The
Questions of Life and the Riddle of Death
Part 2
Stuttgart, 17 May 1913
Since a number of years, I have spoken here about the objects
of spiritual science, and several listeners who have already
participated in these considerations many a time will find
various knowledge that is not new just in the today's
comprising consideration. Only that which I have said this year
about spiritual science gave occasion to envisage the objects
from the most different viewpoints. Since one could say, today
spiritual science, as it is meant here, is by no means
generally acknowledged and many people confuse it with
everything that one calls “theosophy” more or less
exactly.
The
so-called chance passes something on to you in this respect.
When I came on a lecture tour through a certain city, I saw two
little writings in a bookstore in which I looked, however, for
something quite different. The one contained a popular
representation of the philosophical worldviews
and approaches to life of the nineteenth century
(probably by Max Bernhard Weinstein, 1852-1918, published
under this title in Leipzig in 1910). If you look at this
writing more exactly, you get the impression that this booklet
was written with a certain seriousness; the single chapters
correspond to a rather thorough knowledge of that which is
discussed there — with the only exception of theosophy or
— as it is meant in the narrower sense here —
spiritual science.
I
try to bring together spiritual science with that which is said
there just in this chapter, and there one must say, as good and
conscientious other chapters are, as superficial is the chapter
about spiritual science. I do not want to dwell on this chapter
here, I would only like to point out that beside various
incorrect statements the author says that spiritual science
spreads abstruse fantasies of these or those world facts.
— Now I thought, there could be alluded to my Occult
Science, and somebody would deny that what is well proved
there, without inspection of the thing. However, I read on
straight away, and found the sentence that in the circles of
the supporters of this spiritual research everywhere prophecies
of wars and earthquakes play a big role. — I ask you, do
such prophecies play a big role in my explanations?
One
could assume that few people read such writings. However, the
other booklet or more precisely pamphlet had the title
Seven Sects of Perdition. A Warning
for Protestant Christians (edited by a Protestant
association in 1913). I will not read out it. You find the
following seven sects of perdition enumerated:
First: Adventists or Sabbatists — about four pages.
Secondly: the dawn Bible students — also four pages.
Thirdly: the new-apostolic — three pages. Fourthly: the
Mormons — four pages. Fifthly: the Scientists —
three pages. Sixthly: the spiritists — only two pages.
Seventhly: theosophy, about that he knows half a page only.
However, I do not want to read out it completely but only half
of it.
“In particular it [theosophy] teaches self-redemption
instead of the redemption by Christ; one can equal it to
paganism” and one points to the church history. It is
interesting also that this pamphlet contains the remark that
you can buy the booklet at any price and dimension, also as
loose sheets. For pennies you can form an opinion about that of
which should be talk today, and then you can attach the
concerning sheet to the wall.
Thereby it becomes clear where from the judgements come which
face us from some sides if they condemn the value of our object
wholesale. It is typical also that the author of this pamphlet
can say only half a page about the “seventh sect.”
Now, from this outer example it arises that there, indeed, in
our time many prejudices exist against spiritual science and
that there is little will to get really to the prime concern of
spiritual science. Nevertheless, one may assume that that who
wants to judge an object knows this really. It is obvious that
this is not the case with spiritual science among wide sections
of the population. From those persons who want to know nothing
about it one cannot demand that they deal with it; however,
from those who judge publicly. It would probably confuse some
persons to have to deal with the things about which they want
to judge “conscientiously.”
One
has repeatedly to ask, how shall spiritual science place itself
into the immediate life of the present? How and with which
right does it position itself to the big questions of life and
to the riddle of death?
It
becomes more and more evident that from unaware depths of the
soul life these cardinal questions become aspirations in the
human souls. However, the area of spiritual science is as big
as the world, and one would have to speak a lot if one only
wanted to indicate what spiritual science encloses. However,
even if spiritual science has to extend its research
infinitely, nevertheless, its investigations culminate in both
life riddles that we call with the words destiny and
death. The knowledge has to assert itself that the outer
science cannot answer the big questions of life and immortality
if it is aware of its borders. However, this outer science
tries to produce the most varied worldviews, namely just such
worldviews that believe to stand on the ground of natural
sciences, and believe that they are allowed to say that their
results are directly contrary to that which spiritual science
has to say.
It
would be a wild-goose chase to speak of the fact that the bases
of spiritual science really conflict natural sciences. These
natural sciences have produced many things for three, four
centuries, which have changed our whole life largely. If that
is true which Goethe says that one has to judge a school of
thought according to its fertility, natural sciences have shown
their fertility — indeed, only with the solution of
material life riddles. However, one has to take something else
into account. Natural sciences have educated humanity in a
particular way. They have been a wonderful means of education,
so that the human being put the questions of life and death in
another way than he put them before. It also corresponds to the
fact that spiritual science works with its method, its whole
view, completely after the pattern of natural sciences.
However, while the questions have become deeper, the souls have
been duped into accepting that as real only which they perceive
with their senses.
Spiritual science cannot offer physical things. It cannot go
into a laboratory and create spiritual knowledge there. Already
the spirit that lives in us between birth and death can be
fathomed for a certain time and for our consciousness by soul
processes only. Everybody knows that the spiritual life is in
him since his birth; everybody should know that he can reach
that which he has experienced, for example, twenty years ago
only by memory, and that he cannot bring up this process of
memory with outer apparatuses. So one should also recognise
that spiritual science has to look for its sources by an
increase of such inner experiences like memory. However, it
will still last long, until humanity realises that the method
of spiritual science is, indeed, an inner one, but is inspired
by the same spirit as the outer natural sciences. One can
recognise this immediately if one looks at that which such
critics of spiritual science say who deny that one can reach
what is beyond sense perception. Even if they concede that
there is something supersensible, nevertheless, they say, the
human cognition cannot penetrate into it. With such spirits,
one can observe with which difficulties spiritual science has
to fight. Since such an objection has no other value as if
anybody wanted to say, for example, what have the today's
botanists in mind, actually? They say — and this should
be a basic achievement of the nineteenth century —, the
plants consist of single cells, and the animals consist of such
cells, too. Let us assume that now anybody proves how much a
human being can see with his eyes. He cannot see the cells and
everything that crosses the borders of physical cognition.
— Those who speak in such a way prove that the eyes
cannot look into that which, nevertheless, the naturalists have
seen. Such a proof can be right; then one would prove that it
is impossible to reach the cell composition of plants and
animals with the human eyes and to penetrate into these
subtlest processes. Someone would be a fool who wanted to prove
that such a proof is wrong. — Numerous proofs are of the
same quality, which assume that the human cognitive faculties,
as well as they are, can know nothing about the supersensible.
Such proofs can be quite correct, and a fool would be who
wanted to disprove them.
However, completely apart from the limits of the physical eye,
[one has to take into account] that one has armed the eyes with
cognitive means like microscope, telescope, and spectroscope
and can thereby observe processes and substances which [were
invisible before], for example, with spectral analysis. The
fact that this has been done is also right, and it is as right
if old worldviews spoke about the limits of knowledge. Just as
natural sciences have sharpened the eye, spiritual science
strengthens that about which one can say in its natural state
probably rightly: it has limits. However, from it we realise
that the proof of the limits of knowledge is justified just as
little as the proof of the limits of the eye. The eye arms
itself with microscope, telescope, and spectroscope — the
human mind gains strength with inner, intimate means:
meditation, concentration, and contemplation. I have already
mentioned that. From my writing How Does One Attain
Knowledge of Higher Worlds? you can more exactly get to
know what one understands by meditation, concentration, and
contemplation.
The
normal soul activity, however, depends completely on the
physical body, on the nerves or the brain. Spiritual science
argues nothing against that. However, spiritual science applies
methods by which the mental capacity becomes different, as well
as the vision became different by the application of microscope
and telescope.
Let
me speak about the mental capacity first. In the usual life, it
deals with the world of the things. How does this mental
capacity work? We stand here just at one of those points where
it will maybe become obvious already in the next time that
natural sciences — if they are properly understood
— are in harmony with that which spiritual science has to
give. Natural sciences already touch this. If we develop a
thought that is directed in the usual life to the area of our
sensory existence, the mental capacity intervenes in our brain.
This is just a common result of spiritual science and natural
sciences, save that spiritual science knows it, while natural
sciences hypothesise. However, the usual life already teaches
us how the thinking intervenes in the brain, and one knows that
the mental capacity works in such a way that it causes
destructive processes in the brain, destructive processes of
the smallest subtlest structures of the brain. The mental
capacity is active, and it destroys the brain perpetually. Our
mental capacity could be protected from causing this
destruction if it were used different.
Just as a human being behaves who sees himself in the mirror,
the mental processes behave; they intervene in the brain: they
reflect the work of thinking in our soul, so that we become
aware of the mental process. Thus, the usual mental capacity
works. The usual life proves it, while the thinking causes
tiredness that sleep again balances. This is the regular
course: the balance of these destructive processes with sleep.
Natural sciences already have words for it like assimilation
and catabolism, and for that who knows to observe these things
it becomes clear that the results of natural sciences also lead
to that which spiritual science teaches.
This process of thinking is as natural as the vision of the
eye. Just as one can strengthen the eye with instruments, one
can strengthen the mental capacity, not with outer means but
with the inner means of concentration, meditation, and
contemplation. What do they cause? They cause that the human
being gets around — if he wants to become a spiritual
researcher - to giving himself contents of thought arbitrarily
which are not stimulated from the outside. The usual thinking
proceeds in such a way that we get from outer impressions to
inner experiences. The spiritual thinking proceeds in such a
way that the inner work differs from the usual way [of
thinking]. For longer time the thoughts have to be directed to
an inner soul experience that the human being himself has
created and that is not stimulated from the outside. For
example, the soul dwells on the words:
In the bright light living wisdom is flowing.
Of
course, this is folly for the usual thinking. However, it
matters that we do not have images of the outside world [in the
meditation]. These images have rather the purpose to deepen the
soul forces. This happens if the soul tries to bring out its
inner abilities from its depths to do something that one does
not do in the usual life at all: concentrating on such an
image. One usually does not apply the soul forces that appear
in the meditation in the usual day life; at most, they become
faintly noticeable. They are brought up quite different in the
meditation. Slumbering soul forces emerge from the depths of
the soul, and then it becomes obvious that these soul forces
are independent of that on which the usual mental capacity is
dependent. While the usual thinking is dependent on the brain
and causes destructive processes, that thinking creates an
inner power, which gives the soul the experience: I am
independent of my physical body.
We
want now to characterise this process of the independent mental
capacity a little more. We get here to an area that natural
sciences can also acknowledge. I have already touched one
chapter. Du Bois-Reymond (Emil D. B.-R.,1815-1890, German
physiologist) pointed [in his lecture] at the scientific
congress in Leipzig (1872) to the limits of cognition and he
considered the sleeping human being only as explicable because
he is free of affects, desires, and mental pictures. Something
is there that just such scientific thinkers who take the facts,
as they are, will recognise more and more. Let us assume that
anybody says, air surrounds us, the human being inhales it,
then a quantity of air is in him; now I want to investigate the
air. I investigate the lung how it is nourished how it carries
out its organic processes et cetera. — It would be the
worst method to investigate the air this way. One would find
out something about the lung. However, one investigates the air
best of all in the atmosphere, because the air has its
existence in the atmosphere. If anybody wanted to recognise the
air by investigations of the lung, one would consider him as
brainless.
One
is still far away from getting to know the affects and passions
if one investigates the physical body. One cannot get to know
the thinking, while one investigates the brain. This would be
as brainless as to investigate the air in the lung. As the lung
inhales the air in a respiratory process that envelops the
earth as atmosphere, the body inhales the soul life with every
awakening. As well as the inhaled air relates to the lung, the
soul life relates to the brain. With falling asleep, the body
exhales the soul life again. While we are waking, we have the
soul life in ourselves, which belongs to the spiritual-mental
life in which we live as we live physically in the
atmosphere.
Here we have a field where it is clear, how natural sciences
and spiritual science intertwine, as Du Bois-Reymond already
recognised. The spiritual life belongs to the entire spiritual
world, as well as the air belongs to the physical atmosphere.
We may say, if the human being sleeps, he has exhaled spirit
and soul. His spirit and soul are in the spiritual-mental of
the whole world; however, he cannot perceive them there because
he has no consciousness.
Somebody who has developed his mental capacity by meditation in
such a way tears his power of thought out of the material body
forces; he becomes aware of himself as it were beyond the body.
That is he develops thought processes that do not originate
from the application to the things of the material world, but
he goes with his thinking to the spiritual world. He knows by
immediate experience that he develops the thought process
beyond the body and experiences beings that face him as
spirits. This is based on the release of the thinking from the
body and is that which can be considered as the first source of
spiritual research. One can also experience internally that the
thinking is different which one acquires this way; it does not
tire us. Since it is an important phenomenon that we experience
such processes, which do not fatigue us. However, some
meditating people believe at first to note that they fall
asleep straight away with the meditation. This is due to the
fact that then the process has not yet advanced far enough
because it is difficult to detach the thought process from the
purely external. It takes years and years.
What do you experience then? Then you experience something that
cannot be characterised in the abstract, you experience
stupefying inner things. You experience that you have your self
beyond yourself that you survey from without what you have
experienced.
As
you feel enclosed in your skin in the day consciousness, you
experience it now as an outer object. The outer world remains
interesting, you are attracted to it like with hundred about
hundred magnetic forces. You do not want to be torn away from
the outside world. You feel, so to speak, that you belong to
it. However, these are emotional forces and sensory forces,
which belong, above all, to the reality of higher experience.
You learn to recognise the forces with which you feel attracted
to the outer physical body. Now you get to know the reason, why
you wake up in the morning, you learn to recognise that the
body says to us, you belong to me, you have to unite with me as
that unites with me which is exhaled by the outer physical
nature [during sleep] when that is repaired which the outer
life has destroyed. One learns to recognise, why the soul
returns to the physical body.
You
learn something else: the forces that were there before
conception. You get to know the soul as it is today, however,
you also learn to recognise that they are the same soul forces,
which were there before birth, which have drawn us to the
parents who could give the physical body. You get to know the
forces that led to the present life on earth, also the forces
that led to our destiny. If the human beings develop forces to
get free from the body with the thinking, then they get around
to recognising the forces by symbols that lead their destinies.
The materialist dream research has already recognised that one
experiences images, memories in the dreams.
One
cannot easily imagine that in the usual everyday life a
misfortune that a human being experienced twenty years ago is
not something that he deeply longs for. If we have drawn
ourselves with the thinking from the body, we experience that
that which was unpleasant to us at that time that we feel now
attracted by it. Why? Because the soul recognises that it has
imperfections. They are so deeply concealed that one does not
notice them with the usual day consciousness. This inclination
to compensate imperfections works in the depths of the soul,
even if it knows nothing of it in the usual consciousness. It
feels attracted to something that brings ill luck into life;
not before it has passed this ordeal, the former imperfection
can change into a perfection.
The
life with the released mental capacity looks in such a way that
in the soul the forces appear to which we feel attracted. The
question of destiny becomes the question of imagining. We start
understanding the misfortune because we know that the soul must
search the misfortune to compensate certain imperfections. It
has to know that we were equipped before our birth with forces
that have drawn us to the suitable embryo, as well as the plant
seed is drawn to the topsoil that is suitable to it. In this
respect, spiritual science is also in harmony with natural
sciences that cannot deny that, for example, an Alpine plant
grows in surroundings whose conditions correspond to its
growth. The soul is led to such a destiny in which it can
change an imperfection into a perfection. We walk through the
gate of death. If the soul did anybody wrong and walks now
released from the body through the gate of death, it feels: I
can only feel perfect in future, if I try to balance out what I
did wrong. Committed crime changes into a feeling: my soul is
helpless against that which happened, but I can learn to
develop forces which are as predisposition in me and which
cause that I get a destiny in which I can transform myself.
In
similar way, the human being gets beyond the present soul life
if he acquires another soul force. As we can disengage the
mental capacity, so that it proceeds internally, we can
disengage another force that finds other use in the usual life:
the power of speech. What happens with this power of speech? We
develop something spiritual-mental in the speech, but it does
not remain something spiritual-mental in the usual life. It
intervenes in the processes of the brain, of the larynx —
the power of speech intervenes in the material-bodily. As we
stop the mental capacity, before it intervenes in the brain, we
can also stop the power of speech, before it intervenes in the
brain and the larynx.
Natural sciences look for the organ of speech in the third
convolution of the brain, in Broca's field; monkeys do not have
it. Someone who pursues the facts only with the view of natural
sciences says, speech comes about with Broca's organ. —
However, the fact militates against it that somebody who grows
up only on a lonesome island does not attain language, in spite
of Broca's organ. The fact is that the power of speech
structures the brain, so that Broca's organ is [structured) and
from there the activities of will develop in such a way that
language originates. Thus, we have something spiritual in the
power of speech that intervenes in the organic. However, we can
now change the power of speech, while we do not allow it to
come close to the bodily. We achieve this, while we make our
meditation, concentration, and contemplation somewhat
different. To release the power of speech it is not sufficient
that we dedicate ourselves only to the contents of mental
pictures, but it matters that we penetrate the object of our
mental picture with sensation and emotion. We can meditate in
thoughts on such a saying like
In the bright light living wisdom is flowing.
However, we can set our thoughts aglow with feelings, we can
feel our soul life in that light which becomes a symbol of the
flowing wisdom to us. Then we feel that we retain the forces
which, otherwise, we let flow out in words. This leads to
Inspiration, as well as the thought power — if it is
retained — leads to Imagination.
If
the human being emancipates the power of speech so that he
applies the same forces internally, but retains them in the
soul, then the view of the spiritual world extends. Then we can
take up other results of spiritual science. Since the soul life
extends not only up to the existence beyond the body, but we
learn also to look back to former lives on earth. Stopping the
power of speech enables us to experience former lives on earth.
One always regarded silence as something special. Hence, one
needs not limit the outer talking; one has only to apply the
inner forces.
I
want to bring not only results of spiritual science, but I want
also to show the means which lead to them. One maybe
contemplates: how long does the interval last, actually,
between two lives on earth? For the spiritual researcher arises
that our former life on earth goes back to a time where still
nothing of the individual language was there. The individual
language needed so long time for its development as time passed
since our last life on earth. — This is an example of the
fact that one can only investigate facts of the spiritual world
if the suitable soul forces have developed. However, to
understand that without prejudice what the spiritual researcher
says, one only needs to think logically. As well as someone can
understand a portrait who does not understand the technique of
painting, everybody can also understand the messages of the
spiritual researcher. One must be a spiritual researcher to
penetrate into the spiritual world, but if one puts the
investigated into words, one can understand them with common
sense.
One
has to expect no answer to questions of the spiritual world
from science. However, the common sense knows what is right.
Numerous philosophers say that the human being puts questions
that exceed the usual capacity of the senses, for example, the
question of human destiny. The outer life does not answer it.
The thinking about which I have here spoken today answers it,
while it changes the question of either sympathy or aversion
into a question of imagining. The big questions answer
themselves in such a way that life confirms spiritual science
everywhere.
Except the mental capacity and the power of speech, one can
still develop a third. The human being knows that he intervenes
with it already in the usual life in such a way that it can
seize his blood circulation. Shame makes us blush; fear makes
us turn pale. Our soul life intervenes up to the activity of
the heart. One can also retain this force in the soul if the
human being carries out concentration, meditation, and
contemplation in suitable way, so that that which lives in the
blood circulation remains in the spiritual-mental. If he
connects his will impulses with those forces if he meditates,
for example, the sentence:
In the bright light living wisdom is flowing
and
feels it in the following way: I want to move through time in
such a way that I contribute to the flowing light process, then
he tears a part out of that force which expresses itself in the
blood circulation, in the movements of the limbs, in the
gestures of the everyday life and turns them to the spiritual.
The meditation has to come about with such motionlessness of
the limbs as usually in sleep. If one breaks away these forces,
one can seize that which works beyond the earth as a
spiritual-mental life. One gets to know the earth as a
re-embodiment of a spiritual being, as one has recognised the
human soul as reincarnated from former lives.
Thus, the human being rises in the universe, he experiences his
coherence with a spiritual-mental that surrounds us as
physically the air surrounds us. Thus, we grow into the
spiritual world, while we solve not only the questions of life
theoretically, but experience the solution. Then that is not
theory which spiritual science gives, it becomes an elixir of
life, then it flows out into our soul lives like steam energy
into a machine. As natural sciences intervene in the outer life
and achieve triumphs, spiritual science will intervene in the
inner human life; it will give us power and certainty of life.
This will not remain a theory, but get closer to the solution
of the questions of life at every turn, while the human being
realises what he has in his inside, as well as he has the air
in his lung.
Then he knows that he has a soul in himself, something that
walks from life to life. One speaks about immortality not only
theoretically, but one experiences it in himself, as well as
one can experience the future plant in the seed that only
creates it. Yes, spiritual science shows the living spiritual
core by now; we learn to experience that which prepared the
next life. We understand immortality, while we experience it in
such a way that there is a guarantee of living on. We will
recognise that something exists after this life and something
existed before this life. We get to know an originally
spiritual state from which we have arisen. We learn to
recognise, as long as we are still imperfect, that we must
develop that we will go over together with the earth into a
spiritual-mental state at the end of our lives on earth. We
will know that we must experience our guilt in this and in
future lives as imperfections, until we recognise that our
lives are lined up. We get to know immortality in our own
souls. With it, spiritual science gives us what the human being
needs in this present to solve the questions of life and the
riddle of death.
It
becomes completely obvious — if one looks at the present
time — that, on one side, the need exists of that which
spiritual science can give — that, on the other side, one
has the biggest prejudices if spiritual science answers single
questions of everything that it has to be.
Let
us take an example. One mostly judges using outer reasons.
There is a famous professor of philosophy (presumably Ernst
Mach, 1838-1916, Austrian philosopher and physicist). If he
speaks about the soul, you find the following words, and
countless students carry the words as the highest wisdom into
the world. In view of this fact, you must not be surprised
about prejudices against spiritual science. There he says, the
sum of our experiences, imagining, willing and feeling as they
combine in the consciousness to a unity is the soul which rises
to moral impulses at a certain level of perfection. Of course,
someone who gives such definitions of the soul can only get to
the result that the soul dissolves at death. The child has
already to learn in the school that one is not allowed to add
apples, pears, and plums and “unless the first and second
were, the third and fourth would never be.” However, what
does the philosopher mean? He talks about a sum of imagining,
feeling and willing and — it is strange — this can
become moral feeling and willing. He performs a miracle
absent-mindedly. Such a miracle is put absent-mindedly: the
single experiences combine to a unity, and after they have been
summed up, they get to moral feeling and willing. The child
already learns at school that one is not allowed to add
different things.
From there the objections against spiritual science originate.
However, where it is measured in life, solutions are found
which can be understood and whose comprehensibility can make
the soul healthy. Spiritual science can be measured how it can
cope with life. Life answers the questions in such a way as
well as the scientific questions are answered. A scientific
invention is so long a figment, until life proves it true. It
proves itself, while it says, yes, if the facts turn out to be
right in life, I can reveal myself to you. This also applies to
spiritual science.
If
the human being walks through the gate of death, he fights in
the spiritual world for that which he has already prepared
here: the seed of a new life. Then in the postmortal life, the
life between birth and death turns out to be a transformation
of a new soul life.
We
ask a modern psychologist, Bartholomäus von Carneri
(1821-1909, Austrian materialist psychologist)) to get to know
something about death which is only another state of
consciousness to spiritual science. He says: “Life was a
fight, the human being got tired from this fight, and death is
the most beneficent if it proves to be sleep after the heavy
work of life which no god disturbs.” — Yes, you can
touch it here with your own hands in this characteristic that
got stuck unconsciously in impossible mental pictures. Someone
who wants to prove the cessation of the human soul life talks
of the fact that it is the most beneficent if he sleeps without
being disturbed by a god. I would like to know which mechanic
says if his machine does not work: I put it to bed. There one
notices how those get entangled who do not yet want to get
themselves into spiritual research.
Others admit [the existence of a soul], as that American who
was, actually, a chemist said in a lecture which he held in
1909: every human being has to feel as an independent soul.
Yes, so far the naturalists who judge impartially have
come: behind the bodily, something exists. One is allowed today
to speak about soul and spirit in general which are behind the
sensory world. However, one is labelled as a daydreamer if one
does not only say: this is spirit, spirit, and spirit. However,
if you say, as well as one finds beings in the animal and plant
realms, there are spiritual hierarchies that outrank the human
being, then one discounts it as a pipe dream.
If
humanity gradually understands that spiritual research places
itself in the spiritual life of the present, it knows: it is
the same situation as it was when natural sciences, when
Galilei, Copernicus, and Kepler appeared. At that time, people
said, the human view has proved with certainty that the earth
stands still and the sun circles around it, against all
appearance these men state that the earth circles around the
sun, that is nonsense. — Even if Copernicus was denoted a
swindler; nevertheless, his teachings were accepted later.
The
world does not behave much different today compared with
spiritual science that substitutes scientific materialism with
spiritual reality. Spiritual research shows what its knowledge
can give. It solves questions of life and death. However, one
objects what I have read out at the beginning of this talk
[from two writings]. People who face spiritual science as those
once who denounced Copernicus, Galilei, and Kepler as heretics,
will “prove” for long that one can prove the human
life only from birth to death. The course of the times and of
the universal spirit will be in such a way that humanity has to
recognise that it will experience the same as it experienced
with Giordano Bruno concerning the outer borders of space.
People considered the [visible firmament] as the border of
space that encloses the world.
Giordano Bruno proved that only the [restricted] human
cognitive faculties gave this border. Spiritual science shows
today that the temporal firmament, that [the limitation of the
human life] between birth and death has to be wiped out. As
Giordano Bruno extended the borders of the firmament, spiritual
science shows the infinite temporality [of the human life], the
infinite possibility of life transformation, [so that the human
beings] will recognise the everlasting work with
self-knowledge.
Hence, may popular writings speak of figments and prophecies,
that who recognises the development says, may people brand
spiritual research and spiritual science ever so much. The
course of time will show that spiritual research is as little a
sect as natural sciences are a sect. One may say about those
who want to progress in the area of truth that the genius of
humanity will neglect them, and one will recognise that
spiritual science is not a sect, but that it speaks about the
riddles of life from deep knowledge and that its knowledge has
to be handed over — as the knowledge of Copernicus,
Galilei, and Kepler — to the welfare of humanity.
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