10. Between Death and Rebirth of the Human Being

A completely different attitude toward truth and truthfulness, toward human knowledge, is necessary than is common in our time. Anyone who wants to obtain spiritual-scientific results using the methods discussed in these lectures must, above all, approach what can be called truth and knowledge with a sacred awe, with boundless reverence. How easily, in our time, do we accept as our attitude toward truth one that wants to make a decision in advance about everything that presents itself in human life, a decision that presupposes: I can, with the soul capacities given to me in the state of mind and mood in which I happen to be, allow myself to judge what can be said about the realms of existence and reality. The spiritual researcher and those who wish to receive his findings need a different state of mind; they need a state of mind that says: in order to receive the truth, in order to participate in the truth, my soul needs above all preparation, it needs to live itself into a state that goes beyond everyday life. And when one is immersed in spiritual science — although I ask you not to misunderstand this expression in an ascetic or other sense — one feels very strongly, I would say, how impossible the everyday state of mind is for truly living with truth, with knowledge. One feels knowledge as something hovering above, which one can approach when one goes beyond one's ordinary self, as it were, when one strains all the forces within oneself to prepare oneself to receive the truth worthily. One feels unworthy when, based on the everyday state of mind, one wants to allow oneself to judge the truth — this is something one can know from spiritual science — and one then strives to wait until the soul has progressed a little further in its preparation, until it has prepared within itself that strength and worthy receptivity that is justified in the face of truth and knowledge. And often one feels that way, saying to oneself: I would rather wait, I would rather be patient and let the truth hover above me; I must not enter into it, for if I were to enter into it now, I might spoil it by not yet being ready for it.