74. The Riddle of Death as a Riddle of Life

What do people need to know for it to be possible to speak of morality at all? People need to know that the human being also has an etheric body, and that if the occipital lobe of the physical brain is too small, the etheric brain, the etheric occipital lobe, can nevertheless be developed not only in a normal way, but even in an excessively normal way, in a way that goes beyond the normal; and that the human being compensates for what he develops as inner soul life, and what he misses when he has a too small, a stunted occipital lobe, by the fact that the etheric body is all the more powerfully developed, because one has taken care of this in his upbringing. Because they balance each other out: the physical occipital lobe and the etheric occipital lobe. This means that a time must come when people will say to themselves: It is quite true that the criminal has too small an occipital lobe; but how the consequences are to be remedied will become clear when one learns to look at people in their development in the way described in the simple booklet “The Education of the Child from the Point of View of Spiritual Science”. If you observe people, you will know: This or that principle of education must be applied in order to compensate for what is lacking in the physical body. People will have to know this in the future, they will have to know it correctly in the future! It will have to be taken into account that the spiritual human being is present. From the present time onwards it is the task of human beings to know this and to apply it in life. For what would happen otherwise, if nowhere, nowhere in the world were educated in this way, and people did not behave towards people in the way they do on the condition that an etheric human being is present? Yes, then, under the influence of those thoughts which cling only to the physical body, mankind would come to depend only on the physical body. It would come to depend only on the physical body! If the materialistic worldview were able to triumph, the etheric body would be forgotten, and it would not be developed in the near future. - The human being who is born with an occipital lobe that is too short shows that by nature he also has an etheric lobe that is too short, for the physical brain is formed in this way because the etheric lobe is also too short; but through education the etheric lobe can be lengthened ... although not the physical one, at least only partially