Spirit and Matter, Life and Death
Berlin, 15 February 1917
In
a time in which we are surrounded by such serious events, it
seemed to be right to me to begin the course of lectures of
this winter with considering the big questions of the human
soul, of its nature, of its destiny. This talk has to deal
spiritual-scientifically with spirit and matter, life and death
what belongs certainly to that from which already the great
Greek philosopher Plato said that without its investigation
life is not valuable for the human being.
I
would like to turn your sight at first to some men who in the
course of the nineteenth century and up to now looked for a
solution of those riddles that should occupy us today. Since
questions like that of matter and spirit have affected the
human beings at all times according to the knowledge of these
times in the most different way. One does not come close,
actually, to such questions if one talks only generally about
them, but only if one looks at the struggling human soul. Since
then one recognises the significance only which the
investigation of these matters has for the immediate life, for
the deeper destiny of the human being.
There I would like to turn your view to a man who still speaks
immediately as from our present, although he already died in
the eighties. He struggled with the knowledge of the material
processes that natural sciences had gained, and tried to figure
out the relation of the spirit in which the human being knows
his soul anchored, to the material processes. I would like to
turn your view to Gustav Theodor Fechner (1801-1887) who was a
professor in Leipzig until the eighties; he worked on the
knowledge questions of the nineteenth century in the most
comprehensive way. Today this should not occupy us. Rather a
situation of his life should occupy us which he himself
describes in the beginning of that book, which contains a lot
of depths of the striving of the modern time about the day and
night sights of the human worldview (The Day Sight Compared
to the Night Sight, 1879). He describes, how he sat
down to recover on a bench one day, because his eyes had
already become weak, how he faced a hedge fence that had a
hole, a cutting through which he could look just at a meadow.
He could see the green of the meadow, and his weak eyes enjoyed
the green of the meadow. He could see the coloured flowers and
butterflies, and he could hear a morning concert. He allowed
his thoughts full bent within the perceptions that were
fertilised by the whole scientific education of his time.
To
gain access to these thoughts now, one has to realise what
especially suggested itself from the scientific thinking of the
time what had induced him to struggle internally just in such a
situation with the riddle of matter. I have repeatedly drawn
your attention to the worldview direction of illusionism in the
nineteenth century. I have drawn your attention to the fact
that certain considerations of physiology, of epistemology,
certain ways of considering the scientific phenomena persuaded
just the excellent thinkers of the nineteenth century to say to
themselves, that which the human being perceives as the world
of colours and tones that surrounds him is not real in the
outside world. In the outside world are atoms, molecules,
wholly spatial entities swinging, moving and relating to each
other in a way. So that already Schopenhauer and others got
around to saying, the coloured world round us, the sounding
world round us, is there, actually, only as long as a human eye
can open to perceive them, a human ear can hear them. Unless a
human eye or ear faces this outside world, this outside world
is in itself dark and silent, there are movements of
dark-colourless, lightless, and toneless entities. One got
around to taking in the human soul everything that pleases the
human being that surrounds him in the world, and to leaving the
silent and dark cause of the pure matter to the outside
world.
Such a spirit like Fechner does not take up such a view like a
theory only, but he takes it regarding the question: how can
one live with such a view? How can the soul relate to the world
if it has this view? — That is why Fechner said to
himself sitting on the bench at the hedge fence, I look through
this opening in the hedge fence. I believe to perceive the
green of the meadow, the colours of the butterflies. But the
colourless and toneless matter pretends all that. I believe to
hear the tones of the morning concert; they are not outdoors,
they sound when the oscillations of the air that are the
instruments the violins and flutes cause, work on my ear. There
outdoors everything is toneless, everything dark and
silent.
Fechner called this view of the material world the “night
sight.” He pointed repeatedly to the fact that everything
that the admirable natural sciences brought to light leads
necessarily to this night sight. This sensitive man knew that
he was not alone with this view: “If you look out there,
you look out at everlasting night!” and he said, I
quote:
“For they are the thoughts of the whole thinking world
around me.”
“How much and over what they may quarrel, philosophers
and physicists, materialists and idealists, Darwinians and
Anti-Darwinians, orthodox and rationalists sing from the same
hymnal. It is not a stone, but a foundation-stone of the
today's worldview ...”
Then Fechner says to himself, only if this dark matter bangs on
the protein bundle he expresses himself this way of the human
brain, the coloured splendid world develops by that which
happens in the brain; then only the “day sight”
comes into being which still becomes a big illusion. However,
Fechner never was of the opinion that one has to fight against
the scientific development. He did not underestimate the
significance of the scientific knowledge, but he turned the
spiritual view to a human future which he supposed in close
distance and about which he thought that the night sight has to
give way again and another, spiritualised view has to replace
it. This must be based on everything that surrounds the naive
human being as a “real” world, but it has to ascend
to a world in which the soul has to recognise itself as spirit
unless it wants to get lost unsubstantially in the matter.
“Indeed, I believe that a day sight follows the night
sight one day, as certainly as the day follows the night, a day
sight which instead of contradicting the natural view of the
things rather supports it, and it will find the reason of a new
development in it. So Fechner says anticipating: “Since
if that illusion dwindles which changes the day into night,
everything wrong that is connected with it must disappear, and
the world appears in a new connection, in a new light, under
new positive viewpoints.”
Then Fechner himself tried to ascend from the world, to which
the day sight is directed up to a world in which the soul can
recognise itself as spirit. He did not succeed; he only got to
some conjectures of a spiritual world from the concepts and
mental pictures that he had about the everyday world and the
usual science.
If
one liked to speak scholarly, one could say, he tried to
imagine the spiritual world after analogies. The earth with its
mantle of air became to him a big organism, also the whole
solar system that has a soul in itself like the human organism.
But Fechner bases all these mental pictures about a spiritual
world on mental pictures of the everyday life and the outer
science. One can say, only the basic feeling of his soul
directed to the spiritual urged him to assume such things, not
to stop at the world of matter, but to rise to a spiritual
world that he contrived hypothetically. If now you ask yourself
on which point this subtle spirit who reflected the spiritual
education of the nineteenth century in special way stood in his
own development, then one can say that he stood just before the
gate of that which is meant here as spiritual science.
Spiritual science must originate from that to which the outer
materialist science comes as a rule.
Spiritual science has to start from that point up to which also
the usual everyday life penetrates. This science and this life
penetrate to the mental pictures, concepts, and ideas that the
human being can make about the outside world. The toneless and
dark matter, the night sight retained Fechner, but he strove
for the day sight. You cannot gain this day sight unless you
target the usual thinking and imagining sharply. Where the
usual science stops, spiritual science has to begin. Hence, it
has to deal with the question, what is, actually, the thinking
that urges us to form mental pictures of all phenomena and
impressions of the outer world?
You
can answer this question only if you try to face the thinking
in rest and in the inner power of the spiritual development of
the soul life. Then you get to the view that this thinking
itself in which the outer world is reflected spiritually is no
longer something that is bound to the matter.
I
know while pronouncing this sentence that it encounters
countless prejudices of our time. I would need many hours if I
wanted to state all details here to confirm it completely. For
we are no longer in the matter while we are thinking, but we
have lifted out ourselves already with our souls from the
material work in which the soul is active because it has to use
the physical body as its tool for its everyday activity. It
belongs to the serious prejudices of the modern worldview that
one does not recognise the spiritual nature of thinking.
Someone who looks not only briefly at the thinking, but as it
were withdraws from the act of thinking, but in such a way that
the thinking stands like a kind of memory before the soul
recognises that he lives in this thinking as one lives in
himself if one stands before a reflecting surface. The
reflecting surface returns a picture of our being, but one
knows for sure: our own being is not in the mirror inside; the
mirror is only the occasion that it is reflected to me. I would
not perceive this picture if the mirror were not there. But I
know, the mirror has to do nothing with my being, but to
reflect my picture to me.
A
precise unbiased consideration of thinking shows that thinking
relates to the brain as its tool as the mirror is, indeed, not
like a dead mirror, but like a living mirror. Since that what
lives and weaves as thinking takes place not inside by the
processes of reflection, but it takes place in the soul being
beyond the body, and the body is only the opportunity that I
can become aware of that which would not dawn on me, otherwise,
as a picture of thinking. An impartial consideration of this
thinking shows that you would go astray if you interpreted this
thinking as a product of some bodily processes. I would like to
draw your attention to this error by a comparison.
If
we walk on a soft ground, the tracks of our steps stay behind
in this ground. We could not go if the ground did not resist.
We impress the tracks of our walking into the ground. However,
it would be senseless to believe that forces in the ground had
caused the tracks. Someone only knows the score who knows that
a being has walked on the ground that has nothing to do with
the earth, but everything that this being has accomplished
expresses itself in the ground.
So
about the thinking relates to the nervous systems. The nervous
systems must be there; the entire bodily organisation must be
there; otherwise, the soul could not unfold thinking here in
the life between birth and death. The soul could not perceive
this weaving in the thought if it did not face that into which
it impresses what lives in it. Then the physiologist, the
biologist may come and investigate how everything is reflected
in the bodily tools that the soul has done, which processes are
in it. Then he can develop the right view of all details: that
everything that lives in the soul can be detected in the human
brain. However, one would go astray, if one explained
everything that lives and weaves in the thinking in such a way,
as if it originated from the inner processes of the brain, of
the nervous systems.
The
truths that I develop cannot be proved in the usual sense with
a superficial logic. They can be criticised even very easily by
such a logic. But someone who dedicates himself to the methods
of spiritual research just gets to them as the scientist of the
outer world comes to his results, by the consideration of the
soul which is directed upon the weaving and being of thinking,
as directly given by experience. The truths must be
experienced, but they can be experienced by the fact that the
spiritual researcher just develops the inner methods of
research that I have shown in my book How Does One Attain
Knowledge of Higher Worlds? and in my Occult Science. An
Outline and now in relation to the outer science in my last
book The Riddle of Man. If the spiritual
researcher can really figure the spiritual nature of thinking
out, he can ascend to other levels of spiritual research. Since
then he is able to develop further that what lives, otherwise,
in the thinking and is not recognised, so that he indulges in
the thinking, which lives independently from the physical
world. It is another training of that independence of thinking
which one can recognise in its being. It accepts the thinking
that the world gives us as the first spiritual from which now
everything can be developed by additional meditation and
concentration of thinking, by additional methods described in
those books of spiritual research. But because one does not
only regard the thinking as something that independently faces
our material world but develops it further in inner soul work,
one gets around to experiencing the life in the spiritual human
being more intensely independently from the material human
being. This emergence of the spiritual-mental from the physical
body becomes reality, while the human being keeps on developing
the thinking in the intimated way.
Then the human being also sees that sinking down for his
knowledge not for his life in the night which Fechner called
the day sight. Because the human being completely settles in
the life of pure thinking, the outer world of the material
effects disappears. However, for it the spiritual view of the
human being is turned to his own being, and he faces his own
being, while he regards himself, otherwise, always as a
subject, he withdraws from himself. While I pronounce this, I
would like to point to a second spirit of the nineteenth
century who because he was not only a speculating, but also a
feeling thinker and scientist felt the peculiar kind of the
thinking, and whom this thinking urged to grasp the nature of
the non-material thinking. I point to the little known Karl
Rosenkranz (1805-1879) who was one of Kant's successors on the
chair of philosophy in Königsberg up to the seventies of
the last century.
Karl Rosenkranz was a disciple of Kant and Hegel, but a
disciple who could really make the questions of knowledge vital
matters and who brought along to say to himself, you have to
reach a point in your thinking where you are independent of the
outer sensory world to which you want to gain access only by
thinking. There he got the idea of that thinking which is
independent from the outside world, from the material world.
From this way, in which Karl Rosenkranz speaks about this
thinking, one recognises that he felt what the transition from
the outer physical material world to the spiritual world means.
There this thought is found if it cannot experience that
development which I have just indicated, at first in its
dreadful emptiness. Since in the usual life we are accustomed
to direct our thoughts upon the outside things, to depict the
outside things in our thoughts. If we leave the outside world
out of consideration as Karl Rosenkranz wanted, and we withdraw
into the thinking, without developing it further on basis of
the knowledge that this thinking is free of body and leaving
the body, then the thinking remains empty. The outer world is
cast out; the thinking itself is empty. Speaking theoretically
of this thought is relatively meaningless. However, to a
recogniser who takes the cognition as a big riddle of life this
thought is substantial. It becomes the inner torture of the
soul, the feeling of abandonment. Karl Rosenkranz expresses
this feeling of a real thinker striving for living cognition
with the following words: “The most shattering idea,
which I hardly dare to imagine and can hardly express, is
whether anything exists generally. From this idea, the abyss of
the world void of figures threatens me. It whispers to me like
the betrayal of God. A kind of fear seizes me as in my
childhood when I read John's Revelation, and heaven and
earth collapsed there. There round me the world extends in all
directions, with all defiance of sensory effectiveness and
seems to mock at my idea. It forces me in its circles, makes me
obey its orders, and laughs at my idea of its nothingness as at
a chimera. And, yet still this idea this absurd seeming idea
what would be now if this world were not is a giant who plays
with the whole empiric existence.”
The
thinker feels like standing before an abyss; he stands, so to
speak, before the gate of spiritual science. That means that he
has just reached the idea that has cast off the sensory world,
but stops before the gates and does not enter into spiritual
science. One has to remind of such thinkers to recognise the
significance of spiritual science for the today's life who
could not yet find the access to spiritual science. However, he
felt just from the scientific age what goes forward in the soul
if it opens the gate if it gets to the thinking that is a final
point for the outer life and science that is still the starting
point for the real cognition of the spiritual world.
I
count Gideon Spicker (1840-1912) also to these thinkers who
taught philosophy so long at the University of Münster and
who showed already by the course of his outer life that
knowledge was his destiny, his life affair. With a fervent soul
that strove for the experience of the spirit, Gideon Spicker
became a Capuchin and priest he described that in his nice
book, which appeared in 1908: From Cloister to
Lectureship. Then his way of knowledge urged him from the
cloister to become engrossed in philosophy to find the way that
leads to the gate of the spiritual world. There Gideon Spicker
also got to that point where the thinking is left to its own
devices where it stands isolated unless it knows to be active,
as I have indicated it. Therefore, Spicker says about this
thinking:
“All the philosophies start from an unproven and
unprovable proposition, namely from the necessity of thinking.
No investigation comes behind this necessity, as deeply as it
may prospect. One has absolutely to accept it and cannot found
it on anything. Every attempt to prove its correctness always
requires it.” Now that word comes where you realise that
he directly touches the forces of the heart with his knowledge.
Gideon Spicker continues:
“Beneath it a bottomless abyss yawns, a nightmarish
darkness illuminated by no beam of light. Therefore, we do not
know where from it comes nor where to it leads. It is uncertain
whether a merciful god or a bad demon put it in the
reason.”
So
Spicker finds: unless we assume that the thinking informs us
about the problems of the world properly unless we acknowledge
the necessity of thinking in its characteristic, we cannot
generally orient ourselves in the world. However, behind this
necessity is the bottomless abyss. With it, Spicker also shows
that he stands before the gate of spiritual science, but he is
not able to enter. One cannot decide what, actually,
correctness which one has inevitably to assume put in our
reason, whether a merciful god or a bad demon.
One
has to take the thinking seriously in such a way if one wants
to recognise the significance of knowledge for life. What can
such a thinker like Gideon Spicker not do? He cannot withdraw
from the thinking to look at this thinking to gain the
conviction that this thinking is of spiritual nature. Since
then the thinking presents itself in its characteristic as it
is, and does not leave the choice to us between the merciful
god and the bad demon who could have put it in the reason.
On
the way of spiritual-scientific knowledge everything matters to
get to know the nature of thinking, not to accept this thinking
as the last but as the first which has to further us.
I
would like to point out that from the usual life the human
being can gain the conviction that the thinking does not live
only in our ego, our soul or even in our brain, but that it has
an essential existence in the outer world, that it is a
creative power, that it penetrates the world, that it is not
the thinking in us, but that we live with our soul in the world
penetrated by thinking.
You
do not need at all the methods of spiritual science nor the
spiritual-scientific research to get this conviction, but you
have only to observe certain processes intimately. There the
human being if he wakes once under favourable conditions can
keep something like a dark memory of that, which has taken
place, just before he has woken. There thoughts squeeze from
the sleep in the waking state with which the human being can
realise that he would never have thought them while awake that
they are connected with nothing that can be thought in the
waking state. I can only point to these things; if we had more
time, we would realise that all objections that these pictures
are memories could be disproved if one examined them more
exactly. If you experience such a thing like “you emerge,
actually, with your soul from the weaving, living
thinking,” you know at the same time when the soul is
just blessed to perceive such a thing: that which is like a
thought being works on the own bodily being. Since you notice
that you have lived in sleep together with the bodily
processes. These processes, which you experience in sleep and
which sometimes appear in the dreams, are pictures of the inner
experience of the body. — If you have both insights: the
knowledge of the independent work of the living thoughts in the
world, and the knowledge of the work of the thoughts on our
bodies, then you have a starting point of an inner meditative
work to ascend to the knowledge of the spiritual world now.
The
more precise, more intimate knowledge of thinking which you can
gain at especially favourable moments of life supports you to
undertake the inner soul work now really which the spiritual
researcher has to undertake. By inner soul work, he has to
manage that he can really emerge from his body with his
spiritual-mental, and to face himself, as he is in the everyday
life as you face the outer things of the sensory world. This
emergence from the body is absolute reality that approaches the
human being if he does certain soul exercises. Then he cannot
only look by the tools of his body at the world surrounding
him; then another world is there which is not the world of the
senses but a spiritual world. While he enters into this other
world of spirit, he does not become an opponent of natural
sciences but on the contrary. Everything that the modern
natural sciences have justifiably produced is just proven more
intensely than natural sciences are able to do by that which
spiritual beholding finds in the world.
In
my book The Riddle of Man, I have called this view the
beholding consciousness that the human being gains preparing
himself to break free from the conditions of the material
processes, because I wanted to go back, like in all my
spiritual-scientific attempts, to Goethe's worldview. In his
nice article On the Beholding Faculty of Judgement, he
showed that the human being if he wants to strive to a
knowledge supporting the spiritual must get around not to
taking up the outer material world only passively but to
invigorating himself internally to grasp this spiritual
internally as one grasps the outer sensory world by the senses
from without. I have called this life in the beholding
consciousness an awakening from the usual consciousness of the
everyday life and the usual science that you can imagine like
the awakening from the dream world in the world of the usual
wake consciousness.
So
the spiritual researcher is urged to point to three states of
consciousness: to the dreaming consciousness where the human
being is completely directed to the processes of his body which
face him partially, but not as they are, but as the living
thoughts reveal the inner bodily processes like in an
Imaginative life. The visions during the dream life are
directed upon the bodily inside of the human being. He is
enclosed as it were in his skin. The real consciousness of the
human brain is not involved in the visions, but the soul is
turned in the dream to that what, apart from the processes of
the brain, goes forward in the body. However, this expresses
itself in the visions that sometimes appear so bright and
admirable, sometimes so chaotic before the soul. Someone who
looks now at this world of visions finds that they do not
differ in their contents, in their nature from the images that
we have in the everyday life.
The
awakening is something else; it is an action of the will. It
does not change the nature of the images, but the human being
invigorates himself in his will, relates by his will really to
the outer world. Thereby he relates what would be turned,
otherwise, only to his inside to the outer world. He puts as it
were his thinking, his imagination about the surface of the
outside existence because he has invigorated himself in the
will because he has adjusted himself to the outer world with
his imagination. Being awake means arranging the image life by
the will with the whole human being in the relations of the
outer world.
In
the beholding consciousness that becomes truth up to a certain
degree that from a higher viewpoint this outer sensory world is
only an imagery. We accept it in its rough-material way as the
last reality in the usual life as we feel our dream world as a
reality in the dream. However, while we awake from the dream,
the dream world becomes an imagery to us. From the viewpoint of
the wake consciousness, we know only how to arrange the dream
world properly in the whole world.
Now
deeper thinkers compared, while they felt a force for the
spiritual world in their souls, the world of the senses and its
rough-material reality with a world of pictures, and did not
equal but compare it with the dream. Above all the great German
thinker Fichte (Johann Gottlieb F., 1762-1814) expresses that
in his writing The Vocation of Man (1800) where he
speaks about the life and weaving of that which is seen by the
senses: “Pictures are the only that is there, and they
know about themselves, in way of the pictures; —
pictures, which pass by without anything being there that they
pass, which are connected with pictures of pictures. ... Any
reality changes into a miraculous dream without life of which
is dreamt, and without a spirit that dreams there; in a dream
which is connected in a dream with itself.”
These words should make the human being aware not to disregard
the real world in ambiguous way in which his duties are in
which his life between birth and death must take place. On the
contrary, the human being should not be turned away from this
world but his attention should be drawn to the fact that one
can awake from the usual consciousness to a higher
consciousness in the beholding consciousness. In the beholding
consciousness, one manages the pictures of the sensory world
that surround us, otherwise, in the spiritual world. However,
if one experiences the spiritual world in the soul directly,
one receives a new viewpoint about the relation of the spirit
to the matter. Since then one can behold the relation of the
spirit to the matter in the human being himself. The awoken
beholding consciousness that has withdrawn as it were from the
human being faces the world different from Fechner's night
sight.
This beholding consciousness says to itself, indeed, for
everything that the human being thinks and feels that he enjoys
that he suffers there are physical processes in the usual
physical life. He experiences everything that he experiences in
his soul by the body that reflects it to him like a mirror;
otherwise, he would know nothing of it. The body is there that
the human being can develop a consciousness of it. But while he
withdraws and recognises himself in real, not dreamt
introspection, he attains a view different from the night view.
There he gets around to saying to himself, yes, so that I see
the colours of the world, certain processes must go forward in
my nervous system, in my body. However, while I see the blue or
red colours, I hear the tones C or C sharp, the processes on
which it depends have already taken place. The soul impresses
that what it does in the brain; the brain reflects that to the
soul which is within the body, which the soul itself has
impressed. After the soul has made an impression in the brain,
the brain changes into a reflecting being. The soul feels this
impression as red and blue, as C or C sharp. The soul has
already worked on the brain, before it perceives. The whole
perception is a reflection that comes about because the soul,
before the perception comes about, has already worked on the
body.
Now
there one looks into a being of man that one cannot recognise
with the usual consciousness. Since the world of sensory
perception reveals itself to the usual consciousness only. But
the usual thoughts are derived from the sensory perception.
Now, however, one looks under the surface of the sensory
perception; now one looks at the activity that remains usually
unaware. Now one recognises how the soul relates to the matter,
how spirit and matter co-operate. However, this cooperation of
spirit and matter maybe appears shocking at first: While the
human being experiences what he receives by the usual physical
heredity from father and mother, he lives in the natural
development that is like the development of that what flows out
from any seed and becomes more and more perfect. While the
human being begins developing his soul, that is while in the
described way the soul as a spirit gains a relation to the
matter, the soul destroys, on the whole, perpetually. We cannot
have any sensation, any mental picture without the soul
struggling against life. While as it were the soul forces back
the life of the nerves, it causes that which reflects then. If
the soul sees blue, it performs a destructive process in the
nerves. This process forms as it were the reflecting surface
that reflects the blue colour. Thus, the soul must dissolve and
destroy the matter perpetually, which however restores itself
then either in the usual sleep or in the sleep that always
exists that also accompanies the wake life. But that what
reveals itself to the beholding consciousness as the relation
of the human being to spirit and matter shows that the spirit
develops, that it unfolds the spiritual consciousness, while it
destroys, actually, the matter perpetually.
Thus, you look at a process that remains, otherwise, under the
threshold of consciousness, which those who approached the
older form of spiritual science have probably known. Hence,
they called the gate of spiritual knowledge “the gate of
death.” One recognises that death is not only the unique
process which the human being experiences at the end of his
life, but death is also that which is perpetually working in
the human being in such a way that perpetually life is
combated. Just while death is working from birth or from
conception on in such a way that its effect can be compensated
over and over again, life and death work in the human being
perpetually together. While the soul combats the physical
growth this way, the spiritual develops.
This is an astonishing truth, if one recognises it in its whole
meaning. The physical develops, while it sprouts, but this also
is subject to decay. This decay always appears as accelerated
process at death if consciousness should develop. — Thus,
the beholding consciousness looks, actually, perpetually at the
co-operation of death. Death is the basis from which the
spiritual of the human soul develops; while the soul faces
life, it must be active in life together with death.
When the beholding consciousness has done this inner discovery,
it can advance by the described soul methods. Then it cannot
only know itself in spirit that it recognises how the material
phenomena come about that as it were death works in its partial
phenomena hour by hour, from moment to moment, but the soul
released from the body learns to survey with one glance that
what takes place not in space but in time: the development of
the whole life, in what way the soul works in the bodily
between birth or conception and death.
Then the soul becomes so free that it knows itself not only
independent that it advances gradually so far that it knows
itself also independent from the usual physical life. Then it
knows itself in that state in which it was, before it entered
this physical life by birth or conception. As well as the human
being overcomes the space in the physical life, the soul
overcomes the time; it learns to survey life from a point that
lies before birth or conception. It learns to consider this
life as a unity, as it were, on the background of death that
finishes this life. As well as the human being looks with the
beholding consciousness at that what he experiences in his
senses on the basis of destructive processes in his body, this
beholding consciousness looks at life on the background of the
bodily life, while it has also freed itself from the bodily
life. Now this death does not appear only with its surface as
it appears to the outer physical life, but this surface appears
as transparent, and the spiritual life appears behind
death.
As
well as behind the destructive process of the body the life and
weaving of the soul appears in the body, the spirit of the
universe, in which the human being is taken up after death,
appears behind the surface of death. This death is as it were
the surface; it has an inside. Through death, the human being
looks into the life and work of the spirit in the universe.
Then he knows himself in spirit and he knows that he is taken
up by the spiritual world after death, as well as his physical
body takes up him when he awakes. He knows that after death the
spiritual world appears. Now he knows himself in the spiritual
world. With it, he also knows its significance for the whole
physical and spiritual life. Since he knows: what he
experiences in the matter remains in his consciousness, and
this consciousness remains to him if he dies. The life in the
body lives on in his soul and by this retrospect on that what
he has experienced, otherwise, in his body he prepares the
forces for his next life on earth. Thus, he learns to survey
the repeated lives on earth. About that, I would like to speak
in the next talk where I speak about the destiny of the soul;
what I have said today should be the starting point.
I
only want to add that the human being does not at all learn to
regard the life on earth as meaningless. But he takes up in
himself in this life on earth what he has to bring into the
spiritual world where it lives like an over-all memory as a
force in his soul to go through eternity. There it becomes
obvious that this knowledge still has a second meaning:
Gustav Theodor Fechner connects the consideration that he did
when he was sitting on the bench in the rose valley with
another. He says, he wanted to do a walk with his wife through
the wonderful woods on the island Rügen; but she who had
gone with him through life, who had shared the rough and the
smooth with him, became so tired that she could no longer walk,
and said, I must let you go, but a time will come soon, when
you will have to walk a lot without me. There Fechner said, oh,
maybe the time will also come that you will have to walk
without me. However, we will not remember! — And he
walked on through snug woods where the sun shone through the
leafy trees where everything was nice and great. There he
enjoyed the whole beauty of the outer sensory world without
thinking of the “night sight.” Then in the end, he
said something that can grieve you deeply: truth appears there
also in its beauty. One can guess that this sensory world, in
which the soul gets to know the soul, is not there to be
extinguished by the dark and toneless material world; but the
human being guesses that this sensory world spins, indeed, the
destinies between the human beings but it spins them in such a
way that if this sensory world is taken away the human being
sees the last barriers falling, which separate soul from soul,
so that he may hope: if the bodily sheaths are cast off, soul
and soul will live in intimate community. Fechner's scientific
view increases to the assumption of the being together of the
souls in the spiritual world after death.
By
spiritual science, Fechner's assumption becomes certainty which
is not searched but which arises as an objective truth. The
human being knows himself in the spiritual world; he knows that
this bodily sheath surrounds him between birth and death, so
that he can bring into the spiritual world what he can
appropriate only in this sheath.
He
knows that life is there in this physical world that soul is
brought to soul but in a purely spiritual relation when the
sheath is cast off. Thus, the human being gets to know himself
with the human being, with everything that surrounds him in the
sensory world, the preliminary stage of the spiritual world; he
gets to know the necessity of the physical world, but he also
gets to know the reality of the spiritual world.
What Fechner guessed and longed for should spiritual science
fulfil. Thus, one would want that spiritual science carries out
Fechner's word, which, however, comes not only from his soul
but from many hoping souls: “Indeed, I believe that, as
certainly as the day follows the night, a day sight follows the
night sight of the world one day which does not contradict the
natural view of the things but will support them, and will find
the ground for a new development of the things in it. Since if
that illusion dwindles which changes the day into night,
everything wrong that is connected with it and it is a lot must
also disappear, and the world appears in a new connection, in a
new light, under a new positive viewpoint.”
While Fechner turns his supposing view to this world for which
we hope fulfilment by spiritual science, he speaks of the fact
that he really feels to be at the starting point, not at the
end. I would like to say, he says like anticipating spiritual
science confirming: “Now clearness is the last in these
things, however, the last will also be the
clearness.”
Spiritual science wants to bring the clearness for the
spiritual life and with it the certainty in spirit to
humanity.
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