Lecture II

It is death that is active in us when we surrender ourselves to what is spiritually active in our consciousness. And just as we look through the unconscious creating forces to the beginnings of life, so we look through the conscious conceptual forces that reveal themselves as destructive forces; they reveal themselves as what begins to take hold of us more and more as we grow into earthly life, to break us down, and finally to lead us to confront earthly death; we see through these forces to the other end of life, to death. Birth and death—or, let us say, conception, birth, and death—can only be understood by taking the spiritual into consideration.