The Human Soul, Fate and Death

GA 70a — 12 March 1915, Nuremberg

9. What is Immortal about the Human Being?

Dear attendees! If it must always be obvious to the human soul and the human mind, and must belong to its most intimate concerns, to raise the question that is to be the subject of today's reflection in our time, when so many, many people in the prime of have to go through the gate of death at a young age, it must be even more important for the soul to direct one's feelings and thoughts to that which is immortal in the human being.

Of course, in our time, a consideration such as the following is met with prejudice after prejudice, especially those prejudices that come from those who, from their firm ground, as they say, of the scientific world view, to be able to consider this question from the standpoint of the scientific world view, either as something that transcends the limits of human knowledge or as something that is so incomprehensible that everything that can be said about it must be in clear contradiction to the achievements of the scientific way of thinking. If a sentence were to be spoken this evening, dear attendees, which could not stand up to the strictest criticism of a scientific world view, I would rather leave this consideration unsaid.

For what natural science has to say about this question from its point of view must not only be anticipated by the person speaking from the standpoint of the humanities, but it must also be recognized as fully justified if it proves to be so from the standpoint of contemporary science. But those who raise objections to the following kind of presentation from an apparently scientific point of view are always assuming that even in our time, one can still get by with the thoughts and ideas, with the insights, or better said, with the thought patterns of a worldview that is coming to an end, in the face of advanced spiritual science. And it is still extraordinarily difficult for people today to understand that anyone who wants to talk about such questions of spiritual world view must appeal to insights of the human heart, the human soul, the human spirit, that go beyond what natural science is able to produce, that, so to speak, enter the terrain of a completely different field of knowledge, but that can exist alongside and above natural science as fully as natural science. The aim of spiritual science is to allow its insights to flow into the spiritual development of humanity, just as insights that we today call the scientific worldview flowed into this development three to four centuries ago. And just as this scientific world view at that time contradicted the thinking and prejudices of a wide circle and yet found its way to the human sense of truth, so spiritual science will take this path to the human sense of truth even if today it must still meet with objections, and if something like what has to be said today must, quite understandably, be seen by many as a flight of fancy, as a fantasy.

Because that which can give us an answer to the question, “What is it about the human being that is immortal?” can give us an answer, must first be drawn from the hidden depths of the human soul. A research method is needed that is based on intimate inner soul work, that rests deep within the human soul, that reaches for nothing but what is present in every human soul, but what eludes observation and the attention of this human soul in the everyday life of this human soul. That which a person carries through the gateway of death, that which he carries up into a spiritual world in which he finds himself when he has laid aside his body, cannot be grasped with everyday powers, cannot be grasped with the powers of knowledge that one has for everyday life as a way of observing the world. A more intimate inner work of the soul is necessary for this. Already on repeated occasions have I been allowed to speak here in this city about this intimate inner path, the purely spiritual-soul path, which the human being has to go through if he wants to enter the field of spiritual beings and spiritual realities. From a particular point of view, this path of the soul to the spiritual will be illuminated again this evening.

We cannot recognize from the everyday life of the person before us what belongs to the spiritual world. Nor can we recognize this as we can see from the water that the hydrogen, which is quite different from water, is contained in this water. First chemistry must come and separate hydrogen from water by its laboratory method; then one obtains something that can come out of water and which shows quite different properties from those of water. While water is liquid, hydrogen is gaseous; while water extinguishes fire, hydrogen burns. But no one can know what the properties, the characteristics, the essence of hydrogen are just by looking at water. Chemistry must first come and separate hydrogen from water. Likewise, one cannot recognize from the person who stands before us in everyday life what lives in him for eternity, for immortality. The spiritual scientific method must, one might say, come like a spiritual chemistry and separate from the body that which cannot appear in connection with the body. And as fantastic and dreamy, and perhaps even foolish it may still appear to some today, there will be a science of the future that is clear about the fact that there are spiritual-soul methods that bring the spiritual-soul of man, the immortal part of man, out of the connection with the body, so that man can really know: “I now live with my soul outside of my body, I experience myself in the soul outside of the body!”

And only through this research, which leads to an insight whereby the soul experiences itself cognitively outside the body, can one enter the realm in which the soul has its immortal members. But not external methods, not tangible methods, as used by external natural science, can serve to, as it were, chemically separate the soul from the mortal body, if the crude expression may be used. Rather, it is intimate, soulful methods, inner soul experiences. Of these soul methods, these inner soul experiences, we want to present two in particular to our soul today.

The first, it is called, I would like to say with a technical term of spiritual science: the concentration of the life of thought, of feeling, of the life of will impulses. When it is described in this way, this concentration of the life of thought, of feeling, of the life of will impulses seems easy; but one would like to say with Goethe's “Faust”: “But the easy is difficult.” And what I have to describe concerns the soul's experiences that are shattering and have a tremendous inner effect. These experiences of the soul we stand before in recognition with a much greater inner tragedy, I would say, than one can ever stand before external physical death. That is why those who have been close to spiritual science at all times have always emphasized that the path to the spiritual worlds, the path to spiritual knowledge, leads to the gate of death. Simply - but this simplicity must be approached with all intensity, with all energy - simply what one has to do to free the soul from the experience with the body together. A thought, a feeling or a series of thoughts, a series of feelings, one must first fully embrace them with the soul, make them fully present in the soul, then place them at the center of consciousness, so that nothing but these thoughts and feelings arbitrarily placed by our soul at the center of consciousness, so that, as it were, the whole world is forgotten and absorbed around us, with all sensory impressions, with all other feelings and thoughts. And only that which we place at the center of our consciousness through our free will must merge completely, I would say completely, with the soul and its powers; the soul must know itself to be completely one with that which it thus places at the center of consciousness.

This is a task for a long, long time. Depending on the person's aptitude for it, it may take weeks, months, years. Again and again, even if it only takes minutes during the day, it takes a long time to evoke in the soul that inner ability to reject all other thoughts and feelings, all other feelings and desires, and to place only a certain kind of thought at the center of consciousness. It does not matter so much what the content of the thoughts is, but rather that they place a clearly comprehensible sensation or thought at the center of our consciousness in such a way that we actually live only in what we think or feel, that we forget ourselves in doing so, that we know ourselves to be completely one with it. In this way, we concentrate all the powers of our soul on this single sensation, this single thought. At first, however, we must be clear in our own minds that, as I said, this seems easy; “but the easy is difficult.” Many things are involved when we are practising concentration of thought. Above all, it is essential that the thought we place at the center of our consciousness is one that we can fully comprehend. With most of the thoughts we have, all kinds of inner sympathies and antipathies, all kinds of feelings and memories play a role. They color our thoughts so that we usually do not even know what is going on in our soul when we have a thought in everyday life and concentrate on it.

Of course, anyone working in the field of psychiatry or psychology or modern science today has a cheap objection to all this. He will say: So if the spiritual researcher concentrates on a thought, he cannot possibly know everything that comes up in this thought from the subconscious depths of his soul and how he then becomes absorbed in self-suggestion and fantasies. Of course, it is quite understandable that such objections are raised from a scientific point of view; and they appear to be fully justified in a certain way, these objections, and the spiritual researcher can well see that they must be raised. But usually what must be observed in all these things is not observed. You will find a careful compilation of the details in the two books: “How to Know Higher Worlds?” and in my “Occult Science”. One passes by what is required there, that one should pay full attention to it. What matters is to place at the center of one's entire soul life a thought, a feeling that can be easily surveyed, that cannot remind us of anything, that cannot evoke anything from the subconscious depths of the soul. Therefore, it is even better not to place in the center of one's consciousness an idea taken from some external reality, an idea that depicts something, but rather an idea that is purely allegorical, purely symbolic, where it is only important that we concentrate the soul forces, that we focus all the work of the soul forces on detaching ourselves from everything else in order to concentrate purely on this one point.

I will give a very simple example: when someone becomes absorbed in the thought:

“In the bright light, the clear truth of the world takes effect,” or: “In the bright light, the clear truth of the world lives.” When someone forms such a sentence, anyone who is grounded in external, sensual materialism can of course say: Yes, such a sentence is pure daydreaming, it means nothing, it does not reflect reality. But that is not the point. The important thing is what one does when thinking and feeling such a sentence, what the soul does. And then, when one either meditates for a long time on such a sentence or when one alternates with such a sentence with others, then one has a very significant inner experience, an experience of which the one who has gone through it fully knows that it represents something so real in relation to the human soul as only any chemical or physical method represents something real in relation to external, sensual things. One comes to experience, by concentrating on a particular content of consciousness, one comes to feel more and more strongly those soul forces that one can call the imaginative, the thinking soul forces. In a sense, by identifying with it, one feels more and more inwardly stronger and stronger, and while outwardly one is at rest with regard to the whole world with one's senses, with the outward mind, inwardly one feels strengthened. In deep subsoil, one feels something welling up that lies hidden in the soul, that one has not observed, but of which one is now becoming aware in direct experience.

And by feeling this experience more and more strongly and more and more brightly, one comes to a certain point. We will see in a moment that this point should not actually be fully reached by a regular spiritual development, as I will describe in a moment, but has to be modified by something else. But if you would concentrate more and more, would execute more and more and more everything that is in the soul, on the one chosen, then you would finally, by feeling your inner activity swelling more and more, you would come to feel that power as if it were paralyzing itself, as if it were fading away. It is a momentous experience to which one comes, an experience that represents an infinitely unforgettable inner experience for the one who undergoes it. Because he has a very specific inner experience in the process, the experience that he feels: Now is the moment when, after concentrating all the powers of the soul, after gathering together everything that is otherwise hidden in the soul, where you have allowed it to flow into your power of thought, into your power of imagination, and where it flows out of you – but what you have brought up from the depths of your soul flows out into the world. It withdraws from you, it leaves your body, it flees you!

And one would not come along now, one would feel like the soul has been taken out of one's body, and this soul united with the general spirit that blows and works through the world. One would feel estranged from oneself. Therefore, the exercise that is implied by this must be modified by another, which must proceed simultaneously with it. And anyone who follows the path of spiritual research as I have described it in my book “How to Know Higher Worlds” receives the individual rules in such a way that what I have just described is actually modified, so that we do not feel as if the best part of ourselves has been taken from us. So something else has to happen. The first thing that separates the soul from the body was the concentration of thought, the intensification of the life of thought. Through this intensification of the life of thought, we are, as it were, snatched from ourselves. The second thing is a contradiction to that; it is something opposite, the other pole, but life proceeds polarly, it proceeds in such a way that it passes through opposites. Therefore, if one has knowledge, knowledge that should not be knowledge in abstract terms, but knowledge of the laws of nature, of life, then one must move through contradictions.

The second is what could be called a complete surrender of the will to the ruling, present, and active world powers. So that, as it were, just as we bring our sensory perception to a standstill in the first, we must bring every inner stubborn will to a standstill in the second. Now there is a certain means by which one can develop the strength within oneself to make one's own will truly radically subject to the general weaving of the world. This is when one acquires a completely new attitude towards what we call our destiny. How do we experience our destiny in our ordinary existence? Well, we experience our destiny in such a way that we regard what happens to us as fate in good and evil as something that happens to us, that we encounter it with sympathy or antipathy, so that we really see what is, so to speak, what befalls us, what we incur, we see as something that comes to us; we stand outside of it, we see ourselves as the I-, the self-being, on which fate has an effect, to which it comes.

Even in ordinary life, one can see through truly rational reflection that we basically cannot relate to fate at all. If you consider what you are at a particular point in time in your later experience, you will say to yourself: what you are there, what you experience in your inner being, what you can do and are capable of, is inconceivable without the ordinary fate of life between birth and death. Just think about it carefully. Everything we are able to do in the present moment, if we trace it back to our ordinary life between birth and death, we have to admit: what we are able to do now is connected to something we have gone through earlier. The fact that I am able to do something now may be connected to the fact that the person who was responsible for my education once brought me into this or that sphere. What happened to me back then united with me, became strength in me; now it is my ability. Whenever you really think deeply, “What am I actually, what is there in me?” you will see that what is in me or in other people at the present moment is in every person, woven together out of destiny. And if you follow this thought properly, one might say in a soulful way, you come to understand how you must, as it were, grow ever more together with your destiny, how you must recognize what you call your self as a web of destiny. What one otherwise speaks of as a coincidence is now found within oneself, interwoven within oneself; one finds oneself as a result of fate. One grows together with fate, and in this way one grows together to the extent that one identifies with it.

As one must say with the earlier path, the earlier means of spiritual research: you identify with a thought, with a feeling, so now you must recognize yourself as identical with your destiny through the thing itself, through the circumstances themselves. What I am saying now must not remain only theoretical, it must not be only an abstract consideration, but it must be lived through inwardly, feelingly; it must permeate all the fibers of our soul. Then we feel how we gradually see our will streaming out into our destiny, and we see how we say to ourselves: 'You have so far regarded something as a twist of fate, but it was you yourself. That which is in you has brought this twist of fate upon you, otherwise you would not be this being, this I.

In essence, when you meditate on your destiny for weeks, months or years, depending on your disposition, you will experience an emotional surrender to your destiny. You learn to recognize that you have to go out of yourself from the little room in which you have felt locked up. One learns to flow with the stream of one's destiny. When one thus recognizes how the self, the I, actually lives outside, how in what we call 'happens' to us, in truth our will rests, how the I flows along in destiny, then this will is torn out of us again as we surrender ourselves to our destiny. And that is the second thing. But it must be achieved, it must be achieved in an inner emotional and mental experience. It must fill the whole person, that is, it must be emotionally surrendered to fate. Then one feels how one grows together with fate and at the same time with spiritually effective world forces that permeate and interweave the external world. What seems to flee from us in the concentration of thought, what seems to take away our selfhood, is then followed by - that is, the thought is followed by - an element of will, an emotional element of will. While we feel the thought flowing out of our head in the way indicated earlier, we then feel something following from our whole being. We sacrifice the will to the thought. And then, the soul, the thinking, the feeling, the sensing, the willing steps forth out of the thought, and we go with it.

What I have described is a real process, a real emergence of the soul from the physical shell. This is something that can be experienced experimentally just as truly and intensely and really, one might say, as the emergence of hydrogen from water, the detachment of hydrogen from water. It is like the detachment of the soul from the physical, which then remains behind, so that the physical with all its outer experiences becomes an external object; the soul has stepped out of the body. It then looks at its body, which it has left, as one otherwise looks at the table or the chair in the sensory world.

And what is important is that it does not merely experience itself in the abstract, but as truly as it develops an inner experience within the body, so truly it develops an inner experience outside the body, which it knows is a spiritual-soul experience. The soul experiences itself fully in the inner experience. And truly, just as people did not know for a long time that oxygen could be separated from hydrogen, but had to learn how to do it, so the spiritual culture of humanity will learn that the spiritual-soul can be separated from the physical, however baroque, foolish, and foolish it may still seem to present-day humanity.

A true spiritual science is that which the future will have - and through which the future of the human soul will bring that knowledge which the human soul needs when the powers that have been there from time immemorial have matured in it for such things. We await such a time. Only he can deny it who misjudges the signs of the time, who does not know the deepest longings that are already living consciously in numerous souls today, unconsciously in others, and that will take hold of all mankind: the longing to know about the spiritual. But then, when the soul grasps itself in real bodiless experience, then it becomes acquainted with powers within itself, which one does not have in everyday life, which one cannot unfold in the body. One power will be described in the following way.

When we live our everyday lives, we come, as the soul develops the power of imagination, feeling and will - we come in everyday experience to what is ultimately called memory. And anyone who reflects a little on memory knows what this memory means for the whole cohesive being of the human being. We could not develop self-awareness if we did not remember the experiences we have gone through since a certain point in time after birth. It is only because the stream of memories does not break off, because we know that it was we who have lived through this stream, that we are a self, a self. Even worldviews can only work with memories that the soul stores, and can then bring these memories into a harmonious or logical context, so that we can understand what the soul has before it in everyday life as its final experience, as a memory. So what is memory based on? Well, from an external point of view, we can say that when we go through experiences, we form ideas, we feel this or that about the experiences. Then an image remains with us, which is stored in the soul, and when we have long since moved beyond the experience, we know that we can look back on the image in our inner experience; the experience is not there, only the inner image is there, something is there that our soul is just weaving. In order to approach this image, to approach the essence of memory in general, we can now consider the following, which I can only outline in rough strokes, as if with charcoal, and which you can then follow in detail in spiritual science literature.

If we want to approach this memory, we find that in the first period of life after birth, after entering the world, this memory is not yet alive. This memory only occurs in the earliest childhood; up to a certain point of the earliest childhood, we remember later. What is before that must be reported to us by our surroundings, but we do not remember back. What is the basis for remembering back? It is based on certain powers that the soul can use to retain images, powers that enable the soul to store these images within itself. These powers were already there before memory was there; they were already present immediately after birth, but they had a different task then. They had the task of still working on the delicate organs of the human being, on the nervous system and the brain of the human being; on the nervous system and brain they have to work plastically. They were still formative forces of the human organism, of that which is still soft, so to speak - roughly speaking, but it means a reality - which must first be formed so that the human being is this particular human being. As formative forces, these still run into the bodily organization in early childhood.

And when this organization has hardened – again, this is figuratively speaking – so much so that these formative forces can no longer flow into the physical, then the physical works in such a way that these formative forces do not flow into it, but are reflected back from the physical into the soul. The body acts like a mirror. And what we then experience in our soul, especially what is stored in our memories, are mirror images reflected back from our bodily life. In truth, we remember because our body is a mirroring apparatus. Science will fully understand this when it continues on the paths on which all this is hinted at. Then it will also see through the contradictions it raises when such things are presented. Just as if there were one mirror hanging on the wall after the other and we walked past, we would only see ourselves when we stood in front of the mirrors. The mirror reflects our own image. This is how it is with our inner soul experience. The body is a mirroring apparatus; it reflects what the soul experiences. Through this, the soul itself experiences what were previously formative forces in the most tender childhood, what was used, so to speak, to build the mirror in the first place.

A further step is this: Imagine the following – I present it to you as a comparison, but it means something very real. Imagine that you are standing in front of a mirror that allows you to see yourself, to see what you yourself send to the mirror as a ray of light. You see yourself because the mirror reflects your physical image. In the same way, your body reflects that which is in the soul. But now imagine that you acquire the power – and this takes place in the soul – to not need a mirror. You would develop such great strength that you would, as it were, look into space at that which the mirror otherwise reflects as your own image. But this happens through the soul exercises that I mentioned: concentration of thought, immersion in the will, surrender to the order of the world, you could also say.

In this way the soul's powers are so strengthened that what would otherwise be reflected back from the body, which is only a mirror image, emerges as one's own inner, soul experience, that it becomes inwardly alive through the soul's own power. Therefore, what the spiritual researcher experiences inwardly when he has separated his soul from his body is a more highly developed, active act of remembering. While in ordinary life we only go as far as memory, through which we are dependent on the reflection of the body, the exercises indicated now give us the ability to develop inner soul forces in order to make our soul's inner life actively engaged, so that it radiates an inner reality.

When the soul reaches the point where it creates its inner powers, as it were, but in truth draws them from the deepest part of its being, then it will notice that not only does it unfold these powers, but that with the unfolding of these powers, with the procurement of the inner mirror image, so to speak, something else takes place: what we can call perception, direct grasping of a spiritual world. However, this perception is quite different from the perception of the external, sensual reality. When we perceive the external-sensual reality, we look at the objects with our eyes, we listen to the sounds with our ears, and touch the external objects with our hands. There is the object that we approach, which has an effect on us from the outside. But when we develop what I have described as the inner powers of the soul, then something really comes to life, so that the soul knows itself outside the body in a system of inner forces. Then what is spiritual essence, spiritual reality, flows into these forces.

I will use another comparison: when I grasp this corner here with my hand, through sensory perception, the corner is outside of me; the corner touches my hand from the outside. It is not like that in spiritual perception. Rather, if this were a soul force, as the hand is now, when I do not let it work, the spiritual flows into the hand from behind, as it were. While the physical touches things from the outside, the spiritual does not touch from the outside; the spiritual flows into the soul forces, so that we have to acquire completely new concepts if we want to speak of this spiritual recognition and perception. We perceive external things; in order to enter into a relationship with the spiritual, it is necessary that we develop forces into which this spiritual world flows. That is to say, we must say: We experience the great and powerful through soul development, that the spiritual world perceives us, that we become something like a thought, like a will impulse of higher spiritual beings that invisibly and supersensibly stand above us. The spiritual researcher must speak of these spiritual beings, which are invisible and supersensible to the just-discussed powers of knowledge of the soul, in the same way that the natural scientist speaks of the mineral, plant, and animal kingdoms, and the physical human kingdom as the four natural kingdoms that are outside of us. And just as we say when we are confronted with these beings of the four kingdoms: we perceive, we reflect on these entities, they are outside, and we form sensory images of them, so we must say: by going out of our body with our soul we ourselves become - but in a much higher, in an inner liveliness and essentiality - we ourselves become thoughts, feelings, and volitional impulses of the higher spiritual beings; we are perceived, we experience ourselves being perceived by the higher spiritual beings.

From this you can see, dear reader, that anyone approaching the question, “What is immortal about the human being?” cannot approach the question as people still so often do today. They approach such a question and say: Well, I have acquired this or that concept. How can one prove to me the immortality of the soul?

Yes, with these concepts, which one has acquired in the outer life and in science, which one calls today, one cannot prove it; because these concepts relate to what the soul experiences in everyday life and what is only an inner reflection. Just as the reflection does not remain when the mirror is no longer there, so what the soul thinks, feels and wills in everyday life does not remain, because it is only a reflection of the body; even the memory in which it is stored up is a reflection of the soul. Anyone who wants to prove the immortality of the soul through thinking, feeling and willing is on the same path as someone who wants to prove the permanence of the mirror image from the picture in the mirror. Everything that the mirror image is must be admitted to the natural scientist, and nothing else is presented to him. All that is called “soul” in ordinary life does not pass through the portal of death, but it contains something, the soul contains something - for what spiritual science brings up is the soul – that passes through the gate of death in such a way that it can only be grasped in terms of ideas that one does not have if one does not develop them first.

While for ordinary experience one must say that the human soul perceives, for spiritual experience one must say: the soul is perceived by higher beings. While in sensory experience one perceives oneself, for spiritual experience one must say: after death, the human being is received by the higher spiritual beings. When a person incorporates thoughts of external natural things into his soul, then the entity that rules over him supersensibly incorporates itself into him; he is remembered, he is carried away into the spiritual world. That is why it is so difficult to answer the question, “What is immortal about the human being?” if you want to answer it with the ordinary concepts of the day, which do not apply to it at all.

And all philosophers who have tried to approach the immortality of the human soul, to answer the question of the immortality of the soul, have always come back to saying: there must be something fine and substantial that goes beyond death. We have seen, dear attendees, that nothing of the substantial remains, but that the soul's powers are themselves a highly developed memory life, that it is a being perceived, a feeling of security in the spiritual world. They all know that such processes in the life of the senses even have their symbols, their analogies. When you push a billiard ball against another, the physicist says: the state of motion of the first ball goes over into the second. What has gone from one ball to the other? It is not the substance of the first that has gone over into the second, but only the force goes over.

Those who have thought about the immortality of the soul have always thought of it as something that is in the ordinary life and passes through the gate of death; while what passes through the gate of death must first be sought, because it lies so deeply hidden in the soul that it is not noticed at all, that attention is not focused on it in ordinary life; but it is there after all. And when someone who has so truly, chemically, as it were, separated the soul and spirit from the body, then experiences this soul and spirit as it is sheltered in a supersensible world of spiritual beings that stands above it, then he also knows that in this of the soul - just as hydrogen is hidden in water - that in this he has something that works in secret, so to speak between the lines of life; which absorbs the finest powers of the soul, of experience, of the moral abilities of the human being, just as the small plant germ absorbs the forces from the whole plant in order to concentrate them. And after withering, after the leaves wither and the blossom dies, the plant as a small germ carries over what lived in the previous plant, carries over into the following plant what the plant has saved as a germ - so it is in the human soul. If you distill it out in this way, you realize that in every moment of life, waking and sleeping, this human soul works in the depths of everyday life, working out everything we acquire in the way of abilities , is permeated, deeply permeated, by what it has done in the way of right and wrong, beauty and ugliness. It carries this within itself, just as the germ of a plant carries within itself the germ of the whole new plant.

And then we know that what lives so hidden in the soul goes through a life between death and a new birth, and then returns to earthly life. In this life between death and a new birth, the human being gathers spiritual forces from a spiritual world, but these become formative forces so that, through a new birth, he can unite with what he has been given by his father and mother and his line of ancestors, in order to give himself a new inner soul life when it has solidified to the point that it can reflect. Thus the human soul does not live through one earth life, but successive earth lives.

Thus the complete life on earth consists of a succession of lives that take place between birth and death, and of lives between death and a new birth that are longer than the lives on earth in which the soul dwells in purely spiritual spheres, where it is active and engaged, where it is just as much at one with the spiritual world as it is with the physical world here. That the human soul experiences repeated lives on earth in its universal existence, and that each subsequent life on earth is the effect of previous lives on earth, is what spiritual science will gradually incorporate into the spiritual culture of humanity, just as the Copernican world view has been incorporated into external culture. Of course, it is still the case today that people often say: Yes, what you are telling me, contradicts what the five senses consider to be true! Yes, now, man has even had to experience quite different things that contradict his five senses. For thousands of years, man has believed according to his five senses that the sun and the starry sky move around the earth. That it is the other way around, that the earth moves around the sun, he had to believe despite the contradiction of his five senses. So what must now contradict the five senses, that man goes through repeated earth lives, will also enter into people's thinking habits. But then man will speak out of a real science about what is immortal in the human being. He will seek this immortal, so to speak, between the lines of ordinary experiences, will know within himself an inner working being, which is sheltered in a spiritual world, just as the thinking mind shelters the sensual outer world in our ideas and thoughts and feelings. Then the human being will know himself connected with his eternal, his immortal, connected with the spiritual world. Such is the destiny of human development. And we may truly remember this in our time, in this time of difficult but also glorious trials; we may remember how German intellectual life in particular – you will not find it incongruous if I mention this in the last part of my discussion – how German intellectual life in particular has been working for a long time to gain such a science.

We need only remember Lessing, the great standard-bearer of modern German intellectual life, and the store of enlightening ideas for him and for humanity that he has gathered in his soul. He summarized them, as if in a testament, in his beautiful essay “The Education of the Human Race.” Of course, many people, especially the very clever ones, say today: Well, Lessing! He wrote and said a lot throughout his life, then he grew old, his mental powers weakened, and then he also wrote such complicated stuff, where he also fought for something like the doctrine of repeated lives on earth, of intermediate lives between death and a new birth in the spiritual world! People consider it a crazy idea, and they forgive the great minds if they also come to such complicated ideas, which one does not see as such in ordinary life, which one can grasp with the five senses. But Lessing said something very significant at the end of his work: 'There have always been people in the most ancient times who, through ancient clairvoyance, through ancient abilities of the human soul that are still closer to certain powers of the spiritual world, have known something about repeated earthly lives in primeval times. And Lessing says: “Should that which the human soul has arrived at through original powers, what it has achieved before it was corrupted by the sophistries of school, should that, precisely that, be untrue?”

Lessing was right. Spiritual science will show humanity that what was, so to speak, at a primitive stage of development will, at the highest stage, come to a truly developed scientific knowledge, if, that is, science will be so far advanced that it not only but also to methods of spiritual-soul experimentation, as has just been described as a kind of spiritual chemistry. And it is precisely German spiritual life that has always pointed to this intimacy of the soul life, through which the soul comes beyond itself into a higher life of feeling, which is not a mere life of memory but an immersion into spiritual reality. A higher life of thought, a higher life of feeling, a higher life of will. To achieve this, to strengthen the soul's powers so that it can emerge from its body, has always been the goal of German spiritual life; and this is one of the seeds of German spiritual life that I referred to yesterday, which still have to blossom and bear fruit in this German spiritual life.

We see, for example, how very remarkably inward-looking German minds, such as the quite wonderful Novalis, how these German minds, through their inner, living contemplation, their contemplative experience of their soul, grasp this soul and receive it in direct contemplation in such a way that they know: This can pass through the gate of death as the immortality of the soul; and then they arrive at concepts that are foolish for ordinary experience, but which, because they do not fit ordinary experience, are precisely suited for an experience that goes beyond ordinary experience. Those who want to find only the usual concepts in spiritual science cannot achieve this. This spiritual science requires an inner mobility, an elasticity of mind, so that one can arrive at new concepts. Most people want to spare themselves this out of inner laziness. They believe that the spiritual world must be something like a finer copy of the sensual world; they imagine the spiritual world to be material again, substantial. But if you experience the world spiritually, nothing of what you are accustomed to remains in it; instead, something completely new awakens that you have not yet known, but with which you must enrich your soul in order to experience within yourself what is immortal in the human soul.

When speaking of the spiritual world, to which the soul belongs in the immortal, such people must first form the words, the concepts. That is why I have to apologize to you, so to speak, for today's lecture. In a lecture like this, where one speaks of the spiritual world in terms that are shaped for ordinary life, one has to struggle with words. One has to claim that when formulating words that go beyond ordinary words, one resorts to words that are uncomfortable for those who want to cling to the ordinary. Time and again, critics come along and say: What you said, that doesn't even exist. I know that. I know, well, of course, these gentlemen know a lot, an infinite amount, but when they apply their old concepts to something that must have completely new concepts, then their criticism is not appropriate for what they want to characterize. But in German intellectual life we have minds – Novalis is one of them – that know how to speak in a language that is indeed the German language, but is nevertheless like something, like a wonderfully lively essence that is distilled from the German language to show something that is as real as the sensory world, which is the reality into which the soul passes when it passes through the gate of death. What such people say can have an effect on those who are receptive to it.

And now I will give you a remarkable example; it is too beautiful for me to withhold from you how Novalis worked. I am deliberately seeking to cite his influence on a Belgian-French poet-philosopher, a Belgian-French poet-philosopher who studied Novalis, who, as he claims, immersed himself completely in this Novalis, who gained an impression that he describes in the following way.

I must say, before I present this, that yes, another, as you will soon hear, perhaps another Belgian-French poet-philosopher, Maurice Maeterlinck, immediately after the outbreak of the war and again and again, found particular abusive words about the German “barbarians” and went on a rampage against this “barbaric culture”. That is Maurice Maeterlinck, for whose fame in the world German intellectual life has done more than French intellectual life. Well, but gratitude is not something that needs to be demanded in this day and age. He really did insult and revile these German “barbarians” very much, following the example of the others I mentioned yesterday.

In contrast to this, there is another Belgian-French poet-philosopher, Novalis, who allowed himself to be influenced by one of the most German of German poet-philosophers, with all that he had to say about what is immortal in the human being, and he then talks about this influence. He cannot but say: When one reads Sophocles or Shakespeare in this way, when one sees what Sophocles' figures, what Shakespeare's characters, what Hamlet even experience, then what these people do and suffer is entirely earthly; it only interests the earthly human being. But, says the Belgian-French poet-philosopher, if a spirit from another planet or an English being – forgive the expression, I mean a being that is an angel, says the Belgian-French poet; you cannot refer to Goethe's words in “Faust”, which are somewhat ambiguous : “They lisp English when they lie,” that is inserted in parentheses. This Belgian-French poet-philosopher says: If a spirit descended from other worlds, it would not be able to relate to the experiences of the characters of Sophocles and Shakespeare; these are only earthly matters.

But in Novalis, this Belgian-French poet-philosopher finds a soul that has something to experience, something to say, that would interest even spirits who would one day descend from the universe to visit the earth because Novalis speaks of the eternal in the human soul, which must interest not only the human souls, insofar as they live in the body, but must also interest that which also belongs to the whole extra-terrestrial world. And in beautiful words, this Belgian-French poet-philosopher speaks of what he experienced in Novalis, the German poet-philosopher:

But if he needed other proof, it would lead him among those whose works almost stir to silence.

He means that the ordinary language of the day is for what is transitory, but what is immortal, one could say, one should actually remain silent about it or find another language.

She would open the gate of the realm where some loved her for her own sake, without worrying about the small gestures of her body. They would climb together to the lonely plateaus where consciousness rises [one step] and where all those who are restless about themselves [feel] attentively survey the immense ring that connects the world of appearances to our higher worlds. She would go with him to the borders of humanity; for at the point where man seems to end, he probably only begins, and his most essential and inexhaustible parts are only in the invisible, where he must be constantly on his guard. On these heights alone are thoughts that the soul can approve of, and images that resemble her and are as commanding as she is. There, humanity has ruled for a moment, and these dimly lit peaks are perhaps the only lights that announce the earth in the spirit realm. Their reflection truly has the color of our soul. We feel that the passions of the mind and body would resemble the tolling of bells in the eyes of a foreign reason; but the people I am talking about have come out of the little village of passions in their works and said things that are also of value to those who do not belong to the earthly community.

Such are the words of the Franco-Belgian poet-philosopher. If he had not heard Maurice Maeterlinck railing against the “barbarians” [what emerged from “barbarism”], as the Franco-Belgian poet-philosopher spoke of, as I read to you, he would not say to Maurice Maeterlinck:

In truth, it is difficult to question one's soul and to discern its weak, childish voice amidst the useless clamor that surrounds it.

No doubt the Franco-Belgian poet-philosopher I have been reading to you would call such a useless barker a “barbarian babbler” with his “Barbaric Chat”. Yes, but there is a catch, because what I said earlier was perhaps very justified, because the words are from Maurice Maeterlinck himself - albeit written before the outbreak of the war!

These are the things that we experience today; that is why I said yesterday: What we are experiencing in the world today is a characteristic chapter of psychiatry. For what follows from the incredibly paradoxical fact that the same Maurice Maeterlinck utters these words about the German Novalis – and later reviles and curses the entire German people as a “barbarian people”? What follows from the fact that what he said years ago and what I have read to you is deeply false and dishonest? That is the peculiar thing about our present culture, dear honored attendees, that because this culture is so full, so to speak, of what has already been stored up through language and through appearances, the untrue soul can also produce very beautiful words, beautiful-sounding words, but words that can be inwardly false. But it is precisely one of the paths of the soul that leads to the spirit in the way I have described, that everything the soul brings forth, goes through, is true in the deepest inner being, shattering true.

If only something is a mere phrase, only something is false in the soul on the way into the spiritual world, then one cannot find this way into the spiritual world. Following the one who said, “I am the way, the truth, and the life,” that is, the connection of the three, such a way of imitating the one who said this, is this way of truth. And if he is only a phrase, however beautiful a phrase may sound, he will not find the truth; he will only find the great deception, which can also penetrate into the soul, where the soul wants to find that with which it is connected as with its immortal part. Inner truth alone brings the soul into connection with that which, as the Divine, permeates and permeates the world.

And when, again, out of German spiritual life, Master Eckhart the philosopher speaks beautifully and profoundly of the fact that there is a spark in the mind, which ignites that which can live from the divine in the individual can live, so one must say that the human soul can only truly experience what, like a spark in the mind, is to be ignited if it is deeply true to itself.

However, this requires self-knowledge. But this self-knowledge is difficult to achieve in life. What we achieve – what I have explained – is that the human being with his soul and spirit emerges from the physical, and then he has his ordinary earthly self before him, as he otherwise has external things before him. But he must be able to see his earthly self and, before he begins this spiritual path, must be able to acquire self-knowledge as an inner habit.

But just how difficult it is can be seen from the following comparative example: Dr. Ernst Mach, a very famous contemporary Viennese professor, formerly of Prague, who wrote various books that are highly esteemed today, gave a sample on the third page of his book 'Analysis of Sensations' of how difficult it is to arrive at self-knowledge, even in terms of physical form. He recounts: “As a young man, I once saw a face in profile in a shop window while I was crossing the street. There were two mirrors facing each other. I thought: What kind of person am I encountering with a repulsive, even revolting face; and I was not a little surprised when I discovered that it was my own image in front of me, revealed to me by the way the mirrors were arranged.” And as a second example, the same professor tells the same story on page three of his book: ”Once, when I was quite tired from a journey, I got on a bus. I saw a man getting on from the other side, and I thought,” he says, he admits it, he is completely honest, ‘what a run-down, unpleasant schoolmaster is getting on there. And again I saw: it was me.’ And he adds: ‘So I knew the habitus of the species better than my own.’

A lady who had heard this after I had said it in other lectures, related an example of such a lack of self-awareness in relation to her appearance, which she had experienced with a relative. She went into a restaurant in a strange city. She didn't really know her way around. As she walked towards the wall, she saw a lady coming towards her from the other side. “Well, what kind of ugly country girl is that?” she thought. She was a very elegant city woman. It was only when she spoke to the lady and received no answer that she recognized herself.

These are examples that I would say are taken from the coarsest external sensuality. But even if a person has so little insight into his external physical sensuality, he has even less insight into the soul in ordinary life. But this possibility of looking at oneself, of knowing oneself as an external object, is part of the real grasp of what is immortal in the human being.

And the one who really immerses himself in the spiritual world and can then also follow what is real in this spiritual world, can follow - I say this without prejudice - the human being not only in his life between birth and death, but beyond death, who knows that when he communes with his soul, the soul looks back at death, and precisely by looking back, it looks back at itself in self-recognition, at what one has experienced between birth and death. Self-recognition is, as it were, the eye of the immortal spirit. Through self-knowledge, we must see the whole spiritual world in the time we live through spiritually between death and a new birth. All this is really so that we can say: the seeds that must come to further development and unfolding in the course of time are contained in German spiritual life, which must be grasped in a living way. Then real knowledge, real spiritual understanding, will emerge from this German spiritual life in the future.

If you look at the spiritual cultural history of modern times a little, you might think that it is leading you to the conclusion that the German spirit, with its sustaining power, is called upon to develop its idealism, which it has developed in its great philosophers, into spiritualism, into spiritual knowledge, into spiritual experience, into scientific knowledge. One is tempted to say that the German spirit was pressed, suppressed and suppressed by the foreign spirit. We see how Goethe, who is rooted entirely in the German spirit, sighs under what is coming over from France, especially in his time.

While the German mind is actually designed to recognize more and more intimately the spirit that pervades and permeates the world, the French mind is more designed to grasp everything that can be grasped by the intellect, to rationalize. This can even be seen in the peculiarity of French poetry. Reason, however, which is tied to the brain, is basically only capable of developing materialism. Therefore, materialism is basically a genuine French product, and only through the influence of French intellectual life on German intellectual life was what must emerge from the living forces that lie precisely in the German character, in the German spirit, overshadowed. Materialism is not in the German character when it is captured in its deepest intimate interior. This inner Frenchness, this inner materialism, must also be defeated by the German spirit in the course of time.

And if we follow a characteristic phenomenon of the development of world view in the British Isles, especially in terms of the leading philosophy there, we can summarize it by saying that the British philosopher – and this can can prove this in detail everywhere - goes back to what Locke, Hobbes and so on went back to: only to accept what the senses see and what is combined from that, and to make the intellect only a servant of sensory perception. This leads to external empiricism or to skepticism, to doubtfulness. But this has also deeply influenced the German mind, and that is also something from which it must free itself. We are, after all, experiencing some things in our time just below the surface of our soul's consciousness.

While England, with its world view, was called upon to swear by mere sensory appearances, and France was called upon to cultivate man from rationalism, from the intellect, to the point of the sentence “Man as a machine”, the German spirit - after emancipating itself from France - cultivated idealism, which is the predecessor of spiritualism, of the actual science of the spirit. Idealism does not seek to remain bound to materialism, which is tied only to the intellect; it does not seek to remain bound to the empiricism of Englishness, which wants to hold only to the senses, nor to the rationalism of Frenchness, but seeks to grasp what lives in the soul. Yesterday I showed this in the figure of Fichte. But by liberating it from foreign influences, by the German placing himself spiritually on his own, German idealism will incorporate the living spirit-knowledge of the culture of the future.

If one still endeavors to do something for this living spirit-knowledge today, one still encounters a great deal of resistance for the time being. If I may mention this here in a personal capacity: since the 1980s, I have been striving to establish Goethe's theory of colours, to establish the depth of this theory of colours, in the face of materialistic English Newtonian physics, in which the spiritual grasp of the physical is also real. It is easy to understand why physics objects to Goethe's theory of colors. All the objections can be listed. But Goethe's theory of colors is itself a scientific product that vividly penetrates into the physical reality of colors. And as spiritual knowledge takes hold of human culture, it will be recognized how infinitely superior this theory of colors is to the English one. Today, however, we are still talking to deaf ears; the relevant writings are not yet being read – or only by a small circle. But it has always been that way.

Goethe has established a natural – from what lay in German idealism as the ancestor of real spiritual science – a world view of development, how living beings develop. I have been writing about this since the 1880s in order to show how this Goethean theory of development is a spiritual view. This is the basis for Goethe being able to make real what he was able to emphasize to Schiller, namely that he already sees the idea in reality. But even here, one is preaching to deaf ears; because the other is more convenient. This doctrine of Goethe's was inconvenient for humanity to accept. And when Darwin came along and presented all of this in a more convenient way, in an external-sensory view, in a way that suits the English mind so well, it was accepted, it flooded the world; and the difficult, inconvenient, but spiritual doctrine of Goethe, people passed by. When Darwin presented it in a convenient way, the theory of evolution, it was accepted.

And another example was shown by the great philosopher Hegel, who also has a lot to do with this city. He showed how the German astronomical philosopher, philosophical astronomer, to whom science owes so much, Johannes Kepler, has achieved great things in terms of understanding the world's context. Yes, indeed, Kepler was the subject of the famous epigram by Kästner; because he saw through the course of the stars, because he saw through all of this and formulated it in wonderful formulas, he had to live a life of which the epigrammist [Kästner] says:

So high
had no mortal yet ascended
As Kepler ascended – and died of starvation.
He knew only how to amuse the minds,
Therefore the bodies left him without bread.

But Hegel goes further and shows that the famous Newtonian gravitation theory, on which every physicist says modern physics is based, is nothing more than what the Swabian Kepler achieved, expressed in mathematical formulas. The real thing is Kepler's. Speaking of the legitimacy of Newtonianism is to stand before a historical lie.

The German spirit will have to stand on its own. This will stand out from the many sad but also glorious events of our time as a marker of the historical development of humanity. However, what has worked so thoroughly from the west and northwest on human souls in such a way as to make the path I have described, the path into the spiritual world, more difficult for them, has done so.

Now I will say something, forgive me, that many will consider very stupid; but I know that it is the truth. Perhaps the time will come when this truth can be shown in detail. All that is needed is time. I can only put it this way: the way has been thoroughly blocked for souls from childhood on – now it has already improved, but it still has to improve more and more – the way has been thoroughly blocked for souls, the possibility to freely unfold in the powers that were indicated in order to do the way into the spiritual world. As a result, the path has been laid – I say this truthfully, not out of mere national chauvinism, but out of psychological, cultural-historical knowledge – the path has been laid because the poison of Robinson Crusoe by Defoe 's poison still poisons and contaminates the lives of many boys and girls; and in this lies that which takes root in the soul in order to imbue it with the empiricism of Englishness.

Many, many inner victories, victories that are in the interest of German culture, will still have to be fought. But what is happening now is the great, bloody, but also glorious harbinger. And those who now go through the gate of death as heroic souls – the spiritual scientist in particular must point this out, because he knows how souls pass through death as realities, and because he knows how those who are dead continue to live in life only in a different form – they will be among us in a high sense with their unspent powers. For in their soul-spiritual there is something that can still do so for decades. These are young, flourishing human lives that leave the earth in our time. There is still much in them that could have provided the body with formative forces for a whole long life, for decades to come. But that will still live and weave apart from their immortal soul part; that will be there in the spiritual sphere; that will be there, that will help when humanity meets it with understanding in the creation of a truly spiritual worldview, in such a worldview, which is spiritual through and through, which is scientific in the fullest sense, in the strictest sense of the word. Spiritual science will thus be able to be something very much alive and real. For the spiritual scientist knows that when what he has to give as the result of his research comes to life in the souls, these souls will become so much a part of life on earth that the great gulf that today gapes as a materialistic world view between the physical and the supersensible will be bridged.

In a much more real sense than one suspects today, people will live into a world view that will show them not only the earthly citizens who are immediately present but also the people who have passed through the gate of death in their effectiveness. But this is a world view that at the same time admonishes us to see the great number of deaths that our fateful time has brought upon us. Much blood, much death, much adversity, much suffering and pain, much courage, much willingness to make sacrifices, tremendous greatness rushes and weaves through that which surrounds us in our fateful, destiny-laden, world-historically significant present. But it is particularly appropriate in this present time to point to that which points beyond all death, beyond all mere temporal life, to that which is hidden, to that which is immortal in the human being.

Not everyone will be able to become a spiritual researcher, just as not everyone can become a chemist. But times will come when what a few chemists give to humanity will be made fruitful for all, so that what the individual spiritual researchers have to give will benefit all of humanity and their coexistence. One need not be a spiritual researcher oneself to find the truth in the results discovered by spiritual researchers; one need only be free of the prejudices that today's habits of thought put in one's way, and the things that have been hinted at today, spiritual science, can be understood. In order to discover the facts for oneself, yes, to say just one sentence of what formed the main part of today's consideration, one must go the path of spiritual research oneself. In order to penetrate into the spiritual world, where divine spirit beings dwell, who are just as real as the things and beings of the physical world, in order to really bring messages from this world and these beings, one must go the path of spiritual research oneself.

In order to understand what is brought from the spiritual worlds, one really only needs to have an unbiased sense of truth for the matter. People who cannot believe that this sense can be united with what spiritual research says today only do not realize that it is not the sense of truth, but the habits of thinking brought about by prejudice. But when these habits of thinking have been done away with, just as the old habits of thinking were done away with in the face of the Copernican world view, then spiritual science will bring something infinitely more fruitful in relation to the spiritual and soul life of human experience than natural science has brought for external life. For what natural science brings relates to what surrounds us, to what we build for ourselves, to many things that help make our lives comfortable and pleasant, to what is useful to us. But what spiritual science has to give is something that every soul desires, if only it becomes aware of the powers of this desire in the spiritual and soul; that which gives people the opportunity to develop in such a way that their souls cannot be drawn into desolation, loneliness, disharmony of life, but what strengthens the soul so that the soul can face life strongly, which will demand more and more complexity of the future from this soul.

Spiritual science will incorporate something into spiritual development that will evoke a living awareness in the soul of what is immortal in the human being. And in this coexistence with the immortal part of the soul, the person will truly know, will know that the world is more comprehensive than what the senses see, than what one experiences in time. The knowledge, which will not remain abstract or theoretical, will be concentrated in certain feelings that make the soul inwardly happy and bear it, but will also make it industrious, powerful and capable.

In conclusion, I would like to summarize in a few words what can be awakened in the soul through spiritual science. I would like to end with what, as I said, I have only been able to say in brief strokes, like a charcoal drawing, about the question today: “What is immortal about the human being?” May this fade away into the words that are, so to speak, the residue of feeling of spiritual-scientific knowledge and of the spiritual-scientific confession in relation to the question of today's reflection:

The human senses speak
The things in the vastness of space;
They change with the passage of time.
Awakening itself
The human soul awakens
From the vastness of space
And unperturbed by the passage of time
In the stream of becoming of eternity!