74. The Riddle of Death as a Riddle of Life

We hand over our physical body to the elements of the earth - faster through burning, slowly through decay. Basically, the two ways of handing over the physical body to the earth differ only in the length of time. Both are basically the same process. We hand over our physical body to the elements of the earth; we no longer have it; it passes away from us in death, so to speak. What remains of this physical body? It is not as if we have nothing left, but something remains of this physical body. It would be quite wrong to believe that we have nothing left at all. You see, when we are here in the physical world, we feel like self-aware human beings within our skin. And the fact that we have our physical body within our skin means that we can feel like self-aware people here. Everything that we have falls away from us; it falls away from us to the outermost limits of our skin ... But what filled our body really remains in our consciousness after death, like a kind of cavity of the whole universe - as strange, as paradoxical as that sounds - it remains there. It is not the place that matters, but the form. While we feel ourselves here within our skin form, after death, when the physical body has fallen away from us, we get the mental image of the whole universe, which, as we will see in a moment, fills us more and more: But left out of this universe of our physical body form is hollow space. And we do not perceive it in such a way that we would merely regard it as a hollow space; in fact, that is by no means the main thing ... but after death it becomes a feeling, a basic feeling; it becomes an extraordinarily blissful and important feeling. It becomes the feeling: Look, there is something in the world that only you can fill. There are many things in the whole universe, but what is in the whole universe leaves your place empty. And that space will always be empty from beginning to end if you don't fill it.