Lecture XVII

You will find that those matters I have only briefly summarized today are described in more detail in numerous published cycles of my lectures and books. From such descriptions you can realize what a change it signifies in the whole constitution of the human soul when spiritual science will be the very nerve center of human feeling; when human beings will go about in the world with an awareness of their being such as the one attainable from spiritual science. People today indulge only the egotism of the soul that wishes to cling to a postexistence; they do not want to press onward to a real comprehension of the human soul which had experiences before birth, just as it will have experiences after death. The whole, complete eternity of the human soul is only grasped by one who can not only speak of immortality but, based an insight, of “unbornness,” too. We can believe, because belief always comes from a desire for life after death. We can know of the life before birth and the life after death as two things that are inseparable. Knowledge takes in the total being of the human soul; belief is concerned only with the postmortem existence. Knowledge of the spiritual is what the human being must struggle to acquire, but this is what people today strongly resist. Real knowledge of the spiritual world can only flow out of spiritual science. Out of spiritual science will come a constitution of the human soul that is healthy, not only true, and physical healing will be a necessary consequence of spiritual healing. Then man will not view the earth in the manner of modern geology as a huge mineral globe; he will view it as a spiritual being of which he himself is a member. That is what we must work toward.