Death and Immortality
Berlin, 26 October 1911
If I speak about death and immortality
today, it may seem, as if at first such a consideration is
caused in the personal needs of the human soul, which have
little do with knowledge, with science. If you survey the
series of spiritual-scientific talks that I have held, you yet
realise that I applied a scientific standard to the considered
objects already, even if a spiritual-scientific standard.
Hence, the today's consideration does also not start from that
what we find within our emotional life, within our longings and
wishes towards a life that exceeds the life of the physical
body. It will rather concern this: how has human knowledge to
position itself to the questions of death and immortality
completely in the sense, as this knowledge positions itself to
other objects of our knowledge? Since if we abstain from the
longing for a life which exceeds the bodily if we abstain from
that what is to be understood possibly in the sense of concepts
like fear of death and the like, we have the question of the
nature of our whole human individuality in it as something that
remains for the human knowledge regarding death and
immortality.
But it may seem today, as if in case of all
considerations of spiritual life these important questions of
death and immortality are disregarded. Since if one takes one
of the official psychologies, you find, indeed, the phenomena
of the soul life discussed in detail. However, as far as they
face us in the everyday life, for example, the question of the
development of concepts, the question of memory, of perception,
of attention and the like, but you will look in vain for a
discussion about the real being of our soul life. Yes, you can
find the prejudice just in most scientific circles
this soul life that someone must be a
dilettante who wants to put these questions as scientific
ones.
But this scientific thinking has now to
turn to roads different from the usual ones if it wants to
consider issues like death and immortality. There that
psychology is no longer enough which one calls
“psychology without soul,” a psychology with which
only the phenomena of the soul life should be considered,
without looking at the real being of that what rests in our own
individuality and whose expression the phenomena of the soul
experiences are. Now spiritual science or anthroposophy is an
unusual point of view regarding these as well as other
questions.
Indeed, the questions of death and
immortality have emerged like from dark depths of spirit
already since more than one century from the Western cultural
life. One has interpreted it always as a dream of single
persons if it appeared with a great spirit, as for example with
Lessing. One regarded it as a meaningless dream if it appeared
with such men whose names are called less within the cultural
life of the last decades. Concerning the questions of death and
immortality spiritual science is also not in any opposition to
natural sciences. Only the opinion is often spread, as if
natural sciences must reject what spiritual science has to say
for its part. Thus, we can experience that whenever something
new appears, as it happened, for example, in the last decade
with the problems of life, one points to the fact that the
assumption of a real spiritual life that exceeds the only
bodily, material life must be overcome gradually and
completely. Spiritual science is not forced at all to deny
something that appears, for example, in such discussions like
in that by Jacques Loeb (1859–1924, German-American biologist)
at the First Monists' Congress (Hamburg, 1911) about the
problem of life. However, spiritual science has to hear
repeatedly, as well as at that time, that it is over now with a
spiritual-scientific consideration. For one can hope that one
will succeed, finally, in the laboratory in producing life
under outer material conditions.
Compared to all such matters I would like
to remind you of one thing. There were times when one did not
doubt really that one could once create life in the laboratory.
People who have thought something to themselves with the
representation of the Homunculus in the second part of
Goethe's Faust and have remembered that this
representation of Homunculus was really a kind of dream of the
physical research of the Middle Ages and earlier times. That
means that the creation not only of subordinated living beings,
but also of the highest, the human being in the laboratory was
a dream of the naturalists once. People who cherished this
dream intended by no means that then the spirit had to be
abolished from any consideration of humanity and the
world.
No spiritual consideration of life
contradicts the hope of producing life from the composition of
outer substances. No, only the direction of the habitual ways
of thinking matters. The habitual ways of thinking that develop
with someone who immerses himself more and more in spiritual
science show a view of a certain factor exceeding the material
in the development of the human being and humanity.
The purely materialistic view of the human
life says: there we see a human being entering the earthly
existence, and we observe how the material processes happen
this and that way, and we see the human being gradually growing
up from a clumsy being to a human being who familiarises
himself with life, can accomplish tasks of life. Moreover, we
see descending processes after ascending ones as it were which
lead gradually to the dissolution of the physical body or to
death.
This materialistic consideration of life
turns its attention solely to what one can reach with the
senses and with methods of thinking and researching which are
based on sensory views. There one is probably forced to exceed
that what is given with the moment of birth or conception,
because one cannot explain everything that appears in the human
being if one pays attention only to those factors that prevail
between birth or conception and death. Then one speaks of
hereditary factors. However, as far as one remains within the
purely material approach, one believes that all factors, all
elements that should explain the human life consist only of
that what one can observe between birth and death, or what
comes into the human life by the inherited qualities of the
parents or other ancestors.
However, as soon as people investigate this
heredity, they realise that it is rather superstitious to lead
back everything that the human being can realise in his life
possibly to hereditary factors. Just in the last decade
a brilliant historian, Ottokar
Lorenz (1832–1904), tried once to examine families whose
descent relations were known to what extent the qualities of
the parents, grandparents and so on can be recognised in the
lives of the descendants. However, he could get on this way of
the purely experiential observation to nothing but to say, if
one looks up in the line of ancestors, one finds that among the
twenty to thirty ancestors whom everybody can count upwards
human beings are who were either genii or idiots, wise men or
fools, musicians or other artists, so that one can find all
qualities, which are found with any human being, and that one
does not come far in the reality if one clings to the
prejudices of scientific theories if one wants to explain these
or those hereditary factors, this or that expression of the
human character, this or that quality.
Spiritual science adds a spiritual core to
that what one can find in the line of heredity as conditions of
the human life, which we cannot find in that which we search
with the parents, grandparents and so on, but which we have to
search within a supersensible spiritual world. So that in the
course of the incarnation process something combines with the
physical factors that is not physical that is of spiritual
kind. This spiritual that one cannot see with physical eyes is
that being that we carry in us as the result of our former
lives on earth as one says. As it is true that we lead back our
physical origin to our ancestors, we have to lead back a
spiritual origin to a spiritual lineage, that means, to
ourselves. Spiritual science is just forced to speak not only
of one life on earth of the human being, but of repeated lives
on earth. Indeed, one has to go far back for reasons that may
become obvious in the course of these talks if we want to
search our being in our previous life. So we say in the
spiritual-scientific sense: we bring our essence with us from a
former life, we have experienced this former life, and we have
gone through death and then through a life between death and
our appearance in this life.
Spiritual science is also forced to imagine
this essence going through death and a supersensible life
between death and a new life on earth. This essence is not a
product of the material existence, but collects and forms the
matter as it were, so that we receive this physical
corporeality. Hence, we speak in spiritual science of repeated
lives on earth. This idea of the repeated lives on earth faces
us necessarily from the Western thinking first with Lessing
(Gotthold Ephraim L., 1729–1781) in the work which he left as
his testament, in the
Education of the Human Race.
There he says about this teaching: “even if it is the oldest
one what the human beings have confessed to, must it not appear again
at the summit of the human development?” In his
Education of the Human Race
Lessing also answers to some questions that
can be objected the repeated lives
on earth. Indeed, if such things appear with an excellent
person, then people who judge this excellent spirit normally
say: he performed great achievements, but later he became
addicted to this strange dream of the repeated lives on earth,
and one has to grant the great Lessing that he could also
commit this strange mistake. — Thus, every little spirit feels
called to condemn the great spirits with their “terrible
mistakes.” Nevertheless, this idea did not let single
persons of the nineteenth century rest, and even before the
recent Darwinist natural sciences approached, the idea of the
repeated lives on earth appears as a necessity of the human
thinking again. Thus, it faces us in a book by Drossbach
(Maximilian D., 1810–1884) about human rebirth, a somewhat
confused book from our standpoint, but an attempt that allows
itself just compared with scientific thinking to represent this
idea. Soon afterwards, a little community was to be found which
put a prize on the best writing about the immortality of the
soul, and the prize winning writing by Widemann (Gustav W.,
1812–1876) which was published in 1851 dealt with the problem
of immortality from the standpoint of reincarnation. Thus, I
could still state many a thing how the thinking has gradually
induced many persons to consider this idea of
reincarnation.
Then the scientific view of the human being came that was based on
Darwin. At first, it considered the human being materialistically, and it
will consider it still this way for a long. But if you take my book
Theosophy
or other books which are written in the
spirit of spiritual science and natural sciences at the same
time, you will realise that the scientific thinking
— thought through to the end —
imposes the necessity to the human being to
think of the idea of incarnation. Nevertheless, it is not only
this. I would like to show not only a logical consequence, but
also that, indeed, the human being must come to the idea of
reincarnation on basis of the same principle which prevails in
natural sciences, namely of the principle of experience.
However, another question arises there, is anybody able to
collect experiences of that what should come in from
supersensible worlds what should produce the human body and
leave this body at death again?
One can realise cursorily still without
spiritual-scientific foundations that something mental works on
the outer body of the human being; but one does not like such
considerations particularly today. If the human beings looked
more exactly at the physiognomy of the human being in its
different sculptural forms if one also looked at the facial
play, at the gestures, which are individual with every human
being, at the creative spirit, one would soon get a sensation
how the spirit is internally working on the body.
Observe a human being who has been working
on the big questions of life for about ten years, namely in
such a way, as one does it in the outer science or philosophy
where one reflects on these matters without having to say a
lot. On the other side, observe a human being who has dealt
with these issues so that they have become inner problems to
him, so that they have taken him in states of the highest
bliss, but also to the highest pains and the deepest tragedy.
Consider a human being who deals with the questions of
knowledge, and look at him, after he has led such a soul life
for ten years, and you will realise how this work expresses
itself in his physiognomy, how, indeed, the humanely mental
works into the forms of the body. May one pursue now by certain
methods such working on the outer physical body further to that
point where not only certain forms of our face are changed in
such a way that into them the character of the soul life is
pressed, but where the indefinite form which the human being
has at first becomes his completely
elaborated figure?
It is necessary that the human being leads
his soul life beyond the point where it is in the everyday life
today. He has to learn to seize the supersensible in himself,
that which is accessible to no outer observation. Then every
human being can find both points by mere reflection, so to
speak, where our life directly finds the
supersensible.
These two points are the transitions from
the wake state to sleep and again from sleep to the wake state.
Since nobody should think so illogically that the human soul
life stops with falling asleep and comes again into being with
awakening. Our soul life must be in any state of existence in
sleep, it must be somewhere to put it another way. The big
question emerges which maybe the child puts that is justified
for someone who gets involved with the questions of knowledge,
namely the question: where does the soul go when the human
being falls asleep? We see also other processes stopping, we
see, for example, a burning candle going out. May one also ask
there, where to does the fire go? Then we say, the fire is a
process that stops if the candle goes out, and which begins
again if it is kindled again. — May we compare the
bodily process of the human being to the candle and say: the
soul life is a process that goes out if the human being falls
asleep in the evening, and is kindled in the morning when he
awakes again? It seems perhaps to be in such a way, as if one
could use this comparison. However, this comparison becomes
impossible if, indeed, one could prove that not for the usual
perception or sensation, but for a sensation to be attained by
careful soul preparation that can face us which leaves our body
with falling asleep and visits us with awakening again. If this
is in such a way that while falling asleep not only a process
takes place like a going out flame, but if we can pursue what
leaves the body in the evening while falling asleep and visits
it in the morning again if we can prove this process in its
reality, then a supersensible inside the human being exists.
Then one asks us this supersensible:
how does it work within the body?
Even the famous naturalist Du Bois-Reymond
(Emil Du B.-R., 1818–1896) pronounced the thought that one can
understand the sleeping human being from the standpoint of
natural sciences, but not the waking one in whom impulses,
instincts, passions and so on surge up and down. You can read
that what I have outlined today only briefly, more in detail in
my writing
How Does One Attain Knowledge of the Higher Worlds?
I have described the methods there which we want to touch now
briefly by which the human being gets around to getting to know
the reality of that what leaves the body in sleep, and what
with the awakening goes into him again. At first, we want to
ask attentive soul viewers who have got a certain ability to
listen to these important moments like falling asleep and
awakening.
There we hear them saying what spiritual
science can confirm absolutely that at first that changes what
exists with sharp contours in the surroundings into something
nebulous, into blurred forms. Then the falling asleep feels, as
if his whole inner being is extended and does no longer depend
on the forms of his skin; this is connected with a certain
feeling of bliss. Then a strange moment occurs in which the
human being can feel everything like in a brief vision that he
has accomplished as satisfying moral things; this faces him
vividly, and he knows that these are contents of his soul, he
feels being in them. Then a jerk happens as it were, and the
human being still feels: oh, this moment could last
forever! — Some people just have this sensation who pay attention
to the moment of falling asleep. The consciousness has
disappeared.
The human being goes over to an inner
essentiality at such a moment where the outer body plays no
role, because the daily strain tires him. One feels as if the
reality of the mental is scurrying. All methods of spiritual
science which we can call experimental ones
spiritual-scientifically consist in nothing but that the human
being receives the inner power to keep that which is
disappearing so that he can experience the moment of falling
asleep completely consciously. The consciousness is kept. Since
why does the consciousness dwindle while falling asleep?
Because the human being cannot unfold that inner strength and
willpower in the usual life to experience something else when
the outer senses leave him. Let us ask ourselves, how much we
experience in the usual life within the soul what is not
stimulated by the outer impressions? There is a little left
with most human beings surely. No wonder that the inner
strength does not exist which can penetrate the soul-life and
that is left by any outer experience at the moment, when it
steps out while falling asleep. Any spiritual development is
based on the penetration of our soul with the strength that the
soul needs to receive the consciousness unless it receives it
from the body. Meditation, concentration, and contemplation are
experimental means to advance farther with the soul life than
one can come in the usual life. I would like to bring in one
example only.
Assuming that a human being can put a
thought of benevolence or of something else in the centre of
his experience and can exclude all the other thoughts, also
those which one can get with the senses, to hold on this one
thought only. Since the thoughts fly to the human being at such
a moment as the bees fly to the flowers if one stands within
the usual life. However, if one can have the strength to
exercise concentration of thinking repeatedly, to practice
meditative immersion, as soon as one can become free of the
mere outer impressions, and delves repeatedly into pictorial
thoughts which express something allegorically, then such a
thought can startle the human soul-life, so that it becomes a
stronger force than the human being normally has. Then such a
human being falls asleep consciously, that means he experiences
consciously that he grows with his soul life into a spiritual
world. This is no dream, also no self-deception or
self-suggestion, but something that is accessible, indeed, to
every human being, but is to be reached only with care and
energy. The human being can free himself completely from his
physical corporeality. As he frees himself, otherwise, in sleep
unconsciously from it, and as every human being is in sleep
beyond the physical body, he will consciously live by such
exercises in that what exists usually unconsciously beyond the
human being. Briefly, the human being can experience a relief
of his soul from the physical corporeality with soul
exercises.
Indeed, one can always hold against such a
representation that is based on inner experience: this is based
on deceit! Nevertheless, whether it is based on deceit or on
reality, this can be decided only by experience. Hence, I have
to say repeatedly: what the human being believes to experience
this way can absolutely be self-suggestion, for how far does
the human being go self-deception! He can go so
far that if he thinks, for example, only of a soda he already
has its taste on the tongue. Something may well give the
impression, as if it were perception of a spiritual world, but
still it can be self-deceit. Hence, someone who does such
exercises and makes his soul the experimenter must take all
means to eliminate illusions. Nevertheless, in the end only the
experience decides. Certainly, somebody can suggest the taste
of a soft drink to himself, but it is another question whether
he can quench his thirst with it.
There is the possibility to experience as
reality what is in sleep beyond the physical body. How does one
experience it? So that the human being makes his soul more and
more independent and gets to know a quite new supersensible
world. Indeed, he starts getting to know a world of spiritual
light. Then something particular turns out there. The human
being who otherwise does not consider his thoughts and mental
pictures as realities takes them along when he leaves his body
with his soul really. He loosens his conceptual life from all
materiality, and this conceptual life experiences a
transformation when the human being becomes free of his
physical body. What I say now appears to materialistic minded
people like daydreaming, even so it is reality. Our mere
thoughts change into a world which we can compare
— but only
compare, it is different — with a propagating
light with which we find the underlying cause of the things. So
you get to the world in which you detach the thinking that is
bound, otherwise, to the tool of the brain and submerge with
your thinking in a newly appearing world. This expresses itself
in the way that you feel more and more enlarged. You get to
know a world of which the outer physical-sensory world is only
a revelation. Spiritual beings, not atoms, form the basis of
the outer sensory world, and we can penetrate as human beings
into this spiritual world. So we are accepted by such a
spiritual world as it were if we carry out this self-experiment
in our soul.
We only attain a complete knowledge of the
relation of this spiritual world to us human beings if we can
also spiritually experience the moment of awakening. This is
possible when the human being contemplates a lot about his
inner life in meditation and concentration. For example, he can
review that pictorially every morning or evening what he has
experienced during the day or the day before to consider it
contemplating or he contemplates his moral impulses and takes
stock of himself. Then the human being gets around to
experiencing the reverse moment consciously by such exercises
where we submerge in our bodies that we experience, otherwise,
unconsciously while awakening.
Then he experiences something that I can
characterise only in the following way. You all may know that a
healthy quiet sleep depends on our emotions. If the human being
has thought ever so much, has exerted itself ever so much in
his thinking, he falls easily asleep. But if anger, shame,
remorse, and in particular a troubled conscience gnaw at him,
he tosses and turns sleepless in bed. Not our thinking which we
can carry over to the big spiritual world but our emotions can
drive away the sleep.
Our emotions are associated with our soul
life in the narrower sense. We share our thoughts with the
world. The way in which our emotions just affect us is
something intimately connected with what we ourselves are.
Somebody who has learnt now in such a way to free his soul
consciously from his body, also gets clear from immediate
observation how he carries his emotions into the world into
which he enters if he has become free of body. As blissful it
makes us on one side to submerge in a world of spiritual light,
free of the body, as much we feel chained in this world to our
emotions gnawing at us. With it then we go into the spiritual
world and have to carry it again into our body. However, by the
mentioned exercises we find our emotional world again while
submerging in our bodies. It faces us as something strange. We
get to know ourselves submerging in our emotional world, and
thereby we get to know, while we pursue it now consciously,
what works in truth killing on our organism. I note here that I
speak about death in a later talk that has a quite different
meaning considering it with plants or animals than with the
human being. Spiritual science does not take the easy way out
to find these phenomena identical in the three realms if we
pursue that consciously what has become the possession of our
soul that it settles in our physical body and can work
destroying in it. Then we get to know how our innermost being
really forms the body while it combines with that what comes
from father and mother and from the other ancestors as
hereditary factors. There we see the human being entering in
the physical life, we see him entering clumsily at first. He
cannot yet speak; then we see the forms becoming more and more
certain and see him becoming an active human being
gradually.
Considering the whole development of the
human being spiritual-scientifically, we realise how an inner
essence develops and this forms the human being working on the
body from the spiritual from birth or conception on. We find
the same essence that works creatively on the body if we can
pursue how it leaves the body and penetrates into a spiritual
world. There we find two things: an element that enables us to
pour out our own being like in a spiritual world of light; but
we also find something in this essence that we must bring into
this spiritual world, namely our emotional world, that is
everything that we have got to know in life. In these two
things we have on one side what is creative in the human being
what leaves the body as our spiritual essence, goes through
death and appears again in a new body after an interim and on
the other side we have our emotions which we get to know by the
spiritual-scientific view as a real being as that what destroys
our body and leads to death.
Therefore, we realise how our spiritual
essence enters in existence, builds up the body gradually, and
we see this essence working the strongest in the first months
where we do not yet have an inner soul life where we do not yet
think. There we see the human being entering existence sleeping
as it were. If we try to remember, we can come back to a
certain point, not farther. We have slept into existence as it
were. Only from the third, fourth years on the human being can
feel as an ego. The reason is that
the spiritual essence of the human being is busy forming the
body at first. Then he comes to a point where the body has to
grow only, and from then on the human being can use what flowed
once in his body for his soul life which works within the
physical body constantly in such a way that we take up the
necessity of death at that time, where we start saying
“I” to ourselves, up to
which we can remember later where we begin an inner
life.
What do we receive with this necessity of death? We receive the
possibility to take up the outer world, to enrich our inside
being perpetually, so that we become richer in life every day.
In that part of our being that we carry in sleep into the
spiritual world that forms our soul being everything is
contained that we get as joys and sorrows, as pleasure and
pain. While we live and develop a consciousness, we have the
possibility for our inner essence to enrich it perpetually. We
take this enrichment along if we go through death, but we can
have it only because we had to destroy our bodies throughout
life. Our body is built as it has developed from the preceding
life. However, we absorb something new perpetually that
enriches our soul life. Nevertheless, this new can no longer
penetrate completely into our physical body, but only up to a
certain degree. That expresses itself by the fact that we feel
the fatigue of yesterday removed; but it cannot completely
penetrate into our body. What penetrates into our body cannot
develop completely in the bodily.
We take the former example once again. A
human being works on questions of knowledge for ten years.
Thus, his physiognomy has changed after ten years if this
activity has been a matter of his heart. However, his body
limits this change. The desire to develop internally further
may still exist; but, the later absorbed can no longer work
into the body. Hence, we see, because the body puts a border,
the richer inner life beginning when the soul has poured forth
into the body. First, we see the physiognomy of such a human
being changing —
of a thinker, poet or artist; then only we
see the rich spiritual life developing. Not before our outside
world limits us, we develop so surely, but we can no longer
carry into our physical bodies what we develop in ourselves
because our body is built up according to that what we have got
in a former life on earth. Therefore, we have to carry through
death what we still get internally. This helps us to build up
the next body, so that we have built only in a body of the next
life what must destroy our present body.
A view presents itself there that fits into
the scientific thinking, a view of what death and immortality
means what the repeated lives on earth mean. There we realise
if we change our physiognomy how the human being has built that
into his body what he has got in former lives on earth. We see
the results of our former lives in the developing body, and we
see in that what we get now what stands in the way of our
bodily, so to speak, as a spiritual, the developing elements of
our future life.
Spiritual science regards the earthly life
as something that is between something former and something
following. The later considerations will show how our
perspective increases to the times of our existence which the
human being spends free of body in the supersensible worlds. In
order that such matters would not remain pipe dreams, it is
necessary that we look at the methods that enable the soul to
perceive even if it lacks the physical brain. Only because the
human being enables the soul to perceive that in the
supersensible what must remain, otherwise, a mere assertion it
becomes a proven reality.
Today we stand strictly speaking only at
the beginning of a science that deals with such matters. Just
many people consider themselves as the best experts of the
matters, as the most enlightened ones and regard these matters
as fantasies. I would not be surprised if anybody said, this is
daydreaming that completely contradicts any scientific
truth! — Nobody will find it more comprehensible than I do if
anybody says this. But while the human beings become engrossed
more and more in spiritual science, they realise that we can
prepare our souls by meditation so that it can know about
itself, can develop inner forces by which it can still know,
can still perceive if it leaves the body and can no longer
perceive with the organs of the body. This has to be found
experimentally —
one may say, it is to be found
spiritual-experimentally — that the soul is
something that one can experience if it can no longer use the
bodily organs. It goes through births and deaths and works in
such a way that it builds up the body that goes through death
and collects new forces to build the body during the earthly
existence. With the questions of the nature of the human being,
you attain answers to the questions of death and immortality at
the same time.
Goethe said once in an essay that nature
invented death to have much life. Spiritual-scientific research
proves such a notion to be true saying, in any life, the human
being enriches his soul life; he must die because his
respective body is built as an effect of his former lives on
earth. While killing his body, he creates the possibility to
work into in a new body what now he cannot work into his body
and into the world.
Such a worldview influences our lives
deeply. If it penetrates our whole being if it remains not only
a theory, we feel such a truth only as a truth of life. Since
we say to ourselves when we have crossed the middle of our
lives when our hairs begin becoming grey and our faces get
wrinkles: life is going downhill! — Why is it going
downhill? Because that what the soul has got cannot be brought
into the body. However, what we have gained internally, and
what must destroy our present bodies is worked into a new body.
Someone can argue easily: you spiritual researchers state that
the human being becomes weak in old age, so you say that just
with the body the mind dwindles away! — As this objection is
a given, it is a given that one only admits that such a man
does not think about that: from what is our present brain
built? — It is built from our former lives! We must destroy our
bodies and our brains with our thoughts. But the thoughts,
which kill the bodies, are those, which use the brain. It is
obvious that something must stop that is bound to a tool like
the brain. However, our spiritual being does not stop with it.
That is why it occurs that we do no longer find the tools in
ourselves to realise what we have appropriated in the present
life if the human being moves in downward direction. Then this
yet works in a soul life which is not bound to the brain, and
which cannot be expressed by cerebral thoughts. This prepares
itself to act creatively in the next life. One says it not only
in Goethe's sense that nature invented death to have much
life — but we have also to say, death is there to work out
that in new forms what we acquire internally in life. In this
sense, we can say if we see the age approaching: thank God,
that life can go downward, that death can be! Since if it did
not exist, we could not take up what flows towards us from the
world in such a way that it forms us. We need death, so that we
can make that what we experience the contents of our own being.
Hence, we regard death as that by which just life can advance.
Hence, there is no better adviser than spiritual science; it is
not only a comforter towards the fear of death, but it gives us
strength, while we are walking towards death and see the
outside dying. Since we know that then the inside grows.
Spiritual science will raise the whole life to a higher level
at which life seems meaningful and reasonable.
From the following talks will arise that
life does not proceed endlessly forward and backward, but that
also reincarnation has a beginning and an end. Now I would only
like to point to it. From that which spiritual science has to
say about death and immortality arises that we have the effects
of our present life in a following life.
The complete human existence disintegrates
into the existence between birth and death and into that
between death and a new birth. There we see what Goethe felt in
terms of the simple life extended to the whole life while we
look back not only at the little yesterday, but also at the big
yesterday where we made our present life. We look there at the
joys or pains of life and feel: joy strengthens us for the
future; we must experience grief for overcoming obstacles to
strengthen ourselves also for the future. There we see a big
contrast expanding in the future life and think of the Goethe's
verses:
If yesterday is clear and accessible,
If today you work freely and strongly,
Then you can hope for a tomorrow
That is also fortunate.
Happiness and optimism flow to us from the
internally conceived spiritual science showing us: indeed, the
spirit forms the material and survives while the material life
is destroyed to reveal itself always anew, and which applies
the newly acquired. I would like to summarise this for the
purposes of the today's evening with the words:
While living the spirit shows
Always its power only,
Dying, however, the spirit shows,
How through all deaths
It always survives to higher life.
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