only after we have gone through death do we become immortal living beings.

Fichte had a wonderfully beautiful idea, a thought that goes something like this, [not literally], Fichte says: It is not only after we have gone through death that we become immortal beings in the spiritual world. No, already here in the body we can become aware of that which is immortal in us, that which creates and works as the immortal of our mortal body itself and which then passes through death. And I, for my part, must say, Fichte believes, that only by grasping this immortal that triumphs over all mortality in man do I recognize the true meaning of life, recognize that for the sake of which alone one may live in this mortal body.

In Fichte, we see clearly before knowledge what spiritual science is to elaborate on today and must elaborate on more and more in the future. What does Fichte talk about? Fichte says that in this mortal human body, which [grows] and develops, precisely through the immortal soul between birth and death, that in this mortal human body can be grasped - if only the right, the suitable inner strength is released from the soul - can be grasped, even the immortal, that immortal, that man in his mortality can already become aware of the immortal and that he does not have to wait for the recognition of immortality in death, but that he can find within himself that which goes through births and deaths, through eternities, with the powers of knowledge suitable for this.

This spiritual science is particularly present in those personalities of spiritual striving whose time first had to be characterized a little, and it is present there in such a way – and that is the essential thing, because naturally things occur in the most diverse places in their direction towards us - but it is so disposed there that we can, so to speak, draw a straight line between what is beginning to bear spiritual fruit and what must now develop. And one would like to say, dear ladies and gentlemen, that never again in the stream of German, of Central European intellectual life has this awareness of the immortal core of man been lost in a scientific way. It was always there, again and again. I could list many, many things that have emerged in the course of the nineteenth century to the present day. I would just like to draw attention to one thing that should show how there was indeed an awareness, albeit a delicate awareness, or rather, one that only wanted to arise delicately, of what has just been developed here today.

One of those minds, belonging to the second half of the nineteenth century, who also stands on the ground of the Goethe-Schiller-Fichte worldview, who has developed this worldview in his life in uninterrupted progress, is the late, excellent art historian Herman Grimm, who has also been mentioned by me here several times.

This art historian Herman Grimm also wrote novellas. In his volume of novellas, one of the first novellas is this one, entitled: “The Songstress”. In it, he describes how a certain relationship develops between two people, a songstress and a man. He describes how the two people are then driven apart by life's circumstances and character. And he describes how the man commits suicide out of grief, how the singer learns of it, and how it affects her. And now, in the 1860s, Herman Grimm vividly describes in his novella 'The Songstress' how the detached etheric form – a part of what, when a person passes through the gateway of death passes into the spiritual world - appears before the singer, so that after the death of the man she spurned in life, one might say she is looking at the epitome of his immortal being. If I were able to describe this to you in detail, I would also be able to justify why I am referring to this novella in particular. Of course, it can be retorted that the poet is able to exaggerate and misrepresent everything. That is not the point. Rather, the spiritual researcher has the direct impression: here a poet is accurately [reproducing] what is known to be the way the matter unfolds, [he is] giving an account of the life after death.

Herman Grimm has written a novel that should be read thoroughly for other reasons as well: “Unüberwindliche Mächte” (Insurmountable Forces). The story of the novel takes place during the war, in 1866. The interplay of European and American cultural relations is described in this novel in the same masterful way. And from this background, the fate of various people arises; towards the end, the description of the death of the heroine. At the end of the novel, we find that the poet Herman Grimm describes something very strange to us. He describes death very vividly, and he describes death in such a way that what I have described today, how it stands out, I would say through spiritual research experimental art from the body in death. [Gap in the text]. In the 1960s, the time had not yet come to pursue spiritual science, but those people who, through the special structure of their soul life, had a connection with the spiritual, were immersed in this spiritual and felt the need, even when describing forces, to show not only the external sense world, but also that which is the eternal part of this sense world.

People developed out of that spiritual beginning of culture who knew that if one wants to describe true reality, one has to describe more than the physical, external sense appearance, who knew that he who denies this speaks like one who has a strongly magnetic horseshoe in front of him and says, “You are a fantastic fool. It has no invisible powers in it.” The whole sensory world is as it is here in the rough. But people knew this, who, especially out of the deepening of German idealism, learned to feel the spiritual reality. This is the path of human development, dear honored attendees, out of mere idealism, which constitutes the greatness of a bygone and particularly German epoch, to develop a genuine spiritual-scientific worldview. This can be clearly felt by objectively and impartially observing German intellectual life. It is truly a mission of German idealism to concretize itself, to fulfill itself inwardly, so that it can advance from the ideal recognition of intellectual life, as we have it with Fichte, with Schelling, with Hegel, [can advance] to the real view of intellectual experience with spiritual eyes and spiritual ears, of which Goethe spoke.

And again, it is very remarkable, dear honored attendees, that enlightened minds of the nineteenth century, right where they turn their gaze to German intellectual life – [in particular, Goethe] – that they come to the conclusion that a kind of hope for humanity is connected to the development of precisely this intellectual life. One would like to say that, if so, today in these fateful times of ours, perhaps precisely from what is happening between the lines of life – forgive the foolish but perhaps apt expression – , if one examines [with sharpened powers of soul], one feels something of how, through the further development of spiritual life from the roots of German idealism, the world can come to grasp the spiritual. One can feel this without being filled with particular arrogance in relation to one's own German spiritual life. One does not need to be filled with pride, one can really feel today in some phenomena how that which has placed itself in the world as a great thing in the Goethe-Schiller-Fichte era was the beginning of a great spiritual development that is to be defended [in Central Europe].

I would not want to do otherwise than to present, if I may say so, out of a “tragic” feeling, two images that have personally come to mind; I would like to present these two images not out of some national subjectivity, but because they are related to certain feelings of our fateful time.

We experienced them, the first days of August last year – 1914 – and we experienced them in such a way that we received reports of how they were being experienced in the various European countries. I would like to present just two images. The first image: one is confronted with a great event, the magnitude of which one cannot even begin to comprehend! The German Reichstag convenes. I do not want to go into the details, because, as Bismarck famously said, I do not want to mix up what wants to remain in words with what should be decided by action. I do not want to go into the details of the immediate day-to-day politics, or what of this day-to-day politics is connected with the political events. But one image stands out vividly in my mind: there they stand, the representatives of the various political parties, and they are silent, silent! And this silence makes a tremendous impression; an impression, esteemed attendees, as if it were the herald of what was to happen afterwards. And in this silence lies the word of a great truth that has been murmuring throughout world history.

One can avert one's gaze, but actually I should turn it to the other place, more to the east. I would like to say, really, no, I have to say it with a kind of inner weeping, the image that then presented itself during the same days in the assembly of the Gossudarstwennaja Duma. There was no silence, everyone was talking. The people of the various party organizations. And they spoke in such a way that these speeches seemed to form the impression that one was dealing with a staged, world-historical theater performance – one would forgive the expression where one does not want to forgive it, because, as I said, one could only look at it with inner weeping. The dizzying intoxication of a false enthusiasm contributed to what was much talked about in the Duma, in contrast to the silence that prevailed further west.

If you no longer want to merely research external appearances, but want to delve into the inner moods of world history, you will want to grasp spiritually what the development of humanity is murmuring, to look for such moods. There is something in this silence that in turn gives confidence in an inner strength, that gives us a sense that spiritual truth and spiritual strength are well preserved in the bosom of Central European culture and that, as it rests there, it must be defended.

This is what lifts the soul above the [pervaded] pain that enters us from death and heavy fate when we survey Europe and the world of the present. And then you realize that it is still alive in the German character today, which in turn was noticed by a non-German mind, Emerson, the great American, when he wanted to describe Goethe and, starting from Goethe, wanted to point out the mission that the Goethe culture in particular has for the future of humanity.

The American Emerson says it from his time, the time of the nineteenth century, but from the time that is also ours:

The world is young, great men [of times past] call to us with friendly voices.

And these are now Emerson's own words:

We must write [holy] scriptures,

• that tell of the eternal -

to reunite heaven and the earthly world. The secret of genius is not to tolerate a lie

— Emerson is referring to the lie that there is no spiritual reality behind the sensual —

to make everything of which we are aware a truth, to inspire faith, determination and trust in the refinement of modern life, in art and science, in books and in people, and to honor every truth by not only recognizing it but also making it a guiding principle for our actions, both at the beginning and at the end, in the middle of the path and for [endless] times.

When spiritual science approaches the contemplation of what is immortal in the human being, it does nothing other than make true what the geniuses guiding humanity have felt to be the task of our time and of the coming time.

And in our fateful days, do we not feel it so clearly from the voices of death and fate that are so close to us every day, do we not feel that a bright sun is emerging from the twilight of the events of the time that surrounds us, that peace for the sake of humanity must develop out of this terrible war? But do we not also feel that all those who have to endure, who have to risk life and limb for the great destiny of our time, that these, by making the sacrifice of their lives, are a warning to those who will live later? Can we not feel today more than ever what significance there is in the union of earthly and spiritual life when we look at the immortal core of man's being, when we see a kind of spiritual detachment, as in death it detaches itself from the physical body. Then we say to ourselves: There, there they go, many of those human beings who still carry unspent human forces within them, who could still have worked, lived, worked, recognized and perceived here on earth for many more decades of their lives. This is possible because they pass through the gate of death, out into the spiritual world, still full of strength. Humanity will recognize that the law of conservation, of non-disappearance of forces, rules in the spiritual world just as it does in the physical world.

Mankind will know that that which apparently is unused, in which so many people must pass through the gate of death in full bloom of life, will not disappear. In the future, people will not only believe, they will know. This world is connected to a spiritual world; and in that spiritual world, all the forces that now had to leave the physical body unused are real. They will radiate on the horizon of earthly activity in future times; they will be real powers for those people who will become aware of the connection between the physical and the spiritual world. Gone will be the gulf that makes one forget what is only seemingly lost. In physical life, one will know that one has been permeated by those who have made the sacrifice of death for the sake of human goals and human progress.

Widows, mothers, fathers, brothers and sisters and all those who are connected with dear dead ones will know themselves to be really concretely connected; and one will become in the future the world in which the human mortal body lives, but also the world in which the human immortal essence lives. And truly, the human being will not become weak in view of the physical world but rather in view of the spiritual one. Just as we only discover the forces that live in iron when we know that it is magnetic, so we will only find true human strength, elevation, enhancement, enrichment of life when we carry the other part of true reality, when we carry the spiritual part of reality within us.

This is what spiritual science wants to gradually bring from the immortal core of man into human culture. In this way, it wants to work in a concrete way for life. So that we can now summarize in the final words what has been developed. I would like to summarize it, somewhat transforming a German poet's words, who was just trying to express his hope for the human world view of the future in such words: spiritual science [wants] to fathom a knowledge of the human being that does not merely extend to the short present between birth and death, but which envisages that which passes from life to life through eternities and elevates that which is thus discovered from spiritual eternity to the throne of truth, where it shall reign for the true liberation of human beings, the souls within human beings.