Lecture III

We do indeed carry birth and death within us continually. And what is at the beginning of life as birth, where the forces of growth are still most active, where consciousness has yet to arise, that lives with us continually until death and is basically the bearer of our will, our unconscious will, which only becomes conscious when the light of thought is thrown into it. But what is rampant is permeated by continual processes of dissolution, by a continual, continuous fulfillment of that which is then compressed into one at the moment of death, by a process of dying. And just as the growth and proliferation process reveals the element of will to the outside world, so the inward process of dying reveals the element of thought and imagination. If we cultivate this insight within us, we come to the conclusion that we are actually born and die continually, and that the single birth at the beginning of an earthly life is nothing more than a summation of what runs through our whole life until death in miniature.