On Death
Berlin,
27 November 1913
After I have spoken about the nature and
attitude of spiritual science in general in the first three
talks, I would now like to discuss special objects. I note from
the start that this talk and that of the next week form a whole
as it were. They deal with the questions of the human soul life
which are connected with death and with that what follows for
the human being from death, and what I would like to call the
sense of human immortality.
It is not easy in general to speak just
about the topic of this evening in our time; for there are many
outer and inner obstacles against a consideration of death in
the present time. Above all I have to draw your
attention —
in order to avoid any misunderstanding
today — to the fact that spiritual science has it not so good
as some other scientific fields. Spiritual science depends on
considering the fields about which it speaks in the strictest
sense logically distinguished from adjoining fields.
I must say this because the discussions
that should be done today and next time have only a meaning for
the human experience, and because a more naturalistic science
of the present is inclined to expand that which one understands
by death to everything living. Now just spiritual science shows
that that what is externally the same for the different beings
can be very different concerning its inner nature, and I will
probably have the opportunity in the course of the talks to
draw your attention to the significance of death in the plant
and animal realms. I intend to speak about death of the human
being today only. —
However, there are some other obstacles. I
would like to show the nature of these obstacles
— without
going into a general characteristic — just from the
attitude of spiritual science based on single facts.
These obstacles are based on a fear
of the death problem not clearly arising in the human
consciousness. One needs only to consider this fear just with
the most enlightened spirits of the present. One could point to
many enlightened persons; one would find the same thing. I want
to do it relating to the great religious researcher and
orientalist Max Müller (Friedrich Max Müller,
1823-1900). —
If one considers
what he wrote about death here or
there that attracts attention above all which faces us also
with numerous persons of the present: the timidity to imagine
the possibility of investigating anything about death. Even the
great Max Müller managed to say that all human thoughts
that exceed the human life between birth and death even if they
originate from a poet like Dante in his Divine Comedy are
only childish poetry. Nevertheless, Max Müller says, if an
angel descended from heavenlies onto earth and wanted to say
anything to the human being about the conditions of the human
life after death, the human being would understand these
statements as little as a just born child would understand if
one held a talk to it about the conditions of the present life
in any human language. Some aversion exists even with the most
enlightened spirits of the present to refer to these matters.
Besides, Max Müller is not a negative mind in relation to
the matters of human immortality; he himself is ensouled by a
certain religious security concerning a postmortal life. He
does only not want to award the possibility to the human being
to attain any knowledge of the postmortal life. He emphasises
repeatedly that the human being cannot know anything about the
fields that are beyond death.
This fact shows symptomatically which
difficulties exist in the present concerning our topic.
However, one can also say that the modern scientific view
mentioned in the previous talks repeatedly is so significant
that it distracts the human being from the idea to gain any
knowledge of the postmortal life.
I have spoken in the preceding talks so
appreciatively about this scientific way of thinking and so
approvingly about that what it has brought to light that today
I am not misunderstood if I say briefly why it is difficult
with the scientific way of thinking to admit that one can
penetrate into the fields beyond death. What is this scientific
way of thinking based on? Why has it become great? Because it
established the principle of the human sensory observation and
the application of the intellectual activity to this sensory
observation in the strictest sense of the word.
You can now realise one matter easily. If
one makes the principle of sensory observation and the
application of the intellect to the sensory observation the
exclusive principle of research, one wants, quite certainly, to
investigate what the human being receives with his body by his
birth and develops in his physical life. That what one could
broach as anything “immortal” that has a spiritual
life beyond birth, or conception, and death and one cannot
enclose it in the field of sensory observation and intellectual
research bound to the senses. With his body, the human being
most certainly receives what surrounds his being what organises
his senses and his reason that binds itself to the senses. The
human being certainly acquires that in the area of temporality
which research does in the most remarkable sense in the modern
scientific way. This belongs to the area in which our being
disintegrates if we go through the gate of death. Hence,
without any doubt natural sciences completely work with tools,
which pass away at death as they originate with birth. One is
not surprised if one makes the work with these tools the
exclusive principle of research that one cannot investigate
what these tools cannot reach.
Therefore, nothing seems to be more foolish
than to suppose that one could penetrate with the means of
natural sciences into the mysterious fields one day that are
beyond death. Hence, it has also happened that not the worst
spirits of the nineteenth century finally denied the life after
death from the scientific point of view. Since among many
extraordinary praises of the scientific way of thinking which
controls the general education and thinking more than one
believes certainly also that is justified that it has educated
the human being so that his preconceptions, his wishes and
desires — his subjectivity — do not have a say if
it concerns the scientific investigation of anything. One just
gets big respect if one sees the efforts of this way of
thinking really and works in the experiment with it: operating
in the observation strictly objectively in such a way that
anything subjective of the human being plays no role. Why
should this not be concerning the question of death? However,
have not always the human emotions, wishes, and desires played
the biggest role if the human being answered to this question?
While one has given up in the scientific research that these
things play a role, just the ethically not worst persons of the
nineteenth century refused the life after death.
If one looks for the reasons why these
spirits refused a life after death, one finds noble motives.
One has to admit this without further ado. Some materialistic
thinkers of the last century said that it belongs to the human
egoism to wish that one reached with his little ego beyond
death. It is nobler, they said, that the human being should
merge that what he works what he acquires between birth and
death in the general human life, in the stream of historical
development, and that he should know that this ego does not
survive, but sacrifices itself on the altar of general
humanity. Some moral and academically educated people regarded
such a sacrifice, such merging of that what one has acquired in
life as that what one can say about the death of the human
being.
There are many things indeed which rebel
within the human emotions and wishes against such a merging in
the general stream of humanity. All that must not have a say
answering our question based on real cognition. However, there
is one thing that can lead the human being, even if not to an
answer, nevertheless, to a correct question at least concerning
death and the life after death. Even if one refrains from all
wishes, from any fear of death if one refrains from all what he
likes as an answer about the life after death, and if one
looks, actually, only at that what he is entitled to look,
namely at the economy in the universe, then one has to answer
possibly as follows. If one considers what the human being
acquires in life internally as valuable what revives there in
the soul as our innermost possession and as possession
concerning that what we can do for love, devotion and other
impulses for ourselves and our surroundings, and one asks
himself: what is the most valuable? — It is something
intimate and individual for any human soul, so that one cannot
give away it to the stream of general existence because of its
intimate character. Really; so much we can also give away to
the general stream of existence — the most valuable is
connected so tightly with our soul that we would not give away
it that it would absolutely have to sink into the general
nothing if we did not go as something through the gate of
death. For the most valuable would be lost without doubt for
the world economy that the human soul has attained and worked
for if the human life were over with death. However, this would
contradict what we notice, otherwise, everywhere in the
universe. We realise that nowhere in the universe forces
develop up to an extreme height that they can develop at first
and dissolve then into nothing; but everywhere forces are
generated in such a way only that they change, that they keep
on working in the world. Should the human being be condemned
solely to acquire something that would not be processed further
in the universe, but would have to dissolve into
nothing?
This is by no means an answer at first, but
means putting the following question that is quite independent
of human wishes and preferences: how would it be possible for
the purposes of a general world economy that that dissolves
into nothing what the human being acquires in his soul during
life? However, one cannot advance farther than to put this
question, actually, with the means of outer research. Since
undoubtedly one has to search the immortal of the human being
beyond the outer experience. The outer experience approaches us
by the senses, and a slight experience shows that also
everything that can result from reason belongs to the outer
experience, and that that all can only develop within the
physical body which we get by birth or conception, and which
dissolves at death. However, with it we have no tools that
enable us to investigate the problem of death.
In the introductory talks I have already
spoken of the fact that the human being is able to develop his
soul by the spiritual-scientific methods, indeed, in such a way
that it is detached from the bodily experience like by a
spiritual chemistry. Thereby it really attains a point of view
on which it cannot only express itself as a phrase, but as an
immediate inner experience: I know what it means to develop a
spiritual-mental activity in myself which does not have the
body as its tool. Can we hope that anything can be stated about
death by anything else than by investigating it with the means
of the described cognitional forces instead of means of the
outer experience? Just if one thinks scientifically, one must
say that one has to experience what one should investigate.
However, with no outer tool one can experience death that just
takes away the outer tools from us.
Thus, one can investigate death only under
the premise that it is possible with tools that do not exist
within the bodily life. I have drawn your attention to the fact
that the human being can strengthen his soul life by certain
inner intimate exercises, so that really his spiritual-mental
is detached from the bodily, like while decomposing water
oxygen is detached from hydrogen. Thus, these exercises detach
the spiritual-mental of the human being from the bodily and
with it, the human can experience internally in the
spiritual-mental. If he experiences internally in the
spiritual-mental this way, if he gets around to having his own
bodily as an object like an outer object beside himself, then
he becomes aware of that what the spiritual researchers of all
times meant when they moved two experiences closer together:
the experience of the so-called initiation and the experience
of death.
We must only keep in mind that spiritual
research existed at all times. Spiritual research was done
already in the oldest times of humanity in the so-called
mysteries. Someone who would like to inform himself more
exactly about it can read up in my book Christianity as Mystical Fact and the Mysteries of
Antiquity. However, at that time
spiritual research could not be done as today. The human beings
change in the course of evolution quite substantially; and
before I go further into it, I would like to draw your
attention to the fact that in ancient times one had to develop
quite different forces in the soul. This is why in sites, which
were, so to speak, halfway of art, science, and religion, the
human being concerned was brought to the point where by the
development of his soul forces the spiritual world appeared to
him.
One has to develop soul forces in our times
that are different from those of former times, after the souls
have been educated during the last centuries scientifically.
Therefore, spiritual science must be different in our time
where it must be a continuation of natural sciences. However,
it always brought those two experiences: the development of the
soul capacities, which allow experiencing the spiritual world
regardless of the bodily, and the experience of death.
Repeatedly we find in the different writings expressed that the
human being who was brought to the experience of the spiritual
world, its processes, and beings approached the “gate of
death” in the mysteries. That means that he experiences
something about which he knows immediately that it resembles
the experience of death, or that it is something with which one
can also know the relevance of death if one recognises it. The
initiand knew that he had to approach the border of death. One
always said this. In my writing A
Way to Human Self-Knowledge, I
describe an experience that I have already mentioned here which
the human being attains if he opens himself to meditation and
concentration for many years. I have said there that if the
human being carries out that development of his soul by which
it grows out of the body for short times to a body-free
experience, he arrives at an infinitely meaningful moment that
shakes the soul when it appears for the first time. The
spiritual researcher must often repeat it later; but when it
appears for the first time, it is a deeply intervening
experience. If one increases that soul activity limitlessly
which one else calls attention, devotion, the body-free soul
forces gain strength in such a way that a particular moment
appears in the soul life.
It may appear in the turmoil of the
everyday life; it does not even disturb if one ascends to such
an experience by a development as I have described it in the
book How Does One Attain
Knowledge of Higher Worlds? and
the usual everyday experience can go on apart from that. This
moment can appear also in sleep. Then one feels it suddenly, or
one feels an Inspiration or Intuition during the day life
flowing into the general life. Typically, I want to describe
what one experiences that way. It can be different a hundred
and a hundred times with the human being, but always it has
something of that what I would like to describe now. I try to
express it in words; but doing this, I am aware that I can
express it with words only imperfectly. One feels, as if one is
rudely awakened, and one has the feeling that something asks:
what happens with me? It is, as if a flash goes through the
room where I am and as if it smashes the vessel of the outer
physical body. At such a moment of increased knowledge you do
not only feel something sneaking that destroys the outer
physical body, but you feel almost filled with that what
destroys the physical body. You feel that you can only maintain
yourself with this experience by means of the strengthened
inner soul forces, and you say to yourself now, I know what can
exist in the outer world to detach the physical body from me in
which I am. From this moment on you know that something
spiritual-mental is in the human being that is independent of
the physical body. The physical body relates to the
spiritual-mental like an outer vessel and tool. From this
moment on you know figuratively what death is.
Indeed, it is an uncertain knowledge, an
uncertain experience at first; but it gives the soul that mood
and inner seizing of a spiritual reality by which it can get
into that what enables the soul to penetrate into the regions
of spiritual life. It is an intimate experience; but it is an
experience of humanly quite general kind because it is so
serious that it separates you from that what is connected in
the narrower sense with the personal wishes and intentions and
familiarises you with that what is, actually, always only
behind life. However, it shows something else quite clearly:
the difference between achieving the real spiritual-scientific
knowledge and that outer knowledge. You obtain outer science,
outer knowledge learning this or that, you get yourself into
this or that striving; then you have what you desire to learn.
You gain for yourself by working what you should
know.
It is not the same case with the
spiritual-scientific knowledge. Indeed, it is not in such a way
that somebody should believe that one gains
spiritual-scientific knowledge in such a way that once
enlightenment comes over the soul which then surveys the
spiritual world. Indeed, some people imagine that one attains
spiritual-scientific knowledge without any effort. However,
that does not apply. If anybody said that on the part of
spiritual research many a thing is said that the historian can
bring to light only with efforts in a years-long work from the
documents and sources, and then the spiritual-scientific
researcher comes and says something without anticipating that
one can say such a thing only after years-long research; then this is
presumptuousness. One has to answer that the spiritual
researcher must not only spend the work that one needs to such
years-long investigation of documents or experimentation; but
he must carry out the whole work that is necessary for years in
himself. However, this work has another aim, another character
in a way.
That which one can perform as a
spiritual-scientific researcher does not really lead to
knowledge but is only its preparation. All that I have said in
my writing How Does One Attain
Knowledge of Higher Worlds? characterises that only what the soul has to do to
prepare for that moment when the spiritual world reveals
itself. Preparation —
not elaboration as in the outer
science — is that what the spiritual researcher has to carry out
at first. Indeed, one learns to recognise this if one can
connect sense with the words: I experience myself as a
spiritual-mental being within the spiritual world.
Then one still connects sense with
something else, namely with that what does not seem so
important, indeed, as the question of death because the usual
consciousness is accustomed to it, namely with sleep. One
learns to recognise the nature of sleep. One recognises that
and in which way the human spiritual-mental being leaves the
physical body every time with falling asleep as the hydrogen
leaves the oxygen if water is decomposed. However, the human
soul is not strong enough in sleep to maintain its
consciousness. In the normal life, the human being can maintain
his consciousness only if he submerges with his
spiritual-mental being in the physical body and this reflects
his mental experiences to him like in a mirror. He can have
this experience only like in a reflection in his mental
consciousness. It is in such a way, as if the human being
maintained his consciousness only because he would pass by
mirrors as it were and while looking in the mirrors he would
sense and feel his self. However, if the human being sees
himself in the mirror, he knows that not the mirror is the
cause of the picture, but he who is standing in front of
it.
The human being who experiences a
spiritual-scientific development starts knowing that that what
he thinks, feels, and perceives in the usual life is like a
reflection, and that he is in the spiritual experience a being
that perceives itself like in a reflection if it submerges in
the body. The body makes the soul strong enough that it can
perceive itself; if it is, however, beyond the body, it is not
strong enough to know of itself. If the human being comes to
the point that he senses and feels his independent
spiritual-mental existence as it were, he knows that that is
behind the mirror of the usual consciousness in reality. Then
he starts knowing, not only as a phrase, but by immediate
experience that he is from falling asleep up to awakening in
his real spiritual-mental being and experiences that in it from
which he can only not get any consciousness in the normal human
experience.
The spiritual researcher learns to
experience as one experiences in sleep, but only with the big
difference that one is unaware in the normal sleep, while the
spiritual researcher consciously experiences in his inside
preparing his soul and gaining strength compared with the
bodily-physical experience. Then the spiritual researcher
completely experiences his spiritual-mental essence.
Besides, one experience is of particular significance.
One would like to call it the “change of the
ego-experience.” The ego that we must have in life if
life should normally pass lights up from a certain point of
childhood. This is the point up to which we remember in life.
If we can remember, we know how everything that we have
experienced is connected with the ego. We sit down as it were
beside our ego and feel united with all our conscious
experiences. Our egoity is warranted only because we feel
united with the ego with all mental experiences. If the spiritual researcher reaches that point, where
he can scrape out his spiritual-mental core from the physical
body, then a big transformation of his ego-experience takes
place. For that transformation one has to be prepared, so that
one does not become upset. A great deal of that what I have
described in my writing How Does
One Attain Knowledge of Higher Worlds? is intended to prepare the soul for this
experience.
What happens at a certain moment when the
soul becomes free of the body? What happens there, what becomes
an immediate experience can be shown approximately, and I would
like to take the following way.
If we took the human body as the outer
science investigates it with its outer tools, one would already
get clear by outer logical reasons about the fact that this
human body must be penetrated by something, so that it does not
follow its own laws and its own inner necessities. Which laws
and necessities are these? They appear at death when the
physical body disintegrates. Then it is left to its own
resources, to its very own laws. One can conclude by a certain
logic, which I have also already explained here, that in the
human being something higher must exist than this physical
body. However, a certain rest must always remain there with
such logical considerations that make objections possible if
from the start a healthy sense of truth does not exist for that
which spiritual science can investigate from the primal grounds
of existence. What is it, however, if really the initiation
takes place by which the spiritual researcher experiences
himself internally independently from his physical-body? There
he really has his physical body beside himself, knows himself
beyond this physical body, does not have it around himself; and
how does it appear to him? One must not believe that it is so
nice and cute that one hovers over his body and has his body
lying in the bed.
That is not the case. Nevertheless, you
perceive something very strange after a suitable preparation.
You do not perceive the vital forces of the body but the lethal
forces that already exist during the whole life as the
dissolving forces. If you want to express yourself
scholarly, you may say that you get to know the latent
death in the body. Everywhere you get to know the trends of the
body to fit into the elements of earth and to disintegrate. One
can express this by a comparison; but I do not only mean a mere
picture with it, but I use it in order to express inner
experiences that one has to do.
Look at a candle flame. The candle burns
low. The fuel is destroyed. As long as fuel is there, the flame
can be there. Why is the flame there? Solely because the fuel
burns gradually and dissolves. If you want to avoid that the
fuel dissolves, you must extinguish the flame. You cannot
demand that the candle remains intact and the flame still
burns. You can only have the sight and use of the flame, while
the fuel consumes itself.
Like such a flame the own physical body
appears to you in the supersensible sight while it is used up.
The body appears like the candle that burns low. You know what
takes place in the body because in the body always the tendency
exists to consume itself. As the
flame of the candle originates by consuming the fuel, the human
ego emerges from the forces of death. You would never
experience this ego if you did not carry death in your body.
That applies to the human being. Put yourself hypothetically in
a human body that would be inserted in the world so that it
could not die that it would not have the forces that consume
it. Its ego would be extinguished; the ego would no longer be
there! This is the impressive knowledge that you attain as a
spiritual researcher, which one must summarise with the
following words. We carry not only the vital forces, but we
also carry the forces of death in ourselves. It gives us the
possibility of ego-consciousness for the life between birth and
death.
Indeed, you feel a transformation taking
place by an inner process if you are now as a spiritual
researcher out of the physical body. The ego becomes something
that one does not like. From a thought, which accompanies you,
otherwise, always in life without which you are not there while
awake, the ego becomes something that you do not have in
yourself that you face like a flame emerging from the picture
of the physical death: the ego becomes memory. This is the
significant transition to spiritual cognition that you have the
ego as a mere memory in yourself about which you know that it
is there at which you can look like at a memory, but you cannot
have it in yourself now. — You get to know
death spiritual-scientifically and its connection with the ego
in the normal human life.
Now spiritual investigation can go on. You
can divide what we experience in the soul in three groups. I
would like to point two groups out as significant, namely the
imagining thinking and the will. We must accompany the everyday
life with our thoughts. What would we be as human beings if we
did not walk thinking through the world if we could not form
thoughts of the things? What would we be as human beings if we
did not have the impulses to do this or that, to accomplish
this or that? Will and thinking are the soul forces that always
accompany the human being through his everyday life.
If you advance in spiritual research to the
body-free experience, you realise that you are not able to take
the thinking into the body-free experience. You have to leave
the everyday thoughts outside, also those of the usual science,
which follow the experience of the outer senses; they die away,
while you enter the body-free cognition. The spiritual
researcher understands completely if anybody who wants to count
generally only on the life of thoughts as for example Professor
Forel (Auguste-Henri F., 1848-1931, Swiss psychiatrist,
brain researcher, myrmecologist), says: consciousness falls
asleep very soon if it has nothing to imagine from the outside.
This is comprehensible. For you cannot take the impressions
that come from the outside world with you neither into sleep
nor into the spiritual-scientific experience. For someone who
wants to become a spiritual researcher this causes something
extremely depressing by which he feels apart from everything to
which he is attached in the outer life, that he considers as
the most valuable about which you can even say to yourself, in
the normal life, you fall asleep if you do not have
it.
You have to go as spiritual researcher in a
life where you cannot have this where you must lay down
everything that you were used to think about in the usual life.
What do you experience then concerning that which expresses
itself in the normal life as thinking if the thoughts, which
you normally do no longer have, have died away if they have
remained before the threshold of the spiritual world? You
experience at first what sleep makes. This is a quite
significant experience to know how sleep makes it. Now you
learn to agree even in rather modest way with the materialistic
thinker who says that the brain is necessary for thinking, and
certain movements must form the basis of a thought in our
brain. Quite true, very true! One has to dismiss any objection
against materialism that the thoughts can also be there without
brain. Since thinking is not that, by which we settle in the
spiritual world. We do not find them there. Nevertheless, we
find that from which the thought in the brain only originates.
What sets the brain in particular motions, so that it becomes
the mirror of thoughts? These are only the spiritual-mental
forces. Behind the thinking — not in the
thinking — the spiritual-mental forces work which the spiritual
researcher finds. Hence, he agrees with that what the
materialistic researcher — if he remains in the
borders of his field —
can say that the everyday thoughts are
results of the brain. However, what takes action in the brain
that always makes the physical body the mirror of thinking is
the work of the spiritual-mental behind it. We come as
spiritual researchers really behind the everyday life into the
creative realm of the world. Hence, we also learn to understand
sleep and experience how that what is behind sleep mends the
worn-out parts of our brain at night.
We look at this regeneration of the body;
we get to know the activity of sleep. As spiritual researchers,
we get to know the thoughts, which face us by day from the one
side, from the other side. Whenever a thought can appear and
appears in the mirror of the brain, we get to know it from the
other side if the body sleeps if it lives within the brain and
stimulates the brain to its activity by day. One gets to know
thinking from the other side this way. This is the one part how
you get to know thinking.
Now the other part, how one gets to know
thinking, is something of spiritual research that you do not
like from the start if you have not well prepared yourself. You
get to know the inner work, the inner feeling, the inner
self-experience of the soul. You get to know the soul as
something internally mobile; you get to know an activity of the
soul from which one can ask: what does this activity want? It
wants to form thoughts. However, in such a way as it appears it
cannot form thoughts. You get to know a part of the soul
activity that is used to mend the exhausted brain in sleep; you
may be content with that. You get to know another part of the
soul activity with which you touch the whole physical brain
like from the inside from which you may say to yourself: you
have it now. While you start investigating more exactly, you
realise that you have it by what you have experienced from
birth and have processed it in your soul; but it has thereby
become something that touches your brain; and this does not let
it come about as usual thoughts of the everyday life. The
spiritual researcher settles in a condition that way where he
feels imprisoned in his body, his wondrous tool of thinking. He
feels so touched with it that he says to himself, now you could
form thoughts from your inner activity if your brain did not
lie there like a heavy mass and cannot be roused to that what
the soul wants.
One often speaks of the fact that the
methods, which the spiritual researcher has to go through, lead
to a certain suffering. Suffering always consists of the fact
that something that one would like to carry out in the soul is
prevented. Even physical pains consist of it; however, I want
to speak about the latter another time. Suffering seizes the
spiritual researcher in his development and that which wants to
become a thought but cannot become a thought. Since the brain
is good only for the thoughts which are obtained in the normal
life. Maybe you understand just at this point that the
investigation of the death problem becomes, nevertheless, an
inner martyrdom of the soul. You can do it only because the
human being has the necessary thirst for knowledge in himself
to discover the mysteries of life. Yes, you also understand
that this investigation is not carried out so often because one
makes progress, indeed, generally only if one can be way beyond
everything that one likes, otherwise, in life. Hence, one
speaks only with a certain melancholy and deep seriousness
about what I have indicated just now. Then you are able more
and more to look not only at the lack in the spiritual-mental
experience, but you learn to renounce to form thoughts from
that what you experience with the body. This learning to
renounce one can easily express; however, this renunciation
belongs to the serious problems of life. This renunciation is
connected with bitterness, which justifies itself only because
it just leads to knowledge. — If you have
experienced to be unable to find an expression in thought of
that what you have attained, then you experience it only
internally. What do you experience then? You experience what is
fit to intervene, indeed, not in the body because the body
prevents it but in that what forms the origin of a new physical
body that we build for the next life on earth if we have gone
through a life after death in a wholly spiritual world.
— I speak
later about the experiences in the time between death and the
next birth.
I have tried to show by means of inner
experiences, which the spiritual researcher has, how he
experiences his inner, spiritual-mental essence that must
emerge because of its own peculiarities in the next life on
earth. That is as certain as a sprout evolves into a new plant.
Since you do not get to know that of the human being which
outgrows death, while you speculate on it, but while you
recognise what prepares itself for the life beyond death, if
you look for that what you cannot see with the senses and
cannot think with the reason engaged in the senses. Spiritual
science does not speculate or philosophise on immortality; but
it wants to prepare the human soul in such a way that its
immortal essence lies there, I would like to say,
“spiritually prepared” as one also investigates
something in natural sciences, while one extracts it surgically
from the surroundings in which it cannot be investigated in its
peculiarity. So far about thinking.
The matters of will are different. Here you
experience a transformation, too. Then you realise how much the
will that one expresses in the outside world depends on the
constitution of the body, how a strong will in the usual life
is connected intensely with the whole constitution of our body.
With any impulse of will we bring our body into the field, so
to speak. However, as spiritual researchers we must now have
the will without the body. There the will asserts itself
straight away in a way, as you are not used to it, otherwise.
Otherwise, you are used if you have an impulse of will to bring
your body into the field; if the body lies idly in the bed, no
impulse of will stirs. We feel impulses of will always
connected with the body. Now, however, the soul which wants to
penetrate into the spiritual world is beyond the body; the body
plays a part in the will impulse. This causes a certain inner
tension, as if the will is limited from all sides, as if it is
in an impenetrable eggshell, as if you are hindered from
thinking, imagining, feeling and perceiving, from walking, from
standing, from everything.
You feel the will as self-contained, but as
stumbling at the walls everywhere through which it cannot go.
You have to do the inner spiritual exercises again so far that
you perceive not only this negative of the will, but that you
can experience the inside like pressed in the will. Then you
realise that you want something again that you do not like to
experience. If you apply the will in the outer world, you have
the will impulses on the one side, the moral-social order on
the other side. You impose duties upon yourself in life, or the
moral-social order imposes them upon you. One makes a
difference between good will and bad will, between right and
wrong; one distinguishes the moral rules from the will impulses
in the outer world. This is correct. Now when you have
withdrawn from the outer world, the will remains to you in a
quite similar way as the ego has just now remained. What you
have wanted remains like a memory. I describe how the
experiences arise. I have to describe the Imaginative view in
this case; this seems maybe fantastic, but I have to show the
matters in such a way.
Then you experience something in your
pressed will like morality contained in this will. You
experience an action that must considered as bad with the outer
sensory consciousness in this will in such a way that you have
to compensate it. You experience the will in memory in such a
way that the compensating force of that what must happen
because the immoral action demands this is included in the
will. I cannot help saying, if you have done anything bad, it
must place itself beside you like a ghostlike enemy who stands
beside you, until you have got rid of him by compensating
actions. Someone who experiences the will in himself and in his
memory what he himself has wanted faces the bad without fail
which has an effect, until he has got rid of it by compensating
will impulses. You experience what one often calls the inner
work of karma.
Then you know for sure: if you experience
an act of volition that you have wanted, you experience it in
such a way that you recognise that it is done. Since every act
of volition belongs, like thinking, to memory. Then you know
that it is done, at the same time it has contributed that we
advance in our development. Something also spreads over our
consciousness that one can call an enlightening purification of
that what is done. However, any action has an effect in such a
way that you realise how the moral and the mechanical that are
separated in the physical life are combined. You realise that
something bad or immoral is effective, until you endeavour to
extinguish it to a certain degree in the outside life, until we
have gained the power to extinguish the bad; that means to make
it good. We know if we experience the will in the body-free
cognition that this has its inner moral impulses at any price;
we know that karma is an active force continuing to have an
effect in the world. We experience painfully now recognising
that there are many, too many actions in our present life that
we cannot compensate. We know about them, because we behold
their reality that they go along in our next life on earth and
contribute there to our destiny.
You can call investigation of death what I
tried to suggest in such a way, because it means to experience
what strides through the gate of death as the immortal of the
human being. You recognise from all that that the true
investigation of death is an intimate, inner research that it
is, however, the more a generally human one because it aims at
that what one can find in all human beings. For it is due to
the outer body and the outer world that we are these particular
human beings in the life between birth and death; this does not
go with us through the gate of death. That goes with us through
the gate of death, which lies behind the physical-sensory
realm. That causes the physical-sensory realm and our outer
experience between birth and death.
Now we put the following question. Why do
we notice nothing of our immortal soul in the usual life? Why
does that what can reveal the mystery of death drape itself in
such darkness? Because we live on this darkness in the usual
soul life between birth and death. We must extinguish our
immortal in the usual consciousness, so that we live in the
body in the outer physical sensory world, we become fond of it
and accomplish our mission on it. If we want to penetrate to
our immortal, we must extinguish our everyday life.
If we must extinguish our immortal in our
usual consciousness to have the usual physical-sensory everyday
life, we are not surprised that we do not find that what can
inform us about death within the everyday life for which just
the mystery of death must be covered. The spiritual researcher
can also show, why one cannot find the mystery of death in the
usual life. For while we descend with our spiritual-mental part
from spiritual heights to that what is given us by the line of
heredity by father and mother, while we combine with the
bodily-physical substances and submerge in them, the limited
consciousness must extinguish the infinite consciousness. At
death where the infinite consciousness lights up again, the
limited consciousness is extinguished, and that what can be
maintained of it exists as memory. However, the life
after death is guaranteed by the spiritual-scientific
development of the human soul if it exercises those methods by
which it already penetrates into the spiritual world in the
usual life and passes the gate of death fully consciously.
Next time, however, I would like to
describe the immediate result of that what we tried to discuss
spiritual-scientifically today as the mystery of death which is
there already during life, and which enables our usual
consciousness. Yes, an aversion exists against these matters in
the present; one does not like to investigate them. Even good,
brilliant thinkers shy away from penetrating into those regions
to which I have today pointed related to the death
problem.
So it happens that such an excellent person
like Maurice Maeterlinck (1862-1949, Belgian playwright,
Nobel Prize in 1911) puts the [most]
wrong views of the death problem
forward in his recently appeared booklet On Death — which you should
read because he has written it so excellently. He who is able
to speak about all the other fields of life very brilliantly
had to fail with this matter because he has a particular way to
approach the matters; namely to describe death with the same
cognitive means as the outer matters. He is no spiritual
researcher. He does not know that one has to leave these means
if the areas should be investigated which are considered with
the death problem. Maeterlinck is in the same situation, as
once the mathematicians were towards the problem that one
called the square of the circle. There were certain times when
one sent solutions to mathematical circles how one could
transform a circle into a square using a compass.
However, all the solutions were dissatisfying, and today
everybody is a dilettante who still deals with this problem
because it is strictly proved that the problem cannot be solved
this way. While one had the opportunity once to count as a
genius if one wanted to solve the square of the circle, today
someone is a dilettante who still attempts this. Concerning
immortality the view of the human beings will also change as
the views of those mathematicians changed. For somebody still
attempts a solution of the square of the circle in another
field today; but one would have to say to him, you demand that
one proves the mysteries of death with the means of the usual
life. However, it matters, above all, that one realises the
proofs. One must also realise that the proofs that want to
prove the mystery of death and immortality with means of the
usual life are impossible because we have covered the forces of
the immortal just in our everyday life, so that we become
ego-conscious human beings in the transience.
However, a particular feature still appears
with Maurice Maeterlinck. After he has talked at cross-purposes
everywhere, he finally concludes — somewhat more
brilliantly, belletristically than Max Müller, who did it
somewhat more professorially — that the soul should
get used to the fact that it cannot really investigate the
mysteries of existence in this and not in that life. Then he
adds, it is probably good that one cannot investigate them. He
would not wish on his worst enemy that he could investigate the
real mysteries. He is afraid that the world becomes free of
mysteries if they are investigated that it would lose any shine
of the mysterious if one penetrated into the mystery of death.
He considers it as valuable that a mystery remains a mystery,
so that one does not destroy the surprise in the soul if one
comes behind such a mystery.
I have already mentioned in another context
that the mysteries do not become inferior if one faces them as
spiritual science can speak about them. Since just that which
we investigate in the mysteries does not make life more
superficial, but deeper and deeper. It is still in such a way
that if we behold in something of our previous life on earth,
this does not solve the riddle of life superficially and does
really not deprive the mystery of life of its shine but it
makes it even greater, even more brilliant. Spiritual research
does not penetrate into the matters so that it deprives the
mysteries of existence of their admirable character, but so
that our admiration can still increase because one can
investigate the reasons behind the matters.
Therefore, one has to answer to someone who
speaks about death as Maeterlinck does and says, he does not
wish on his worst enemy that the mysteries are investigated,
that the mysterious is not taken away from life, while one
attempts to investigate it. However, with a trivial word
— it is not trivial, but it is meant quite seriously-,
one could express what one would like to say to a person who
wants to maintain life while he wants to accept it as
“unfathomable.” One could ask him, would you want
if anybody has been born blind to advise that he should not be
operated so that that what is round him remains a mystery to
him, and that the shine of the world should not illuminate his
inside? Would you like to argue that you did not wish even on
your worst enemy that the mystery of the world would be
divested of its wonders because he would be operated? —
Someone who answers yes could also answer with the question,
which Maeterlinck expresses at the end of his book: the world
would lose its shine if one investigated its mystery.
Spiritual-scientific research shows that this is not the case
if one investigates the mysteries of the world. While
investigating death our emotional life will just get the view
that death forms a necessary link in the whole life, and that
not only Goethe's word is true that nature invented death to
have a lot of life, but that for the human life the word is
true: nature needs death to let perpetually arise always new
marvellous things from the origin of life.
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