The
Meaning of Immortality of the Human Soul
Berlin,
4 December 1913
Today I would like to speak about the
meaning of immortality of the human soul taking up the
preceding talk. In case of such a spiritual-scientific
consideration, I do not speak using conceptual definitions or
theoretical discussions. I would rather like to give some
indications from the field of spiritual-scientific research
that can shed light on this subject.
It became obvious from the last talk here
that spiritual research just wants to penetrate to the immortal
essence of the human being. I have said that that research is
able to penetrate into the area of human knowledge where this
immortal essence is to be found which arises from the
development of the human soul that is the only instrument by
which we can really penetrate into the spiritual world. I have
suggested many a time that everything depends in spiritual
research on the fact that single persons are able by means of
the mentioned exercises to carry out an inner spiritual-mental
activity, detached from the physical body, detached from the
tool by which any remaining human soul activity is carried out
in the course of the everyday life. By intimate developing
processes of the soul, it is possible to free it from the body.
I have also indicated that for the spiritual researcher who has
really learnt to connect meaning with the words
“experiencing beyond the body,” this human soul
also arises with its qualities that prove by themselves that
the life of this soul outreaches birth and death.
We realise in the course of the today's
considerations that such a consideration — attained by
initiation of the human soul — gives a meaning to
the word immortality. However, I would like to stress first,
that we really live in a time in which the deeper human
thinking and the more serious consideration of the human life
may have the effect that they discharge gradually into the way
which spiritual science expounds for the problem of the human
immortal soul life. I would like to point only to one matter
just from the point of view to gain a meaning of human
immortality. I would like to point to that spirit who counts as
one of the leading guides of Enlightenment, to Lessing
(Gotthold Ephraim L., 1729-1781, German writer,
dramatist, art critic), who tried to get a meaning out of the
idea of immortality.
In that writing in which Lessing gave his
spiritual testament to humanity, he renewed the ancient idea of
reincarnation, as he believed; and he undertook this, because
he felt forced to understand the complete historical life of
humanity on earth as education. One can dismiss easily this
testament that he gave as the completion of his striving
saying: also great spirits grow old and proclaim many a pipe
dream.
However, someone who has learnt to have
respect for spiritual life and pursuit cannot dismiss
Lessing's Education of the Human Race (1780), his ripest
work, in such a way. I cannot go into the details of his
writing. I can point only to the fact that to Lessing history
appears in such a way that humanity ascends from more primitive
conditions of life and views to more and more developed ones.
Lessing understands this evolution of the human race as a
mysterious education that the spiritual world bestows on the
human race. He distinguishes single epochs of the advancing
humanity, and from these considerations, the question arises to
him who could not yet stand on the ground of our modern
spiritual science: how can one position the single soul life of
the human being in the historical evolution of humanity?
He says to himself that the single soul
life can position itself in the course of the historical
development only if one assumes that the human soul lives
repeatedly on earth. If one imagines that the soul which lives
today has lived repeatedly in preceding epochs in which it has
absorbed what these epochs could give the souls. Thus, the
question is solved for Lessing in a satisfying way: what about
the souls that have lived in ancient epochs and have not taken
part of the development of higher soul forces? The answer
arises for Lessing that these were the same souls which have
lived in former times which have carried over the fruits of the
past epochs to their present existence and which gain
additional fruits for themselves now which the present can give
them. They go with these fruits after death through a wholly
spiritual life and they carry them over to future epochs to
participate in the progress of humanity. Thus, the whole
meaning of the historical development lightens up for Lessing
with the sense of the immortality of the human soul at the same
time. Thus, this meaning arises for him, and thus the
possibility arises for him straight away to remember that the
life of the single person is greater and more comprehensive
than what can be expressed in the life between birth and
death.
As one considers the single life, which
this single human soul lives from birth up to death, fits into
that what this life can give. It, walks then through the gate
of death, casts off the physical body, and penetrates into a
spiritual world to look for its further development. One can
imagine the complete historical development of humanity and of
the earth in the sense of Lessing. What humanity experiences on
earth is the “soul” of the earth and everything
that geology, biology and other sciences investigate is the
“physical body” of the earth which once falls off
from the united human souls as the human body falls off from
the single human soul at death. Then, however, the earth, after
the body has fallen off from it, advances to a future
embodiment in the universe to ascend to future spiritual and
material heights. One realises that the sense of human
existence and of the whole earth evolution arises from this
thought of Lessing. Lessing could not be discouraged from this
thought by the fact that one can argue that this was a thought
which humanity had in the most primitive conditions of the soul
development; then, however, it has disappeared from the
cultural development. On the contrary, Lessing says at the end
of his treatise on The Education
of the Human Race, “Is
this idea less valuable because it is the oldest, because it
lighted up in the human soul before the sophistries of the
school paralysed and weakened it?” Lessing imagines
without doubt that a future spiritual development brings that
to the souls again what they have lost in the
interim.
Thus, one attains real forces that carry
over the results of ancient times into the present. Thus, one
overcomes that impossible point of view where one speaks that
“ideas” are effective in the history of humanity,
as if “ideas” could be realities one day! However,
ideas cannot be effective in history, because mere ideas are
abstractions, are nothing real. For Lessing imagines that the
real life on earth proceeds because the realities of the human
souls carry over what is created in one epoch from epoch to
epoch. There we stand on the ground of spiritual realities that
hold together the historical epochs of humanity.
You can now ask yourself, what has our
spiritual research to say to this thought gained by Lessing on
basis of certain historical necessities? Spiritual research
finds its way to look at that what exceeds birth and death.
Proving this I have to point once again with a few words to
what presents itself to the spiritual researcher in the real
mental experience. He opens himself to the exercises informed
in the previous talk and lives emotionally in such way, after
the soul itself has drawn itself out of the physical and has
come to an experience in the spiritual. Then this soul has the
physical body beside or before itself and experiences it in
such a way that it is subjected to death as something external.
While the everyday life proceeds, otherwise, in such a way that
the human being only develops consciousness if he is, so to
speak, within his physical body and uses this as tool to make
his surroundings the object of his consciousness, namely the
physical-sensory world.
Let us imagine the experience of the
spiritual researcher lively that he lifts his soul out of his
body that he strengthens the inner soul forces so that he does
not depend on perceiving only with the help of the bodily
tools, but can control them without bodily forces. Then the
spiritual researcher comes to a particular knowledge: where
from it comes, actually, that one has a consciousness in the
everyday sensory life.
If the spiritual researcher has really
freed his soul experience from the physical body, and has this
body beside or before him, then he learns to recognise how
actually this everyday soul life comes about. I would like to
use a comparison. The spiritual researcher does not change the
soul life as it is already. What he attains is only that he can
behold spiritually what happens, otherwise, in the everyday
life. There the spiritual researcher recognises that the
activity of the spiritual-mental works on the body in such a
way that at first the nervous organs of the human being are
treated that one can compare this work to the writing of
letters on paper. I ask you to consider what the spiritual
researcher recognises at first as spiritual-mental activity is
not the thinking, not the feeling, not the will, also not that
what one knows in the everyday life as soul activity. However,
it is that what works at first in his bodily organs and
processes them so plastically that they get those movements
only of which the materialistic worldview speaks. These
movements in the brain, in the nervous system et cetera are
there actually, and in this sense, one has to agree with the
materialistic worldview completely. These movements, these
oscillations in the brain exist as I write down the letters on
paper. As my activity is that of writing, the first activity of
the human being that he develops is that he causes movements,
oscillations in his nervous system as “letters” at
which his soul looks that it is comparable with the sight of my
own letters that I have written.
The difference is only that I write the
letters consciously on the paper and can consciously read them
again. However, if I relate to the outside world, I write the
physical activities that are to be carried out in the nervous
system unconsciously with the spiritual-mental. If I have
written them, they run off, I look at them, and this looking is
the conscious soul life.
Thus, we realise that the spiritual-mental
in the true sense of the word stands behind that which develops
as spiritual-mental in the everyday life, and that between the
true spiritual-mental in which the spiritual researcher lives
if he has learnt to experience independently of his body and
between the spiritual-mental in the everyday soul life the
complete bodily experience exists. Between our true
spiritual-mental and the everyday conscious life is our body.
However, that which this body experiences, how this body puts
itself in perpetual organic activity, so that consciousness can
originate as a mirror reflects a picture is the result of the
spiritual-mental. Behind our body, we stand with our
spiritual-mental, and in this spiritual-mental the immortal
essence of the human being exists.
If one distinguishes in such a way, one no
longer searches the meaning of immortality in the continued
existence of those soul contents that one experiences between
birth and death; but one has to search the real basic origin of
immortality in that what is behind the everyday life. Now we
must get a concept of that what is behind this everyday life.
However, one can do this while glancing at the real nature of
the spiritual investigation.
From that which I have just discussed
arises that the everyday consciousness is from the body as
comparatively our own picture is reflected by a mirror.
Somebody who does not search the spiritual-mental behind the
picture but believes that the spiritual-mental originates from
the body as the function, as the effect of the body who thinks
materialistically resembles a person who says; I see a mirror
before myself; it is strange that it lets my picture emerge
from its substance. However, it does not let it emerge from its
substance, and it is nonsense to believe that the mirror
produces the picture; but the mirror reflects the
picture.
Thus, the body reflects our own
spiritual-mental activity. You can compare your body to a
mirror which reflects our spiritual-mental activity, only with
the difference that we face the mirror quite passively but
treat the body with the spiritual-mental activity first, we
write this activity in it which manifests to our consciousness
then. The comparison would be correct only if I carried out an
activity from my body. This activity would cause a process in
the glass which caused the reflection when I stand actively
before the mirror and would emit certain radiations et cetera
which cause intersections or the like which cause the content
of the everyday consciousness and make it possible that the
human being appears before himself. However, from that ensues
that the human being needs a counterfort for the life between
birth and death in which he can reflect his spiritual-mental
activity. If you had to develop such content of consciousness
without body, you would not be able to do this in the life
between birth and death. If the body did not carry out its duty
as tool, you would have no counterfort; you would have nothing
to reflect the spiritual-mental activity.
If now the spiritual researcher becomes
able by the mentioned exercises to lift his spiritual-mental
out of the physical body, it also becomes apparent that he can
no longer turn his spiritual-mental sight to the outer physical
world. This sensory world disappears from the horizon of his
consciousness at the same moment when the spiritual researcher
lifts the spiritual-mental out of the physical body. I would
like to note this only by the way for those who believe that
one could be possibly distracted by spiritual research from the
pleasant sight of the physical-sensory world with its wealth. O
no, this is not at all that way. Just someone who has become a
spiritual researcher realises when he lives in his
spiritual-mental and the sight of the physical-sensory
disappears; but he appreciates its beauty and real value all
the more. He returns repeatedly, as long as it is granted to
him, strengthened by his stay in the spiritual world; he
develops a bigger interest in the beauties of the physical
world — and gains a particular support to recognise the
beauties of the physical world and their tasks which have
escaped him before without spiritual research. Only those make
such objections who have not yet come closer to spiritual
research.
If it is now really in such a way that the
physical world disappears if we do not have the counterfort of
the body in order to perceive — and the spiritual
researcher has this body beside himself, does not use it as
tool, then the question arises: how does the real spiritual
consciousness come about? Does the spiritual consciousness not
need a counterfort? Does the soul not need anything by which it
can be reflected if it wants to go into the spiritual
consciousness?
Spiritual research answers this question in
such a way that the human being wants a counterfort too when he
leaves his physical body with his spiritual-mental and lives in
the spiritual-mental, something that is now a mirror to him.
Something becomes a mirror to him that is to be endured really
still before death if it is experienced in spiritual research
only grievously. There we stand again at a point where I must
point to the fact that spiritual research leads not only to
bliss, but also to tragic moods what one can endure only with
big pain. However, the spiritual researcher must just purchase
higher knowledge with pain. That what comes up then as a
counterfort is the own life which we have gone through from the
point of childhood up to which we can otherwise remember.
However, we have it in the memory picture in the everyday life
in such a way that we are in it as it were that we are combined
with it. We ourselves are our thoughts, our experiences, our
pains, all memories strictly speaking; we are in them, are one
with them. However, with the spiritual researcher it happens
that that what one has, otherwise, in memory gets out of him
like out of a cover. That with which you are one, otherwise,
and about which you say to yourself, I have experienced it, and
now I feel combined in my thoughts, sensations and feelings
with that what I have experienced — you feel this now
like an outer vision, like a Fata Morgana before yourself. You
feel that enlarged what comes out of you in which the
spiritual-mental is reflected.
There you realise that you must endure in
the spiritual-mental experience, in the initiation
— not
after death —
that you have your life as a substantial
basis of experience instead of the outer physical impressions.
That is in contrast what you can perceive spiritually.
— There
you realise to what extent you have become a good or bad mirror
for the spiritual world. There you get to know above all what
it means to face what you have experienced. For that is now the
reflecting surface to which everything is in contrast that the
spiritual world shows. Instead of having your body as your tool
for perceiving, you have your own egoity, your commemorative
egoity, and your own experiences as tool. Own experiences must
merge with that what you experience spiritually; they must
reflect what you experience spiritually. And now you
notice — when you do no longer experience your own inside within
your body, but have it like a Fata Morgana outside of
you — that at this moment this inside presents itself like an
etheric being that becomes larger and larger because it is
internally related to the whole spiritual universe.
You feel like being soaked up from the
spiritual universe. You feel if you have gone through the
indicated experiences, as if something exists in the human life
between birth and death that is contained in the forces of the
physical body. When you have left the physical body with
initiation, something becomes free of the forces of the
physical body held together as the etheric body. Then that what
has become free has the tendency to spread in the spiritual
world, it thereby becomes more and more imperceptible
— and you
risk that your own self, the self of thoughts, dissolves in the
spiritual universe, and that you thereby lose its sight because
the reflection does no longer exist after the
dissolution.
The physical body counteracts it, as long
as the physical just lasts. For at the moment when the danger
threatens that the subtler etheric of a more spiritual body as
it were would lose itself, the physical body asserts its
reinforced forces —
and one has to go again back into the
physical body. Then this is just in such a way, as if you are
forced back by the power of the physical body to the everyday
perception, to the usual sight and to the physical way. As you
can learn from this representation, you get to know the moment
that must take place when the physical and chemical forces
seize the outer physical body and take it away if death enters.
One learns to recognise how the consciousness can live on after
death because now the physical body does no longer call back
the just described subtler etheric body. It can just live on at
first in this form that our own experience faces us as a memory
picture, only as long as the forces of the spiritual universe
assert themselves and the subtler body disintegrates in the
universe.
Thus, we realise how the spiritual
researcher causes that condition by his experiences that must
come into being with the human being at first after death. As
the first, you get to know what takes place after death
immediately. Nevertheless, you also learn to recognise that you
have only grasped the very first times after death. In
my Occult Science. An
Outline I have indicated the
length of these very first times after death. They last only
some days according to the character of the human being. The
memory of the past life takes a few days. It lasts as long as
the forces of the inner subtler body which spiritual science
makes apparent can continue.
If you consider the conditions this way,
you ask yourself, what causes the length of the period in which
this memory can take place? — If one compares it
to the length of that time which this or that person can stay
awake in the usual life, then you have the period within which
this memory of the past life takes place. You can say,
depending on the capacity of his etheric body the human being
opens himself to life without falling asleep without having to
call forth sleep as compensation, the memory tableau of the
past life lasts longer or shorter which presents itself like a
living Fata Morgana .
About such a period and about the following
ones about which I will still immediately speak you learn to
speak in the area of spiritual research by inner consideration,
not by outer measuring. What you experience there in the
retrospect in the initiation appears in such a way that you
know: it contains the forces that the human being must
maintain, before sleep overcomes him. You experience the former
life for days. What happens then, however, arises from the
spiritual research, too. It does not appear in indifferent
thoughts what you have experienced in your life between birth
and the present moment; but that also appears what you have
experienced morally or, otherwise, in the fields of your
efficiency, in your fitness for life.
However, this appears in particular way; I
would like to discuss it using a concrete example. We look back
at our life, look there at a time when we have done something
wrong. This wrong appears now to us in that Fata Morgana of the
past life. The impression is for the spiritual researcher in
such a way that first like in an uninteresting picture, like in
a tableau, this life appears and something gradually emerges
from it — and in doing so the
spiritual researcher beholds more and more tragic
conflicts —
about which one could say that the whole
personal value arises from that what one has done and has
experienced. If you have done anything wrong, this wrong first
comes out of the tableau of the past-life in such a way that
you look at the picture only, knowing that you have done this.
Then this picture is penetrated with emotional forces emerging
from the spiritual-mental, and you must say to yourself that
you cannot be the human being who you should be if you must
always look at this what you have done there. You can be this
only if you have wiped out this wrong from the perception of
the inner destiny, from karma. The longer you succeed in
staying with what presents itself like a spiritual mirror, and
the longer you look at it, the stronger the emotional
experiences appear which say, you must look at your deed as
something wrong, until you have extinguished it!
Indeed, the spiritual researcher must go
through this. He must see then that in the Fata Morgana which
is in contrast to it and becomes a sum of countless
self-reproaches what shows him his value quite clearly how far
he is, and what he has to deal with in order to make himself
the true human being only. Self-knowledge — it is peculiar that
it becomes more and more tragic, more and more difficult, the
farther you advance in it, and that you face everything as
self-reproach in particular that you should not have done, so
that you are so fixated on it that you cannot turn away the
spiritual glance from it, before it is extinguished.
Up to here, Aristotle
(384-322 BC) already recognised the sight of the human spiritual
life. He also recognised what must be attached to this Fata
Morgana. Aristotle already knew that the human being if he has
gone through the gate of death really lives in his being, and
looks back-at the own deeds and misdeeds on which his glance is
fixated. However, he was not yet as far as a spiritual
researcher that he would get beyond this retrospect. This
retrospect extends to eternity according to him. Aristotle
could not recognise how the human being could escape from it
one day; so that he had another retrospect after the first
short retrospect that presents itself figuratively before him
forever. This is a rather hopeless aspect of his philosophy if
you understand it correctly. Aristotle believes that the short
life on earth is there to prepare the experience in the
spiritual world in which the human being, looking back, would
be fixated on the sight of the imperfect existence between
birth and death; and his life after death would consist of the
fact that he would be fixated on this sight.
His world would be to look at himself in
such a way that he was in the life between birth and death; and
as we see a world of animals, plants, stones, mountains, seas
and so on, we would be fixated on the sight of the experience
of our own actions in the time after death. — Franz Brentano
(1838-1917), the excellent investigator of Aristotle pointed
clearly to it in his book Aristotle and his World View (1911). What I have just stated — even if the words of
Aristotle are sometimes in such a way that one can argue about
what he had meant with them — arises from
Aristotle absolutely. He did not yet know that this is a
passageway only as the modern spiritual research can show which
presents itself to the human being as such retrospect that is
penetrated with inner emotional experiences.
What presents itself to the spiritual
researcher if he penetrates into that region which the human
being enters striding through the gate of death?
If he has advanced so far that his body
does not reclaim him too fast, then that results which is
attached to the uninteresting Fata Morgana as retrospect. Since
the spiritual researcher can ascend on his way in such a way
that he sees a Fata Morgana of his life events and some of his
spiritual experiences at first that are obvious; then his body
can reclaim that subtle etheric body in his inside, and he
enters like from an initiation dream again into the everyday
reality. However, if he continues the exercises on and on, he
comes so far that he even beholds what lifts out itself from
this Fata Morgana, so that that appears which we are not yet
which we must become, if we did anything wrong, for example. We
are not yet that who has eliminated this wrong; but we must
become someone who eliminates the wrong.
This is the internally oppressive again
that one feels the forces evoked by the self-inspection, which
want to compensate everything wrong karmically. You look at
your imperfections. You see them. However, you also see more
and more in which way you must do it, so that you can erase the
imperfect, the wrong. You see what you must become. This is the
self-knowledge that you feel the germinal forces in yourself,
which already press us forward beyond death, so that you say to
yourself, these forces live in us after death; we do if we are
relieved from our body what these demand. Now I must keep the
wrong, the imperfections; however, I feel the forces that can
eradicate the wrong. Now you know by the inner sight that it
lasts for years, until that what presents itself by own
experience gradually gets the forces which can really
compensate the wrong. Now they cannot compensate it. They must
go through a spiritual world first. As true as the physical
consciousness says to itself looking at the sun set in the
west, now you have to experience the night, then the sun can
appear in the east again. As true the spiritual researcher
knows if he experiences the germinal forces in the soul: after
you have developed the forces gradually, after you have
realised after death —
or have realised throughout the
years — how the compensating forces must be, you must dive into
a spiritual world to find the forces. These forces are
collected now, as it were, from this spiritual world, so that
the human being, after he has experienced the spiritual world
between death and new birth, becomes ripe to enter a new life
on earth with these forces.
But spiritual research can also get an
impression of that what the soul has to experience if it has
appropriated those forces spiritually first after death looking
at its past life, after it has realised which forces it must
have if it prepares for a new life on earth going through the
spiritual world. Since the spiritual researcher, as long as he
lives on earth, cannot transform these forces. Nevertheless, he
looks into the spiritual world; he sees the material for this
transformation. He sees as it were originating in himself how
the forces demand a new life.
As you can see lungs in a human embryo
which has not yet come to daylight, you know that they can
breathe: if they come into breathable air. You can also realise
if the soul is relieved of the body, the spiritual organs
inhaling the spiritual air in the spiritual world that develop
spiritually only when they approach a new life on earth. You
get to know this spiritual self-development looking at it
directly only, you get to know what it means to grasp the
spiritual substance with spiritual organs. — If you wanted to use
an expression for what happens there with the soul, you would
find no other expression in the usual language than that one
says: it is a blissful experience in a certain respect. For it
is a life in activity, perpetually invoking and acquiring
spiritual substance in this existence between death and new
birth, causing the preconditions of a new life on earth. In
this existence, the soul feels as a part of a spiritual world,
and thereby it feels it like heavenly bliss, after it has felt
what it must regard as tragic in the past life, what has to
develop as the germinal forces on basis of the previous
life.
We have now collected everything concerning
the sense of the continued existence when the human being goes
through the gate of death. First, we have a spiritual,
mirage-like retrospect of the past life lasting some days, and
then you look back emotionally at this life. Since these
emotional experiences are not only a retrospect, but you
experience everything that you have committed as imperfections,
as wrong what should be different, so that you reach that in
the following life which you should reach, and get the forces
which you need so that the next life can become different. As
long as you have a retrospect of the previous life, you only
work on those forces with your thoughts so that you realise,
you must have these or those forces in the future life on
earth. If you have experienced your life on earth once again
after death in the spiritual, then you reach a wholly spiritual
region, and you inhale as it were all those spiritual forces,
which descend then to combine with that what father and mother
can give as physical substance and to form a new life on
earth.
It may seem now, as if the passage through
the life between death and new birth makes it necessary that
the consecutive lives on earth would be more and more perfect.
However, this is virtually not the case, because it is true
what already a great spirit said out of his almost ill soul:
“the world is deep and deeper than the day has
thought” (Friedrich Nietzsche in Thus Spoke Zarathustra (1883)). We can come only slowly and gradually to that
what is put in us, and that our human forces are rather
imperfect in relation to what they must become once, and what
can stand as an ideal of true humanity before us.
Then it becomes apparent that we are not
always able to survey after death which forces we have to
appropriate in order to compensate the committed wrong. There
many forces participate, so that it may be that we believe to
compensate with an even bigger egoism or folly what we have
committed from egoism or folly in the previous life. Thereby it
can happen that the following incarnation is an even more
imperfect one, an even harsher training than the previous one
was. However, overall the course through the repeated lives is
a rise. It is possible that the human being looking back at the
past life can be in error concerning the way of compensating
something and that thereby imaginary or real descents are
caused. Overall, strong rises often follow deep
“falls” of the human being, while after death the
dreadful happens that we look back at a deep wrong we have
committed, or what adhered to us as a big imperfection, and
that we experience a big rise after a deep fall.
Many a thing appears if the spiritual
researcher pursues the life sharp-sightedly, since this does
not only happen. If you have your life after death as
background, you merge with the spiritual world, so that you
meet the soul —
if you meet something wrong that you
committed —
that you wronged, at the same time and then
you witness the wrong which you committed on this soul.
Generally expanding the look at something spiritual leads us
not only to our own soul at first but to the other human
soul.
You learn to observe the other human soul,
so that you start observing and pursuing the other soul that is
already disembodied —
even if it is hard to believe. Indeed, I
have to draw your attention to the following. If the spiritual
researcher tries to expand his own life in such a way that he
penetrates into the space of experience — “space”
is thought symbolically, of course — where any soul is,
he can witness the destinies of this soul after death. I must
say only that you witness the destinies of those souls at first
with which you were connected in the preceding life; but if you
advance in spiritual experience, the destinies of such souls
with which you were connected in former lives also appear. The
spiritual researcher realises that he develops relations with
almost all souls on earth; however, it is exceptionally
difficult to recognise them and you can succeed only using
certain aids.
Some questions may become clear to the
single listener if I speak this way about the meaning of human
immortality. If you take together the previous talk with the
today's one, you can say, I can understand that the everyday
consciousness can only develop, while it envelops the
everlasting of the human soul like a veil, and that we develop
the sensory consciousness because we darken what develops after
death. We must bear death in ourselves, so that we can have the
present consciousness. To such an extent as we develop the
forces that lead us to our natural death, we can develop the
everyday consciousness. The fact that we can die makes it
possible that we can have the sensory world round
us.
Thus, one can understand that the human
being must die, so to speak, when he has experienced his life.
However, someone who hears speaking about the meaning of
immortality this way has to ask again, what about those lives,
which may end unfilled in the prime of life, maybe because of
inner illnesses or inner weaknesses or misfortunes? What can
the spiritual researcher say about such deaths? How do they
line up in the course of the earth-lives, and what are they
after death?
I would not like to speak here abstractly.
I have already held these talks for many years here. Hence, it
goes without saying that now somebody may believe that I give
such portrayals as mere assertions. You experience repeatedly
that those who listen to such things for the first time and
have not familiarised themselves with the literature make
objections which have been cleared up long since. However, I
would not be able to progress in our considerations if I had
always to say the same every year. Hence, I must refer compared
with completely entitled objections to the fact that one must
try to penetrate into the literature and to take into account
that I have cleared up such objections already in the course of
many talks.
We take the case that a misfortune carries
off a blossoming human life. Then the spiritual researcher
recognises the following. If he pursues this soul beyond the
grave, it becomes apparent that it has adsorbed forces by
misfortune, which are adapted to prepare higher intellectual
abilities for the next life than it could prepare if this
misfortune had not been caused. However, you would badly
understand the spiritual researcher if you hold the thought in
your mind even in the least, that it would be so easy to make
yourself more intellectual for the next life on earth if you
let a car run over you. That is not the case. Since it becomes
apparent that the consciousness cannot decide on that what is
necessary in the human destiny beyond the grave but that higher
consciousness which becomes effective there before birth or
after death in the wholly spiritual world.
With the usual consciousness, we can never
survey whether a misfortune has an effect on us in this or that
way. Nevertheless, in numerous cases the spiritual researcher
realises that, indeed, in the pre-birth spiritual our soul has
already caused such destiny in a wholly spiritual consciousness
that has led with certain necessity to this misfortune. We are
not entitled after birth to decide this. Before birth we direct
our existence to the misfortune, with it our soul receives, so
to speak, the possibility to destroy the physical body, and
thus it has the experience at the moment of the transition: how
does our humanity work if this body is destroyed and does not
continue to develop naturally? It makes good sense
— not for
the everyday consciousness but for our superconscious
being — that human lives can also perish, so to speak, by
misfortunes before reaching the normal age. It is a long shot
to state such a thing in the present, but I have to point to
it. The spiritual researcher realises with many souls that
these or those talents go back to former lives and he beholds
how inventive forces, intellectual forces developed by
misfortunes in a certain age which can provide services to
humanity.
One has to look only reasonably how for
these or those performances which are of original kind a
certain human age is necessary. Great inventors get around to
uncovering certain forces from the depths of life in a certain
age by straining their abilities in the extreme. It needs not
be an epoch-making invention; it can also be something that
completely serves the usual everyday life. This can be because
this soul had to go through conditions of life, which destroyed
the body at that time. The soul thereby gains inventive forces
that control, direct, and penetrate the physical world.
— You
cannot “prove” with the outer usual logic that such
things can be investigated. However, this can be done only what
has been shown so often in these talks that the spiritual
researcher gets around to observing with a strictly regulated
methodology of his soul life what goes forward when a soul
experiences any misfortune which leads to this or that, or even
to death.
Let us take another case. If a young human
life is carried off by an illness, the spiritual researcher
realises that the intellectual life is not so much influenced
in the next embodiment but the volitional life. Once again, we
are not allowed to cause such a strengthening of the volitional
life that we wish in the usual consciousness by an illness that
we cause artificially. However, if in the whole context of
existence, which is controlled by the spiritual world, a human
life is carried off by a pneumonia or another illness in the
prime of existence, the spiritual researcher realises very
often that such a soul could not unfold such willpower that it
already possessed in a way. The outer physical body offered
resistance. However, while one experienced the illness, and
while the spiritual-mental experienced the resistance of the
physical body, going through the life between death and new
birth it found that in this resistance what gives the
willpower. Just by such a consideration, it becomes apparent
that life gets its sense in all directions.
Indeed, all pains that we feel in the
physical life on earth facing the misfortunes of life or our
destiny will always be there. This will not be removed
completely, however, it will be reduced if one realises that
wisdom pulsates, nevertheless, through our life. From a higher
point of view all pains appear which are integrated in life as
necessary for our development, and the spiritual researcher
assumes that wisdom is to be found everywhere in the world from
the start. He considers life with all its strokes of luck and
misfortunes as the result of a calculation that is not there,
before one has not carried out the calculation. Wisdom does not
exist in the human life, before he does not convince himself in
many cases with admiration of the fact that wisdom still forms
the basis of any life. Because we are in an experience that
must happen by the body, the misfortunes will work suitably,
will take us with them as human beings, and it would make the
life in the body appear an inhuman one if it could not feel
pain with misfortunes. Nevertheless, just as the sense
perception covers in life what the spiritual-mental is in its
importance for eternity, the experience in the body covers that
higher point of view from which any conscious experience of the
human being appears as penetrated with wisdom.
The spiritual researcher does not become
like a dried up field crop by the fact that he can contemplate
wisdom even in a misfortune. No, just because he can rise on a
higher viewpoint the survey of life appears to him as filled
with wisdom, as rational. However, when he enters the life on
earth again and lives in his body, he is a feeling human being,
of course, as every other human being. As someone who mounts a
summit and has a nice sight from it but must not stop to have
the sight of that what proceeds below in the valley, the true
spiritual researcher can also not lose any compassion and
witnesses human happiness and grief if he faces happiness and
grief in the life between birth and death. However, just this
spiritual research realises that compared to eternity the human
being is not born to despair, but that any look at the realm of
the spirit shows him the world full of wisdom, meaningful, and
that knowledge of true immortality is a knowledge of the
meaning of immortality at the same time.
I could only make some indications of human
immortality, and from it, the meaning of human immortality has
to arise. The spiritual researcher just has to express those
matters in words that lie, so to speak, beyond the usual life
if he wants to point to that what the human being experiences,
after he has gone through the gate of death. What is
experienced in the usual life offers no clue to characterise
the life after death if one should recognise its spiritual
substantiality. Thus, one must take stock of the fact that the
human being is not able to carry the picture of a single lion
or a single mountain with him through the gate of death,
however, that inner spiritual-mental activity which enables us
to have a mountain as a mental picture in our consciousness, or
to imagine a lion. We carry them through the gate of death. We
carry just that mostly through the gate of death what is not
“real” in life. If we see various lions, we form
the concept of the lion. You can easily prove of course that
the concept of the lion does not exist in the sensory reality,
but only the single lion; also not the concept of the mountain,
but only the single mountain. However, what enables us to
recognise mountains and lions and to understand something
spiritual-mental, to recognise justice, freedom and so on what
enables us to live with a human soul like with our own soul, to
penetrate into the human soul by mysterious sympathies, that
mysterious weaving from soul to soul — all that we take
with us through the gate of death. On the question, whether we
are together again with our kith after death we can answer that
we are together with them again! We are together with those who
are close to us in life. Also already between birth and death
ties exist between the souls which belong to the
extra-terrestrial —
what one only does not recognise because
the mental look is mesmerised by the physical sight.
Investigating the spiritual means at the
same time recognising the eternity of this spiritual.
Recognising the human being as something spiritual means
recognising the eternity of the human spirit. Actually, one has
to say as spiritual researcher that someone who regards the
spirit as mortal does not recognise it in reality. The
philosophers who do not believe in the immortality of the human
soul are for the investigation of the soul like botanists who
deny the existence of plants. It is the certain way of
spiritual research that one can say that the soul recognises
the spiritual as something natural as the botanist recognises
the plant as that what it is.
Therefore, we can say that that is the most
valuable for the complete human life concerning the
spiritual-mental, concerning the behaviour of the human soul
after death what is covered by the outer observation in the
physical-sensory experience what is not perceived in this
experience. Someone who wants to bring in concepts in the life
after death who does not want to suffer from the “hunger
for concepts” after death — if you allow me to
use the expression —
must appropriate concepts which do not
apply already here in the life on earth only to the sensorily
discernible, but exceed it. We can live on the
spiritual-scientific concepts in the life after death. If
anybody believed that the hunger for concepts killed him after
death, one has to say that an immortal soul can suffer, indeed,
from this hunger, but cannot die of it as the physical body can
starve to death.
Thus, I could only give you single
indications about the meaning of the immortality of the human
soul. Of course, I know best of all what those can or must
object to such indications who stand so completely in the
consciousness of our time. We live in a time that is completely
hostile on one side to accept that that development of the
soul, about which I have spoken here, leads really into a
wholly spiritual experience. However, we live at the same time
in a period in which the human soul longs for the knowledge of
the spirit in its subconscious depths. There can be also human
beings who say, why can the human being not remain with that
what nature has given him, with the reason and the senses which
nature has given him? However, this would be, as if anybody
said that the child should stop at that what it has as a child,
and should not learn what it would have to carry out as an
adult. Just on the same point of view somebody would stand who
said that the soul should stop at the abilities which it
already has.
We see where one can break away from the
gross preconceptions that one conceives the real nature of the
human essence. One can realise that philosophers of the present
break away from the wholly physical experience and
interpretation of it. Anyway, it is interesting, even if he
misses his aim ever so much that the French philosopher Bergson
(Henri B., 1859-1941) regards the memory as something that leads into
the spiritual realm. However, one sees at such an example that
the philosophers of the present have difficulty bringing
themselves to acknowledge the spiritual world. One sees in
other points again that a healthy soul life comes up to the
front gate of spiritual science. It is extremely interesting
that unlimitedly increased attention gives the possibility to
transform the human being. If one realises then at least that a
very significant philosopher of the present, McGilvary (Evander
Bradley McG., 1864-1953), comes out of the
health of the American nature just up to the point where he
says: if one wants to get to know the real soul being if one
wants to get to know what soul what immortality is, one can do
this only by developing attention. McGilvary says that the
human being can know by an effort, by an increase of the forces
of attention that one gets the conception of a spiritual-mental
that one has like an inner activity. You realise how such
attempts lead to the gate of spiritual science.
Another example: I felt highly satisfied
when I got a treatise which a very gifted director of a grammar
school — Deinhardt (Johann Heinrich D., 1805-1867) — wrote. There you
realise how a highly educated man of the more recent past who
could not know spiritual science struggles with the highest
questions of life. Indeed, also others did this. Nevertheless,
it is interesting to realise that in a talk in which he brought
his ideas of immortality forward the editor draws the attention
to a letter that he received from this teacher. He writes
there: if it were still granted to him to continue his
attempts, he still would show how the soul still works in the
life between birth and death on a subtle body which goes then
through the gate of death. It is encouraging to see somebody
struggling in the middle of the age of the arising materialism
with the problem that I have treated in the two last talks. I
tried there to show that one grasps the immortal essence of the
human being spiritual-scientifically, which develops on and on,
which goes through the gate of death to prepare for a new
earth-life with the passage through the spiritual world. That
director refers to this “spiritual-mental essence”
as a “subtle body” which the soul organises to
carry it through death and in which the subtler forces can
gather themselves that the soul needs then to continue its
development.
Even if today the glance is deflected from
the spiritual-mental because of the great achievements of the
outer science, and, hence, the immortality of the human soul is
not yet acknowledged and is not understood, nevertheless, one
sees the struggle for concepts which give the human being a
picture of that what exists after death and brings power and
assurance into life and makes the human being only a complete
human being. One can say to someone who can live without these
“metaphysical things” that life must take place in
such a way that it brings up that from its depths
— even if
the mental glance can be darkened for epochs
— what
releases the natural view into the fields of the everlasting,
the immortal.
Thus, one can say that also for that what
seems paradoxical today the time becomes ripe in which that is
understood as the achievements of science have always been
understood. Already once, I have drawn your attention to the
fact that we can feel spiritual science in harmony with the
present science. Therefore, I would also like to point to
something at the end of these considerations that burst out of
the soul of the Greek philosopher Heraclitus who did deep looks
into the experience of the universe from the viewpoint of his
time. He felt his soul taken along by the “stream of
becoming” as which he interpreted the whole universe.
Heraclitus considered the restless becoming as the real
characteristic of the universe. “Being” was a
delusion to him. What exists is there in truth only
imaginary.
Everything is active in the stream of
becoming, and the soul is woven into this perpetually flowing
activity. The fire was the symbol of becoming to Heraclitus, he
felt his soul positioned into the fire of the universe. Living
in it emotionally he felt the impulse of immortality as an
inner experience, as an immediate inner observation. He
expressed this impulse that way and his words shall close our
considerations of human immortality only somewhat
changed.
If the soul — freed from the
body — soars the free ether, it appears before itself as an
immortal spirit freed from death!
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