5. Natural Death and Spiritual Life

We are now learning how the human being must, as it were, harden himself to a physical organization that wrests itself from him, that works in the same way as the physical forces work in death, which can only be overcome by the human being being permeated by his soul and spirit. One learns to recognize these powers of dying and death through the fact that, with higher knowledge, one has a world of thoughts that does not descend into these powers of dying and death. And so spiritual life is placed alongside natural death for this higher knowledge, and so man learns to recognize how precisely the powers of thought – those powers that connect our inner life with the world of the senses, that convey the external world – how these powers of thought are bound to the dissolving, to the dying powers of the human organism. That, ladies and gentlemen, is a significant insight, for it allows us to see the riddle of death in a new light. We see that we have not only the essence of death before us when it appears to us as the final enigmatic link, as the conclusion of physical life, but we perceive death as it continuously works between birth and death in the human being, and we perceive its intimate connection with the ordinary life of thought. But with that – my dear audience – the essence of this thought life also becomes clear to us.