The Rudolf Steiner Archive

3. The Human Soul in Life and Death

[ 1 ] In the first two lectures with which I began this winter lecture series, I attempted—drawing on the inspiration that the great historical events in which we live can provide—to explore the essence of German spiritual culture as it is embodied in its great figures. What I sought to illuminate through these reflections was that it lies in the very nature of this spiritual culture to become ever more deeply imbued with an awareness of the reality of spiritual, eternal existence. Today I will attempt to present, in a sense, a special chapter drawn from what spiritual scientific reflection has brought to light up to our own time, in order thereby to lay a foundation for what will form the content of tomorrow’s lecture: a reflection on the essence of the European national souls. In this way, I would like to suggest—at least in broad strokes drawn from spiritual science—what the latter has to say, from its own perspective, toward understanding what is now taking place around us.

[ 2 ] The reflection we are to undertake today on the human soul in life and death has, after all, always been close to the human heart as one of life’s greatest mysteries — and particularly so in our time — when we see the question of life and death confronting us with such overwhelming force, when so many are deeply affected by this question through the reality of existence, and when we see that—as it were, through the facts themselves—the noblest sons of the people are confronted with this question at every moment of their existence. In the lectures I have had the privilege of delivering here over the years, I have often drawn attention to the fact that we are living in a time in which questions such as those concerning the nature of the human soul, the destiny of the human soul and of humanity in general, and similar questions are being incorporated into a scientific mode of thinking—a mode of thinking demanded by the development of that other scientific field which has attained such great perfection over the last two to four centuries: the field of the natural sciences. To place what can be known about the soul and spirit, in a truly scientific manner, alongside what has been achieved for humanity through the natural sciences—this has often been described here as the task of spiritual science; and it has also been said that it should come as no surprise if this spiritual-scientific approach is still rejected today by the vast majority of people. This fate is shared by this spiritual-scientific perspective with everything that seeks to enter anew into the development of the human spirit and culture, and it is also shared by natural science itself, which emerged in exactly the same way in its own time, encountered opposition upon opposition, and which first had to prove—though it could only do so over the course of centuries—what it is called upon to achieve for human development. However, spiritual observation must relate to what we call knowledge and science in a very different way than natural science does. Precisely in order for spiritual contemplation to be called scientific in the truest and best sense, it must proceed differently; it must approach human beings in a different way than that which constitutes the essence of the scientific method. In the natural-scientific approach, we first turn our gaze outward to the facts of nature and life, and from the abundance of diversity that assails us there, we recognize the laws of life. What enters our consciousness through the senses becomes an inner, spiritual experience within us; it becomes thought, concept, and idea. But who has not felt that with this ascent from the rich, full-bodied contemplation of external diversity to the clarity—but also to the abstractness—of ideas and natural laws, the human soul, with its inner experiences, actually distances itself from what one might call reality? We have the full abundance of nature before us; we take possession of it through science, yet we feel how, fundamentally speaking, thin—one might say devoid of reality—the concepts and ideas that embody the laws of nature appear to us in comparison to external reality. And so we ascend from the abundance of external reality, which lies spread out before our senses, to what I would call the ethereally thin spiritual experience we have when we have taken possession of the laws of nature in our world of ideas. In a sense, we are distancing ourselves from nature and its abundance; but we strive for this distance, for we know that we can only come to know nature and its laws by distancing ourselves from it. This is the highest goal we strive for in science: the inner experience of the soul in ideas and thoughts.

[ 3 ] Spiritual research must take exactly the opposite path if it is to be a science. What is the ultimate consequence of the inner experience of science in relation to external nature is preparation—merely preparation—for the knowledge of the spiritual and the soul; and it would be a complete mistake to believe that spiritual science could proceed in the same way as natural science. What natural science ultimately strives for is, for spiritual science, a preparation: living within the inner experience of the soul, becoming absorbed in what strengthens the soul from within and what it cannot obtain from external nature. In short, knowledge and science can only be a preparation for what one ultimately arrives at: the contemplation and perception of the spiritual world. One could say: In natural science, one strives for knowledge and science; in spiritual science, one prepares oneself through knowledge and science for what is to reach the soul, and everything one can possess in terms of knowledge and science remains, in essence, an inner matter for the soul within spiritual science. But what the soul and the spirit experience does not lead to something merely subjective—something that concerns only the individual human soul—but rather to what is real, what is truly real, just as external nature is truly real.

[ 4 ] I have often drawn attention to the nature of this preparation for observing and truly experiencing spiritual reality from within. I would like to do so again today from a certain perspective.

[ 5 ] Only through this preparation can one lead the soul farther and farther, to the point where, at last, spiritual reality unfolds all around it. We leave nature behind; it is already there. We move forward toward the spirit. We must seek spiritual reality. We cannot start from it—it is not there to begin with; we can only prepare ourselves to perceive it. But when we prepare ourselves to perceive it through inner experience, it comes to meet us like a grace, spreading forth from the spiritual twilight. We must earn the ability to perceive it.

[ 6 ] The first thing necessary to experience, so to speak, the human soul in its reality is an inner—not mere attention, not mere thought, but an inner experience of that which we otherwise have only as a reflection of external reality: the world of thoughts, the world of feelings—that which we otherwise sense within ourselves when we confront external nature, and which we regard as a reflection of nature, as an idea into which nature has entered. We must experience this strongly and intensely by turning our gaze completely away from external reality, by making ourselves blind and deaf to external sensory reality; experience it in such a way that we allow it to be intensely present in the soul as the sole inner reality. The natural scientist seeks to extract a law of nature as a thought from external sensory reality. The spiritual scientist surrenders to a thought—or even a thought imbued with feeling—in inner experience; by sending neither the eye nor the ear out into external reality, he allows, as it were, the soul’s inner interwoven and interpenetrated nature to rise up and directs his most intense attention to this inner experience; he forgets himself and the world and lives only in what he allows to rise up, as it were, from the depths of the soul’s life into his empty yet alert consciousness. And this is where the peculiar phenomenon occurs: the thought to which we devote ourselves with infinitely heightened attention over a long period of time—the stronger this thought becomes through our inner power, the weaker it becomes precisely in terms of its content; it becomes ever more transparent, ever more ethereal. One might say: The more the spiritual researcher strives to maintain what is called inner concentration on the thought, the more the content of the thought fades away. The more we strive to make the thought firm, as it were, visible, when we devote ourselves to it, the more this devotion leads to its gradually fading away within itself, dissolving as if in a mist and then vanishing completely from consciousness. One could also express a principle of this inner experience as follows: the more sharply a thought is experienced in the soul, the more energy it gains through our own intervention, the more it dies out in the soul. To put it epigrammatically, we can say: For the thought to reach the goal of spiritual research, it must die within the soul; and as it dies, it undergoes an inner destiny—the same destiny as the seed that is sown in the earth to rot: yet from its rotting springs the power for a new plant. As the thought dies within us through concentration, it awakens to a completely different kind of life; and one does not discover this different kind of life until the thought has died in sharp inner concentration. One must stop thinking in order to allow the soul-plant—that which emerges from the thought—to sprout within oneself.

[ 7 ] And what then follows from that thought?

[ 8 ] It is difficult to express in human language what arises in this way from thought, because human language is designed for external sensory experiences, not for inner experiences of the soul. Therefore, in a certain sense, one can only allude to the inner experiences in question. — As the thought, having been energized, dies away, the soul inwardly senses a burgeoning force, a force of which it becomes aware and of which, the moment it becomes aware of it, it knows: This is a spiritual-soul force; this is something that is not bound to your body; something you carry within yourself without needing the mediation of your nervous system and your brain. But by grasping not the thought itself but the power of the thought, the question arises—as if by an inner necessity—a question that presents itself like a bolt of lightning: “Where has the thought gone? After all, it was essentially you yourself, insofar as you had given yourself to it in intense concentration. You lived within the thought, and as it dissolved and died, it carried you away with it. Where has it gone? And where have you now arrived?”—One must draw a comparison here. Just as we carry within us the thoughts we form about the external world, just as we know we have these thoughts, so do we immediately perceive a state within ourselves that leads us to say: The thought, just as you held it, has died in your concentration of thought; but through this it has awakened to another life—and has taken you with it. You are now being thought of by it in the spiritual world!

[ 9 ] This is a profound, momentous, and immensely significant experience in the life of a spiritual researcher. For the only way to ascend into the spiritual world is to feel oneself grasped by it—just as a thought, were it alive, would feel itself grasped by us. And, fundamentally speaking, one can experience immortality in no other way than by being able, through one’s inner spiritual development, to appeal to the invisible spiritual beings who always reign over us—just as the beings of nature visibly reign around us—and by appealing to our connections with these spiritual beings, who, at the very moment the thought fades away, begin to take it upon themselves and to think of us. Now we begin to realize: within the spiritual world there are beings whose existence transcends mere nature; just as we humans think with our thoughts, so do our spiritual beings think, and so do these higher genii think the content of our souls. They sustain us, they carry us; and because we are within them, our immortal being—which transcends our physical existence—is made possible. Through spiritual science, we tell ourselves: If we cannot sustain ourselves in death, if we lose that which we have been able to create for ourselves in life—between birth and death—as an inner experience through external nature, then we pass through the gate of death and see, from the findings of spiritual science, that that which in us is independent of the body is, in essence, the thought of higher beings.

[ 10 ] It is not the case that what we call the spiritual world extends around us in a manner similar to that of the external natural world—as many expect. The external natural world stands before us; we stand before it, and we look at it. As we ascend into the spiritual world, it is different. There, the spiritual world penetrates into our own experience, which we have first transformed; there, we do not think about the spiritual world, but must experience inwardly how we are being thought. We are in the same position vis-à-vis the spiritual world as our thoughts about external reality are vis-à-vis our soul. This is, in essence, the most surprising aspect of external reality. It is the experience of spiritual reality—which is the reverse of that of sensory reality—that leads us to say: In relation to spiritual reality, when we truly experience it, we feel the way nature must feel toward us in sensory reality; we do not think about spiritual beings; we experience that, once we have elevated ourselves to them, we are thought of and held by them. To put it in pedantically scientific terms, we become objects of the spiritual world. Just as we are subjects in relation to external natural reality, so do we become objects in relation to the spiritual world. And just as external natural reality stands before us as an object, so do we rise to an experience of spiritual reality in which we ourselves are objects; for spiritual reality confronts us as a subject—or as a multitude of subjects.

[ 11 ] This inner experience is very often—but always only by those who are unfamiliar with it and who have no desire to engage with it—portrayed as something subjective, as a purely personal matter. In a certain sense, the objection raised here is entirely correct. For what one can come to know at the first stage of spiritual research has a subjective character; it bears a personal nuance in all the struggles and inner triumphs one must undergo in the process. And one can indeed justifiably raise the objection regarding these first steps: The researcher has the task of demarcating the limits of human knowledge, and should be aware that whatever goes beyond the general limits drawn for us by external nature can, in essence, be nothing more than subjective knowledge. The objection is valid, and no one will acknowledge it more than the researcher of the spiritual world; but it applies only up to a certain stage, for the reason that, in reality, everything one can experience subjectively and personally up to that point is merely preparation. The moment the preparation is sufficient, objective spiritual reality itself comes to meet us, as if through a grace that descends upon us as a force. What is experienced as preparation can, in essence, vary greatly from person to person; but where they ultimately arrive is the same for everyone. The objection is also often raised that spiritual researchers usually convey what they share with a subjective slant; one person describes the facts of the spiritual world one way, another another way. That is quite correct, but it is true only because many do not know how to convey what is presented through the grace mentioned; rather, what they convey is still their personal, subjective perspective, because they have not yet reached the point where the spiritual researcher stands before a spiritual world that appears as objectively before him as images of nature appear objectively to the human soul. The spiritual researcher himself is best able to judge the validity of the objections raised against spiritual scientific research—as I have often said here.

[ 12 ] Once the spiritual world has been attained by the spiritual researcher after sufficient preparation, that researcher finds himself experiencing an invisible, supersensible world. His knowledge has ceased to have any meaning for him. This knowledge has been fully transformed into experience—into the most immediate immersion within it. And now the spiritual researcher experiences what becomes immediate truth for him. He knows: Now you are living in the world in which you are always present over the course of twenty-four hours; you are now living in the spiritual realm, in the soul’s existence, in which you are otherwise always—though unconsciously—during sleep. Through spiritual research, one comes to know the state of sleep, learns to recognize that in this state the human soul is truly outside its body, that it has, as it were, the body before it, just as one otherwise has only the objects of external nature before one. How does one come to recognize this? By the fact that one now truly finds oneself in a state in which one is usually during sleep, only in a completely opposite way. In sleep, consciousness is suppressed, and darkness spreads around us. But now, as a spiritual researcher, one can observe this state because one experiences it—not unconsciously, as in sleep, but consciously. One knows: by stepping out of the body—for one steps out of the body consciously—one is inwardly united with the spiritual world; one has become one with the spiritual world. —- And now the question is answered: Why is it that, ordinarily, the soul is in such a state during sleep that it is not aware of itself? Why is it outside its body in that dull, dark state? For the spiritual researcher, this question is answered by the fact that they can now recognize what has been removed from their inner soul life through their preparation, and what remains for the soul when it is asleep. For through his preparation, the spiritual researcher arrives at a battlefield—an inner battlefield—and it is difficult to find words to express what approaches a person with immense intensity and inner tragedy when he seeks to bring his thoughts to the point of extinction and rebirth in another sphere. What asserts itself in the human soul there—and what can lead almost to the tearing apart of the human soul—is that, if one does not maintain proper self-awareness, an inner opposition, an inner rebellion, arises against what one is doing inwardly. For at the very moment when the thought extinguishes itself inwardly, one senses: the more one lives oneself out of one’s own consciousness and into the consciousness of the invisible spiritual beings who reign in the unseen, the more inner forces awaken that wage the most fierce opposition against this ascent from one consciousness into another. One feels something coming that does not want one to do it. And that inner discord, that rebellion against one’s own action, becomes the tragic inner struggle that every genuine spiritual research must intensively wage. All words are too weak to truly express what must be lived through in this way. For when, feeling this way inwardly, one feels, as it were, torn away from oneself, when one feels lifted up into another sphere, then that opposition asserts itself, saying: “You do not want to lose yourself, but you are doing everything to lose yourself. It is, after all, death that you are bringing upon yourself; you are not living with your own being within you—you are becoming the thought of another. You are dying within yourself!” And everything one can muster with an immense will of inner protest asserts itself as an opposition to this merging.

[ 13 ] The next step is this: to gain mastery over that inner opposition, over what arises from the depths of the soul. One must first find what offers the possibility of emerging from this state. Once it has been found, it is the second element that must be added to concentration of thought—which, so to speak, falls under the second greatest spiritual law governing the development of the human soul.

[ 14 ] One wonders: What is it, exactly, that rebels within you? What is it that rears up like a terrible rebel? And just as one builds upon a thought by holding onto it and allowing it to fade away and resurface in another sphere, so too must one now build upon what one already has. And what one has—what one must build upon—is what can be called human fate. This human destiny approaches us in such a way that we experience its inner blows—whether good or bad—as if they were coming at us from the outside. How far are we, in our human experience, from regarding destiny as something other than what “befalls” us, which is, in the best sense of the word, “chance”? But one can begin to view it differently. And by beginning to view fate in this different way, one becomes a researcher of the spirit. One can start by asking oneself: What are you, actually, in relation to your fate? One can look back on one’s past—whether from one’s youth or the years one has lived so far—and survey one’s destiny; one can examine the individual events of this destiny, to the extent one can grasp them, through retrospective inquiry, and one can ask oneself: What would you actually be if this destiny, with all its “coincidences,” had not befallen you? And if one grapples intensely with this question—which, admittedly, must now be a personal one—one realizes: No matter what the blows of fate may be, whether they turned out for the better or for the worse—what we are now, we are because of all those good and bad blows of fate; we are, at the end of the day, nothing other than the result of our own fate. One asks oneself: What else are you but the result of this fate? Had this or that not affected you, it would not have shaken and stirred your soul, and so you would not be what you are now. And when one then surveys one’s entire fate in this way, one finds that one’s present self and one’s entire experience are, in essence, as closely connected to fate as the sum in an addition problem is to the individual addends. Just as the sum in an addition problem is nothing other than what flows together from the individual addends, so we are, in essence, nothing other than the sum of all the good and bad strokes of fate we have endured, and by engaging in such reflection, we grow together with our fate. The first feeling to which we can then surrender is: You are one with your fate. And whereas we used to separate ourselves from our destiny, whereas we used to stand apart as a distinct “I,” now that distinct “I” flows into the stream of these fateful events. But it flows into it in such a way that it does not merely stand there as a result within the stream of the present; rather, as we gradually experience this merging, destiny carries our “I”—that which we are—along with it, as it were. We look back on the sequence of fateful events, and as we look upon our destiny, we find our own activity within it; we grow into the unfolding of our destiny. We do not merely feel at one with our destiny; rather, we gradually grow into it in such a way that we become one with destiny and its workings. And now it is once again one of the significant, profound inner experiences that, looking back on a stroke of fate, we do not say: “It struck us; it happened to us by chance,” but rather that we say to ourselves: “We were already immersed in this fate; through it, we have become what we are today.”

[ 15 ] Such contemplation cannot be limited to thoughts, ideas, and concepts. Every step of this contemplation is filled with an inner, emotional, and vibrant reality of the soul. One experiences a merging with destiny; the “I” expands beyond destiny. And what expands—we learn to recognize it as something entirely different from thought. We learn to recognize it as the other element of the soul that exists within us: the will, which is carried by feeling. We feel the thought as it concentrates, fades away, and merges as a force into a foreign spiritual world, by which we are, as it were, thought; our will, our will borne by feeling, grows back into the vastness of time, expands until it coincides with our destiny, becoming ever stronger. As we feel at one with our destiny, we do not experience the dying of thought, but rather an ever-increasing vitality of the will. While the will is initially concentrated on the single point of our present, and we allow it to flow out into our deeds and words, it expands—as if from a tiny seed—into the stream of time toward that which shines backward, that which, in a sense, has created us. Our will—this is the second law at work here—by surrendering itself to fate, by losing itself in fate, becomes inwardly stronger and stronger, more and more powerful. It transitions from the state in which we usually find it to an entirely different state.

[ 16 ] The thought dies only to be reborn in a new existence. With regard to the will, we find ourselves in a situation where, at a certain moment, it is dead in relation to our fate; it is dead in relation to the vicissitudes of fate. If we direct the will toward our fate in inner meditation, it becomes—by sacrificing itself and, as it were, becoming ever more submissive to our fate, by recognizing that we ourselves live within our fate—stronger and stronger. Thought passes from its strength to its dying away and to its rebirth in another sphere; the will passes from its momentary effect to an immense breadth by becoming the bearer of our entire destiny. And this is where experience truly expands into a realm that is inaccessible to external experience. External experience has access only to the realm up to those experiences where consciousness has awakened, where external memory begins: in a person’s third or fourth year. But when we truly live through our lives with our will, so that we no longer regard our destiny as something foreign, as something that lies “outside” us, then we no longer remain—and over time this inner experience develops—confined to the consciousness of the soul in our present life. Then we look back into vast, vast distances, look back into states of our soul that preceded our birth—or conception—look back to times when our soul itself lived in the spiritual world before it was drawn into physical, earthly existence, and look back to a state of the soul in which it prepared the forces necessary to take hold of our body. Thus, by preparing our will to undergo the opposite of what is experienced in concentration of thought, we take hold of our own life, which lies beyond birth and death. If we wish to grasp the thought, we must detach ourselves from external reality; we must become blind and deaf to external sensory reality; we must withdraw entirely into ourselves; then the thought is transformed in such a way that we ourselves are thought by higher consciousnesses. With the will, we must undertake the opposite: we must expand into that which otherwise stands only outside of us. With thought, we go within ourselves; with the will, we go out of ourselves, enter into our destiny, and, by passing through our destiny, find the path into the spiritual worlds, where—in accordance with the reality of our soul—we stand within the most all-encompassing reality, that reality which had already taken hold of us even before we descended into physical existence.

[ 17 ] What I am describing here—seemingly in theoretical terms—is simply an account of the inner experiences that the spiritual researcher must undergo in order to rise to an understanding of the spiritual world, to come to a vision of the spiritual world. With regard to external nature, nature comes first, and knowledge follows; with regard to the spiritual realm, knowledge—that is, what proceeds as knowledge—goes ahead as preparation; the vision follows. And now we recognize ourselves in what, in essence, always lives within us, but which humanity will also have to examine scientifically if cultural development is to proceed spiritually; but for this to enter into consciousness through the advancing forces of development, the scientific grasping of these processes must precede it. Of course—one should not even need to mention this—we do not “create” the spiritual experience by grasping it in this way through spiritual science; rather, we perceive within ourselves that which is always within us. But just as in the study of nature, experience and knowledge develop out of contemplation, so too in spiritual science must the contemplation of the spiritual world develop out of knowledge of spiritual processes if human development is to move forward. And what one recognizes is that which is independent of the outer physical body—that which, as it were, draws the body toward itself by descending from the spiritual world into the physical one.

[ 18 ] But even in ordinary everyday life, we live life to the fullest by—for reasons that have already been discussed here on several occasions—alternately entering a state of sleep at various times over the course of twenty-four hours. And when we consider the state of sleep, we may ask: Why does that which normally enters our spiritual consciousness diminish during sleep? Why is there darkness around us then? And through spiritual science, we come to realize—precisely at the moment when the soul, through genuine preparation in concentration of thought and meditation, powerfully seizes hold of itself—how this power enters the body, and we also recognize—because we then grasp the inner, immortal force—what obscures it during ordinary sleep, what makes it impossible to perceive spiritual reality while asleep, when one is out of the body. When one examines this, when one beholds the spiritual reality that is otherwise obscured, one realizes: There is an excess of desire present in the soul, an overgrowth of cravings, an emotional immersion in the most intense life of desire—a life of desire far stronger than that which exists when the soul re-enters the body and awakens. And what does the soul desire in sleep? This must be examined through spiritual scientific research: In sleep, the soul intensely longs to re-enter the physical body, into that which it has left behind. And because the desire to re-enter the body is overwhelmingly strong within the soul, this desire—just as a mist obscures clarity—erases for the soul what it would otherwise perceive as a member of the spiritual world: the awareness of higher beings and their experience—the soul’s — being contained within higher beings — and its being contained within them before birth and after death. But because the soul needs the forces that can come to it solely from the spiritual world—just as the body needs the forces that can come from the atomic world—it must repeatedly re-enter the spiritual world; yet because it always desires to re-enter the body, its awareness of spiritual processes remains extinguished, even when it is bodyless in sleep. What a person experiences in his body, he will never be able to experience directly—at least not initially—without that body. What he experiences in this body is that the meager power he possesses in his soul to perceive the spiritual directly is overwhelmed in ordinary life by the craving for the body, and that this power becomes ever stronger and stronger within the body, where the soul possesses it. In the body, the soul learns to develop consciousness and self-consciousness. This is the essence of this bodily life. The soul undergoes this life in the body—not as if in a dungeon, not as if in captivity, but as something necessary for its overall experience. For the soul can only become what it is meant to be, and this experience progresses from a dull state to one of clear consciousness. But the conscious powers are first aroused within the body. When the soul, so to speak, finds its fulfillment, it devotes itself to being overshadowed by consciousness. Consciousness passes into it as a force. And then—as spiritual science makes particularly clear—when the soul experiences “becoming conscious” within the body, it retains the aftereffect of this consciousness. Something then comes into play that is higher than ordinary memory, yet similar to it. In life, through our ordinary memory, we recall the experiences we have gone through; we can bring these back into the soul. What the soul experiences in the body—this brightening of consciousness, this permeation by consciousness, this recollection of self-consciousness—occurs in the spiritual researcher—when he goes through what I have described—in such a way that he has the experience lived in the body present in his soul as if in a memory. We must bear this in mind.

[ 19 ] The spiritual researcher lives in a higher, spiritual world; he becomes, as it were, the thought of higher beings. But as he immerses himself in what spiritual research has to offer, what would otherwise become rebellion transforms into such an inner experience that, as he lives his way up into the spiritual world, he remains, as it were, imbued with a memory of his physical life. Now he knows: this physical life does indeed belong to you. And now, through the memory gained by expanding one’s understanding of destiny, this rebellion is cast aside. One knows: one is not now exposed to spiritual death in the spiritual world. For however one may merge into the consciousness of higher beings: one ascends in such a way that, while thoughts are indeed grasped by the higher beings, we remain within the power of inner experience; we preserve ourselves, we retain ourselves as we ascend into the higher consciousnesses, just as thoughts are preserved within the consciousness of the higher beings. What we retain as a memory in our mind is not reality until we bring it up from memory. People are not initially interested in what lies down there in the dull subconscious; there it has no reality. That is why I called what the spiritual researcher then possesses something like a higher memory, which is nevertheless similar to memory. When we live our way up into the consciousness of higher beings, it is as if all our thoughts retained an independent reality, and the stream of our experiences is not merely, for our memory, like a stream that is there so that we can draw it up into memory, but rather as if the experiences were flowing within it in their own spiritual reality. Thus, through the experience that has been described, through our memories, we ascend into a higher world; yet these memories are ourselves, grasping ourselves within our own remembrance. It is hardly more than a parable, but it expresses the reality of the matter when one says: As the soul develops further through meditation, through concentration of thought, and through the pouring out of the will over destiny, the human soul becomes something for those beings who take it into their consciousness and who hold it in the regions where it lives after death and before birth. But just as thoughts have only an existence borrowed from us, so do we ascend into the “community of thoughts” of the higher consciousnesses; and as these look back upon us, they regard us as beings that have remained independent. By having taken hold of our destiny, we maintain our presence in the consciousness of higher beings.

[ 20 ] Everything I express in this way is merely knowledge of the reality that is always present for the soul. For what the spiritual researcher experiences is nothing other than knowledge of what the soul experiences when it passes through the gate of death and moves beyond external reality. But just as external natural phenomena unfold without us initially being aware of them, so too does death pass us by and transform the soul into what it must become. Yet in the course of human evolution, people must learn to understand what death does to the soul; through spiritual science, they must acquire knowledge of what is called “access to the mystery of death.” That is why what the spiritual researcher attains in his inner soul development has, with some justification, been called “reaching the threshold of death.” Even from the consideration of sleep, it becomes evident that in its purely spiritual existence, the human soul is “saturated” with the longing for the body. When it passes through the gate of death and detaches itself from the body, it does not remain steeped in this longing. Rather, by withdrawing from the body, it is healed of the longing for the body; the longing is driven out of the soul, and communion with the spiritual world unfolds within the soul. The soul learns to experience itself in the spiritual world. But it would be dependent on others if it had not passed through death. The soul must pass through death, for death is the greatest reality, the greatest experience for it. Just as we must, through birth, enter into the body, so must we emerge from the body, pass through death, and die—in order to perceive ourselves as a self in the spiritual world through the experience of death and dying. We become a memory of higher states of consciousness by shedding the consciousness of the present that we have in the body; and after death, what our Self gives us confronts us in a different way than it does in the form of our Self between birth and death. Between birth and death, we exist in life in such a way that we lose our self when consciousness is subdued, obscuring what we experience in sleep. Simultaneity exists between us and our body, but also between us and our self-consciousness. After death, this changes. What in ordinary life between birth and death is, so to speak, the ordinary spatial relationship to our physical body becomes, after death, a relationship to our existence in time. After death, we look back on what we have gone through in our physical existence, and in this looking back, in this retrospective, in this connection with our physical existence, we feel our self-consciousness; we feel ourselves as the self. In this context, the relationship becomes one with our self in terms of time. As we gaze upon our spiritual surroundings, we merge into the higher beings into whom we become attuned. We retain our independence, our full self-awareness after death, by immersing ourselves with our memories in the past physical life—just as we immerse ourselves every day in spatial existence in order to arrive at our self-awareness.

[ 21 ] Thus the human soul passes through the full experience that encompasses death, to which death belongs as something that is necessary; for self-consciousness in the spiritual world includes the experience of death in the sensory world. With this, we can at the same time hint at—but only hint at; this will be explained in more detail in the following lectures this winter—how this experience of death presents itself. Certainly: immediately, as a person passes through the gate of death, they will remain unconscious of what they are experiencing. But as they continue to acclimate themselves to the spiritual world, they strengthen themselves with the forces that can flow to them from the spiritual world and purify themselves of the forces that, between birth and death, cloud their spiritual consciousness as a craving for the body; and in this inner purification from that dullness, the ability to look back into one’s own self arises, and with it comes an understanding of the spiritual world. The experience after death occurs, as it were, in such a way that the memory of the death experience gradually emerges within the human soul as the person enters the spiritual world after death. But then, each time the person looks back on their earthly life, their self-awareness blossoms just as it does upon ordinary awakening within the sensory world.

[ 22 ] Of course, what has been explained here cannot be proven objectively. Therefore, it is very easy for those who are unwilling to accept true proof of the spiritual world to raise objections. To those who demand that the spiritual world be proven in the same way as the facts of external natural science and its laws—and who, when this proves impossible, maintain that all talk of a spiritual world is merely subjective—it must be replied: The spiritual world cannot address the general public in such a way that everyone can conduct experiments or make observations. Nevertheless, spiritual science does not remain mere subjective talk, but rather something of value and significance to the general public; for there exist methods—the inner workings of the soul—that lead every human being, when they undergo them, to penetrate the spiritual world. Therefore, if someone says, “Your spiritual world is not clear to me; prove it to me using the methods of external natural science,” one must reply: You must find the proof for yourself by applying to your own soul the methods specified by spiritual science—methods that are applicable to every human soul!

[ 23 ] What I have been able to discuss today only in general, principled terms—the idea of one’s passing and one’s rebirth in another sphere, the extension of the will over destiny, and how it must operate in specific instances—I have presented in greater detail in my book *How Does One Attain Knowledge of the Higher Worlds?*, which has now been published in a new edition, extensively revised; and I have also attempted to present it in a different way in the book *The Riddles of Philosophy*, which has now been published as a second edition of my *Worldviews and Views of Life in the Nineteenth Century*, with a “sketch-like outline of anthroposophy” as the culmination of the entire spiritual and philosophical development of the West.

[ 24 ] Let it be emphasized once again: Spiritual science does not provide anything that would not exist without it—just as natural science does not provide anything that would not exist without it. But the very fact that a person knows something presupposes that the facts of that knowledge already exist. When these facts are taken into consciousness, however, spiritual science will provide the human soul with what will endow it with the strength and power it will need in the future. The soul has certainly also had an awareness of its connection to the spiritual world in the past. But humanity continues to develop further and further. And the results of spiritual scientific research will increasingly form part of what the soul will need for its inner strength—what will bring it to self-awareness—including a true understanding of the spiritual world, the world of the soul, which can only be conveyed through research, just as knowledge of nature can only be conveyed through research. Through this spiritual scientific research, the human soul is given what expands memory beyond the horizon beyond which it can otherwise wander on its own. This can only be hinted at today. As the will expands beyond fate and the human being becomes one with fate, and as the will within the human being grows to such strength that it grasps what the blows of fate—both good and evil—are, and knows: “I have formed all of this myself”—memory reaches back to earlier experiences and extends even into those times that constitute earlier human lives on Earth. We can only hint at what will be elaborated upon in later lectures: Closely connected with the expansion of the will beyond fate is the realization that a human being does not merely live one earthly life, but that this one life is the result of earlier earthly lives, that this preparation of the will for fate took place in earlier earthly lives. And so it becomes clear to our consciousness that what we now grasp with our will is the cause of later earthly lives and continues to exert its influence into them.

[ 25 ] It is precisely in the spiritual culture of Central Europe that the stages have always emerged through which outstanding spiritual leaders have grasped in their souls this connection between human soul experience and the spiritual world. And when it has been said today that the human soul, through concentration of thought, can bring this thought to an end and to a revival in a higher world, then reference can be made to a thinker whom I have already drawn attention to in earlier lectures: Johann Gottlieb Fichte. He did not yet have spiritual science. But he was so deeply immersed in German and Central European spiritual life that, through the way he found himself engaged in that life—as if from an elemental, impulsive consciousness—he beheld the certainty of the human soul’s inner presence within eternity. In many passages of his works, Fichte expressed what resonated within him, what he felt regarding the human soul’s inner presence in the world of a higher consciousness; but one may perhaps find no passage where he articulates this connection between the human soul and eternity more intensely than in his “Appeal to the Public,” in which he defended himself against the false accusation of atheism. There he says—addressing external nature, which arises and passes away in the realm of space, as “You,” and addressing the “I” that comes to grasp itself as “I”—there he utters the following words:

[ 26 ] “You are changeable, not I; all your transformations are merely my spectacle, and I will always hover unscathed above the ruins of your forms. The fact that the forces are already at work to destroy the inner sphere of my activity—which I call my body—does not surprise me; this body belongs to you, and is transitory, like everything that belongs to you. But this body is not Me. I myself will hover above its ruins, and its dissolution will be my spectacle. That the forces are already at work which will destroy my outer sphere—which has only just begun to take shape in the next few moments—and which will destroy you, all you shining suns, and the thousand times thousand celestial bodies that revolve around you, cannot surprise me; by your very birth, you are doomed to death. But when, among the millions of suns shining above my head, the most recently born has long since exhausted its last spark of light, then I will still be, unharmed and unchanged, the same as I am now; and when, from your ruins, new solar systems have coalesced as many times as there are of you all—you suns shining above my head—and the youngest among them has long since exhausted its last spark of light, then I will still be, unharmed and unchanged, the same as I am today.”

[ 27 ] These convictions are not merely recognized in theory; these convictions are experienced. And that is what I wanted to convey—through feeling and intuition—in my last lecture here: that it is precisely Central European, German intellectual life that contains the best, the most beautiful, and the most vigorous seeds for this experience. That is also why the awareness of its significance in the world may well flow from this intellectual life itself, and that now, when this spiritual life is also confronted with the question of “to be or not to be” in the external experience of Central Europe, this spiritual life—through its immediate self-knowledge—can know what it is called to do, how it must live, and how it must not perish, because it is necessary to form the bond between the human soul and the eternities. Then, from this spiritual life in particular, flows that consciousness which, as it were, sees in an intense form when we now turn our gaze to all—we may well say—heroic figures who stand caught between life and death in the torrent of today’s events. We look upon the great enigma, the great question of destiny, which is posed to us today by the current epoch—including in the form in which today’s events present it to us—: the question of life and death. And when we look, from the perspective of spiritual science, at what lives within the human body—living in such a way that it may know itself to be safe in the consciousness of higher beings, that it may believe itself to be preserved as a living, independent memory—even when this body is destroyed, — what lives there is precisely what must step before our souls today, as we see so many bodies sinking into the sacrifice, into the great sacrifice of our time.

[ 28 ] We then ask ourselves: In light of the events of time—viewed specifically from the perspective of spiritual science—do the events of the soul, as it were, impose themselves as a reality upon the one from whom death is demanded by the events of time, demanded most often at a young age? We look upon the one from whom death is demanded in the sacrificial service of time; we look upon what we grasp through spiritual science as a soul element—as a measure of forces—and we know: The thread of life is severed from what lives in the body in the prime of youth, at a time when the soul and spiritual forces could still endure for a long time. But truly, once we have come to know these spiritual powers through spiritual science, we know that they remain alive, that they pass into a spiritual world, into a new context, when they detach themselves from the old one. And when we then consider how we ourselves become memories and thoughts in higher states of consciousness, then precisely this death of so many—which appears so tragic to us today—will appear to us in a higher light. So that we see the forces we see being taken from the body ascending into higher states of consciousness—and we see these higher states of consciousness looking down upon physical life on Earth. With their strengthened forces, they have absorbed everything that human beings have sacrificed to them. And because it is the higher states of consciousness that provide us spiritually with nourishment, with the forces for the fertilization of the soul, and with the sustaining and life-giving forces—just as physical forces provide us with physical nourishment— therefore we can look up to those who, through the events of our time, are entering the spiritual world through a sacrificial death as something that in the future will look down with strengthening and invigorating power upon what unfolds on the physical plane of Earth. It takes on a real, genuine meaning when it is said: Sacrifice on the battlefield finds its meaning in the entire evolution of humanity. And what is meant by this becomes clear when we realize: Just as we, as physical human beings, stand before nature, and it provides us with our nourishment, so do we offer ourselves as nourishment to the spirits and gods; they, in turn, provide us with what we need to nourish and strengthen the soul. And when young forces—those who die on the battlefield or waste away from their wounds—leave the body, these young forces become revitalizing forces for the future evolution of humanity.

[ 29 ] Then it becomes very real when the one sacrificing himself on the battlefield is filled with the awareness that he is not merely dying, but that in his death he comes to life and will live—unlike if he had died any other death—for the salvation and the vibrant future of humanity. We look to the meaning of these sacrificial deaths by recognizing how the seed is sown for the flourishing of humanity in the future, and by knowing how the warrior may be imbued with the awareness that, while he experiences his death today, while he endures the fate of the wounded today, he nevertheless preserves the strength through which he will remain united in all future times with that for which he dies. Torn from all sentimentality, into the simple

[ 30 ] What might otherwise so easily be taken merely as symbolic or figurative is placed within reality. Thus, precisely such a spiritual contemplation as we have undertaken today—concerning the life of the human soul in its outer existence and also in its supersensible existence—I believe, by creating the right impulses in the proper sense, becomes part of what we experience today as the “fate of the times.” And if, on the occasion of a significant spiritual experience, a poet—Robert Prutz—has spoken beautiful words about the ideal deeds of his people, then we may, from the standpoint of spiritual science and in light of current events, ascribe an even deeper meaning to these words. Considering what the human soul experiences in life and in death, we may ask: What is the meaning of the deaths and sufferings that time now demands of us? And so today, deepening our understanding of the meaning of Robert Prutz’s words, we may say to everyone who sympathizes, who will witness what time demands of us today, what he—Robert Prutz—said in response to an event that had less of an impact on world history:

It is for the coming generation,
It is for the dawn of tomorrow,
It is for freedom and justice,
It is for life and death!