The Rudolf Steiner Archive

10. What is Immortal about Human Beings?

[ 1 ] If it must always be close to the human soul and the human mind—and must be among their most intimate concerns—to raise the question that is to be the subject of today’s reflection, —in our time, when so many, many people in the prime of life must pass through the gates of death—it must be all the more significant for the soul to direct its feelings and thoughts toward that which is immortal in the human being. Admittedly, in our time, a reflection such as the one that follows is met with prejudice upon prejudice—above all those prejudices that come from those who believe, from their firm ground, as they say, of the scientific worldview, that they can make no judgment on this question, either viewing it as something that transcends the limits of human knowledge, or maintaining that anything said about it must stand in clear contradiction to the achievements of the scientific way of thinking. If, then, any statement were to be made this evening that could not fully withstand the strictest criticism from the perspective of a scientific worldview, I would prefer to leave that consideration unspoken. For whatever natural science has to say about this question from its own standpoint, must—from the standpoint of the spiritual-scientific worldview, from which we are speaking here—not only be anticipated in advance, but, insofar as it proves justified in our time according to the standpoint of contemporary science, must also be fully recognized as justified. But those who raise objections to arguments of the following kind from a seemingly scientific worldview always assume that, even in our time, one can still make do—in the face of advanced spiritual science—with the thoughts and ideas, with the insights, or better yet, with the habits of thought of a worldview that is drawing to a close. And this is still extraordinarily difficult for people today to understand: that anyone who wishes to speak about such questions of spiritual worldview must appeal to insights into the human heart, the human soul, and the human spirit that go beyond what natural science is capable of producing—insights that, in a sense, tread the ground of an entirely different realm of knowledge, yet can stand fully alongside and above the findings of natural science as being just as scientific as those. The spiritual-scientific worldview seeks to allow what it has to say to flow into the spiritual development of humanity, just as what we today call the scientific worldview flowed into this development three to four centuries ago. And just as that scientific worldview of the time contradicted a wide range of habitual ways of thinking and prejudices and yet found its way to the human sense of truth, so will spiritual science take this path to the human sense of truth—even if, quite understandably—and I say this explicitly—it must still face objection after objection today; and when something like this—as must be said today—is quite understandably regarded by many as daydreaming or fantasy.

[ 2 ] For whatever can provide an answer to the question, “What is immortal in the human being?” must first be drawn forth from the hidden depths of the human soul. A method of research is needed that is based on intimate inner soul work, that rests deep within the human soul, and that draws on nothing other than what is present in every human soul—but which, in the everyday life of that human soul, eludes its observation and attention. That which a human being carries through the gateway of death—that which he carries up into a spiritual world where he finds himself once he has shed his physical body—cannot be grasped by the forces of everyday life, nor by the powers of cognition that one employs in everyday life for observing the world. A more intimate inner work of the soul is necessary for this. On several occasions I have already had the opportunity to speak here in this city about this intimate inner path—the purely spiritual-soul path—that a person must traverse if they wish to enter the realm of spiritual beings and spiritual realities. From a particular perspective, let us once again shed light on this path of the soul toward the spiritual this evening.

[ 3 ] One cannot discern, from what a person manifests in everyday life, what aspects of that person belong to the spiritual world. Just as one cannot see from looking at water that it contains hydrogen—which is entirely different from water—one cannot discern this either. First, chemistry must come along and, through its laboratory methods, separate the hydrogen from the water; only then does one obtain something that can be extracted from the water and that exhibits properties entirely different from those of water. While water is a liquid, hydrogen is a gas; while water extinguishes fire, hydrogen burns. But no one who has only water before them can know what the properties, the peculiarities, the essence of hydrogen are. Chemistry must first come along and separate the hydrogen from the water. Just as little can one recognize in the human being who stands before us in everyday life what lives within them for eternity, for immortality. The spiritual-scientific method must, one might say, come like a spiritual chemistry and separate from the body that which cannot appear in connection with it. And as fantastical and dreamlike—perhaps even as foolish—as it may still seem to some today, there will be a science of the future that will be clear about the fact that there are also spiritual-soul methods capable of extracting the spiritual-soul aspect of the human being—the immortal part of the human being—from its connection with the body, so that the human being can truly know: “I am now living with my soul outside my body; I experience myself in the soul outside the body!” And only through this research, which leads to a realization whereby the soul experiences itself as existing outside the body, can one enter the realm in which the soul has its immortal members. But it is not external methods—not tangible methods such as those used by external natural science—that can serve to, so to speak, chemically separate the soul from the mortal body, if I may use such a crude expression; rather, it is intimate spiritual methods, inner spiritual experiences. Of these spiritual methods, these inner spiritual experiences, we wish to present two in particular to our souls today.

[ 4 ] The first method is called—if I may use a technical term from the science of the spirit—the concentration of the life of thought, the life of feeling, and the life of volitional impulses. When described in this way, this concentration of the life of thought, the life of feeling, and the life of volitional impulses seems easy; yet one is tempted to say, with Goethe’s Faust: “But what is easy is hard!” And what I have to describe concerns soul experiences that are shattering and have a profoundly powerful inner effect—soul experiences that, in our recognition of them, confront us with a far greater inner tragedy, I would say, than we can ever face in the face of outer, physical death. That is why those who have been close to spiritual science throughout the ages have always emphasized that the path into the spiritual worlds—the path to spiritual knowledge—leads to the threshold of death. It seems simple—but this simplicity must be grasped with all intensity, with all energy—it seems simple, what one must do to detach the soul from its experience in union with the body. One must first fully embrace a thought, a feeling, or a series of thoughts and feelings with the soul, make them fully present within the soul, and then place them at the center of consciousness, so that nothing else remains in this consciousness except these thoughts and feelings—which we have arbitrarily placed at the center of our consciousness through our soul—; so that, as it were, the entire world around us is forgotten and submerged, along with all sensory impressions, all other sensations and thoughts; and only that which we place at the center of our consciousness through our free will must merge completely with the soul and its powers; the soul must feel itself to be entirely at one with what it thus brings to the center of consciousness.

[ 5 ] This is a task that takes a long, long time. Depending on how well-suited a person is to it, it may take weeks, months, or years; again and again, even if they have only a few minutes to devote to it each day—it takes a long time to evoke within the soul that inner capacity which is capable of setting aside all other thoughts and sensations, all other feelings and desires as well, and of placing only a specific kind of thought at the center of consciousness. It does not matter so much what the content of the thoughts is, but rather that, through our own free will, we place a manageable sensation or a manageable thought at the center of our consciousness in such a way that we actually live entirely within what we are thinking or feeling, forgetting ourselves in the process because we know ourselves to be completely one with it. In this way, we focus all our mental powers solely on this single sensation, this single thought. First of all, however, one must realize that, as I said, this seems easy; yet what seems easy is actually difficult. Various factors come into play when one practices concentration of thought. Above all, it is essential that we place at the center of our consciousness a thought that we can fully grasp. With most of the thoughts we have, all sorts of inner sympathies and antipathies, all sorts of sensations and memories come into play; they color our thoughts, so that we usually have no idea what is actually at work in our soul when we have a thought in everyday life and concentrate on it. Anyone who today stands on the ground of psychiatry, psychology, or modern natural science naturally has a facile objection to all of this. They will say: If the spiritual researcher concentrates on a thought, they cannot possibly know what is surfacing in that thought from the subconscious depths of their soul, or how they then lose themselves in self-suggestion and fantasies. Certainly, it is quite understandable that such objections are raised from a scientific standpoint; they appear, in a certain sense, to be fully justified, and the spiritual researcher can well understand why they must be raised. However, what must be observed in all these matters is usually overlooked. You will find a detailed and careful account of this in the two books: *How Does One Attain Knowledge of the Higher Worlds?* and in my *The Secret Science*. Yet people often overlook precisely what should be given full attention. What matters is that one places a thought or a feeling at the center of one’s entire soul life—one that is easy to grasp, that reminds us of nothing, and that cannot summon anything from the subconscious depths of the soul. Therefore, it is even better not to place at the center of one’s consciousness an image taken from any external reality—an image that depicts something—but rather an image that is purely symbolic, purely symbolic, in which the only thing that matters is that we concentrate and focus our soul forces, that we devote all the work of our soul forces to withdrawing from everything else in order to concentrate purely on this one point. I’ll give a very simple example. Someone can immerse themselves in the following idea:

[ 6 ] “In the bright light, the clear truth of the world shines forth!” or: “In the bright light, the clear truth of the world lives!” When one forms such a sentence, then anyone who stands on the ground of external, sensory materialism can, of course, say: Yes, such a sentence is pure fantasy; it means nothing; it does not reflect reality. But that is not the point; rather, the point is what the soul accomplishes when one thinks and feels such a sentence. And then, whether one meditates at length on such a sentence or alternates it with others, one has a very significant inner experience. Anyone who has gone through this experience knows for certain that, in relation to the human soul, it represents something as real and tangible as any chemical or physical method does in relation to external, sensory things. Thus, by concentrating on a specific content of consciousness, one comes to feel more and more strongly those powers of the soul that can be called the imaginative and thinking powers of the soul. In a sense, one feels oneself becoming more and more, by identifying with them, inwardly stronger and stronger; and while one remains outwardly at rest in relation to the whole world—with one’s senses and the external intellect—one feels oneself growing stronger inwardly. Deep within, one feels something welling up—something hidden in the soul, something one has not previously observed, but of which one now becomes aware through direct experience. And as one thus experiences this feeling growing ever stronger and stronger, and inwardly ever more luminous, one reaches a certain point. We shall see shortly that this point is not actually meant to be fully attained through a genuine spiritual development, as I will describe shortly, but must be modified by something else. But if one were to concentrate more and more, directing everything within the soul more and more toward the one chosen thing, then finally—having felt one’s inner activity and inner energy swell ever more strongly—one would come to feel this force as if it were subsiding, as if it were fading away. This is a significant experience one arrives at—an experience that represents an unforgettable inner journey for the one who undergoes it; for they have a very specific inner experience in the process. He feels: now is the moment when, after concentrating all the soul’s powers, after gathering together everything that is otherwise hidden in the soul—which you have allowed to flow into your power of thought, into your power of imagination—it now flows out of you—it flows out into the world, what you have brought up from the depths of your soul. It eludes you, it leaves your body, it flees from you!

[ 7 ] And one would not be able to keep up at that moment; one would feel as if the soul were, as it were, drawn out of the body and united with the universal spirit that sweeps through the world and works within it. One would feel alienated from oneself. Therefore, the exercise implied here must be modified by another that must take place simultaneously with it. And anyone who follows the path of spiritual research as I have described it in my book *How Does One Gain Insight into the Higher Worlds?* will thereby receive the specific rules by which they can truly modify what I have just described, so that we do not end up feeling, as it were, torn away from the best part of ourselves. Something else must therefore be added. The first thing, then, that separates the soul from the body was the concentration of thought—the intensification of the life of thought. Through this intensification of the life of thought, we are, as it were, torn away from ourselves.

[ 8 ] The Second contradicts the First, as it were; it is something opposite, the other pole; but life proceeds in a polar manner—it proceeds in such a way that it passes through opposites. Therefore, if one has a form of knowledge that is not to be knowledge in abstract terms, but rather a knowledge of the laws of nature and of life, one must move through opposites. The Second is what one might call: a complete surrender of the will to the ruling, essential, and active powers of the world. Just as, in a sense, in the first we bring our sensory cognition—the intellect, which otherwise operates according to the guidance of external sensory perception—to a standstill, so in the second we must bring every inner, self-willed desire to a standstill; in a sense, we must bring everything within us that is will to a standstill. Now there is a certain means by which one can develop within oneself the powers to make one’s own will truly and radically surrender to the general fabric of the world: this is achieved by gaining a completely new attitude toward what we call our fate. How do we experience this fate of ours in ordinary life? Well, we experience this destiny of ours in such a way that we regard what befalls us as a stroke of fate—whether good or bad—simply as something that happens to us; that we meet it with sympathy or antipathy, so that we view what is, so to speak, referred to as the vagaries of fate—what befalls us—as something that truly comes upon us; we stand outside it; we see ourselves as the “I,” the self-essence, upon which fate acts, toward which it approaches.

[ 9 ] Even in everyday life, one can see through truly rational reflection that, fundamentally speaking, we cannot really take that kind of stance toward fate. If one takes a moment to reflect—if one considers a specific moment in a future experience—one will say to oneself: what one is at that moment, what one experiences in one’s inner being, what one is capable of and can do—all of that is simply inconceivable without the ordinary course of life between birth and death. Just think about it carefully for a moment. Everything we are capable of in the present moment—if we trace it back through the ordinary course of life between birth and death—we must admit: it is connected to something we experienced in the past. The fact that I am capable of something now may be related to the fact that the person responsible for my upbringing once introduced me to this or that sphere. What happened to me back then became part of me; it became a strength within me; now it is my ability. Whenever one really thinks deeply: “What am I, actually? What is it about me?”—one will see that what is within oneself or within other people in the present moment is woven together from destiny. And if one pursues this thought properly—one might say, in accordance with the soul—one comes to realize how, in a sense, one must grow ever more closely together with one’s destiny, how, in a sense, one must recognize what one calls the “I” as a fabric of destiny. What one otherwise refers to as a coincidence, one now finds processed within oneself, woven into oneself; one finds oneself to be the result of destiny. One grows so closely together with destiny that one identifies with it. Just as, with the earlier path—the earlier method of spiritual research—one must identify with a thought or a feeling, so now, through the thing itself, through the circumstances themselves, one must recognize oneself as identical with one’s destiny. What I am saying now, however, must not remain merely theoretical; it must not be merely an abstract consideration, but must be lived through completely with inner feeling; it must permeate every fiber of our soul. Then we feel how, little by little, we see our own will flowing out into our destiny, and we say to ourselves: Until now, you have regarded something as a twist of fate, but it was you yourself. What is within you has brought this twist of fate to you; otherwise, you would not be this being, this “I”!

[ 10 ] Essentially, when one engages in such meditation on one’s fate for weeks, months, or years—depending on one’s disposition—an emotional surrender to fate emerges. One learns to recognize that one must step out of the little room in which one has hitherto felt confined. One learns to let oneself flow along with the current of one’s destiny. So when one recognizes how the self, the “I,” actually lives outside of oneself—how, in what we call “chance,” our will in truth rests within it—how the “I” flows along with fate—then, as we surrender ourselves to our fate, this will is in turn torn away from us. And that is the second point. But it must be attained—it must be attained through an inner experience of the mind and emotions. It must fill the whole person—that is, one must surrender emotionally to destiny. Then one feels how, through destiny, one simultaneously grows together with spiritually active world forces that govern and permeate the external world. What seems to escape us in thought concentration—what seems to rob us of our sense of self—is then followed—that is, the thought is followed—by an element of will, an emotional element of will. While we feel the thought flowing out of our head in the manner indicated earlier, we now draw something from our entire being to follow it. We offer our will to the thought. And then the soul, the thought, the feeling, the sensation, and the will emerge into the thoughts, and we go with them.

[ 11 ] What I have described is a real process, a genuine emergence of the soul from the physical body. This is something that can be experienced just as truly, intensely, and realistically—one might say, experimentally—as the release of hydrogen from water, the separation of hydrogen from water. It is like the separation of the soul from the body, which is then left behind in such a way that the body, along with the entire external experience, becomes an external object; the soul has emerged from the body. Just as one normally regards a table or a chair in the sensory world, so the soul regards the body it has left behind. And what is most important is that it does not merely experience itself in the abstract; rather, just as truly as it develops an inner experience within the body, so truly does it develop an inner experience outside the body—an experience of which it knows is a spiritual-soul experience. The soul experiences itself with full content within this inner experience. And truly, just as people long remained unaware that oxygen could be separated from hydrogen and had to learn this first, so the spiritual culture of humanity will learn that the spiritual-soul aspect must be separated from the physical—no matter how bizarre, how foolish, how absurd this may still seem to present-day humanity. A true spiritual science is what the future will bring—and through which the future of the human soul will provide the knowledge of which the human soul has need, once the forces that have existed since time immemorial have matured within it for such matters. We are awaiting such a time. Only those who fail to recognize the signs of the times can deny this—those who are unaware of the deepest longing that already lives today in numerous souls, consciously in some and unconsciously in others, and that will seize all of humanity: the longing to know about the spiritual. But then, when the soul experiences itself in a true, body-free state, it comes to know within itself powers that one does not possess in everyday life—powers that cannot be unfolded within the body. One comes to know a power that may be described as follows:

[ 12 ] As we go about our daily lives, in which the soul develops the powers of imagination, feeling, and will, we arrive at what is ultimately called memory. And anyone who reflects a little on memory knows what this memory, this recollection, means for the entire, cohesive essence of the human being. We could not develop a sense of self if we did not recall, within it, the experiences we have gone through since a certain point in time after birth. It is only because the stream of memories does not cease—because we know that it was we ourselves who lived through this stream—that we are an “I,” a self. Even worldviews can operate only with memories that the soul stores within itself, and can then bring these memories into a harmonious or logical context. We can therefore regard what the soul experiences in everyday life as its final experience—as a memory, as recollection. On what, then, does remembering, or memory, depend? Well, viewed from the outside, we can say that when we go through experiences, we form mental images; we perceive this or that in those experiences. Then an image remains with us, stored in the soul, and even long after the experience has passed, we are able to look back upon this image in our inner life; the experience itself is no longer there, but only the inner image remains—something that our soul simply weaves. In order to approach this image—and indeed, the very nature of memory—we can now consider the following: I can only sketch it out in broad strokes, as it were, with charcoal lines, which you can then explore in detail in the literature of spiritual science.

[ 13 ] If we wish to examine this memory more closely, we find that in the earliest period of a person’s life after birth, once they have entered the world, this memory is not yet active. This memory first emerges in early childhood; later on, we recall events up to a certain point in early childhood. As for what came before, we must rely on accounts from those around us, but we do not recall it ourselves. On what, then, does our ability to recall the past depend? It is based on certain powers that the soul can employ to retain images—powers that enable the soul to store these images within itself. These powers were already present before memory existed; they were already present immediately after birth, but they had a different task at that time. Their task was to continue working on the delicate organs of the human being—on the nervous system and the brain—shaping them in a plastic manner. They were still formative forces of the human organism, acting upon that which is, so to speak, still soft—to put it crudely, but it describes a reality—that which must first be shaped in such a way that the human being becomes this particular individual. These formative forces continue to flow into the physical organization during the earliest childhood. And when this organization has hardened—again, speaking figuratively—to the point where these formative forces no longer flow into it, they are reflected back from the physical into the soul. The physical body acts like a mirror. And what we then experience in our soul—especially what is stored in our memories—are mirror images reflected back from our physical life. In truth, we remember because our body is a mirroring apparatus. Natural science will come to fully understand this as it continues on its path. Then it will also see through the contradictions it currently raises when such ideas are put forward. It is as if one mirror after another were hanging on the wall, and as we walked past, we would see ourselves only as long as we stood directly in front of the mirrors. The mirror reflects our own image back to us. So it is with our inner spiritual experience. The body is a mirroring apparatus; it reflects back what the soul experiences. Through this, the soul itself experiences what were once formative forces in the earliest childhood—forces that were used, as it were, to construct the mirror in the first place.

[ 14 ] The next step is this: Imagine the following—I’m presenting it as a comparison, but it represents something very real—imagine that you are standing in front of a mirror that allows you to see yourself, to see what you yourself send to the mirror as a beam of light. You see yourself because the mirror reflects your physical image. In the same way, your body reflects what is in your soul. But now imagine that you were to acquire—and this takes place in the realm of the soul—the power to do without the mirror; you would develop such strong powers that you would, as it were, project into space what the mirror otherwise reflects as your own image. But this is achieved through the soul exercises I mentioned: concentration of thought, immersion in the will—one could also call it surrender to the order of the worlds. Through this, the soul’s powers are strengthened to such an extent that what is otherwise reflected by the body—which is merely a mirror image—emerges as one’s own inner, soul-based experience, so that it comes to life internally through the soul’s own power. Therefore, what the spiritual researcher experiences inwardly when he has separated his soul from the body is a higher-order, active act of remembrance. Whereas in ordinary life we manage only to reach the level of memory—through which we are dependent on the body’s reflection—the exercises described here now give us the ability to develop inner soul forces and to activate our inner soul life, so that it radiates an inner reality, as it were.

[ 15 ] If the soul reaches the point where it, as it were, creates its inner powers—though in truth it draws them forth from the deepest inner self—then it will realize that it is not only unfolding these powers, but that with the unfolding of these powers, with the creation, as it were, of the inner reflection, something else takes place, which we can call: perception, the direct grasping of a spiritual world. However, this perception is quite different from the perception of external sensory reality. When we perceive external sensory reality, we look at objects with our eyes, listen to sounds with our ears, and touch external objects with our hands. In that case, it is the object we approach that acts upon us from the outside. But when we develop what I have described as the inner forces of the soul—forces that truly come to life, so that the soul knows itself to be outside the body within a system of inner forces—then that which is spiritual essence, spiritual reality, flows into these forces. I will again use a comparison: When I touch this corner here with my hand and perceive it through the senses, the corner is outside of me; the corner touches my hand from the outside. It is not like that in spiritual perception; rather, if what the hand now represents were a soul force, and if I did not allow it to act, the spiritual would, as it were, flow into the hand from behind. While the physical touches things from the outside, the spiritual does not touch from the outside; rather, the spiritual flows into the powers of the soul, so that we must acquire entirely new concepts if we are to speak of this spiritual cognition and perception. We perceive external things; in order to enter into a relationship with the spiritual, it is necessary that we develop powers into which this spiritual world can flow. That is to say, we must say: through the development of the soul, we experience the great and mighty reality that the spiritual world perceives us, that we become something like a thought, like a volitional impulse of higher spiritual beings who stand above us, invisible and supersensory. Of these spiritual beings—who are invisible and supersensible in relation to the soul’s powers of cognition just discussed—the spiritual researcher must speak in the same way that the natural scientist speaks of the mineral, plant, and animal kingdoms, and the physical human kingdom, as the four kingdoms of nature that exist outside of us. And just as we, when we encounter these beings of the four kingdoms, say: We perceive them, we form concepts of these beings—they are outside of us, and we create sensory images of them—so we must say: as we step out of our body with our soul, we ourselves—but in a much higher, inner vitality and essential nature—become thoughts, feelings, and impulses of will of the higher spiritual beings—we are perceived, we experience ourselves being perceived by the higher spiritual beings.

[ 16 ] From this you can see that anyone who approaches the question, “What is immortal in the human being?” cannot approach it in the way people still so often do today. They approach such a question and say, “Well, I have acquired this or that concept.” “How can you prove to me the immortality of the soul?” Yes, with these concepts—which one has acquired in external life and in science—one cannot prove it; for these concepts refer to what the soul experiences in everyday life, and that is merely an inner reflection. Just as the reflection does not remain when the mirror is no longer there, neither does what the soul thinks, feels, and wills in everyday life, because it is merely a reflection of the body; even the memory in which this is stored is a reflection of the soul. Anyone who seeks to prove the immortality of the soul on the basis of thinking, feeling, and willing is on the same path as someone who seeks to prove the permanence of the reflection from the image in the mirror. The natural scientist must be granted that all of this is merely a reflection—and he has nothing else to go on. Everything that is commonly called the “soul” in everyday life does not pass through the gate of death. But there is something contained within the soul—for what spiritual science brings to light is contained within the soul—that passes through the gate of death, and does so in such a way that it can be grasped only in concepts and ideas that one does not possess at all unless one first develops them. Whereas in ordinary experience one must say that the human soul perceives, in spiritual experience one must say: the soul is perceived by higher beings. Whereas in sensory experience one perceives oneself, in spiritual experience one must say: after death, the human being is received by the higher spiritual beings. When a person incorporates thoughts of external natural phenomena into his soul, the being that reigns supersensibly above him incorporates himself into the person; he is thought of, he is carried away into the spiritual world. That is why it is so difficult to answer the question, “What is immortal in the human being?” if one tries to answer it using the ordinary, everyday concepts that do not apply to it at all.

[ 17 ] And all philosophers who have attempted to approach the immortality of the human soul—to answer the question of the soul’s immortality—have nevertheless always come to the conclusion that there must be some subtle, substantial entity that transcends death. We have seen that nothing of the substantial remains at all, but that the soul’s powers are themselves a more highly developed life of memory—that they constitute a process of being perceived, of being born into the spiritual world. You all know that such processes even have their symbols and analogies in sensory life. When one billiard ball is struck against another, the physicist says: the state of motion of the first ball is transferred to the second. What has been transferred from one ball to the other? It is not the substance of the first ball that has been transferred to the second, but only the force.

[ 18 ] Those who have reflected on the immortality of the soul have always thought of it as something that exists in ordinary life and passes through the gate of death; whereas what passes through the gate of death is precisely what one must first seek, for it lies so deeply hidden within the soul that it goes completely unnoticed—attention in ordinary life is not directed toward it; yet it is indeed there. And when the person who so truly—as it were, chemically—separates the spiritual-soul aspect from the physical body, when he then experiences this spiritual-soul aspect as it is sheltered in a supersensible world of spiritual beings that stands above him, then he also knows that in this aspect of the soul, which conceals itself in ordinary life — just as hydrogen is hidden in water — that he possesses something that works entirely in secret, so to speak, between the lines of life; something that takes in the finest forces of the soul, of experience, and of human moral capacities, just as the tiny plant seed takes in from the entire plant the forces it needs to concentrate them. And just as after withering—after the leaves wither and the flower dies—the plant, as a small seed, carries over into the next plant what lived in the previous plant—that which the plant has preserved as a seed—so it is in the human soul. When one distills it out in this way, one realizes: at every moment of life, whether awake or asleep, this human soul works ceaselessly in the depths of everyday life, shaping all the abilities we acquire; it is permeated, deeply permeated by what it has done—right and wrong, beautiful and ugly; it carries this within itself, just as the plant seed sluggishly carries within itself the germ of the entire new plant. And then one knows that what lives so hidden within the soul undergoes a life between death and new birth—and returns once more to earthly life. In this life between death and new birth, the human being gathers from the spiritual world the forces that become formative powers, so that through a new birth he can unite with what is given to him by his father and mother and by the line of ancestors. Thus, the human soul does not live through a single earthly life, but rather through successive earthly lives.

[ 19 ] The complete earthly life thus consists of a succession of lives that unfold between birth and death, and of the life between death and a new birth—lives that are longer than the earthly ones—during which the soul dwells in purely spiritual spheres, where it is active and engaged—where it has become just as intertwined with the spiritual world as it is here with the physical world. This fact—that the human soul, in its universal nature, experiences repeated earthly lives, and that each subsequent earthly life is the result of earlier ones—is precisely what spiritual science will gradually incorporate into the spiritual culture of humanity, just as the Copernican worldview has been incorporated into external culture. Certainly, it is still very much the case today that people often say: “Well, what you’re telling me contradicts what my five senses hold to be true!” Well, human beings have even had to experience something entirely different that contradicts their five senses. For millennia, guided by their five senses, people believed that the sun and the starry sky revolved around the Earth. That the opposite is true—that the Earth moves around the Sun—is what they had to believe despite the contradiction with their five senses. In the same way, what must now contradict the five senses—namely, that human beings go through repeated earthly lives—will likewise become part of people’s habits of thought. But then human beings will speak, based on true science, of what is immortal in the human being. They will seek this immortality, so to speak, between the lines of ordinary experiences; they will know within themselves an inwardly active being that is secure in a spiritual world, just as the sensory external world is secured in our conceptions, thoughts, and feelings through thinking.

[ 20 ] Then human beings will know themselves to be connected to their Eternal Self, their Immortal Self, and to the spiritual world. This is what lies ahead for the evolution of humanity. And we must truly remember this in our own time—a time of difficult yet glorious trials—we must remember how German intellectual life in particular—you will not find it out of place that I mention this in the final part of my reflections—how German intellectual life in particular has long been striving to attain such a science. We need only recall Lessing, the great standard-bearer of modern German spiritual life, and the thoughts he gathered in his soul—thoughts that enlightened both him and humanity. He summarized them, as if in a testament of his life, in his exquisite work *The Education of the Human Race*. Of course, many people today—especially the very clever ones—say: “Well, Lessing!” He wrote and said so much throughout his life; then he grew old, his mental powers waned, and he went on to write such convoluted stuff, in which he grappled with concepts like the doctrine of repeated earthly lives and the intermediate lives between death and a new birth in the spiritual world! People consider it a whimsical idea, and they forgive the great minds when they, too, occasionally arrive at such convoluted ideas—ideas that are not regarded as such in ordinary life, ideas that cannot be grasped by the five senses. But Lessing made a very significant statement at the end of the work: There have, after all, always been people in the most ancient times who, through ancient clairvoyance—through ancient abilities of the human soul that were still closer to the spiritual forces of the world—knew something about repeated earthly lives. And Lessing says: “Is that which the human soul attained through its original powers—what it accomplished before it was corrupted by the sophistry of the school—is that precisely what is to be deemed untrue?”

[ 21 ] Lessing was right. The science of the spirit will show humanity that what existed, so to speak, at a primitive stage of development will reach the highest level of truly mature scientific knowledge—provided, of course, that science has advanced to the point where it does not limit itself to relying on outwardly tangible methods that can be grasped by the five senses; but when it accepts as such methods experiments of the mind and soul—which have just been described as a kind of spiritual chemistry. And it is precisely German spiritual life that has always pointed to this intimacy of the soul’s life, through which the soul transcends itself into a higher life of feeling—one that is not merely a life of memory, but an immersion in spiritual reality. A higher life of thought, a higher life of feeling, a higher life of will. German spiritual life has always strived to achieve this: that the soul may thus strengthen its powers and thereby emerge from its body; and this belongs to the seeds of German spiritual life that I pointed out yesterday, which have yet to blossom and bear fruit as the flowers and fruits of this German spiritual life.

[ 22 ] We see, after all, how strangely inwardly focused spirits—such as the marvelous Novaks, for example—how these German spirits, time and again through inner, living contemplation, through the contemplative experience of their soul life, arrive through direct insight at the realization that this passes through the gate of death as the immortality of the soul; and how they then arrive at concepts that seem absurd to ordinary experience, but which—precisely because they do not fit ordinary experience—are suited to an experience that goes beyond ordinary experience. Anyone who seeks only ordinary concepts in spiritual science cannot come to it. This spiritual science requires an inner flexibility, an elasticity of the mind, so that one can arrive at new concepts. Most people would like to spare themselves this out of inner complacency. They believe the spiritual world must be something like a finer copy of the sensory world; they, in turn, imagine the spiritual world as material and substantial. But when one experiences the world spiritually, nothing familiar from before remains in it; instead, something entirely new awakens—something one has not yet known, but with which one must enrich one’s soul in order to experience within oneself what is immortal in the human soul.

[ 23 ] So when such people speak of the spiritual world, to which the soul belongs in its immortality, they must first formulate the words and concepts. That is also why I must, in a sense, ask for your forgiveness regarding today’s lecture. In a lecture like this, where one speaks of the spiritual world but in words shaped by everyday life, one must grapple with the words. One must accept that, in one’s phrasing, one resorts to words that are uncomfortable for those who wish to cling to the familiar. Time and again, one encounters critics who say: “What you’ve said doesn’t even exist!” I know that. Certainly, these gentlemen know an infinite amount, but when they apply their old concepts to what must be expressed in entirely new terms, their criticism cannot fit what they are trying to describe. But in German intellectual life we have minds—Novalis is one of them—who know how to speak in a language that, while it is the German language, nevertheless appears as a wonderfully vivid essence distilled from the German language to reveal something as real as the sensory world—the reality into which the soul enters when it passes through the gate of death. What such people say can indeed have an effect on those who are receptive to it.

[ 24 ] And now I would like to give you a curious example; it is too beautiful for me to withhold from you, because it shows how Novalis influenced others. I am deliberately citing his influence on a Belgian-French poet-philosopher who studied Novalis, who, as he claims, immersed himself completely in Novalis with his soul, and who was left with an impression that he describes as follows.

[ 25 ] Before I get to that, I must say that another Belgian-French poet-philosopher, Maurice Maeterlinck, immediately after the outbreak of the war—and time and again thereafter—found particularly scathing words to describe the German barbarians and launched monstrous attacks against this barbaric culture. This is Maurice Maeterlinck, though German intellectual life has done more than French intellectual life to make him known to the world. But gratitude need not be demanded in this day and age. He truly did revile and denounce these German barbarians in the same vein as the others I mentioned yesterday.

[ 26 ] In contrast, there is another Belgian-French poet-philosopher who has allowed Novalis—one of the most “German” of the German poet-philosophers—to influence him with everything he has to say about what is immortal in human nature, and he then describes this influence. He cannot help but say: When one reads Sophocles or Shakespeare in this way, when one sees what Sophocles’ characters and Shakespeare’s characters experience—even what Hamlet experiences—what these characters do and suffer is entirely an earthly affair; it is of interest only to earthly human beings. But—so the Belgian-French poet-philosopher argues—if a spirit were to descend from another planet, it could not take an interest in what the characters of Sophocles and Shakespeare experience; after all, these are merely earthly matters. But in Novalis, this Belgian-French poet-philosopher finds a soul that has something to say that would interest even spirits who might one day descend from the cosmos to pay a visit to Earth; because Novalis speaks of the eternal nature of the human soul—a subject that interests not only human souls insofar as they dwell within the body, but must also interest all beings belonging to the extraterrestrial world. And with beautiful words, this Belgian-French poet-philosopher speaks of what he experienced in Novalis, the German poet-philosopher:

[ 27 ] “But if further proof were needed, she would count him among those whose works border on silence” — he means that the ordinary language of everyday life is, after all, meant for what is fleeting; but as for what is immortal, one must actually remain silent about it or find another language for it —, “it would open the gate to the realm where some loved it for its own sake, without paying attention to the slight gestures of their bodies. Together they would ascend to the lonely highlands, where consciousness rises by one degree, and where all those plagued by restlessness about themselves attentively survey the immense ring that links the world of phenomena with our higher worlds. She would go with him to the boundaries of humanity; for at the point where man seems to end, he likely begins, and his most essential and inexhaustible parts lie in the invisible realm, where he must remain constantly on guard. At this height alone are there thoughts that the soul can approve of, and ideas that resemble it and are as commanding as the soul itself. There, humanity reigned for a moment; and these dimly lit peaks are perhaps the only lights that announce the Earth to the spirit realm. Their reflection truly bears the color of our soul. We sense that the passions of the mind and body would resemble the tolling of bells in the eyes of an alien reason; but the people of whom I speak have, through their works, emerged from the small village of passions and have spoken words that are of value even to those who do not belong to the earthly community!”

[ 28 ] Such are the words of the Belgian-French poet-philosopher. If that same man were to hear Maurice Maeterlinck now railing against the barbarians—the very same barbarians from whom emerged what the Belgian-French poet-philosopher speaks of, as I have just read to you—wouldn’t that same Belgian-French poet-philosopher call this Maurice Maeterlinck, with his barbarian drivel, a useless loudmouth? Yes, but there is, of course, a catch, for the words are Maurice Maeterlinck’s own—though written before the outbreak of the war!

[ 29 ] These are the kinds of things we experience today; that is why I said yesterday: what we are witnessing in the world today is like a characteristic chapter in the history of psychiatry. For what follows from the incredibly paradoxical fact that the very same Maurice Maeterlinck could utter these words about the German Novalis—and then go on to revile and denounce the entire German people as a barbarian people? What follows from this is that what he said years ago—and what I have read to you—is, deep down, untrue and hypocritical. That is, after all, the peculiarity of our present-day culture: that—because this culture, so to speak, overflows with what has already been stored up through language and outward appearances—even a false soul can produce very beautiful words, words that sound beautiful, words that may, however, be insincere at their core. But it is precisely one of the paths of the soul that lead to the spirit in the way I have described—that everything the soul brings forth within itself, everything it goes through, is true, truly true, and profoundly true in its deepest core. If there is even a single phrase, even a single element of falsehood within the soul on the path into the spiritual world, then one cannot find this path into the spiritual world. Following in the footsteps of the One who said, “I am the Way, the Truth, and the Life!”—that is, the union of the three—such a path of imitating the One who spoke these words is this path of truth. And if it is merely a phrase—no matter how beautiful it may sound—one will not find the truth; one will find only the great deception that can penetrate even into the soul, precisely where the soul seeks to find that with which it is connected as its immortal part. Inner truth alone brings the soul into connection with that which, as the Divine, interweaves and permeates the world.

[ 30 ] And when, again, drawing from German intellectual life, Meister Eckhart— the philosopher, speaks from German intellectual life, saying that within the mind there is a spark in which that which can live from the Divine in the individual human soul is kindled—then one must say that the human soul can experience what is to be kindled like a spark in the mind with authenticity only if it is profoundly true within itself.

[ 31 ] This, however, requires self-knowledge. But this self-knowledge is difficult to attain in life. When a person, as I have explained, succeeds in stepping out of the physical realm with his soul-spiritual being, he then has his ordinary earthly self before him, just as he otherwise has external things before him. But they must be able to see their earthly self and, before embarking on this spiritual path, must be able to cultivate self-knowledge as an inner habit. To illustrate just how difficult this is, here is a comparative example: A rather famous contemporary professor, the Viennese philosopher—who was formerly in Prague—Dr. Ernst Mach, who has written various books that are highly regarded today, provided a brief example on the third page of his book *Analysis of Sensations* of how difficult it is to attain self-knowledge, even with regard to one’s physical form. He recounts there: “As a young man, while crossing the street, I once caught sight of a face in profile in a shop window where two mirrors faced each other. I thought: what kind of person is this before me with such a repulsive, indeed repugnant face? And I was quite surprised when I discovered that I was looking at my own reflection, revealed to me by the way the mirrors were arranged.” And as a second example, the same professor recounts immediately below that, on the third page of his book: “Once, when I came back from a trip quite exhausted, I got on a bus. There I saw a man getting on from the other side as well, and I thought”—so he says, he admits it, he is completely sincere—“what a shabby, unsympathetic schoolmaster is getting on there. And then I realized: it was me.” And he adds: “So I recognized the typical traits of the species better than my own.” A lady who heard this after I had mentioned it in other lectures recounts an example of such a lack of self-awareness regarding one’s appearance that she observed in a relative. This relative went into a restaurant in a strange city. She wasn’t quite familiar with the place. As she walked toward the wall, she saw a woman coming toward her from the other side. “Well, what kind of ugly country bumpkin is that?” she thought. She was a very elegant city woman. It wasn’t until she spoke to the woman and the woman didn’t answer that she recognized herself.

[ 32 ] These are examples that, I would say, are taken from the coarsest external-sensory realm. But if a person has so little insight into their outer, physical, and sensory nature, they have even less insight into the soul in ordinary life. Yet this ability to look within oneself, to recognize oneself as an external object—this is part of truly grasping what is immortal in the human being. And whoever truly immerses themselves in the spiritual world and can then also trace what is real in this spiritual world—who can thus trace the human being not only in their life between birth and death, but beyond death—knows that when the soul, in communion with the individual, looks back on death, it does so precisely by looking back in self-knowledge upon itself, upon what has been experienced between birth and death. Self-knowledge is, as it were, the eye of the immortal spirit. Through self-knowledge, we must perceive the entire spiritual world during the time we live through spiritually between death and a new birth. — All of this is truly so that we can say: within German spiritual life lie the seeds that must come to further unfolding and development, that must be grasped in a living way over the course of time. Then, from this German spiritual life, true knowledge and a true grasp of the spirit will emerge in the future.

[ 33 ] If one considers the intellectual and cultural history of modern times even a little, one is led to recognize how the German spirit, in its sustaining power, is specifically called upon to develop the idealism it has cultivated through its great philosophers into spiritualism, into the recognition of the spirit, into the experience of the spirit, and into scientific knowledge. One might say the German spirit was pressed, weighed down, and suppressed by the foreign spirit. We see how Goethe, who is deeply rooted in the German spirit, sighs under the influence of what was coming over from France in his time. While the German spirit is actually inclined to recognize, in its cognition, more and more intimately the Spirit that pervades and surges through the world, the French spirit is more inclined to grasp everything that can be grasped by the intellect and to rationalize it. This is even evident in the distinctive character of French poetry. The intellect, however, which is bound to the brain, is fundamentally capable only of developing materialism. Therefore, materialism is, at its core, a genuine French product. Materialism is not inherent in the German character when it perceives itself in its deepest, most intimate core. This inner “Frenchness,” this inner materialism, must also be overcome—overcome by the German spirit in the course of time.

[ 34 ] And if we trace a characteristic feature of the development of worldviews in the British Isles—particularly in what has emerged from there as the dominant philosophy—we can summarize it as follows: The British philosopher—and this can be demonstrated in detail everywhere—ultimately arrives at the same conclusion as Locke, Hobbes, and so on: to accept only what the senses perceive and what is deduced from that, and to make the intellect merely a servant of sensory perception. This leads to external empiricism or to skepticism, to a tendency toward doubt. But this has also deeply influenced the German spirit, and it is something from which it must free itself. After all, beneath the surface of the soul’s consciousness, we are experiencing quite a lot in our time. While England, with its worldview, was destined to swear by mere sensory appearances, and France was destined to cultivate humanity—out of rationalism, out of reason—to the point of the proposition “Man as a Machine,” the German spirit, after emancipating itself from France, cultivated idealism, which is the precursor to spiritualism, the true science of the spirit. Idealism does not seek to remain stuck in materialism, which is bound solely to the intellect; it does not seek to remain stuck in the empiricism of the English, who wish to adhere only to the senses, nor in the rationalism of the French, but rather it seeks to grasp what lives vividly within the soul. But as this is liberated from foreign influences, as the German people come to stand fully on their own spiritual feet, German idealism will be incorporated into the living spiritual understanding of the culture of the future.

[ 35 ] If one tries today to do something to promote this living spiritual insight, one still encounters quite fierce resistance for the time being. If I may mention something personal here: Since the 1880s, I have been striving to assert what Goethe’s theory of colors is—and the depth of this theory—against the materialistic English Newtonian physics. It is easy to understand—one can list all the objections that physics has against Goethe’s theory of colors—it is understandable that physics opposes it. But Goethe’s theory of colors, even as a scientific product, is a living penetration into the physical reality of colors; and as spiritual insight takes hold of human culture, it will become clear how infinitely superior this Goethean theory of colors is to the English one. Today, however, people still turn a deaf ear; the relevant writings are not yet being read—or are read only by a small circle. But that is always the way it is.

[ 36 ] As the forefather of true spiritual science, Goethe established a natural worldview of the development of living beings. I, too, have been writing about this since the 1880s to show how Goethe’s theory of development is a spiritual perspective. This is the basis for Goethe’s ability to substantiate what he emphasized to Schiller: that he already sees the idea in reality. But even here, people still turn a deaf ear; for the alternative is more convenient. This Goethean doctrine was uncomfortable for humanity to accept. And when Darwin came along and presented all of this in a way that appealed to the senses—through external, sensory perception—in a more comfortable manner, in a way that so appealed to the English mind, it was accepted; it swept the world; and people passed by Goethe’s difficult, uncomfortable, yet spiritually sound theory. When Darwin presented the theory of evolution in a way that was intuitive and accessible, it was accepted.

[ 37 ] And the great philosopher Hegel, who also had quite a connection to this city, provided another example. He demonstrated how Johann Kepler—the German astronomical philosopher, or philosophical astronomer, to whom science owes so immensely much—achieved great things in terms of understanding the interconnectedness of the world. Yes, indeed, Kepler’s life was such that Kästner’s famous epigram applies to him: because he understood the course of the stars—because he saw through it all and expressed it in marvelous formulas—he was forced to lead a life about which the epigrammatist Kästner says:

No mortal had ever climbed so high,
When Kepler climbed—and died of starvation.
He knew only how to entertain the spirits,
So the mortals left him without bread!

[ 38 ] But Hegel goes on to show that the famous Newtonian theory of gravity—which every physicist says forms the foundation of modern physics—is nothing more than the achievements of the Swabian Kepler expressed in mathematical formulas. The reality lies with Kepler. One is faced with a historical falsehood when one speaks of the validity of Newtonianism.

[ 39 ] The German spirit will have to rely on itself. This will stand out from the many sad, but also glorious, events of our time as a hallmark of humanity’s historical development. However, the forces coming from the west and northwest have worked so thoroughly to influence human souls that the path I have described—the path into the spiritual world—is made more difficult for them.

[ 40 ] I am now going to say something—forgive me—that many will find quite foolish; but I know that it is the truth. Perhaps the time will come when this truth can be demonstrated in detail. All that is needed is time. I can only put it this way: from childhood onward, the souls have been thoroughly deprived of the opportunity to freely develop the powers that have been hinted at, in order to make their way into the spiritual world. As a result, for example, the path has been obstructed—and I truly do not say this out of national chauvinism; I say this based on psychological and cultural-historical insight—the path has been obstructed because the poison of Defoe’s *Robinson Crusoe* still plagues and poisons the lives of numerous boys and girls; and therein lies what nestles itself in the soul to permeate it with the empiricism of English culture.

[ 41 ] Many inner victories, in keeping with German culture, still lie ahead. But what is happening now is the great, bloody, yet glorious harbinger. And those who, as heroic souls, are now passing through the gates of death—it is precisely the spiritual scientist who must point this out, since he knows how souls, as realities, pass through death and how those who are dead continue to live in a different form—they will be among us in a higher sense with their untapped powers. For there is something in their soul-spiritual nature that, for decades to come—for these are young, blossoming human lives leaving the earth in our time—could have continued to supply the body with formative forces for a whole long life. But this will continue to weave and live within the immortal part of their soul; it will be present in the spiritual sphere; it will be there, and it will help if humanity meets it with understanding in bringing about a worldview that is truly in keeping with the spirit—a worldview that is thoroughly spiritual through and through, one that is scientific in the fullest and strictest sense of the word. Spiritual science will thus be able to become something truly vibrant and real. For the spiritual scientist knows that when what he has to offer as the result of his research comes alive in people’s souls, these souls will then become so attuned to earthly life that the great chasm—which today yawns as a materialistic worldview between the physical and the supersensible—will be bridged. In a much more real sense than people suspect today, human beings will come to live within a worldview that will show them not only the people who are immediately present on Earth but also, in their active presence, those who have passed through the gate of death. But this is a worldview to which the great number of deaths that our fateful age has brought upon us simultaneously points as a warning. Much blood, much death, much hardship, much suffering and pain, much courage, much willingness to make sacrifices, and immense greatness surge and weave through that which surrounds us in our fateful, fate-laden present—a present of such significance in world history. But it is precisely in this present moment that we must point to that which, beyond all death and all merely temporal life, points to the hidden, to that which is immortal in the human being.

[ 42 ] Not everyone will be able to become a spiritual scientist, just as not everyone can become a chemist. But there will come a time when, just as what a few chemists contribute to humanity is made fruitful for all, so too will what individual spiritual scientists have to offer benefit all of humanity and its communal life. One need not be a spiritual researcher oneself to recognize the truth of the findings of spiritual researchers; one need only be free from the prejudices that today’s habitual ways of thinking place in one’s path, and the things that have been hinted at today—spiritual science—can be understood. To discover the facts for oneself—indeed, to say even a single sentence about what has been the main focus of today’s discussion—one must walk the path of spiritual research oneself. To penetrate the spiritual world, where there are beings—divine spiritual beings who are just as real as the things and beings of the physical world—to speak accurately about these worlds, to truly bring a message from this world and these beings, one must walk the path of spiritual research oneself. To understand what is thus brought from the spiritual worlds, one really needs only to approach the matter with an unbiased sense of truth. People who today do not believe they can reconcile this sense of truth with what spiritual science says simply fail to realize that it is not their sense of truth, but rather their habits of thought—arising from prejudice—that stand in the way. But when these habits of thought have been swept aside—just as the old habits of thought were swept aside in the face of the Copernican worldview—then spiritual science will contribute, with regard to the spiritual and soul aspects of human experience, something that will be infinitely more fruitful than what natural science has contributed to external life. For what natural science offers relates to what surrounds us, to what we build and construct, to the many things through which we make our lives comfortable and pleasant—things that are useful to us. But what spiritual science has to offer is something every soul desires, provided it becomes aware of the forces of this desire within the spiritual and psychological realm; that which gives human beings the opportunity to develop in such a way that desolation, loneliness, and disharmony in life cannot take root in their souls, but rather what the soul gains in strength, so that the soul can face life with fortitude—and this will be demanded of the soul more and more by the increasing complexity of life in the future. Spiritual science will incorporate into spiritual development something that will awaken a living consciousness in the soul of what is immortal in the human being. And in this coexistence with the immortal part of the soul, human beings will become all the more aware that the world is more comprehensive than what the senses perceive, than what is experienced in time. This knowledge—which will not remain abstract or theoretical—will coalesce into certain feelings that will bring inner joy and sustenance to the soul, while also making it industrious, powerful, and capable.

[ 43 ] I would like to conclude by summarizing in a few words what spiritual science can awaken in the soul in terms of such feelings—words that may serve as a fitting conclusion to what I have been able to say today about this question, as I mentioned, only in broad strokes, as in a charcoal sketch: What is immortal in the human being? This may find its conclusion in the words that are, in a sense, the lingering impression of spiritual scientific knowledge and spiritual scientific conviction regarding the question under consideration today:

They speak to the human senses
The things in the vastness of space;
They change as time passes.
Awakening itself, the human soul awakens
Unbounded by the vastness of space
And undeterred by the passage of time
In the stream of becoming that is eternity!