74. The Riddle of Death as a Riddle of Life

You see: Does man know anything at all about his physical inner being, how he lives in his physical inner being within his skin? Yes, sometimes one knows something: when someone has a terrible headache, he knows something of the inside of his head; he feels it inside, feels his head, which one does not feel at all when one is normally healthy. The stomach only growls when it is hungry, when something is wrong as a result of pain or deprivation. It's just a rather dull realization, and you wouldn't be able to do much with it. After all, in contrast to what we usually feel about the outside world, it is a kind of inner sensation. But in a subtle way, in a very subtle way, this experience of our inner being is actually present throughout our entire life between birth and death, in that we grow older and older between birth and death. What does it mean to grow older and older? It means, doesn't it: the physical body becomes less and less alive, it makes us more and more tired and weary, because we want to work through it. You can feel this as the years go by. In a way, there really is the fact that you do feel your physical body more and more ... even if this happens habitually and of course you don't feel it as strongly. But just think, someone could compare the way he related to his physical body as an eight-year-old boy or girl while working with the way he relates to his physical body in his fiftieth year, and the intermediate things would follow one after the other: Then one would already notice how different the physical body has become, how a certain slackening occurs in the physical body - a becoming tired of life, which is quite natural, but which is nevertheless there - like a becoming tired of life. The bruises of old age consist in nothing other than that one feels one's physical body, that it becomes more and more perceptible. And the core freshness of youth consists in not feeling it, in carrying it through life impalpably. The whole of life between birth and death is such that one can say: The physical body is felt, sensed, more and more.