The Rudolf Steiner Archive

3. Birth and Death in the Life of the Soul

Article in the “Münchner Neueste Nachrichten”, January 1905

[ 1 ] Theosophical Lectures. The Secretary-General of the Theosophical Society in Germany, writer Dr. Rudolf Steiner of Berlin, gave two more theosophical lectures at Café Luitpold.

[ 2 ] In his first lecture, he addressed the topic: “Birth and Death in the Life of the Soul.” He began by referring to Plato’s account of Socrates’ death, which offers a treatise on the immortality of the soul, in which the mystical conviction of the soul’s immortality—based on inner experience and the inner victory over death—is clearly expressed. Like Socrates, the mystic feels, in his true inner life, independent of the illusory appearance of the world around him. In order to recognize this true, inner life—the essence that lies behind the phenomenal world—through one’s own inner contemplation, and in order to seek the soul, man must, as mysticism teaches, strive to establish within himself that inner stillness through concentration and meditation, through which he may, for a longer or shorter time, become as if deaf and blind to the impressions of the external world. The world of the spirit must become as real to his inner vision as the sensory world is to sensory perception. The mystic must learn to perceive directly, free from the senses, in contrast to indirect, sense-bound perception. If, in this elevation of consciousness—in the conscious and deliberate transcendence of the sensory world—he experiences the Eternal, one might say of him, in the traditional language of mysticism, that he has passed through the narrow gate of death, insofar as he has died to the sensory world; for the mystic, death is the symbol of the highest goal toward which they strive for higher knowledge. Just as the mystic, by delving into his own soul, is reborn to non-sensory knowledge in the spiritual world, so too will the answer to the question of what birth and death are become clear to him through inner contemplation. Birth appears to the mystic as a surrender of the soul to indirect knowledge through the sensory world, to an indirect connection with it, driven by inner impulse, longing, and desire, for the purpose of gathering experience through the sensory world. For the mystic, death is the means to liberation, to gradual rebirth in the spiritual world once desire has run its course, and to the internalization of the accumulated experiences in the spiritual state referred to by Indian mysticism as Devachan. These absorbed, internalized experiences are utilized by the

[ 3 ] The soul, enriched by this, is reborn into the sensory world and once again develops from within itself what it has internalized. Internalization (involution) and development (evolution) constitute the soul’s life process. It must descend again and again into the sensory world and ascend into the spiritual world, in an eternal cycle of becoming and dying—an eternal law to which the great mystic Goethe alluded with these poetic words: “Whoever lacks this—this dying and becoming—remains only a sluggish guest on this earth.”