Twelfth Lecture

If one knows these things, then our emotional life with regard to the deceased will also be graded and differentiated. We know how to distinguish how the soul should behave towards a younger or older deceased. Life is enriched in its most intimate relationships when one absorbs the idea from spiritual science that not only the souls living in physical bodies belong to one another, but also the disembodied souls. Only then does man enter into full reality. It must be said again and again: to speak of the spirit in general does not lead very far. To speak of spiritual life in general, as certain philosophers do, or as people do who today also believe that they can overcome materialism by speaking in general of spirit and spirit and spirit: that does not lead very far. We muster the courage to penetrate into the concrete spiritual life. We muster the courage to unreservedly confess such conditions, as we have discussed them again today, before the world, no matter how great the mockery of materialistic thinkers may still be at present. Today one cannot see how much that is infinitely fatal for humanity, infinitely disastrous, is connected with the fact that people know nothing about these things in the most important parts of the world and therefore do not think about them, and are therefore so far removed from reality, which must then devastatingly befall them. The present earth catastrophe will be ascribed to all possible impulses, only not to those in which it really originates in the deepest sense.