Sixth Lecture

When a person undergoes an illness, the body is taken from him by forces other than earthly ones. For consider, even in the growth of plants, not only earthly forces are at work, but extraterrestrial forces also collaborate. This is of course also the case with animals and even more so with human beings. Our illnesses do not come from the earth alone. Death comes to us only from the earth in no other way than when we die a violent death. However death may come, it is never a mere earthly event, unless it be a violent death in the sense indicated. Whether death comes to us through an illness – and suicide is not an earthly event either, since it comes about through a decision of the soul – there is no death that is merely brought about by earthly forces, except that which, through sacrificial deaths, through forces that play on earth, frees the body from the soul-spiritual. So that here earthly forces and relationships enter into reciprocal relationships with that which is spiritual. Otherwise, death is always something that completely transcends the earth; it is never a mere interaction between the earth and what is in the spiritual world. The etheric body, which was early deprived of its activity, is given over to purely earthly conditions, to something that is merely earthly, that is merely earthly events. For death is such — hold what I am about to say together with some of my thoughts these days — that when viewed from the physical side, it appears quite different than when viewed from the spiritual side. I have hinted at this in various ways. But always, when death does not occur in the way I have now indicated, it is something that can be understood from the other side. If one enters the other world through a death from illness, from old age, or through suicide, then one has what is needed to understand death there. If death is caused by a bullet on the battlefield, then one must look at purely earthly conditions to understand it. It is the same with accidents. One must look down from the spiritual world to have been earthly; death is to be explained from earthly conditions. And that makes that one must look down from the here and now of the spiritual world into the hereafter of the physical world in order to understand such a death.