II. Cognition of the Christ Through Anthroposophy

He then comes to recognize something that may be thus described: he gazes upon the picture at the gate of death, and the moment of death, and sees that the physical body is no longer held together and built up in its whole forces by the force of an indwelling human soul but is given over to the forces of the earth as they work in the external mineral world; he sees how, through decay or the process of burning, the human physical body is given up to those mineral forces and assimilated with the earth. He sees by comparison how, in effect, what is carried into the earthly life through birth is something (speaking now in the sense of the soul) that dies into the physical body just as the latter dies into the earth at death. What he had in his power of thought in the ordinary consciousness was something that was vital and full of spiritual life in the spiritual worlds before conception and birth, but was then killed in the physical body so that it appeared in ordinary consciousness as the power of deadened thought.