5. Ways of Knowing the Eternal Powers of the Human Soul

And this other fact is this: that even in ordinary human life we encounter two different aspects in a certain area. We observe children growing up. We are, for example, educators or teachers of these children. We know very well: we make an effort to educate the child in this or that. We will strive for this or that knowledge through this or that, which arises from the child's soul. But with some children whom we teach and who have the potential to become more learned, more talented, more intelligent than we ourselves are as teachers and educators, we notice that something is emerging from unfathomable depths. In one child this may be something modest, in another child it may be the potential of a genius. We see in the small and in the large, the emergence of ingenious powers from the human soul. And now we recognize the connection between these seemingly far-removed facts. That which manifests itself in a later period, often years later, in some child in particularly ingenious ways, has passed through the spiritual development, through the invisible spiritual development, and has its cause in the violent death, which can be brought about by external violence. It does not have to be the same soul; but some human being perishes. What he goes through when his soul is violently snatched from the body in this way, that communicates itself to the purely spiritual world, and becomes interwoven with a human soul - with a very different human soul it can be interwoven - that is in the life between death and a new birth! And this soul brings that power, which comes precisely from such a death, into the new life. And these powers arise as genius powers.