Lecture Five

In every stage of life we must make sure that we do not educate only for that stage, but educate for all of a person’s earthly life—and, in fact, beyond. People can arrive most beautifully at an understanding of their own immortal human being; after puberty, they can experience for themselves how what poured into their soul as images through imitation is now freed from the soul and rises into spirit. People can feel how it continues to work, from time into eternity, passing through birth and death. It is exactly this welling up of what was instilled in the human soul through the proper education that provides an inner experience of immortality; primarily, it is life experience itself that shows us we had existence before coming down into the physical world. And what the child takes in as picture and imitates through religious feeling, unites with what that child was before descending into the physical realm; thus an inner experience of the kernel of immortality arises.