12. Spiritual Science as a Life's Work

To illustrate this more clearly, I would like to point out something that already stands at the boundary between the physical and the spiritual. Although it is certainly true that spiritual science gives human beings a gift that enables them to prevent, to a certain extent, illnesses that would otherwise afflict them, if we engage with spiritual science even a little, we quickly become aware of an even more significant gift for the life of the soul itself. I am referring to memory. Who would not complain of a decline in memory as they grow older? Anyone who has even a little contact with people knows how much memory and other faculties decline with age, and how much people complain about this decline. The faculties with which we are equipped for our memory from the fund of human life, as we enter existence through birth, are exhausted. And no matter how healthy one might live outwardly, they would still be exhausted; and although some external means might improve what is not improved, the powers that are innate to us would still be exhausted.