7. Personal and Supersensible Aspects (Relating to Certain Individuals)

Soon after this we lost another friend, another member of our movement.[^2] Again an intense need arose to define the essential nature of this member. This could not happen the way it had happened in the previous case, however. In the previous case it really was true to say of the way the words were chosen that a soul that had gone through the gate of death was expressing itself, saying what it felt itself to be and what it wished to become; it expressed itself. In this second case the situation was that one had to put one's own soul in confrontation, as it were, and consider this soul in the spirit. Then this soul, too, expressed itself, but in words that this time took the material needed for self-characterization out of the soul of the observer. What the soul which had gone through the gate of death was doing therefore merely provided the stimulus to express what one had to feel about its essential nature now that it had gone through the gate of death. And so the following words arose and had to be sent out after the soul at the cremation: