Lecture 7
Personal and Supersensible Aspects
(Relating to Certain Individuals)
Berlin, February 22, 1915
Dear friends, let us first of all
remember those who are at the front, in the great arena
of present-day events:
Spirits of your souls, guardian
guides,
On your wings let there be borne
The prayer of love from our souls
To those whom you guard here on earth.
Thus, united with your might,
A ray of help our prayer shall be
For the souls it seeks out there in love.
And for those who because of those
events have already gone through the gate of death:
Spirits of your souls, guardian
guides,
On your wings let there be borne
The prayer of love from our souls
To those whom you guard in the spheres.
Thus, united with your might,
A ray of help our prayer shall be
For the souls it seeks out there in love.
May the
spirit we are seeking as we work towards spiritual
knowledge, the spirit who has gone through the Mystery of
Golgotha for the good of the earth, for the freedom and
progress of man, be With you and the hard duties you have
to perform!
This evening I intend to consider some
of the things that are known about the way our physical
world relates to the spiritual world, starting from
certain events that concern us more closely within our
own movement. This is such a closed and intimate circle
that such a thing is possible. Above all, I know that I
can justify what I am going to say also to those who were
fellow-members during their physical life and will remain
such during their further life. Some of the facts I
intend to speak of today will relate to them.
Just in
recent weeks, dear friends, karma brought it about that I
was able to speak at the cremations of dear friends
because I happened to be in the places where the
cremations took place. No doubt something else also
played a role, for at the time I was particularly
concerned to obtain certain remarkable impressions
arising from the presence of these individualities in the
spiritual world by making contact with them when they had
gone through the gate of death just a few days
before.
As I have
said a number of times, it depends on various
circumstances whether one is able to gain impressions of
one fact or another in the spiritual world. It depends
above all on the degree to which it is possible to
develop a strong inner bond with the souls concerned. One
may sometimes believe one has a very special relationship
with a particular soul only to find that it is not
entirely so. On the other hand, there are souls where one
does not realize that it is fairly easy to establish such
a bond until actual contact is established after their
death.
In the
three cases I wish to speak of first of all, dear
friends, an intense desire arose to receive impressions
immediately after their death, impressions connected with
the whole nature of those souls. I would say this came of
itself in these particular cases. You know it is of
course possible to pick up all kinds of threads when
making a funeral oration, but in these cases something of
an inner necessity arose to make really intense contact
with the essence of those souls and put it into words at
the cremation. I did not specifically intend to
characterize the nature of the souls concerned at those
ceremonies, but it arose like an illuminating necessity
that this had to be. I am not saying that it would have
to be the same in other cases. This illuminating
necessity arose in the case of one of those souls because
— and I am presenting this not as a law but as
something I have gone through, an experience —
after death the impulses arose for me from the spiritual
world to define the essence of that soul. I did not have
to find the words; the words arose of their own accord.
They came. We shall see later on, dear friends, why that
was so, for certain indications can already be given as
to that soul's life after death.
First of
all let me say a few things about the particular nature
of such experiences so that the whole thing can be
understood. If we Warn to gain an impression in the
physical world we confront the object. We form ideas
depending on the way we see or hear something or feel it
by touch. We know that it is we ourselves who form the
ideas. If one is dealing with a soul that has gone
through the gate of death one will immediately notice
that everything we produce Ourselves by way of thoughts,
of words, really takes us away from the soul in question
and that it is necessary to give ourselves up entirely to
what is taking shape within us. If the impressions are
then to be put into words it will indeed be necessary for
us to have the potential within us for these words to
form, being unable to do anything ourselves to make the
words form in that particular way. We need to able to
listen inwardly for those words. If we do listen for them
Inwardly we also know with certainty: These words are not
spoken by myself but by the soul which has gone through
the gate of death.
That is
what happened in recent weeks when an older member
departed from us and from the physical plane.
[ Note 38 ]
This was an older member
who had really entered into our movement with all her
heart over a considerable number of years, bringing to
life in her feelings, In her heart and mind, the idea and
concepts spiritual science is able to give. With
tremendous devotion she had identified in her soul with
all that is alive and astir in spiritual science. It was
now a matter of giving oneself over, as it were, to the
impression that arose from this soul. And, strangely
enough, it was the case — it has been possible to
show this — that just a few hours after physical
death had occurred Impressions arose that took the form
not merely of verbal impressions but of audible, real
words; like a characterization of that soul. Nothing
could be done in relation to these words but as far as
possible attempt to receive in its pure form what that
soul was speaking through my own soul. One certainly must
call it speaking in such a case. And those then were the
words I spoke at the cremation. They were not my words,
as I said, but words — and please consider the
Words I shall now use carefully — that came from
the soul which had gone through death:
Far into cosmic space I'll
carry
My feeling heart; warm it shall grow
In fires wrought by sacred powers;
In cosmic thoughts I'll weave
My own thinking; clear it shall grow
In light of life that ever is renewed;
To depths of soul I'll guide
Devoted contemplation; strong it shall grow
For mankind's true and real goals;
In God's tranquility I thus will strive
Through life's hard struggles and all cares
Prepare my self to be a higher self.
Seeking the peace of joyful labours,
And sensing cosmic truth within my own,
I work towards fulfillment of man's task;
Then may I live in hope,
Going towards my soul's own star
Who in the spirit realm appoints my place.
When I
spoke these words again at the end of the funeral oration
I had to change the last verse as follows, though I had
not known of this beforehand:
Then may I live in hope,
Going towards my star of destiny
Who in the spirit realm appoints my place.
It was
clear what this was about. The individual concerned was
endeavouring to impress into her very being that now had
gone through death — the thoughts, ideas, feelings
and experiences she had received through spiritual
science over the years — impress them in such a way
that these ideas and experiences became forces that would
mould this individual after death, leaving their imprint.
This individual had therefore used the ideas and concepts
of spiritual science to put their mark, their imprint, on
her own essential nature, shaping the way this essential
nature would then continue on the soul's path in the
spiritual world.
Soon after
this we lost another friend, another member of our
movement.
[ Note 39 ]
Again an intense need arose to define the essential
nature of this member. This could not happen the way it
had happened in the Previous case, however. In the
previous case it really was true to say of the way the
words were chosen that a soul that had gone through the
gate of death was expressing itself, saying what it felt
itself to be and what it wished to become; it expressed
itself. In this second case the situation was that one
had to put one's own soul in confrontation, as it were,
and consider this soul in the spirit. Then this soul,
too, expressed itself, but in words that this time took
the material needed for self-characterization out of the
soul of the observer. What the soul which had gone
through the gate of death was doing therefore merely
provided the stimulus to express what one had to feel
about its essential nature now that it had gone through
the gate of death. And so the following words arose and
had to be sent out after the soul at the cremation:
You came among us,
And a living, innate sweetness
Spoke from the quiet power of your eyes—
Calmness full of life and soul Flowed in the
waves
That from your eyes
Would let your inward weaving
Go out to things and human beings.
This inner nature was the soul
within your voice, with eloquence —
More by the nature of the word
Than in the word itself—
Revealing what lay hidden
within the beauty of your soul.
To the devoted love
Of hearts in sympathy
It would without words be revealed.
Sublimest beauty, silent, calm.
Of world-soul creation
This being could reveal to the perceptive heart.
These words
were spoken at the beginning and the end of the funeral
oration, after which the cremation began. And it was
possible to observe, dear friends, that this moment
— please note, not the moment when the words were
spoken but the moment when the heat of the furnace took
hold of the body — was the time when something of a
first conscious moment after death occurred. I shall go
into this in more detail later on. What I mean by
‘conscious moment’ is this immediately after
death a review of life presents itself in the fain of a
tableau in the ether body. This goes away after a few
days. Now' at the time it proved necessary to have a
fairly long interval between death and cremation. Death
had occurred at 6 p.m. on the Wednesday; the cremation
took place the following Monday at 11 am. At that point
the time had already been reached when the life tableau
was disappearing. The first moment when there was some
degree of consciousness after the life tableau therefore
came when the heat of the furnace took hold of the body.
It then became clearly apparent that such a nature become
spirit has a different way of seeing things' a different
way of regarding the world, from a human soul that still
remains in its physical body.
When we are
in our physical bodies our perception of things in space
is that they remain where they are when we move away from
them. So if there is a chair standing here and I see it,
and I then go a bit further away and look back, the chair
is still there. I look back at it. As I continue on my
way the chair is still there, it stays where it is. It is
not the same for events taking place in time whilst we
are within our physical bodies. The events we have let go
past us in time do not remain stationary. An event that
has passed has passed and we are only able to look back
on it in memory. The only thing that links us to the
event is our past. It is not like this for a spiritual
entity, for this sees events as stationary, the way we
see objects remain stationary in space here on earth. And
the first impression received by the soul I spoke of was
of the funeral and everything that was done and said at
the ceremony. This had happened five or ten minutes
earlier but for the dead person it was still there, still
stood there the way objects stand in space for physical
man. The first impression was one of looking back on the
words that had been spoken, that is, above all, the words
now sounding for her, the words I have just read to You.
It really is the way Richard Wagner once put it out of a
profound Intuition: ‘Time turns into space’
[ Note 40 ]
What has passed
has not in fact passed where spiritual experience is
concerned. It stands there the way objects stand in space
for physical man.
So that was
the first impression gained after death—the funeral
and the words spoken at it. In this case the situation
was such that this look back in time and the vision, as
it were, of what had happened at the funeral cannot be
said to mean that consciousness lit up and then remained.
The twilight state I shall discuss later returned and it
was some time before consciousness lit up again. Once
more, slowly and gradually, consciousness comes to shine
forth again. It takes months until it is so complete that
we can say the dead individual has the whole of the
spiritual world all around him. But at a later time,
exactly through consciousness lighting up at a later
time, this particular individual showed a tremendous need
to look to this moment again and again, to this
particular moment, and to get a clear picture of this
moment. This fully agrees with what we are able to know
about the whole behaviour of the human being after death,
as I intend to show presently.
There is a
third case, one that will also deeply concern our Berlin
members. It is the case of our dear friend and member
Fritz Mitscher
[ Note 41 ]
who died recently. Fritz Mitscher went through the gate
of death just before be had completed his thirtieth year.
He would have been thirty on 26 February which lies just
ahead.
In the case
of Fritz Mitscher, when my thoughts were directed towards
him after his death, it was above all the impulses
arising from his intense devotion to our spiritual
movement that entered into my own soul, the soul of the
observer. He had been a truly exemplary Personality in
this respect. An exemplary personality in that he —
being by nature inclined towards erudition — more
and more felt the inner necessity, a deep inner need, to
move in a direction where he placed the whole of his
erudition, all the knowledge he might acquit!' at the
service of the spiritual scientific movement. This made
ill one of the people who are so essential to the
progress of our philosophy based on spiritual science.
What is needed in the present time is that external
science, external scientific endeavour, is used in such a
way by the soul that this external scientific endeavour
joins into the stream of knowledge obtained out of the
spiritual world towards which we wish to direct our
efforts. And that was the inspiration in the young soul
of Fritz Mitscher. One could not help feeling, even in
looking upon him in physical life, that he was very much
on the right path as far as our movement was
concerned.
Our friends
will recall something I said when another death had
occurred many years ago: Individuals who have taken in,
as it were, what physical science has to offer to the
present time are the very individuals who make important
contributions to our movement after an early death. Our
movement depends not only on souls that are incarnated on
earth. If we did not have the energies of souls that have
gone through the gate of death with earthly knowledge and
there remain connected with the will that must flow
through our movement, we certainly would not be able in
our materialistic age to maintain the hope which we must
maintain so strongly to enable us to progress.
Something
therefore came to me from Fritz Mitscher's soul that may
be epitomized in words I found I could only bring to
expression in the way I shall now read to you. These are
also the words spoken at his cremation.
Happy prospect come before us,
You appeared upon the plane
Where the earth-grown flowers of spirit
May revealed be to the seeker
Through the power of soul reality.
At the root of all your striving
Lay the purest love of truth;
And to work in light of spirit
Was your life's profound intent,
Never would your efforts cease.
Splendid gifts you had and nurtured,
Faithful, to the truth adhering,
Undeterred by worldly opposition,
Firm of step the bright path you pursued
That to knowledge of the spirit leads.
And you used the organs of the spirit
With persistence and great courage;
They would push away all error
To the edges of your path,
For the truth a space creating.
Your own self you were transforming
To reveal the purest light;
Letting sun force of the soul
Shine with might within your heart—
Here your cares lay and your joy in life.
Other cares and other joys
Scarcely ever touched your soul;
Recognition of the truth
Seemed to you to give life meaning
And a value that was real.
Happy prospect come before us,
You appeared upon the plane
Where the earth-grown flowers of spirit
May revealed be to the seeker
Through the power of soul reality.
Painful loss, most deeply felt,
You now vanish from the plane
Where the earth seeds of the spirit
Ripened in the womb of soul reality
To become awareness for the spheres.
Feel our loving gaze directed
To the heights where you are facing
Now a new and different task;
From those lofty spirit regions
Lend your strength to those you left behind.
Hear the prayer of our souls;
In it speaks our truth and faith:
To fulfil our task on earth we need
Powers great from lands where spirits dwell,
Strength that comes from friends who have died.
Happy prospect come before us,
Painful loss, most deeply felt—
Let us hope that in far nearness
Never lost to us, our lives you'll guide
As a soul star in the spirit realm.
Words like
these, dear friends, have been shaped in such a way that
they must be considered to have arisen through
identification with the soul that has passed through
death. They arise from necessity though not spoken by
that soul itself, for that soul only provided the
stimulus. They arise from necessity, through the energies
coming from that soul, to be spoken exactly the way they
have been spoken down to every detail. There really was
nothing else in my mind where these words are concerned
but those words in the form I have just read them to you.
It therefore was extremely moving for me when during the
night following the funeral the soul of our Fritz
Mitscher replied, in a way, to what had been spoken at
his funeral — not out of conscious awareness as
yet, but out of his essential nature. His soul replied
the effect that the following words came from it, that
is, now from the soul which had gone through death:
My own self I was transforming
To reveal the purest light;
Letting Sun-force of the soul
Shine with might within my heart
Here my cares lay and my joy in life.
Others cares and other joys
Scarcely ever touched my soul;
Recognition of the truth
Seemed to me to give life meaning
And a value that was real.
It had
never occurred to me when I had to write down those
verses that they could also be said in such a way that
every ‘you’ would become a ‘me’,
every ‘your’ a ‘my’. What had
come to life for me had merely been:
Your own self you were
transforming
To reveal the purest light;
Letting sun force of the soul
Shine with might within your heart—
Here your cares lay and your joy in life.
Other cares and other joys
Scarcely ever touched your soul;
Recognition of the truth
Seemed to you to give life meaning
And a value that was real.
Now those
words had been transposed in that way, and they could be
transposed without changing the grammatical structure,
merely changing ‘your own self’ to ‘my
own self’, ‘Shine with might within your
heart’ to ‘Shine with might within my
heart’, and so on.
So there
you have a strange connection between the words spoken
here and the soul that had gone through the gate of
death, a connection showing that the words spoken here
truly did not merely return as an echo out of that soul
but had undergone a meaningful change on their return.
Let me merely mention that a certain feeling really and
truly went through my soul when those words were shaped,
as of necessity, providing the following nuance: It
appeared to me to be necessary to give a specific mission
to this particular soul as it went through the gate of
death. We know how much resistance there is to our
spiritual movement in the present materialistic age; how
far from ready the world is for our spiritual movement.
And if we a clear picture of what man is capable of
achieving when in his earthly body we can indeed say that
he needs assistance. This feeling found expression in the
words:
Hear the prayer of our souls:
In it speaks our truth and faith:
To fulfil our task here on this earth
We need powers great from lands where spirits
dwell,
Strength that comes from friends who have died.
Asking this
soul, as it were, to make further use of the seeds
acquired here, using them specifically to further our
spiritual movement. That seemed to me to be a feeling
that had to arise of necessity especially in the case of
this soul.
You will
have noted that these three cases of people so close to
us have something in common, however much they may
differ. What they have in common is that thoughts as to
its essential nature were prompted to come up before the
soul contemplating these things, a soul specifically
stimulated to such contemplation by karma, because a
funeral oration had to be given. There was necessity to
give expression to its essential nature.
In the case
of the first individual I spoke of — you known the
spirit in which I am saying these things; only to provide
insight, not to show off in any way — the situation
was that I had also got to know that individual on the
physical plane when she had joined the Society. You get
to know a few things that happen when people are within
our Society; but our friends will know that it is not my
way to make special inquiries into the circumstances and
so on of anyone, nor ask about one thing or another these
persons have lived through here in their physical life,
and so on. So it was not personal satisfaction I gained
but rather the satisfaction arising from insight when
also characterized this individual according to the
nature of her soul the way it had lived through this life
on earth. The only thing I had before me was the soul
after death. It was not that it spoke the words I read to
you first, but I had the soul before me the way it was
now after death, in its peculiar nature after death. I
really knew practically nothing of what had happened to
her before she had joined our Society, nor of her life in
so far as it did not have to do with meetings and so on,
or the kind of occasions where one meets our members now
and then. Yet it was specifically in this case that I
found myself Induced, as though of necessity, to speak of
certain aspects of her life, aspects relating to her
whole life. of the relationship of the individual who had
died — and she .had reached a great age — to
her children and the work she did in her life. And as I
said, it was not a matter of personal satisfaction but
rather of satisfaction in having gained insight when the
family then told me the0y really were able to recognize
the person in question on the basis of what was said
there. with every word intensely characteristic of her.
The right picture had therefore also been presented of
her personal life during her time on earth and the only
possibility of this had been in perceiving the fruits of
this life now that it had concentrated in the soul. The
specific insight we gain from this is that in the case of
this particular soul we perceive an intense need after
death to direct the eye of the spirit to her own life. It
definitely was through no merit of my own that I was able
to characterize the personal life of this individual.
What happened was that this individuality, though not
conscious at the time, directed her soul essence to her
own life, preparing for the conscious life after death
that was to come. She directed powers that later were to
become conscious to her own life, to what she herself had
experienced. The Wings I was made to say could then be
seen in thought pictures that arose as her soul was
directed towards her own experiences. What I had to
describe, therefore, was what this individual was
unconsciously thinking of herself after death. And the
important thing, the thing to be emphasized, is the fact
that after death this individual felt an intense need
unconsciously to direct her gaze to her own essential
nature.
In the case
of the second person, who woke, as it were, when the
flames took hold of her body, it later showed itself
— in a further spontaneous awakening of this kind
— from her attitude to the very characteristic of
her essential nature, that she had need to reach back as
it were, to go back to this essential nature, to the
words that characterized her essential nature. And,
indeed, in the language — if you can call language
what finds expression in the relationship between souls,
whether they are incarnated or else not incarnated and
already spiritual entities, already dead — in the
way one is able to speak of such intercourse it really
had to be said: when at a later point I was able to
perceive a further awakening in the case of this
individual, I was conscious of a deep joy because I had
been able to find those particular words. For it became
apparent that there had really been good collaboration
with the dead person. It could be concluded that the soul
of this person — you know I am speaking in
analogies — expressed itself more or less as
follows: it is good that it is there ‘It is good
that it is there in that place.’ Such a feeling was
revealed on the second awakening, as though the dead
woman were showing that something had been enhanced, as
it were, in the spiritual world because it has also been
put in human words here on the physical earth and that
this was something she needed, and it was good that it
had become more fixed through the physical words on earth
than she herself had been able to fix it. There was a
need there for her to fix this. And it was a help to her
that it had been reinforced in this way.
In the case
of our dear friend Fritz Mitscher you can of course see
quite clearly that the night following the cremation he
picked up the thread immediately and made use of the
words spoken here, to get a clear picture of his own
essential nature, to be clear about himself.
In all
three cases, therefore, there has been a looking towards
one's own essential nature. These, of course, are the
things that first of all touch our souls, our hearts,
because of their purely human quality, their purely human
aspect. But spiritual insights can only be gained from
the world that is at hand if they are ready to come to us
as a boon. You cannot force it; such insights must be
waited for. And it is particularly in this context that
we can perceive the strange ways of karma.
The day
after the second of the people I have mentioned had died
in Zurich I was in Zurich myself. We were walking past a
bookshop and in that bookshop I saw a book I had read
years before. The way it is with the life I lead, I would
not have found it easy to lay hands on that book in what
is supposed to be my library, for that is in a peculiar
state due to my living in many places. Years ago, as I
said, I had read a book by the Viennese philosopher Dr
Ernst Mach,
[ Note 42 ]
and this bookshop was offering it secondhand. I felt I
wanted to read it again, or at least look at it again.
When I reached the third page something presented itself
to my eyes that I had long since lost sight of, an
interesting comment Ernst Mach had made about man
acquiring self-knowledge, about the difficulty man had in
getting to know himself. I am quoting almost word for
word what it says on page 3 in the book written by Ernst
Mach, a university professor, on Analyzing One's
Feelings:
As a young man I was walking along a
street one day and there encountered a person who
aroused the feeling in me that he had a most
unpleasant, disagreeable face. And it gave me quite a
fright to discover that it was my own face I had
encountered, my own face meeting me in a mirror.
So he was walking in the streets, and
mirrors inclined towards each other reflected his own
mirror image to him. And when he saw himself he said:
That is someone with an unpleasant, disagreeable face I
am coming up against there. Immediately afterwards the
author adds another such comment concerning lack of
self-knowledge. He says:
One day I returned home tired from a
journey and got on a bus. I saw another man getting on
from the opposite side and thought to myself: What kind
of down-at-heel schoolmaster is that getting on there!
And lo and behold, it was I myself. The mirror on the
bus had shown me my own reflection.
Professor Mach adds: ‘I
therefore knew the style and bearing of my profession
better than I did my own.’
Here we
have something of a pointer to show how difficult it is
for man to recognise himself even when it comes to his
purely external appearance. We do not even know what we
look like in three dimensional space, not even if we are
university professors. You can see that from this very
candid confession.
It is
interesting that such an example can be quoted in the
context of the case I have referred to, for I think
you'll agree that it shows how here, in the physical
body, self-knowledge need not be all that much of an
obstacle to whatever we need to achieve on earth. You can
be a renowned professor and know as little about yourself
as this man has told in his book. I have mentioned this
example because it is strange that it presented itself to
the mind's eye when the soul was, directed to take fresh
note of how someone who has died feels a need to grasp
his own essential nature, to perceive it. Here in the
physical world it is perfectly possible to manage without
self-knowledge, I'd say, with regard to anything
concerning the purely material aspects of our lives. It
is not, however, possible to gain knowledge of the
spiritual worlds without self-knowledge. We shall discuss
this in a week's time. For external, material concerns,
however, we can manage without self-knowledge. Yet as
soon as the soul has gone through the gate of death,
self-knowledge will be the first thing it needs. This is
particularly evident from the experience I have
described. Self-knowledge has to be the starting
point.
You see, a
materialist tends to stick at the question as to whether
consciousness persists after death. Spiritual science has
shown that when the soul had gone though the gate of
death it does not in fact suffer from lack of
consciousness but rather has too much of it. A kind of
awakening will come at a later stage, not because it is
necessary to acquire a new consciousness after death but
because there is dazzling consciousness, too much
consciousness, and this needs to be gradually subdued in
the early stages. You will find more about this in the
Viennese cycle
[ Note 43 ]
which has also appeared in print. After death, man has
too much conscious awareness, an overpowering awareness,
and he needs to get his bearings first in this world of
over- powering awareness. Gradually he will achieve this
and as he does so his awareness will be less in degree
than before. Conscious awareness must first be subdued,
just as over-powerful sunlight has to be subdued. A
gradual subduing of consciousness has to be achieved. So
we cannot speak of an 'awakening' in the terms that apply
in the physical world, but of recovering from a
superabundance of conscious awareness to the point where
it becomes bearable, depending on what we have
experienced in the physical world. This requires the
following: to get our bearings in this flood of light
that is our awareness after death, we need knowledge of
our own essential nature as a starting point. We have to
be able to look back upon our own essential nature to
find the guidelines, as it were, for an orientation in
the spiritual world. Lack of self-knowledge is what
hinders conscious awareness after death. We have to find
ourselves in the flood of light. And so you see why a
need arises to characterize the person who has died, to
assist them to find themselves.
This is
something we gain as a kind of general insight from such
Personal experiences that concern us closely. After
death, when the etheric life-tableau has disappeared.
there is a gradual development. It is based on our
getting to know our life, our own life here on earth, as
it gradually dawns out of the spiritual worlds. Once the
tableau has passed this is our only aim after death.
Everything that is part of the spiritual world will be
around us. What we have to get to know above all else,
however, is our own essential nature. The concepts and
ideas familiar to us from spiritual science will then
help us, providing the means of orientation. As you can
see in the first case, the self-criticism which showed
itself had been possible only through the spiritual
science she had taken in, so that it was possible to look
at her own essential nature and the words could come:
‘To depths of soul I'll guide devoted
contemplation; strong it shall grow for mankind's true
and real goals’.
The real
intention with all this is to lift our spiritual
scientific movement out of mere theory and gradually make
it into something that the soul is able to take hold of
in a living way, into a stream within which we are truly
alive, active and present. We shall then know what goes
on in the spiritual world around us, just as in the
physical world We know that around us is the air we
breathe, however much the ignorant may, and indeed will,
deny this. That is the future destiny of man: to know
something of the fact that just as the air is there for
and around the physical body, so the spiritual world is
present all around and can be experienced by the soul.
This spiritual world relates more to the soul, as it
were, the way the air does to the body: it shapes and
fashions the soul, filling it with its essence.
We are also
able to give certain details of the fate of the soul
after death in individual cases. The reason why such
things are discussed in more intimate detail at the
present time is that in the momentous, but also painful,
events of our time, death is letting its breath pass
through the world and our age is demanding countless
deaths in sacrifice. We are specially challenged
therefore to concern ourselves with the occurrence of
death in the present age.
We know,
dear friends, that when the human being goes through the
gate of death he has handed over his physical body to the
earth, to the elements of the earth; the ego and astral
body have then departed from the physical body. Now, in
the second case today we saw that the ether body had
already been cast off when cremation took place; the
ether body goes away within a few days. There is one
particular question that really comes to the fore in the
present time. So many people are going through the gate
of death in the very flower of their youth these days.
Transferring a purely physical concept to the spiritual
sphere — where it has even greater validity than in
physical life — we may ask the question:
‘What happens with the ether bodies of these people
who have gone through the gate of death; the ether bodies
that separate off after a number of days? What happens
with such a youthful ether body?’ Such a person who
goes through the gate of death in his twentieth,
twenty-fifth, thirtieth, thirty-fifth Year' or even
earlier, puts his ether body aside. This, however, is an
ether body that could still have done work here in
physical life, would have had energies still for many
years. It was karma that this ether body could not use it
energies, yet those energies are still within it. They
could have continued to be effective here in physical
life for Many years to come. Physicists are right in
saying that energies are never lost; here on earth they
are transformed. This applies even more so in the
spiritual world. These energies relating to someone
fallen in battle when still young, energies that could
still have supported physical life for many years, do not
convert to anything else. They are just there. And we are
already able to say, particularly in view of the events
of our time, that these energies become part of the
essential being of the folk soul of the people concerned.
This receives those energies so that they are then active
everywhere within the folk soul. Those are true spiritual
energies, energies from the human being which are present
in addition to his ego and his astral body, his
individual personality which he carries through the
period between death and rebirth. For the future it will
be important to understand as far as possible that these
energies are also present in the folk soul, that they are
present within it in the general activity this folk soul
is going to unfold; present as energies, not entities.
There they will be the most fruitful, I should say the
most sun-like. radiant energies.
There is
another instance I would like to refer to. one that is
very close to our hearts. It has no direct bearing on
present events, but the way it happened and what has
become of it can all the same cast some light for us on
all the cases where an unspent ether body is put aside
when death has occurred at an early age. In the autumn we
experienced the death of a member's child, a child seven
years of age.
[ Note 44 ]
The death of this child occurred in a strange way. He was
a good boy, mentally very much alive already within the
limits set for a seven-year-old; a good, well-behaved and
mentally very active child. He came to die because he
happened to be on the very spot where a furniture van
overturned, crushing the boy so that he died of
suffocation. This was a spot where probably no van went
past before nor will go past again, but one did pass just
that moment. It is also Possible to show in an outer way
that all kinds of circumstances caused the child to be in
that place at the time the van overturned, circumstances
considered chance if the materialistic view is taken. He
was getting some food supplies for his mother and left a
bit later that particular evening, having been held up.
If he had gone five minutes earlier he would have been
well past the place where the van overturned. He had also
left by another door than usual; just on this one
occasion by another door! Leaving by the other door he
would have passed to the right of the van. The van
overturned to the left. Studying the case in the light of
spiritual science and of karma it will be seen to
demonstrate very clearly that external logic, quite
properly used in external life, proves flimsy in this
case and does not apply.
One example
I have quoted a number of times is that of a person who
was walking by a river and fell into the water at a point
where a stone was lying. Superficially it may indeed
appear that the man stumbled over the stone, fell into
the water and thus came to his death. The obvious
conclusion will be that he drowned. A post mortem
examination would however have shown that he suffered a
stroke and therefore died and fell into the water. Thus
he fell into the water because he was dead and did not
die because he fell into the water. Cause and effect have
been confused. Things that seem perfectly logical in
external life may be completely wrong.
Superficially, the death of young Theodor Faiss could
also be described as a most unfortunate accident. In
reality, however, the karma of this child was such that
the ego, to put it bluntly, had ordered the van and the
van overturned to fulfil the child's karma. So there we
have a particularly young ether body. The child could
have grown up and reached the age of seventy. The
energies in the ether body would have been enough for
seventy years but they went through the gate of death
after seven years. The whole event took place in Dornach
as you know. The father had been drafted into the German
army and was not there at the time: he died quite soon
after, having been wounded at the front. The whole thing
happened in the immediate neighbourhood of the building
and from that time the aura of the building at Dornach
contains the energies from the ether body of this child.
A person working for this building and able to perceive
the spiritual energies involved in the project will find
within them the energies of this child. Quite apart,
therefore, from the ego and astral body which have
entered the spiritual world, to be active there between
death and rebirth, the unspent ether body has now united
with the whole of the spiritual aura of the building at
Dornach. Deep and significant feelings attach to such
insights for they do not represent knowledge of the dry
numerical kind we take into our minds, but insights
received into the soul with deep gratitude. Mindful of
this, I shall never even for a moment fail to remember,
in anything I have to do for that building at Dornach,
that these energies are contributing to the project,
helping me in the project. Here theoretical insight
merges into life itself.
Being aware
of this, dear friends, you will understand that it is
possible to get some idea now, at a time when countless
ether bodies pass through the gate of death without
having achieved fulfillment on earth, as to what will
happen when the sun of peace returns again, after the
twilight of war. Then the energies, the ether forces of
those who have passed through the gate of death, the gate
of suffering, will want to unite with the souls that are
active here on earth, unite with than for the good of the
earth and for progress on earth. This means, however,
that there will have to be people on earth who appreciate
these things, who will be aware of the fact that the
people who have made their sacrifice to the age are up
there in the spiritual world in their residual ether
bodies. They want to join in the work of this world.
Their work will only be wholly fruitful if there are
receptive souls here that are Prepare{ to unite their
thoughts with what comes to them from the spiritual
world. These are momentous times, but also difficult and
painful times. For their fruits it is immensely important
that thoughts are created out of a science that
acknowledges the spirit, thoughts that are then able to
unite with the thoughts coming down from the ether bodies
of those who have died in sacrifice. Thus we have an
indication that even in the midst of these difficult
times, under the sign of suffering also and of death, we
are under the sign of greatness, that the difficult
things which are happening also remind us that they are
intended to give rise to an age that is more open to the
spirit than the past age has been. What must not happen
is that those who have made the sacrifice will have to
look down on an earth world for which they have given
themselves, to contribute to its progress and salvation,
and find themselves unable to take action because there
are no souls sending receptive thoughts out towards them.
We therefore must see spiritual science as something that
is alive, a living element that will be needed in the
time that is to come. particularly with regard to the
events of the present day. It is this which I have been
summing up again and again in the words I shall now
speak, in the spirit of and in accord with what we have
been considering:
Out of courage shown in
battle,
Out of the blood shed in war,
Out of the grief of those who are left,
Out of the people's deeds of sacrifice
Spirit fruits will come to grow
If souls with knowledge of the spirit
Turn their mind to spirit realms.
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