5. Natural Death and Spiritual Life

You certainly do not have to become a researcher in this field yourself — I have taken the liberty of mentioning this here a few times — to penetrate the justification of the anthroposophical world. Those who become researchers have the spiritual world directly before them, as I have been describing it here for years. They then describe it from what arises for them when they translate what they see into the form of human thought. But in describing it, they appeal not only to their own seeing, but also to the inner human liveliness. And because every human being has this inner life, just as they have their own dying process, they can gradually, even if they do not become researchers in the field of spiritual science and anthroposophy, acquire an understanding of what researchers bring out of the spiritual world. The publication of such writings as my book 'How to Know Higher Worlds' indicates how anyone can at least get started on their own research into the spiritual world. But it also indicates that such books are primarily written as they are so that everyone can, so to speak, receive the spiritual researcher's justification for what he actually does. But that which comes before humanity as ideas, as concepts, can be grasped by common sense. For this common sense is that which can rise to living thoughts just as it can remain with dead thoughts. And this understanding is not mere belief, not mere emotional understanding, but it is an understanding that arises out of the free nature of the human being, which simply connects what is in it of world existence with what can be proclaimed through research out of this world existence.