The Rudolf Steiner Archive

3. Knowledge and Immortality

[ 1 ] Ladies and gentlemen! When we speak of human knowledge, we have two things in mind. The first is the knowledge that the individual human soul—the human spirit—acquires for its own sake; the second is the knowledge that serves as a means of progress for the life of all humanity. One need only think of the knowledge that deals with the observation of natural phenomena and is concerned with harnessing the forces of nature for the benefit of humanity to realize that what is called knowledge in this field not only brings satisfaction to the individual human soul, but that this knowledge seeks to be a selfless servant of all humanity. It is easy to see that knowledge of the forces of nature serves the goals of humanity to a great extent. We see the insights gained through the thinking of researchers and inventors applied in practical life, and anyone who reflects on their value will easily see that the insights resulting from the study of matter are destined to serve all of humanity.

[ 2 ] But beyond these insights, there is yet another insight for which, due to its very nature, such practical application is not possible. This insight must exist for its own sake. Humanity needs it and could not live without it. But even with regard to this insight, one may ask: Is it really just something the human soul strives for its own satisfaction, or does this insight—which we often say exists for its own sake—not also serve the progress of humanity? If one attempts to explore why the human soul, so to speak, thirsts and hungers for such knowledge for its own sake—why it strives to grapple with the mysteries of the world—in order to recognize the significance of knowledge in the service of humanity, then one must delve into the nature and the [fundamental] reasons of the human soul itself.

[ 3 ] Now, the branch of human inquiry known as spiritual science or theosophy seeks to understand the nature of the human soul by tracing it down to its deepest foundations and attempting to discover its essence on the basis of knowledge that goes beyond what the senses provide and what the intellect—which is bound to the brain—can attain. Spiritual science believes that, through its research, it can say certain things about the human soul that are of particular importance to this striving human soul. However, it must take an independent stance toward everything that the spiritual culture of the past centuries has produced. Spiritual science in no way takes a stand against the great achievements of human culture, especially natural science; yet in our present age it must undertake precisely what natural science has undertaken many times over the course of the last few centuries—it must examine all the prejudices and beliefs of people today in the light of its own insights. Spiritual science looks toward something that is among the most important things for the understanding of our time—something that has only relatively recently been instilled in the natural sciences.

[ 4 ] People are, after all, very forgetful. Many truths that are generally accepted today were only discovered by the human mind in the 17th century, for well into the 17th century, both laypeople and learned naturalists believed, for example, that earthworms, fish, and other lower animals could develop from river mud. There are books from this period that discuss, for example, how living beings develop from carcasses. It was not until the 17th century that Francesco Redi first articulated the principle that living beings can only arise from the seeds of living beings of the same kind. The idea that living beings can only come from other living beings was considered a major heresy in the 17th century by the scientific community of the time, and Francesco Redi narrowly escaped the fate of Giordano Bruno.

[ 5 ] The spiritual researcher today finds himself in a similar situation when he turns his attention, for example, to the qualities of a human soul that enters existence through birth. Today, when observing the different qualities of children, it is easy to say that these qualities are inherited from the father and mother. Today it is believed that the structure of the human soul is composed of what originates from the physical environment, just as it was believed in the 17th century that living beings were composed solely of what originated from the physical environment. The spiritual researcher, however, must say: What is spiritual and soul-related can only originate from what is spiritual and soul-related. — He observes the marvelous way in which a human embryo, coming into being through birth, develops step by step over the course of its life, and he is fully aware that the human core of being, which develops in such a mysterious way, can only originate from its own kind. He knows that in order to understand what is developing there, one must go back to another spiritual-psychic entity. When we ascend from the animal to the human, we must distinguish between what is generic and what is individual. We cannot attribute to the human core of being the same thing that we refer to as generic in the case of animals. We must say: What develops in the child over time does not lead back to something generic, but to an individual being that enters into existence through birth. — And if this thought is pursued to its logical conclusions, this search for the origin of the soul-spiritual leads the spiritual researcher to the idea of reincarnation, to the idea of the human being’s repeated earthly lives. For those who view all the facts of life with an open mind, repeated earthly lives are a reality, no matter how much the sensibilities of people today may still rebel against it. After all, it is no longer customary today to burn heretics; instead, people ridicule such things, which are considered heresies according to the current consciousness of humanity. But this truth will fare as other truths and laws have that humanity has attained in the course of its development; after some time, people will no longer be able to understand why there were people who could not believe that spirit originates from spirit.

[ 6 ] Goethe pointed out what his very essence drew from his surroundings. He was able to say:

From my father I got my build,
A serious approach to life,
From my mother, her cheerful disposition
And a love of storytelling.

[ 7 ] And then, after pointing out what he has absorbed from his environment through inheritance, he asks modestly:

What exactly is so “original”
about all this nonsense?

[ 8 ] Anyone who, as I have done, has delved into everything related to Goethe has certainly come to feel a well-deserved respect for Goethe’s parents. But try, if you will, to piece together all their characteristics—you will try in vain to bring to light what about this “little fellow” can truly be called “original.” Precisely what we cannot find in the genetic heritage of his father and mother—that is the Goethe we know and who he will always be in our culture. For an educator, the most fascinating task is to proceed in the upbringing of a child on the assumption that a mysterious core of the human being is struggling to come into being, one that lies beyond all laws of heredity, and that this mystery must be solved anew with every young human being. If we truly apply this truth of repeated earthly lives to a child, it will no longer be foreign to us to regard the child’s outward form in such a way that it appears to us as shaped and formed from a soul-spiritual core. We observe the indeterminate features of this human face in the first days of the child’s life; we see that they become increasingly defined, and little by little the child’s entire body takes on an ever more distinct form of its own. We can see how the soul, which has come over from a previous existence, transforms these indefinite features into ever more definite ones. Here it becomes evident how the inner core of the human being is at work in the physical shell of the human being as it takes shape.

[ 9 ] If we consider this carefully, we will have no difficulty recognizing an ascending and a descending phase in human life. We see how indeterminate forces work their way from within to the surface, and at a certain point we see how everything inherent in the human being reveals itself in the skills and abilities he acquires. Then what happens is that the human being makes one aspect of his being the dominant one. Through the absorption of life wisdom and life knowledge, we see a kind of engagement with his environment emerge, and we can say: This is something that is added to what was brought along from earlier incarnations. — Then a downward current sets in during life, where we can no longer transform anything of what we have become externally and physically in our abilities—we can no longer take anything into our memory either.

[ 10 ] We will only truly understand this actual work of the individual core of being within the human being if we consider the whole of human life. This work within the human being is, in fact, divided into two clearly distinguishable states. The human being alternates between two states of consciousness: waking life and sleep. To consider life as a whole, we must ask ourselves: What do we owe to sleep, and what do we owe to wakefulness? — From sleep, the soul must draw the strength for new work, and it becomes evident that strengthening forces arise for the soul from sleep. Here is an example: People who, because of their profession, are required to memorize a great deal may find that they make little progress with memorization unless they get a sufficient amount of sleep between work sessions. Even scientific research today recognizes the importance of sleep in eliminating fatigue. In scientific circles, the prevailing view is that people become fatigued because their muscles, nerves, and so on are worn out and need to be replenished with new energy. However, this view fails to take into account that muscles can also work without showing signs of fatigue. The heart muscles, for example, work without becoming fatigued. Why is that?

[ 11 ] Asking oneself this question is of immense importance for a healthy outlook on life. Upon close observation, it becomes clear that fatigue sets in only under certain conditions. The heart does not tire, but the smallest muscles in the fingers can become so fatigued that cramp-like pains occur, as is evident, for example, in writer’s cramp. When one investigates these matters, one comes to realize that fatigue and our waking daily activities are interconnected. We come to understand that fatigue occurs when we do not leave parts of our body to their own devices, but [deliberately] imbue them with the energy of the external work we perform. The laws of the universe are implanted in our body; they are at work within it, and under their influence, the body does not grow weary. Fatigue does not occur when—unbeknownst to the person—the laws of the universe are at work in the body. Fatigue occurs only when human consciousness permeates the organism with its own nature.

[ 12 ] The naturalist Thomson asserts the independence of the life of the soul from the life of the body. He says that the life of the soul is as separate from the body as a rider is from his horse. This acknowledges that there is something within a human being that stands in the same relationship to his physicality as a rider does to his horse. We tire our physical being—so says Thomson—just as the rider tires his horse, precisely because he is outside the horse and uses it. Does this not bring to mind the ancient image from a distant era of human development, in which people, by a gift of nature, gazed into a spiritual world? There they beheld the centaurs, the beings who were half-human, half-horse. Admittedly, “wise” modern science claims today that the people of that time were childlike; they are said to have seen wild barbarians sitting on their steeds, emerging from the mist from the north, and in the mist it would have been impossible to distinguish where the man ended and the horse began; from this, these childlike people are said to have formed the image of the centaur. In fact, however, the centaur is a reality that, through clairvoyant perception, reveals the relationship that exists between soul and body—a relationship that is just like that between rider and horse.

[ 13 ] Thus, the fact of fatigue compels us to acknowledge a certain independence of the soul from the body. The reason certain processes in the human body do not result in fatigue is that a universal law is at work, but human consciousness is not involved in it. A person becomes fatigued because their consciousness is involved in the processes of their physical being. In the state of sleep, however, human beings, along with their physicality, are surrendered to this universal law. Human beings need this immersion into another element, as occurs every night during sleep, and we will attribute the proper significance to sleep when we trace the essential core of the human being as it lives in the world into which it enters upon falling asleep.

[ 14 ] Here I must speak of the experiences of the spiritual researcher. Spiritual research does not mean that one can gain insights into the mysteries of world existence at just any level, but rather that we awaken dormant, latent powers of insight within ourselves. When these dormant powers of cognition awaken, they give us the eyes and ears of the spirit, so that we find ourselves in a situation like that of a person born blind who regains sight through an operation. We can only recognize how many worlds surround us if we have the faculties to perceive them. We can experience the world of light and color only if we have eyes to see it, and the world of sounds only if we have ears to hear it. The spiritual researcher becomes a spiritual researcher by awakening the dormant powers of cognition within himself, by opening his spiritual eyes and ears. He engages in a certain training of the soul—that is, certain exercises—through which the soul develops faculties with which it can see and experience new worlds. When a person becomes a spiritual researcher in this way, the perception of the spiritual world is not speculation, but reality.

[ 15 ] When a person begins to look into these spiritual worlds, they have new experiences, and I would like to highlight one such experience that can shed light on the nature of sleeping and waking. For it is the task of the spiritual researcher to investigate certain aspects of ordinary life and then examine them in the light of the spirit. For example, one might reflect on a particular challenge in life and be unable to resolve it; the tool of thought proves to be blunt. Then the spiritual researcher truly feels separated from his physical body as a being of thought and knowledge. He perceives his physical body in the same way one perceives a hammer or some other tool or instrument as something external to one’s being. Just as one might perceive a hammer as too heavy, so one can perceive the failure of individual parts of the brain: one feels that one cannot intervene in the brain.

[ 16 ] The spiritual researcher can indeed feel the separation of body and spirit in every one of his activities. But when the spiritual researcher awakens from a state of sleep—perhaps after a very brief sleep that he can bring about at will through his developed will—it is as if he were awakening from a very specific world in which he had been doing something, so that upon awakening, the activities he performed immediately before waking continue to resonate, and this has a very specific configuration. The process of waking up is such that the activities he performed before waking could be depicted by him in very specific shapes and colors. But there is a difference between this spiritual activity and ordinary daily activities. Ordinary daily activities proceed in such a way that one thinks them through beforehand; that is, one works according to a mental model and is bound by the lines of a template.

[ 17 ] The [spiritual] activity, on the other hand, [which a person performs while asleep], proceeds as if we were following, from within our spirit, a path that arises from the inner laws of our own soul. The spiritual researcher perceives this during sleep as an intervention of his [soul’s activity] into his physical body, into his brain. And he feels this activity, to which he has surrendered himself in sleep, flowing warmly into his physical body, so that this physical body is strengthened to meet the demands of the day. He experiences: You have worn out your instrument, and this activity is a restoration of the instrument for the physical body’s daily work. — Like an architect, we work on our own physical body during sleep, and the spiritual researcher does this consciously. The physical body is constantly worn down during the day, and we bring with us from another world the forces we need to have a restorative effect on our physical body. We do this unconsciously during sleep. If we consciously bring before our soul what we do there in the unconscious state of sleep, it will seem plausible to us that during sleep our soul dwells in a world other than the physical one. From the moment we fall asleep until we wake up, the soul truly immerses itself in a spiritual world, and that is the world from which human beings originate. Every night we must plunge into this sea of spirituality to draw out—to drink in—the forces we need for our physical being, forces that alone make our continued existence between birth and death possible.

[ 18 ] This is how our life unfolds: we continually appeal to our spiritual existence, and we see this spiritual core of the human being emerge anew each day from the spiritual world, as if in a small reincarnation. We find only one difference between reincarnation and waking up: When we wake up in the morning, we always encounter the same physical body that we have built up since our birth. But when we reincarnate into a new life, we must first build up our physical body anew.

[ 19 ] When we consider the course of life, we see many and varied things coming toward us that we can take in with our soul, but which we cannot translate into our physical life. We develop by repeatedly drawing new forces from sleep, but there is a certain limit to the incorporation of these forces into our physical being. Musical impressions, for example, can only be received by the soul if there is a musical ear. The soul encounters a limit in the physical. Much of what is in our soul—what it seeks to process—cannot be incorporated into our external physicality. This gives rise to a certain disharmony that goes beyond the ordinary fatigue that compels us to sleep. This gradual mismatch between the body and our soul life becomes increasingly pronounced the more a person develops a richer soul life. The life of the soul becomes increasingly out of step with the life of the outer physical body. And here we must ask ourselves: Where do we get this physicality from? — When we see this body developing from indeterminacy in physiognomy and gestures into a definite form, we regard the body we have in a particular life as the result of earlier lives. We use this body as an instrument. In the course of our lives, we enrich our soul, and we find that what we have acquired in this life encounters limits in our physicality, and this ultimately shatters this body as well.

[ 20 ] Here we have the descending line of life. We should be grateful that we are once again separated from this body, that we are moving toward death, that we have a soul with a richly developed inner life that transcends the physical body, right up to the point of death. Anyone who looks more deeply into these matters will understand that a richly developed soul must transcend physicality, and that we should not be surprised that in old age—especially in people with a richly developed soul—the brain can no longer serve the life of the soul. Kant, for example, became mentally impaired in his old age, despite his rich intellect. The body’s external instrument is no longer fit for the soul; it withdraws with the content it has gained in this life, and it finally breaks free from the body. What we call death is different in humans than in animals. The ever-enriching human soul breaks free from physicality and passes through death. Then, based on the abilities and content it has acquired in life, this soul builds its own body for a new incarnation.

[ 21 ] Now one might say that we do not, in fact, remember our past lives. This objection would be just as valid as if someone were to say: A four-year-old child cannot do arithmetic, so no human being can do arithmetic at all. — Let us try, through the following consideration, to see that it is possible to acquire the ability to recall past earthly lives. To make this clear, I must mention that even in ordinary human life there is a period that a person cannot remember. These are the early years of childhood—a person does not remember them, even though they were already there at that time. The point in time as far back as memory extends is connected to another point in time. As you know, in the very earliest stage of life, a person has no sense of self. At a certain point, self-consciousness emerges in the child, and this coincides with the beginning of recollection. What lies before this point is not remembered. Why is that? Here, spiritual research shows that in their normal spiritual life today, people erect a kind of boundary around themselves through the development of this self-consciousness, through which they attain the highest aspect of this life. Human memory extends back only to the point where ego-consciousness emerges. That is the boundary; at this boundary, ego-consciousness takes its place and shields from observation whatever happened before it.

[ 22 ] We can learn to see beyond this boundary if we apply to our own souls the exercises that a student of spirituality must perform in order to glimpse into the spiritual world. There comes a moment when a person succeeds in raising this “I” one step beyond themselves. This is the moment when one is able to set aside the ordinary “I”-consciousness, which forms the boundary for memory. Then the person enters the spiritual world. They need only learn to set aside the ordinary “I”-consciousness. “I-consciousness” arises from contact with the physical body. When a person overcomes this—just as it is otherwise overcome during sleep—and when they learn to consciously enter the world in which they unconsciously dwell during sleep, then the possibility of looking back into past lives begins.

[ 23 ] This can only be achieved by consciously turning one’s gaze toward this other side of life—the side that lies beyond the gate of death. We must uproot from the soul the fear and dread of what the future holds in store for humanity. How much does humanity today tremble and fear everything that lies in the future—and especially the hour of death? Humanity must cultivate serenity regarding all feelings and sensations toward the future, face whatever may come with absolute equanimity, and simply think that whatever may come is bestowed upon us through the wise guidance of the universe. This must be brought before the soul again and again. This leads us to receive the powers of retrospect for past earthly lives as a gift.

[ 24 ] In this way, we can train our soul until we attain the awareness that past earthly lives are not hypotheses or dreams, but rather stand before the soul as facts—as something the soul can learn to observe. Our contemporaries, however, are unwilling to admit that it is possible to awaken dormant powers within the soul, so that new worlds—which until then had been hidden in the infinite bosom of existence—may be added to what the soul can experience. But we are approaching the point where people will gradually develop an ever-deeper connection to what can be explored from the dark depths of the past and the future. We are moving toward a future in which more and more people will feel the urge to know and understand the nature of the human soul and its destiny. Thus, a vision opens up before us of an expansion of our capacity for knowledge that enters into a covenant with the spiritual world.

[ 25 ] All higher knowledge, says Goethe, is an expansion of ordinary knowledge. Such expanded, such higher knowledge is not abstract reflection on things. Such higher knowledge is a connection between the essence of our soul and the spiritual-soul aspects around us. Plato cites as proof of the immortality of the soul the possibility of the human soul’s connection with the Eternal—with that which exists outside of space and time as an Eternal—while things within space and time come into being and pass away. If such higher knowledge is taken seriously, it contradicts everything that otherwise manifests as fatigue. Fatigue arises from the kind of knowledge that strives to investigate the things around us. But when a person allows the knowledge he has gained about things to take effect within his soul—when he has moments in life where what he has perceived through his eyes becomes ideas and he can let these ideas work within him—when he can transform the sublime realm of sounds into ideas and let them continue to resonate within his soul— then the human being learns to be awake in a state comparable to the state of sleep. Knowledge is given to us there to the same extent that the consciousness of our ordinary “I” begins to fade away. The arbitrariness of this ordinary ego-consciousness shatters, and the human being experiences true insight by sensing that, with his true self, he must submit to the laws of the spiritual world.

[ 26 ] While human beings are limited in the outer world to a small space by their physicality—which they repeatedly exhaust through the work of the day—and must constantly compensate for this physical wear and tear through sleep, they feel, when the soul is truly “at one with itself,” that they can draw strength from the spiritual world even while awake. They get the feeling that a spring opens up for the soul, through which healing elixirs flow to us from the spiritual world, so that they can master their physical nature. They feel that we can consciously enter the spiritual world, just as we do unconsciously every night in sleep. They feel that we can then consciously enter the realm of eternity when our knowledge becomes life. There it becomes something entirely new, something that cannot be for the ordinary consciousness of modern man. Plato said that in ancient times, people developed the highest knowledge out of enthusiasm. This capacity for enthusiasm may have been lost to modern man; what has not been lost to him, however, is the fact that knowledge of the world of ideas can become a life force within him, that he can feel how he connects with the root of existence and eternity by penetrating into things with his spiritual self in an act of cognition.

[ 27 ] In this way, we come to know insight as something living, as something that heals right down to the physical level. It takes us a long time to come to know this insight—that is, this source of life within our soul. And we also come to understand its connection to a completely different aspect of our culture. All our knowledge must flow into what we might call being permeated by the living Christ. What is this living Christ in the human soul? Nothing other than what we can experience when knowledge and truth come alive within us—as has just been explained—when we feel our personality filled, as it were, by a second personality—by something that is truth itself. This is the living Christ, who is truth and life in the human soul. When one grasps Christ in this way, he is not an abstract idea, but rather the living being who intervened at a specific moment in human development—a being who accomplished the Mystery of Golgotha and thereby entered into the life of human souls.

[ 28 ] In the past, humanity’s understanding of human beings differed from that which followed the Mystery of Golgotha. In ancient times, people looked back to the origin of humanity, and they sensed: It is not as sensory beings that human beings are valuable for the development of humanity; as spiritual beings, we have descended from a spiritual world into this sensory world to live in a physical body, having previously been in a sea of divine-spiritual life; through our soul, we can find our way back to this common origin of humanity.

[ 29 ] This is no longer appropriate for our time; our time calls for something else. In ancient times, the human soul sought the origin of humanity in order to become aware of what united people. Today, we look toward what a human being can become—a common goal for all people. Looking toward this goal, people must be able to say to themselves: This concerns every human being; something must come alive within each person in their innermost being—that is the living Christ. In him, human souls will come together in the future. The Earth, the Earth’s physical body—it will disintegrate along with its material existence. But the human souls who have the living Christ within them will ascend to other levels of existence. When the body of the entire Earth will have disintegrated, then all of humanity will once again be one—but not as it was before it descended to the Earth; rather, it will be one because the Christ will live within this humanity like a common soul-blood.

[ 30 ] All our understanding must be devoted to that great moment in human development when the gaze of the human soul can turn to the God-man who accomplished the Mystery of Golgotha. When we look to the future of humanity, we look toward the Christianization of every human being. This has a completely different meaning and significance than when Buddhist teachings speak of Nirvana, by which they mean the soul’s detachment from all earthly things. No, the soul is not to detach itself from the earthly. We look to the living Christ, who can embrace our souls with his life, and to how the soul, through the life of Christ within it and through immersion in the source of wisdom and truth, can develop ever more richly in ever-new incarnations.

[ 31 ] Thus we see that spiritual science is not in opposition to that without which our culture cannot be conceived—Christianity. It does not seek to combat Christianity, but rather to deepen it by pointing to the living Christ. As Westerners, we look upon the event of Golgotha as the moment that is also known from history, but which only acquires its profound value and deep significance for us when we not only derive the Christ-idea from the historical Christ, but also deepen this Christ-idea through spiritual science. Only when we imbue our knowledge with the Christ-idea—illuminating and spiritualizing it—does this Christ-idea become the means through which the true idea of immortality opens up to us with ever greater certainty. And when Christ has thus become a light of knowledge and a life of knowledge within us, then we connect with the power through which we pass through many deaths and many lives. Knowledge of Christ is the path for human beings to take within themselves the powers that lead them to true immortality—that is, to victory over death.

[ 32 ] This idea can be grasped only through higher knowledge—not through ordinary knowledge, which is concerned solely with the physical and the material. Nowadays, people focus only on the outward, the material aspects of human beings, and these are the most fleeting, the most transient. This is pointed out, for example, by Hamlet’s words, which reveal how death must appear to him in his melancholic state of mind, in which the light of Christ does not yet shine. He speaks of the great Alexander, saying:

Alexander turned to dust;
Dust is earth;
We make clay from earth.

[ 33 ] And he speaks of the great Caesar:

The great Caesar, now dead and turned to clay,
Plugs a hole, no doubt, against the harsh north wind;
Oh, that the earth, before which the world trembled,
Might form a wall against wind and weather.

[ 34 ] But here Hamlet is speaking only of where the earth—which became Caesar’s body—might have gone. He is preoccupied with the fleeting, transitory matter, instead of reflecting on where the great, richly developed souls of the great Alexander and the great Caesar have gone. One fails to see what truly matters in a human being if one looks only at the transitory, at the physical form, and ponders what may have become of it. One must look beyond what passes through death and birth in order to recognize what true immortality is.

[ 35 ] Over the past few centuries, during which our understanding of the material world has made such tremendous progress, we have become increasingly accustomed to viewing matter—that which binds the spirit—as the essential reality. But matter will perish, disintegrate; the Earth’s body, which consists of matter, will decay. The spiritual researcher, for example, views today’s research on radium in such a way that he knows: Here lies the beginning of the shattering of the atoms that make up the Earth’s body. The material substance of the Earth will perish, but the eternal—including that of the Earth’s body—will enter into the eternal essence of things. Today’s quest for knowledge pursues the material, which holds the soul in its spell. People believe they can speak of eternity and of the indestructibility of matter. In response to such words, as spoken by Hamlet, it must be said—based on an understanding of the true nature of the human being and, at the same time, on an understanding of the true nature of matter— Not only the great Alexander, the great Caesar—no, all human souls are parts of eternity; in ever-new lifetimes, they clothe themselves in physicality drawn from the elements of the earth; they live through ever-new lives, which are but steps toward immortality. This applies to every human being:

The humblest of mortals
is a son of eternity.
And in each new life
he will conquer the old death.