The Rudolf Steiner Archive

15. The Essence of Eternity and the Nature of the Human Soul in the Light of Spiritual Science

[ 1 ] When Lessing, in a sketch of his thoughts, hinted at the doctrine that seemed to him to be the only one worthy of the human soul—a doctrine he then, in his own distinctive way, clearly elaborated for a Western consciousness in his masterful treatise on the The Education of the Human Race—when he articulated this doctrine of the reincarnation of the human soul, of the soul’s passage through repeated earthly lives—he remarked, in essence, the following. He said: “Should this doctrine—since it struck the human soul as self-evident in the most ancient times, when the human soul had not yet been corrupted by all manner of intellectual speculations, and since it thus belonged, so to speak, to the most primitive assets of the human soul—be any less true than so many other doctrines that have arisen for the human soul in the course of time through philosophical speculation or the like?” — And after Lessing had clearly pointed out that, precisely for the soul, this doctrine of the repeated earthly lives of human beings is the only meaningful one, he went on to say that there would indeed be a prospect that this doctrine might take root in all those who truly allow the nature of the human soul to work upon them with an open mind—were it not for two things. Now one is certainly curious to know what Lessing meant by these two things that are said to stand in the way of the doctrine of repeated earthly lives for the human soul. But lo and behold, Lessing did not write out this sentence in full; he was interrupted by something, so that the sentence breaks off with the words: “... if it were not for, as it were, two things:” followed by a colon. And we find no statement in his writings where he himself explains what he actually considered these two things to be. Scholars of Lessing have engaged in all manner of speculation about what Lessing’s thoughts might have been as he wrote this sentence.

[ 2 ] Well, perhaps one need not have such strong reservations about this if one assumes that Lessing most likely meant those two things that initially strike most people as objectionable when the doctrine of repeated earthly lives is discussed. Driven by two impulses, so to speak, the human soul resists such an idea. One of these can be expressed roughly as follows: Whatever the case may be regarding the evidence that might be presented from some spiritual science in support of the doctrine of repeated earthly lives, one thing is certain—that normal consciousness has no memory, no recollection of earthly stages already lived through. Therefore, it would seem—at the very least, even if it were true that such repeated earthly lives exist—that they are meaningless to human consciousness itself and thus constitute a kind of arbitrary hypothesis for normal human consciousness. — This is certainly one of the impulses for many souls who rebel against the idea of repeated earthly lives. The second of these impulses likely stems from what might be called a person’s sense of justice toward oneself. The idea of repeated earthly lives necessitates the assumption that, so to speak, our fate—the way in which we are placed into the world, more or less happy or unhappy, gifted or ungifted we are placed into the world, is a consequence of what we ourselves have laid down as causes in earlier earthly lives—so that, so to speak, we ourselves are, in a far broader sense than is usually understood, the architects of our own happiness, our abilities, or our unhappiness and our shortcomings. Many a soul probably says to itself: “If I must accept my fate, if it already weighs heavily upon my earthly existence, then must I also accept that I myself—that is, this ‘I’ that dwells within me—have brought about the causes in previous earthly lives for this fate in which I am now entangled.” — This is what one might call a person’s sense of justice toward oneself.

[ 3 ] Anyone who explores Lessing’s other ideas and his entire being, and makes them a part of his own soul, will hardly doubt that Lessing—this pioneer of the doctrine of repeated earthly lives—intended, in a certain sense, to draw attention to these two objections, and it is indeed fitting that, precisely in our contemplation of the essence of eternity and the nature of the human soul and its connection to eternity, we draw attention to these facts that have just been characterized. For let us recall once again this evening the statement by the German philosopher Hegel, who has already been mentioned in the context of the previous lectures: If eternity is to be a property of the human soul, then this property must not merely manifest itself within the nature of the human soul after death, but must be experienced within earthly existence itself. — Hegel articulates, one might say, the essential point that eternity for the soul cannot begin only after death, but must be a quality already implanted within it during earthly life.

[ 4 ] But if one wishes to seek the quality of eternity in the human soul—how it lives within us, how we can explore it by looking into our own inner life—how could it not be revealed precisely in that which is so intimately connected with this human soul in the sense of spiritual science? The lectures so far have shown that this intimate connection exists with what we might call the human soul’s reaching beyond its individual existence between birth and death through its creative work and activity—precisely with what we summarize in the concept of so-called reincarnation, repeated earthly lives, and in the concept of karma, that is, the influence of causes from past lives on our present life and the causes we ourselves are now creating for our future lives. We must conceive of the human soul as interwoven with this entire web of causes; we must conceive of it, in its present life, as connected to what it has experienced in past stages of existence and to what it will yet experience in future stages of existence. Thus, contemplating the human soul’s present life can lead us to an understanding of past and future lives. And if one does not focus on some abstract idea of eternity, but rather looks at the real, self-contained human soul, then one might arrive at something that could lead to a characterization of the essence of eternity. For, to use a comparison, would it not be more promising to explore the true nature of a chain by moving from link to link, rather than considering the chain as it was when it was still a single stroke, a single line? The latter approach would apply if one were to set out directly toward eternity, while the former comes into play when one considers the human soul as it presents itself in individual lives—as a single link among repeated links that join together to form the entire chain, which then represents to us the perfect, complete life of the human being throughout earthly existence.

[ 5 ] Now, it is true that when a person looks to that which can first provide him with the assurance of the idea of eternity, he usually surrenders to the contemplation of the present. The lectures given here so far have shown, from a wide variety of perspectives, that when a person surveys his inner life, he repeatedly finds himself ultimately reducing everything that has taken place within it, as it were, to a single point that he designates as his “I.” Precisely when one looks at the thinking philosophers of the present day, one is repeatedly reminded that human beings could gain insight into the essence of their own nature through nothing other than by tracing the nature of their own “I”—that which, like a center, holds together everything we experience in the soul. Does it not then seem as though everything we experience in our mind and soul—our thoughts, moods, and impulses of the will—arises and passes away? But what endures? To whom, so to speak, do all thoughts, moods, and impulses of the will belong? The “I” is that which reveals itself to us as the enduring center. We also know quite well that if we did not relate our soul experiences to this enduring center, we could not speak at all of being a unified human being. Nevertheless, as beautiful as it may seem—especially in recent times—what philosophers and other thinkers say about the nature of the “I,” there is a refutation of all such philosophical speculations about the nature of the “I.” No matter how intimately one investigates how this center of our inner life proves, so to speak, to be the same throughout our entire life of thought, feeling, and will: there is a refutation that obliterates our “I,” as we experience it in normal consciousness, and which can, in fact, repeatedly bring to our attention just how easily all the philosophers’ speculations about the enduring “I”—as normal consciousness initially perceives it—can be refuted. This refuter is the one we ourselves experience again and again within twenty-four hours: sleep. Sleep erases not only our thoughts, sensations, and volitional impulses but also the very center of our “I,” so that in truth one cannot speak of the permanence of the “I”—that “I” which normal human consciousness initially perceives—in the face of the sleep that occurs for every human being within the course of twenty-four hours. However, the lectures so far have shown that human beings can nevertheless speak of such a “I” in a certain way—not by focusing on what they have in the immediate present, by relating all their ideas, states of mind, and volitional impulses to their “I”-center, but by taking something entirely different into account. We must ask ourselves one question in this regard: Among all the things we encounter in the external world—which we experience from morning to night—do we find the “I” among these external things? Anyone who asks this question impartially will be able to say: In everything I experience as part of the external world—on which my ideas, sensations, and impulses of will are based—I do not find the “I.” The idea of the “I” cannot arise from any external world, yet it is present from the moment we wake up until we fall asleep. — What can that be which lives in the soul from waking to sleeping, which can always be found amid the flood of our ideas, moods, and volitional impulses, and which can nevertheless be extinguished the moment we fall asleep? Since it cannot be found in the external world, its origin must be sought in our own inner world. But our own inner world is such that we extinguish this very thing—which we experience as our own “I” in normal consciousness. Within the entire vast range of concepts that human beings can form, not a single one that could truly make such a fact comprehensible except for the one that assumes that this—which is not given by any external world and appears as the “I”-thought, as normal consciousness experiences it—is likewise not a reality, for a reality could not vanish in the way that the “I”-thought vanishes during sleep. This “I”-thought is not a reality. What, then, is it? If it is not a reality, then there is no other way to understand the matter than to assume that it is an image—but an image that cannot arise within the broad scope of our experiential world, one to which we can arrive only through a comparison: the comparison of a person with their reflection in a mirror. Let us suppose that a person had never had the opportunity to see his own face. He would then be in the same situation with regard to his outward appearance as he is with his “I.” Normal consciousness always experiences the “I” only as an image; it cannot get to the bottom of what this “I” is, just as a person cannot see his own face from the outside. But when he steps in front of a mirror, his face appears to him—yet it is the image of his face. And when they look around, what is reflected? If they were to look around, they would simply see tables, chairs, or the like. But not everything around them is reflected. Yet if he can say that there is something he does not have in his immediate surroundings, something that is merely reflected to him—for nothing that is there can initially be reflected in our consciousness in the same way that the “I” reveals itself—then it is our own being, to which the “I” in normal consciousness does not initially have access, but which it experiences in the mirror image. And just as what is not there cannot be reflected, so too must the “I” be there, because it is reflected and because the cause of the mirror image cannot be anything else. A single glance at the facts of the world suffices to show that this is true. Therefore, we must say: Since the “I” is initially given to human beings only as a mirror image, it can disappear, just as the mirror image of our face disappears when we no longer look into the mirror. An image can disappear, but reality remains; it is there even though we do not perceive it. For anyone who wished to dispute the truth of the last sentence would have to claim that only what a person perceives actually exists. They would very soon realize the absurdity of this statement as soon as they followed through on its consequences.

[ 6 ] So we must say: In the concept of the “I,” we do not initially have a reality at all. But from it we gain the possibility of positing a reality of our “I.” But how can a person, through ordinary life, come to a certain understanding of this “I”?

[ 7 ] A person can come to an understanding of their self precisely by living not only in the present but also in the past through their memories. If, when we turn our thoughts back to the preceding days, weeks, years, or decades—up to the point already mentioned here and up to which the child can recall—we could not string together all the experiences we have had, as it were, on a single thread, then these experiences of our own inner life would not coalesce in memory as a unity, and we could not then speak of any “I.” It was entirely correct what those psychologists emphasized when they said that a person loses his “I”—at least as an awareness of his “I”—to the extent that the memories of his experiences during the period just described fade away. To the extent that our memory is disturbed, to that extent is our “I” fragmented.

[ 8 ] We have already pointed out on several occasions how a person, initially through their thinking, can go beyond the point to which they can recall. But today we want first to consider what it actually means for a person to experience their true, real self—not merely an image of the self—in memory. If we were to recall only the experiences we have gone through, all the way back to our childhood memories, the difference from the present emergence of the “I” thought would not be particularly great. After all, it makes no difference whether we experience a reflection of our “I” when we currently relate our perceptions, feelings, and volitional impulses to a unified “I”-point, or whether we relate our past perceptions, emotional experiences, and volitional impulses to such a point. In either case, the “I” remains merely an image to which we relate all our experiences. If it were the case that we merely relate our experiences to our “I,” then even in memory we would never come to grasp the reality of our “I.” But we come to grasp the reality of our “I” solely by experiencing this “I” as active, as creative—by experiencing something in our inner life that provides us with proof: There is something in our inner life that creates and acts, and which is not influenced by the external world, yet creates and acts in such a way that it is not now extinguished by sleep. — What is this that lives and weaves within us, and which is not extinguished by sleep?

[ 9 ] Every person who looks back on their life—who truly engages in this reflection with an open mind—will say to themselves: Throughout my life, I have not only experienced events in a way that allows me to relate them to my own self, but it is undeniable that I have processed them through what I have experienced within myself, apart from my external experiences. I have been enriched by my inner experiences. — Anyone who experiences this fact of life’s maturity—which develops within—and gains an awareness of the elevation of life’s conditions knows that this cannot come from any external reality, but only from something that works within us. And anyone who then surveys the whole of life will realize—as has already been mentioned in the context of these lectures—that they need sleep in order to truly attain this elevation of life, this inner development. When we examine our inner life, we know full well how a lack of sleep destroys our mental images and how it has, in a certain sense, a devastating effect on our state of mind. We know that we need sleep as a creative force if what we experience in the external world—what we constantly perceive through the external world—is to truly mature within us. Through this we come to realize that it is certainly not that image of the “I” which we observe during the day that is at work within us, but rather that the reality lying behind this image continues to work even during sleep; for a lack of sleep proves to be destructive to the progress of soul development. Thus, we recognize the active “I” in the growth and maturation of our inner life. And as we experience what we lack when sleep does not come at the right time, and this “I” is detached from its connection with the outer physical body and—apart from it—can work; as we thus experience how a lack of sleep hinders the growth of our life maturity, we become aware of our real, active “I.” We do not perceive it as an image, but as an inner force that works throughout life, both in waking and in sleeping.

[ 10 ] Here we have the first of the indications—one that truly penetrates into reality—of that which lives and works within us as a force independent of the entire external world. And if we take this inner experience further, what do we discover? Many of the details that must be mentioned today have already been hinted at in the previous lectures, including the important fact that must now be mentioned. It turns out that we experience this intensification of life, that we become more and more mature. But it also turns out—and this is a remarkable fact—that the very best aspect of our maturity, that which enables us to grow most into something better than we were before, and through which we can best observe the essence of the “I,” is something we experience in such a way that we can say: It reveals itself as something we experience most clearly through our mistakes and our shortcomings. — When we have really failed at something, when we have done something that so clearly reveals our imperfection and our inability, then we learn from what we have accomplished in our inability how we should have done it. We have become more mature. And it is precisely through such occasions—whether they involve thinking, feeling, willing, or acting—that we develop our wisdom and maturity in life. But this also leads us to say: We see, in what we accumulate within ourselves as wisdom and maturity—which becomes an ever-stronger inner force—that we will never find ourselves in the same situation a second time and be able to learn from our mistakes again; thus, we must store these lessons within ourselves and recognize that there is no place in life for these most important things. — Thus we see that in our earthly existence we live our lives and continually accumulate forces that express themselves as maturity, and that—if a life is truly lived correctly—these forces have accumulated most strongly by the time we reach the threshold of death. We see that there is something within us, living within us, that cannot initially manifest itself in the external world.

[ 11 ] How do we live? We live in the soul by being able to look back on our past existence. Memory, so to speak, holds the thread of our soul together. But from this memory emerges, as it were, something that lives and weaves within us as our inner maturity of life, and which manifests itself as a surplus of energy in our present earthly existence. From a spiritual scientific perspective, one can begin by simply applying a law that holds true in all of external science: the law that forces cannot disappear. Every natural scientist and every physicist acknowledges this for the external world. They point out that if one simply runs a finger across a tabletop and applies a compressive force, that force is converted into heat. It is said: Forces that have once been expended can be transformed or converted, but they cannot vanish into nothingness. — Once one has consciously experienced that, in what we regard as the maturity and substance of our lives, we have stored up forces that, for the time being, find no further use and are most intensely strained as we pass through the gate of death, then, according to ordinary human reasoning, the thought should no longer be far-fetched that the forces—which exist as forces and which have arisen through the work of the “I,” independent of the outer physical body—cannot vanish into nothingness. The physical body—and this is the only logical conclusion—to which this maturity of life is not indebted, may fall away, may be returned to its elements; these forces remain. And because we have the “I” within these forces as the active, dynamic center, the “I” is present in the forces of its maturity of life when the human being passes through the gate of death. Those who have no desire to apply the laws of ordinary physics to spiritual life may dispute this, but they should be aware that they are committing an inconsistency the moment they ascend from the consideration of external physical reality to spiritual reality. Thus, we certainly need not call upon anything other than ordinary common sense when spiritual science speaks of the fact that, in what we call our inner being, when we pass through the gate of death, there are forces stored up that we have acquired during our lives, and that these forces then reach their greatest intensity and must exert their greatest effect in a world that is not the world of the outer physical body. These forces must continue to act after death in a world that must evidently be assumed—a world in which these forces, that is, the inner being of the human being permeated and animated by the “I,” continue to live on when the human being is in a disembodied, body-free state. Thus, common sense points to life after death—and not merely to the general existence of such a life after death, but it even points to the forces that come into play in this life after death.

[ 12 ] But when spiritual science goes further and speaks in more detail about this life that elapses between death and a new birth, then, of course, all those who believe they stand on the firm ground of science today begin to laugh. The spiritual scientist can understand this laughter, for he knows that people’s assertions—and indeed their laughter—do not depend on their reasons and evidence, but on their habits of thought. Anyone who has developed these habits of thought to such an extent that they are unable to engage with what spiritual science has to report about life after death based on its research—to such a person, of course, everything said about this life between death and a new birth must appear ridiculous or even fantastical or fanciful. For spiritual science shows that when a person has passed through the gate of death, a phenomenon first occurs that is otherwise extremely rare in life, though it does occur in life as well and has been observed repeatedly. This is that, after death, a person first experiences something like a retrospective view of their recently concluded earthly life—a view that is not permeated by feelings or sensations. I specifically mean a retrospective view that is not permeated by feelings or sensations, but rather presents to the person, as it were, the sum total of the experiences of their last earthly existence in a series of successive images. This is something that lasts only a short time. In ordinary life, this is experienced, for example, when a person is on the verge of drowning and goes into shock but does not lose consciousness; if consciousness is lost, the phenomenon does not occur. But people who have been in a situation where they experienced great terror while facing a life-threatening situation have, through that terror, had something like a retrospective view of their earthly life up to that point. Even natural scientists who are entirely focused on the external world admit this, and I have already mentioned that the distinguished criminal anthropologist Moriz Benedikt describes how, when he was once close to drowning, he had such a retrospective view of his past life. Spiritual science can certainly learn from such individuals, and it is eager to do so, even if the situation today is still such that this field is not reciprocated.

[ 13 ] What happens when a person experiences such terror due to a life-threatening situation? For a moment, they are unable to use their external physical senses, yet they remain conscious. Through such an experience, a person loses the ability to see with their eyes, hear with their ears, and so on. They are, as it were, torn out of their physical body—which contains all the instruments of their physical life—by their inner being. They are torn out of ordinary life, yet retain their ordinary consciousness. From the fact that they can look back on their life up to that point, it can also be concluded that when a person—consciously—looks inward, they must include everything that may surface in their memory as part of their inner being. For as they are torn from their physical body, this memory remains with them. Thus, in such a moment of terror, a person experiences within themselves—while this inner self is still filled with memory—what runs through their entire life but stands in no connection with the external sense organs that otherwise mediate consciousness. Therefore, if one wishes to understand life, one must speak of the fact that a human being is connected to a finer soul-physicality, which is the bearer of memory but which, in such a moment, is lifted out of the outer physical body. A person—as common sense can again recognize—is not asleep during such a fright, for otherwise he would also have such a recollection while asleep. It follows, then, that during such a fright he possesses something within himself that he does not possess while asleep.

[ 14 ] This confirms what spiritual science teaches: that during sleep, the human being’s soul entity leaves the physical body, but leaves behind that to which their memory is bound—that which they work on throughout their life, striving to retain the images of memory. During sleep, the human being is outside the physical body and outside this outer soul body, which we in spiritual science call the etheric body and which remains connected to the physical body during ordinary sleep. At the moment of death, however, this etheric body—which is also the source of life (this cannot be elaborated upon further today)—now also leaves the physical body, and what remains is merely the physical body, the outer shell of the human being. Death occurs precisely because what appears during ordinary sleep does not appear, but rather because what a person possesses during ordinary sleep—namely, their etheric body—departs with them. Therefore, for a brief time after death, what occurs is similar to what happens in ordinary life during a shock or a fright, as a flashback.

[ 15 ] Now, what a person experiences there as a recollection is actually bound up with something that, as the facts attest, is so closely connected to the physical body that not even sleep can sever that connection. After death, a person takes with them something that does not belong to the innermost core of the soul, but rather belongs, as it were, to the physical body. Therefore, as spiritual science shows, after a relatively short time—measured only in days—it is sent on ahead of the physical body. A person sheds their etheric body and then essentially possesses only what they also have during sleep. But now this other, inner soul aspect—as spiritual science shows—is in a different state than it is throughout one’s entire life. In what state is a person when they go through the alternation of waking, sleeping, waking, sleeping, and so on? They are placed in a situation where they must return to their physical body and etheric body every morning. They are bound to their physical body, to their outer shell, to everything that envelops them—which does not specifically belong to what we call the actual content of soul life.

[ 16 ] But if we now realize that human beings wear down their physical bodies throughout their entire waking day, that, in essence, the entire waking day — as evidenced by the onset of fatigue — is a kind of destructive process, then we can see that at night, because we are able to resume our conscious work in the morning, this destruction can be reversed. So while we work at the destruction of our physical being during the waking state, in consciousness, we are, conversely, active at night in restoring what we have destroyed while awake. We are thus involved in the restoration of our body. In doing so, we carry out an activity that we cannot perform consciously, one that drowns out our consciousness. The moment we regain even a modicum of consciousness, those peculiar dream images arise that are so closely connected to our physical life. One need only recall how, at times, precisely pathological conditions of the body play out in these images. This reveals what consciousness is entangled in. Now, when the physical body is gone after death, there is no fatigue to be remedied, and the human being’s work on the physical body ceases. As a result, however, the forces that are otherwise expended on the physical body during sleep return to the soul itself, and the consequence is that after death, once the soul is separated from the physical body, it can utilize these forces within itself. Now this force manifests as the soul’s consciousness between death and a new birth. To the extent that the soul becomes free from the physical and etheric bodies and all that pertains to them, a different kind of consciousness emerges—one that otherwise does not express itself in this way, namely through work on the physical body, and thus cannot become aware of itself.

[ 17 ] What has just been said seems to be nothing more than a collection of assertions. But aside from the fact that one must refer to the methods you will find described in my book How Does One Attain Knowledge of the Higher Worlds?, one can become aware of this simply through ordinary life. How does a person’s ordinary life unfold as death approaches? When we observe how our thoughts and memories arise, what has already been said comes to mind. We recall, time and again, quite precisely in our imagination, what we have experienced in the past; but we remember very little of the feelings and sensations, or the strength of the impulses of will, that we once experienced in the events we can recall. Who among us, when a painful event comes to mind, does not realize that while we can recall the pain that once affected us intellectually, the very pain that struck our soul at that time does not resurface? Other emotional experiences and so on do not resurface either. But in other forms, they continue to live within us in such a way that they manifest in our overall state of being, so that our entire state of mind is shaped by what we have experienced in the past—whether pain and suffering or joy and moments of pleasure. Who would not know, when looking at a person with scrutiny and empathy—a person who displays a gloomy, melancholic state of mind—that their emotional experiences have sunk into the depths of the soul, do not resurface, yet still rest there and manifest themselves to the observer in that particular melancholic way? The same is true of a sanguine person who always finds joy in life. We can say: What we have experienced is divided into that which we can always recall, and that which lies down there, working within us, and reappearing within us even in our physical existence. — If we consider this carefully, we can convince ourselves that our thoughts and ideas are so powerless, colorless, and lifeless precisely because that powerful shading, that peculiar nuance of the soul—which the thought acquires in immediate experience—descends into the depths of the soul and works there beneath consciousness. Only the more or less bare thought remains, stripped of feeling and will. Feeling and will, which are connected to thought when we stand directly in life, we send down into the hidden depths of the soul, but thought remains alone.

[ 18 ] What has now been characterized does not always present itself in the same way to an unbiased observation of life, but rather in such a way that, during a certain period of life, a person directs the feelings and volitional impulses associated with thoughts downward, whereas in another phase of life, they adhere more closely to their thoughts. The stage of life in which we tend to relegate our pains, joys, and volitional impulses to our subconscious is the time of our youth; and in our youth we are also most inclined to separate out mere ideas and relegate our emotional experiences to the subconscious, so that they later manifest as our emotional state, indeed, as our physical constitution. But our body becomes increasingly solidified, and the aspects of our consciousness that remain the same grow fewer and fewer. The result is that we can no longer work into the subconscious as we did before. This is why what is connected to feelings and impulses of the will is later also connected to thoughts. As one grows older—if one observes life solely through faithful self-knowledge—one senses that in one’s youth, the vast majority of what is linked to moods and so on is sent down so that it may live on in the physical constitution. But the more one has become rigid and dry later in life, the more what the mind experiences in later life as moods remains, and the more the impulses of the will that are not acted out remain connected to thoughts. Thus we see that our inner life becomes richer in this respect as we approach death. We see our physicality gradually wither away, gradually becoming less capable of absorbing what we experience in the soul. In contrast, however, the soul becomes fresher and more mature as we continually learn from life as a school. That is why, in youth, whatever is connected with ideals, with ideas, indeed with mere notions, flashes through our unconscious being, seizes our blood and our nervous system, takes root within them, only to emerge later in life as our ability—or inability—to cope with life. Later in life, we feel that our blood no longer wants to go along with the enthusiasm we once felt for our ideals. This is something that is, in a sense, held back by today’s misguided upbringing, but which will increasingly become part of life’s greatest blessings and bliss, in that what we otherwise surrender to our physicality—and what unites with it—will now, as we hasten toward the winter of life, strengthen our spiritual constitution, but cannot enter the outer physical realm, because that outer physical realm offers it resistance.

[ 19 ] When we consider this, we will say: We see our inner life becoming richer and richer as we approach the gate of death. — On the other hand, the objections that one becomes weak with age and so on are by no means valid; they stem from materialistic ways of thinking and prejudices. To the extent that our body dies away, our inner being is refreshed—one might say our own soul life becomes more childlike within—so that we can also see from this that there is a kind of drawing near to those forces that are most highly strung as we hasten toward the gate of death. This is particularly evident in those for whom the training described in the book How to Attain Knowledge of the Higher Worlds provides the ability to perceive and experience something independently of the instruments of the physical body. It has also been described that one can train oneself upward through meditation, concentration, and so on, so that the experience and perception of the spiritual world within the soul becomes a reality, and that at the same time the soul knows with complete certainty: What I am now experiencing requires no eye, no ear, no external physicality, for I am outside of physicality. — In such a case, the meditation, concentration, and so on that a person undergoes must always be accompanied by living feelings and impulses of the will. Therefore, it is not enough for someone to merely indulge in thoughts. In How Does One Attain Knowledge of the Higher Worlds?, it is described in detail that a person must connect with feelings and sensations—that is, with what otherwise, in youth, sinks into the unconscious depths of the soul. One must meditate and concentrate in one’s life of thought, but in such a way that thoughts are constantly permeated by the fire of emotional states, that they are enlivened by impulses of the will that are not translated into actions but live within the thoughts.

[ 20 ] When a person trains themselves in this way to achieve true clairvoyance appropriate to the present age, they experience in their physical existence what is otherwise only experienced after one has passed through the gate of death. However, they experience all clairvoyance in such a way that they sense the great difference that a clairvoyant soul, for example, might express as follows: “Yes, I experience a spiritual world, a world in which people exist between death and a new birth; I live with them. But everything I experience as knowledge, I merely observe.” The difference between me and these souls lies in the fact that I can observe this, but cannot act within it or create within it. — The soul perceives this difference. But this stems solely from the connection to the physical body, for at the moment when the clairvoyant consciousness is freed from the physical body and the etheric body, then that which is bound to the physical body as tension—and which alone makes perception possible—is released; these are the forces that characterize the human being as he lives through the time between death and a new birth. It is this that clairvoyance experiences, much like the force of a bow that is drawn. The clairvoyant perceives all power as the power of observation. The moment the tension is released, the bow shoots forward, passing from rest into motion. So it is with the clairvoyant when he passes from life in the physical body to life in the world after death. The clairvoyant can say to himself: You can only observe the spiritual world; you see what is taking place. But as your body falls away from you at death, forces are released, just as with the bow when the arrow is shot. These forces are transformed into other forms of activity within the human soul during the period from death to the new birth. — These are the times during which a person can look back on their past earthly existence and then work on their new earthly incarnation until they awaken to a new earthly existence.

[ 21 ] But not only by considering the matter in this way, but also in another way, we can—even if not through a mathematical proof—still obtain sufficient proof of this, provided we conduct our considerations in harmony with nature. When a plant grows, we see how it develops leaf by leaf, how it finally produces a flower, how the flower is fertilized, and how the fruit develops into a seed. Then the plant reaches its conclusion. Is its life force exhausted? No; rather, the forces that are most strongly present in the plant at that moment are the very ones that bring the entire plant into being anew. The force that is internally concentrated, as if drawn together into a single point, manifests itself differently when we place the plant in the earth and see the entire plant spring forth anew. In this way, the beginning and end of the plant’s life are connected for us. In the same way, what we possess within us—the forces that are most intensely concentrated as we pass through death—is connected to what we behold at the beginning of earthly life. There we see that the human being, as a small child, seems to “sleep” into life in a kind of twilight state. But during this falling asleep, work is being done on the child’s physicality within a certain scope—work such that the child’s physical organs are precisely attuned to the nature of his or her soul life. It would be sad if anyone were to claim that the activity of the “I” begins only when self-consciousness arises in the child. No, it is present beforehand, and the human being must only later apply their powers to it in order to develop consciousness and memory. Before that, the powers of the “I” are at work, shaping the physical instruments plastically, artfully crafting the body—which is still soft and supple—so that it may become what can later contain consciousness within itself. Thus we see the “I” at work in the most artful way when a human being enters into existence, and it becomes clear to us that human beings possess active forces which, when they approach what memory can be, are no longer their own. When we observe such a human being without prejudice, we see how they unite with the world in a unique way, finding their place within it. We see how their initially undefined facial features and undefined abilities become increasingly developed. And we finally see how that which previously passed through the gate of death as if in suspense—that which had prepared itself to construct a new body—is now truly working on a new body, so that the human being is placed into a new body with the fruits of the previous life. Thus the “I” passes from one earthly existence into the next. Through the progression of our soul life—having proven itself active in this progression—it reveals itself to be endowed with the strongest forces, which intensify right up to death, and it lives them out so fully in the time between death and the new birth that it then expresses them anew in a new earthly existence.

[ 22 ] Thus we see how the causes we ourselves create carry over into the next life, as that life continues the previous one. We see how one link in the chain follows another. We need only compare this view with what Buddhism, for example, teaches, and we will see that modern spiritual science—as it can emerge from a concept of evolution imbued with clairvoyance—can embrace the positive ideas of Buddhism but must reject the rest. Buddhism is the final fruit of a clairvoyant primordial culture, during which people possessed the primitive clairvoyance of earlier times, and for its time it upheld the idea that there are repeated earthly lives, for the reason that people experienced this as a direct result of their ancient clairvoyance. In contrast, however, Buddhism firmly asserts that everything that carries over from a previous life and coalesces into the “I” in the present life actually amounts to nothing more than the “illusory self” that we see in the image. Buddhism, in essence, does not recognize the real self, but only the illusory self—the image we have been discussing. It therefore teaches that the self passes away just like our body, our physical form, and our other experiences. What Buddhism allows to carry over from a past life into the present earthly life are only the deeds of that past life—karma. According to Buddhism, the way these deeds cluster together gives rise to an illusory self in every new life, so that it is not a self but only the deeds—only karma—that carry over into our new life. That is why the Buddhist says: What functions as the self is an illusion like everything else; it is māyā like everything else; and I must strive to transcend the self. The deeds of my past life have unfolded in such a way that they now cluster around a central point. That “I,” however, is merely an illusory center. Therefore, I must eradicate what has been brought into this life through karma. — Conversely, spiritual science says: The “I” that appears here is the concentrating force of karma. — And while all other deeds are temporal and are also balanced out within time, that deed of karma which has led the human being to ego-consciousness is not temporal, so that with ego-consciousness something arises that we can only characterize as we have done today—that is, that it increases and increases its existence, and that when we re-enter existence, we reappear grouped around the “I.” — Thus, the Buddhist eradicates the “I” and acknowledges only the karma that carries over from one life into the next, creating a new illusory “I” there. Whereas the adherent of modern spiritual science, for whom karma and the “I” are not one and the same, says to himself: From my present earthly stage, my “I” emerges with an elevation of life and will reappear as such in my next earthly existence, where it will then connect with the deeds of that next life. When I have done something as the “I,” it remains connected to the center and passes from incarnation to incarnation along with the deeds.

[ 23 ] This highlights the fundamental difference between Buddhism and modern spiritual science; and even though both speak in the same way of reincarnation and karma, it is precisely the “I” itself that evolves from life to life and shapes our inner spiritual life. And when we consider this evolution, it becomes apparent to us even within a single earthly life in such a way that we are led back in our individual existence to a specific point in time when we were children. We cannot remember what lies before that point; we can only learn about it from our parents and so on. Memory awakens only at a certain point in time, but we cannot say that these forces, which manifest themselves in memory, were not already present beforehand. They were, in fact, present beforehand and were at work within us. This is the basis of the development whereby, at a certain point in time, memory first awakens in the early stages of life.

[ 24 ] Spiritual science goes on to show: Just as our ordinary memory of earthly life awakens at a certain time during our childhood, so too is it possible that a person, having heightened their own consciousness to a certain degree, can then raise it higher and higher, so that they have memories not only of their present earthly existence but also of their previous earthly lives. This is a fact of evolution that is currently revealed only to clairvoyant consciousness, but which is in harmony with what can otherwise be known. If it is said that a person’s sense of justice rebels against repeated earthly lives because one cannot remember them, then it must be countered by pointing out that ordinary memory is a fact, even though one cannot recall what one experienced before memory emerged; just as it nevertheless developed afterward, so too must I first develop that memory which can look back on previous earthly lives. In this way, the memory that people otherwise use as an objection to evolution becomes, in fact, an ideal of evolution, and one must say to oneself: Just as I developed a memory for earthly existence in my childhood, so must I continue to develop a memory for repeated earthly lives. — Thus we arrive at the reassuring fact—which, admittedly, ordinary philistine souls will not share—that we still have many human ideals ahead of us, not only those we can form with our ordinary consciousness, but also the ideal that we must attain as the memory of our previous earthly lives. I say this is a fact that ordinary philistine minds cannot share with spiritual science. For I recently read a statement by a person who is currently highly regarded, who claimed that not all the world’s mysteries can be solved by the human mind, and that humanity’s duty to do good cannot be fulfilled either; for if everything were fulfilled and all mysteries were solved, then humanity would have nothing left to do on Earth. — This man cannot imagine that development extends beyond the present stage, so that humanity thereby gains new abilities and new tasks, and that new forms of goodness also arise for a higher level of consciousness.

[ 25 ] This is also one of the blessings that come from spiritual science: that it shows us a perspective that does not simply end in uncertainty. We need not say: We are gazing into empty time—but rather, we have before us the perspective of all eternity. We see how one link in the chain follows another, and we tell ourselves: In this present life, you carry the powers you have acquired in this life; through this, you are shaping a future existence that will give you the opportunity to live out these powers anew. — There we experience, step by step, how the idea of eternity becomes reality and unfolds before the human soul as a vast, eternal perspective. This is the achievement of spiritual science: that we do not merely ask in our thoughts, “What is eternity?”; nor do we merely receive an abstract idea, but rather, through a genuine, concrete contemplation of human life, we see how this eternity arises, how it builds itself up link by link. And with this, any abstract contemplation is rendered obsolete. Reality shows us what must always be shown in reality: how everything is built up from the individual parts, from the individual elements. Thus, spiritual science shows us how eternity can be explained from the nature of the human soul, and what the connection is between the human soul and the nature of eternity.

[ 26 ] And if we now consider the other objection—one that a figure like Lessing might still have believed in—someone might say: My fate now presents itself to me in this way, but if I am to imagine that I myself have brought this fate upon myself through karma, that only increases my suffering, for I would then have to attribute my own shortcomings to myself. — But from the perspective of spiritual science, this thought takes on a different form. In the time preceding our present birth, we sought out, as it were, the misfortune that has befallen us. For by seeking out and, especially, by overcoming misfortune, we acquire a more perfect capacity—one of which we could not have known until now that we would need. In the disembodied state, we were fully aware of the necessity of this: only by steering toward this misfortune do we make ourselves capable of reaching that level of perfection which we need and which we do not yet possess. Thus, through the law of karma, the school of life becomes our source of happiness. Misfortune presents itself as the bringer of powers in relation to the ideal of eternity.

[ 27 ] It is no longer possible to show how our earthly forms are always followed by others at their beginning, and how a different form of existence will follow at the end of earthly existence, so that human existence is not limited to our present earthly lives—for these earthly lives, too, had a beginning. But what the human being acquires through repeated earthly lives will remain with him even in other forms of existence. From an earthly perspective, however, such a view is sufficient when we consider the nature of the human soul core, for there we behold what teaches us that eternity does not begin only with death, but is already evident in what the soul is within the body.

[ 28 ] Spiritual science thus connects itself with something by raising what is old to a new, higher level—something that earlier spiritual researchers had, to a certain extent, intuited and also explored. It is true, as Hegel said, that eternity cannot begin for the soul only with death, but must be a quality implanted within it already during earthly life. And what spiritual science will bring to ever greater clarity—something imbued with feelings and impulses of the will and thus becoming the elixir of life—is something that nevertheless runs through all ages and is conceived by the greatest minds as connected to the essence and nature of the human soul. Thus, even today I can cite an ancient saying—as it were, summarizing, if not the content, then at least the character of today’s reflection—which was uttered in the third century A.D. by the great mystic and philosopher Plotinus, who reflected on the nature of time and eternity:

[ 29 ] Eternity is not merely a property incidentally associated with the spiritual-soul core of the human being; rather, eternity is an essential part of the nature of the human soul. Eternity is not an incidental attribute of the spirit; eternity belongs to the spirit, eternity is in the spirit, eternity comes from the spirit, eternity lives through the spirit.