The Rudolf Steiner Archive

6. Death and Immortality in the Light of Spiritual Science

[ 1 ] Two questions that undoubtedly touch the very depths of every human soul in the most profound sense will be addressed in the two lectures today and tomorrow—this evening from a more general perspective, and tomorrow we will delve into the consideration of specific individual questions. There is no doubt that the questions concerning the nature of death and what may lie behind the word “immortality” must truly arouse the deepest, most sincere interest in every human soul, and one may say that this interest must still be the greatest conceivable, even when setting aside all the wishes and desires that the human soul associates with the event of death and the question of immortality.

[ 2 ] But even all idle curiosity—indeed, even everything that is commonly called a thirst for knowledge in everyday life—can be set aside when these two questions are to be considered. We can set these aside because, in every profound moment of our lives, we are continually inspired by two things—sometimes more consciously, sometimes more from the deepest, most hidden recesses of our inner life—to find the strength and confidence, the assured hope in our lives, to want to know something about these questions. There are two such things. The first is everything that is encompassed by the idea of human destiny. This destiny presents us not only with theoretical questions but with questions of life, about which we know that if we cannot obtain an answer that satisfies us in any way, this must signify weakness, a tendency toward doubt, and a diminution of our soul. Human destiny intervenes in human existence in a mysterious and enigmatic way. One person is placed, seemingly through no fault of their own, in a situation that can hardly bring them satisfaction—a situation where it is impossible for them to develop within their soul any meaningful forces for human welfare and human endeavor. On the other hand, we see how, seemingly without any merit of their own, another person finds themselves in a position that not only makes a rosy existence possible for them, [but also] allows them to develop the finest talents for human salvation and well-being. Human beings, with their theories, seek the causes when external facts occur, and there is a certain reluctance to investigate the causes of human fate.

[ 3 ] When we consider our emotional life, with all that can so mysteriously unfold within it, we see everywhere that it is precisely this emotional life—the most intimate depths of our soul—that raises questions about the causes of our fate. Perhaps the individual does not ask: What are the causes of this or that happening in my life—that would be a theoretical slant on the question; but what we feel calls us to contentment or despair, to hopeful and confident work or to despondency toward all endeavor. But the most important questions in this realm are those that may not even be formulated as theoretical questions, but rather are expressed in satisfactions, in feelings of bliss, in despondency, and in the sense of abandonment and loneliness; these are questions that, only half-asked, remain stuck in the soul before they can be openly articulated, yet they constitute the happiness and suffering of our entire existence. If fate could intervene in our lives in such a way that we could say it fosters our talents or our deeds here and there, [or] hinders our progress, then these questions would not be so pressing. But when we look more deeply, we find that everything we are at the very core of our being—how we live, how our worth and our competence manifest themselves—is the result of our fate. Human beings tell themselves that their entire being, the entire inner configuration of their nature, is more dependent in no [other] creature on what seemingly approaches life from the outside and shapes and forms that life.

[ 4 ] Thus, it is the anxious question posed to fate—one that, perhaps only half-articulated, drifts away, asking: Where does our entire existence actually come from? What is mysteriously enclosed within us and is so dependent on what we must experience as our external fate? We need only consider two facts alongside the countless individual cases: there we will find how our entire being, our innermost essence, is dependent on fate. One fact is that human beings are placed within a particular linguistic region, a community. Anyone who realizes how much of the intimate fabric of our inner life is shaped by the very way language enters it will say to themselves: Who you are depends on how fate has placed you within a linguistic region. Or consider how much of our confidence and hope for life depends on how our parents, our environment, and our teachers treated us in our early youth. How can harsh treatment harden our entire being, throughout our entire earthly existence! One need only consider how mysterious the interplay of fate is in this very realm. A case taken directly from life can teach us precisely about this area: a child who, at the age of seven—through the way in which fate placed him within a community—experienced a profound injustice from his surroundings that left a deep impression on his soul. At times the child seems to forget this outwardly, but in the depths of the soul it lives on [within the child], continuing to work in the deep undercurrents—what has burrowed itself into the soul as injustice. The child then becomes a middle school student. Something special happens in his sixteenth year. A powerful influence emanates from his teacher in the sense that the student must once again experience a new injustice. Had he not experienced the injustice in his seventh year, the matter might have passed without any effect, just as it did for his classmate. But because the old impression continued to work in the depths of the soul, even though it had been forgotten on the surface, it combined with the experience of the seventh year, resulting in a student’s suicide. Thus we see how our entire being—the way we enter into life—is more deeply connected to the question of our destiny.

[ 5 ] The second thing becomes apparent to a person when they reflect on the course of their life, how they accumulate life experiences, and how they become more and more mature over the years. This may be more pronounced in some people than in others, but this process of maturing becomes evident upon close examination of one’s life; it presents itself in such a way that we usually have to admit: We have become more mature in those things we did imperfectly, from the perspective we must adopt after having gained experience. If we were allowed to do them a second time, [then] we would do them better. We learn things through life, but we learn precisely by performing imperfect actions in this life. The most intimate life experiences result from making our imperfect actions our teachers. Then, looking back from a certain point in our development, we tell ourselves: We have learned many things; we have become more mature, and this knowledge is within us. Where does this experience go? What happens to it when we pass through the gate of death? Does it vanish without a trace into the floods of nothingness?—Yes, we do not always have to take such a life experience to heart; we can say: What we do or fail to do has an effect such that other people experience either benefit or, perhaps, harm as a result. We know that our worth as human beings depends on whether we have harmed or helped others. From this arises another kind of life experience, which coalesces into an overall sense, into fundamental feelings, into the need to do many things differently than we did in our past life. Thus, we feel as though we have many debts that we can no longer repay. For we created these debts precisely by having already committed the actions in question—the very acts through which we incurred the guilt. These are the most intimate, deepest experiences of the soul. Does everything we have acquired—which makes us different from who we were at the beginning of our lives—vanish into an indeterminate nothingness as we live through life? That is the second point. No matter what a person’s nature may be, no matter how unspoken it may remain—it remains a matter of feeling, a matter of life within them.

[ 6 ] Now we can say: In our present age, we have left behind a period in human development in which the noblest, most moral people—who were at the same time scientific materialists and yet held fast to moral ideals—came to terms with such questions of the soul in a very peculiar way. From the standpoint of spiritual science—which is to be presented here—a mindset is required that is never unjust, even toward opponents. For it must be said: It was downright heroic how materialist thinkers came to terms with precisely the kind of question that has now been raised. They told themselves: With death, our inner spiritual life is extinguished, like the light of a candle when the fuel is consumed. But then we have the awareness that what we have lived out lives on in the process of human historical development. Everyone passes on to posterity what they have worked for, even if it was achieved and earned only within the smallest circle. Many such thinkers have told themselves that it is selfish to demand that a person have their own, personal immortality. But it is selfless in the highest sense to die in full awareness that the personal self will perish and that what one has done will pass into the process of humanity. One may say: This view is heroic; compared to certain forms of religious egoism, this heroism of materialism appears grand, but it cannot stand up to a deeper understanding of the question, for the reason that everyone, when contemplating life, must say to themselves: The most intimate aspect—that which is your own life experience—is such an innermost treasure of your soul that you cannot simply hand it over to the outside world. There is much we can give to the outside world, but what we give does not belong to the most intimate part of our soul. The best of what we have learned is so deeply bound to our individuality, to our uniqueness, that it is impossible to hand it over to the world around us. So the question remains: How do we come to terms with the sight of what the soul has experienced—what has given it value in the manner described, which necessitates that life not be concluded if this value is to be fully lived out, and which it does not relinquish when a person passes through the gate of death?

[ 7 ] These are the two things: the contemplation of destiny and the contemplation of one’s own development. These questions must be answered in such a way that the answer can be described as both logical and scientific. To provide answers in the manner in which answers are provided in today’s external science is the goal of that endeavor which can be called spiritual science—an endeavor that inserts itself into contemporary culture and through which something of this culture is to be incorporated as an insight into much of what life needs in order to become strong and vigorous. It cannot be expected that the ideas presented today and tomorrow will be more than mere ideas. Those who believe that scientific answers are only those that relate to external events—to what can be seen with the eyes or grasped with the hands—will, of course, not accept these answers as scientific. The intention is merely to offer suggestions, which are, however, meant to show that the entire way of thinking, the entire way of viewing spiritual life, is akin to the methods of research in contemporary science. People today also demand answers to the questions described above—answers that can stand up to the scrutiny of rigorous science. Thus, the answers may appear different from science in the ordinary sense, but anyone who delves deeper into them will see that the mode of thinking in theosophy is such that scientific needs can be satisfied alongside the spiritual needs of modern humanity.

[ 8 ] The starting point must be that of genuine, true self-knowledge. Because fate shapes the essence of our “self” and because our “self” grows ever more mature, these questions confront us, and therefore we can hope that an answer may flow from a true understanding of our innermost being—that which we call our “self.” But it is difficult for people today to recognize what can be called self-knowledge. Enormous obstacles stand in the way of contemplating one’s own being. Only by overcoming these obstacles can one enter into self-knowledge, and, starting from self-knowledge, move on to knowledge of the world through the connection of one’s own “I” with the world.

[ 9 ] When we want to examine a substance in science, we cannot understand its nature under certain conditions. Even though oxygen is present in water, we cannot examine it in water; we must first separate it from the water through a physical process, and only then can we examine its nature. How very different it is, then, when it presents itself to us in water. It must be something similar when we wish to examine our true self, so that this examination may be satisfying to us. Our self, like oxygen to water, is bound in ordinary life to the outer body. What we call our soul-body—that in which we find ourselves as in our innermost being—we always experience in such a way that we perceive the outer world through our physical organs, so that we come to understand it through the human brain. Just as oxygen is bound to hydrogen to form water, so the soul life is bound to the physical life—to what we have before us as human beings, as ourselves. Thus arises the necessity that, in order to conduct a true examination, we must first separate the soul life from the physical life.

[ 10 ] How can we do this? How can we present our inner life to ourselves in such a way that we can view it in its truth? According to the findings of spiritual research, everyday life does indeed detach the soul from the body over the course of twenty-four hours during the night. Let us accept this as an assertion for now; we will return to it later. When a person falls asleep in the evening, the whole person is not contained within the body; rather, it is that which continues the outer functions of the soul, as happens in the waking state, but not the actual life of the soul—which we recognize as our innermost being—as joy and sorrow, emotions, drives, and passions—which is truly set apart during nighttime sleep and in the morning re-enters and submerges itself into the body to once again make use of the physical organs, the senses, and the brain, the instrument of the soul. One might say, proceeding from scientific prejudices, that it is possible the entire life of the soul—with all its sensations and feelings, with everything that takes place internally—is nothing other than a result of physical life, just as the flame is the result of processes within the candle. But this does not hold up to deeper consideration. Common sense must make it clear to us that there is some truth to this.

[ 11 ] In the state a person experiences from falling asleep to waking up, processes take place in the body that we can only understand as life processes. What flows from within as organic activity into the brain and the other organs continues to have an effect. A comparison brings us to a logical idea that, upon deeper reflection, cannot be avoided. If we compare our sense organs to the lungs, we find that our lungs, like our sense organs, are nourished from within and sustained by the organism. What we see flowing in as a life activity can be compared to what flows into the brain and other organs from within the body—as a nourishing activity—during waking hours, but also during the night. But can we identify anything happening within the body that supplies the lungs’ activity from within, apart from the nature of the air that must flow into the lungs? Could the activity of inflow into the lungs from within ever achieve the lungs’ purpose if air did not flow in from the outside? Does this inner life activity have anything to do with the nature and composition of the air? We cannot learn anything about the air from within. The same is true of the soul. Just as the essence of the air that flows into the lungs is unrelated to the activity that flows into the lungs as an organic process, so too does the content of our soul—which flows into us in the morning and leaves the body in the evening—have nothing to do with what constitutes inner bodily activity, that is, the supply of nourishment that flows from our organism into our soul organs.

[ 12 ] Delve deeply into this comparison, try to think it through—you will not be able to escape the logical conclusion that what we experience in our inner life, what flows into us, is just as foreign to the body’s inner functions as air is to them, so that the independence and inner essence of our inner life appear to be well-founded. After all, a person does not truly live their soul life in such a way that they say: “I live in my muscles, my brain.” That is not their soul life; rather: “I live in my feelings, my emotions.” That in which they live in this way enters their body in the morning like an inhalation and leaves it in the evening like an exhalation.

[ 13 ] Logical thinking may now raise the following question regarding this idea: How can we consider the life of the soul—which stands so independently in contrast to bodily life—in and of itself? If we could observe it during sleep, that would be helpful. But in ordinary life, even though the soul separates from the body, we cannot examine the distinct nature of the life of the soul, for the moment it separates, it slips into unconsciousness and eludes the possibility of examination. There is, however, another way to gain access to this life of the soul, one that every person may have encountered—namely, through a psychic experiment conducted by a researcher of the spirit world who has acquired the means to artificially separate his or her life of the soul from the body; this is clairvoyant observation.

[ 14 ] The first consideration that may arise for every person is the following. It begins with the question: What prevents us from viewing our inner life as separate from our physical life? Two things. First, the moment we wake up, a connection is established through the senses—and the thinking bound to the senses—with the external sensory world, so that we do not have our inner life to ourselves; we are not within our inner life, but rather within what surrounds us as a world of light and sound. There, the experiences of our soul flow together with what penetrates us through our eyes and ears. Whenever we take pleasure in a sound, so to speak, we always have the sound penetrating from the outside and the joy within—like two things flowing together. But we lose ourselves in the external sound. We do not separate our inner life, so that we lose ourselves in the external sensory world. Whoever looks up at the magnificent starry sky, contemplates the wonders of the rising and setting sun—everything that influences us from the outside—feels it flowing together with what is taking place in the innermost depths of the soul: what they experience in the soul as uplifting and devotional, and the strength that flows into them. We have never chemically separated our inner life from what penetrates from the outside world. That is why some philosophers say there is no inner life of the soul at all; they even deny the inner content of the soul and allow it to dissolve into those images that ebb and flow on the horizon of our inner life. For the more intimate observer, what Goethe said becomes true: What gives the countless stars, all the splendors of the heavens, their true value? Only that everything that lives out there in the vast world is reflected in the human heart, finds expression there, so that something is experienced that transcends ordinary expression. And when one proceeds to thorough self-observation, one will find: The soul feels what unfolds outside; it knows that it experiences the inner in external events, that it has progressed step by step, that inner soul events have strung themselves together, and that a continuous stream has arisen from the present moment back to the moment as far as we can recall—and that this stream is something other than what merely acts upon us from the outside. The autonomy of our soul life is compelling, and we ask whether our soul life can separate itself from its surroundings when we are directly confronted with the external world and merge with it. But when we look back not only on what we have seen, but also on the moments of elation and despondency we have experienced—and which we can recall—we find a stream of inner spiritual life.

[ 15 ] It is precisely this current that was mentioned earlier. It is life experience. With it, we stand at a certain point in our lives. Whether our life is short or long—when we pass through the gate of death, we will be in the same situation; we will behold the stream of ever-evolving life, see what has welled up in this soul from the outer world, and ask ourselves, as we take the great leap through the gate of death: Where shall we take that which has developed as a continuous stream within our soul? Thus, we are confronted with this one obstacle: our entanglement with the outer world.

[ 16 ] Therefore, it is essentially a developmental achievement when, by looking back and reflecting inward, we learn to set ourselves apart. But one thing becomes apparent to us when we set our inner life apart: we tell ourselves that what flows there, step by step, is interconnected. We look back to our first memory; we cannot remember what came before that ourselves, but older people can tell us about it. We remember what has happened from that moment onward, and we will strive to have moments as well when we artificially induce a state of sleep—but only that aspect through which we exclude external impressions.

[ 17 ] When, in such moments, we shut ourselves off from the splendor of the outside world and from its other stimuli, we separate our inner life just as we separate oxygen from water. This is a matter of experience for which no theoretical proof can be provided, just as one needs no proof that whales exist if one has never seen a whale. If one always keeps this inner life in mind, one will say: step by step, the life of the soul unfolds, and we arrive at the point to which external memory extends. We can conduct a kind of experiment using our entire inner experience. When we see that this stream of soul life flows onward from the point just described, and that what comes later follows what came before, to what does the point—up to which our earliest memory extends—attach itself? We see how our inner life strives forward; but what brought about the first moment we can recall? Now it is possible to evoke something within the inner life that acts solely within the soul’s experience—something that can give the human soul something entirely new, something that has never existed before.

[ 18 ] To describe what this new, unprecedented phenomenon looks like, I would like to point out something. Hydrogen is a gas, oxygen is a gas; these two gases combine to form water—something entirely new made from two different things. Just as something new—which is unlike these things—truly arises through the coming together of external things existing in the world, so too, if we turn our gaze ever further into the stream of our soul life, back to the starting point in this recollection, something entirely new can arise. Anyone who had never seen two gases combine to form a liquid would find this impossible to believe. What provided the initial impetus within our lives? Then, as if of its own accord, what we experience as our destiny comes before our eyes. Our destiny presents itself as an answer to this question. Why did it begin precisely from this starting point? Why did it turn out exactly this way? This question answers itself when we contemplate our destiny and focus solely on the fact that we must consider destiny not as an idea, but as something entirely different. With what should we view our destiny? What we should use to view our destiny becomes clear from the second obstacle: namely, that we do not usually view our destiny the way we do now, having reached this point. The second major obstacle is self-love and self-will.

[ 19 ] This inner will is a curious thing. Let us try to characterize it. What makes us content with ourselves, what gives us satisfaction in sustaining our lives, need not be characterized. But there is something peculiar about this inner will: it comes up against something in our inner life. This will—whatever it may accomplish in deeds, wishes, or desires—if our reason is to remain true to itself, we must admit that it cannot, of its own accord, readily intervene in the way our life experience has taken shape. There we allow ourselves to be taught by life; there we enter the school of life and let life dictate what we are to believe. Whether we regard something as true or false does not depend on our own will. Precisely that which matures us in life, which gives us insight—the will must be excluded from this! We must not summarize our experiences arbitrarily, but rather as common sense and the logic of the facts dictate.

[ 20 ] But this will is bound to our physicality as a force of the soul in a different way than our ideas and sensations—on which our experience depends and in which we cannot distinguish between what is external and what is internal. Our will is bound to our physicality in a different way. We see quite clearly how it constantly intervenes in our physicality. Let us consider what we come to know in the normal course of life as fatigue. It arises because muscles or other organs are worn out. Nothing seems more self-evident to the superficial observer than this. It seems plausible that physical organs are worn out, and yet it is not true. The physical organs, which live within our organism in a very specific way, do not wear out. What if organs like the heart had to recover through sleep? The organs upon which the conscious will has no effect remain constantly active and do not wear out. Consider the lungs, the heart, the diaphragm, and even the inner workings of the nervous system; these forces are always at work. What wears out is that which emanates from our conscious will. When we work in such a way that our muscles are set in motion by our will, then we become tired. No work causes fatigue if it arises from within the organism itself but remains confined within the organism itself. As long as the will is active—acting of its own accord—the will does not wear out the organism.

[ 21 ] You see it from yet another perspective. This is how the thought process works: If one indulges in the daydreams of the day, one does not grow tired; but one does grow tired when one intervenes in thinking with one’s will, in that consciousness—as an expression of our soul life, which we see acting independently—intervenes from the outside into our physical organism. The human will can act as an independent will only by allowing itself to be stimulated from the outside, by feeling compelled by various pressures; this will wears down our organism, so that we can say: Everything that constitutes the wearing down of life, everything that consumes our body, springs forth and flows out of the will that is compelled by something, that does not remain within the essence of the human being or within the soul’s essence, that is stimulated and determined from the outside, that, as an independent will, sets itself in opposition to what must come from the outside, and that is a destructive force within our organism.

[ 22 ] What, then, is the opposite—what builds up our organism? What actually gives it its configuration? It cannot be a thought, nor ideas, nor sensations; it must be something that, like the will, intervenes in our organism. Our own will must not feel compelled from the outside; it must be able to be our own will entirely. It can be so when our fate presents itself to us in such a way that we conceive of it not through ideas and concepts, but through the will, so that our own will does not come into conflict with itself. This can only happen if—no matter how much we may struggle and quarrel with our fate—we imagine that we would have willed this fate, as if we had brought it about ourselves. This can be carried out as an act of volition. In this way, we remove the obstacle of our own will. The will that regards fate as if we had placed ourselves within the linguistic community, within the family, has made a resolution of the will, albeit of a reverse kind.

[ 23 ] These are not mere assertions; rather, so far we have merely evoked certain states of mind. Then our destiny, as if we had willed it ourselves, travels back to the very first moment we can remember, just as hydrogen travels to oxygen. Then we have something in our soul that stands before us with certainty, as certain as our knowledge that a flame is hot. Now we truly experience something new: the completion of our soul life. Our destiny penetrates our soul life, and we have the answer to the question: What provided the initial impetus? — What gave the initial impulse was what we have established as our self-chosen destiny, and only in this way do we arrive at a true insight into what we were when we began our present earthly existence—if we conceive of destiny as something self-chosen and connect it with our soul life, which we come to know through self-observation. But then, once we have attained this inner experience—which, through self-observation, removes the two obstacles, the external world (Ahriman) and our own will (Lucifer)—we advance to the realization that it is we ourselves who have shaped our destiny. That moment—and everyone can experience this moment—is comparable to the moment when we wake up, when we do not say to ourselves, “You have come out of nothing,” but rather, “You are as you are now because you fell asleep last night.” Whoever earnestly recognizes their inner life through observation—an observation that, however, disregards external observation and dissolves the will of the self—comes to an experience that is like waking up and like remembering past earthly lives. One’s inner core of being emerges from past Earth lives and has shaped its own destiny; we come to a realization that we have lived through past Earth lives. It is not an ordinary memory, but our very life appears to us as one great memory. We come to accept the idea of repeated Earth lives. This earthly life that we go through between birth and death is the result of previous earthly lives. Human beings have lived through many earthly lives, and it follows that, given the state in which a person now finds themselves, they will go through further earthly lives. We are dealing with an inner core of being that, after death, enters a spiritual world and then returns to another earthly life.

[ 24 ] What we can hope for during the time between death and rebirth also arises from self-observation. You cannot intervene there with your will. Your will, your thoughts, your feelings, and what you have gained in the school of life exist separately within your inner life. How strange the will is: We move our hand, but in ordinary life we do not initially know what happens from the moment of willing to what we then see as movement. We see the will as it expresses itself in life through outward movements, gestures, and actions, but we lack any way of understanding how the will transforms into movements and actions. Whatever lies before us—whatever we have acquired as life experience—we must keep ourselves aloof from in this life, for if our will were to interfere, it would be distorted by our will. But in the course of life we learn that we cannot allow our will to act. We cannot influence the way we are placed in this life. When we are somewhat removed from life, there need be no hindrance to our will penetrating—purely and powerfully—what we are experiencing inwardly. When our body no longer forms the barrier between our will and our life experience, when these external experiences can no longer form the barrier, then the will can grasp, penetrate, and empower our life experience. We do this between death and a new birth. Our will will permeate everything we have experienced, so that in a new existence we can take the first step that we saw ourselves taking at the beginning of our earthly life.

[ 25 ] Thus we see how, through the connection established with our ideas, forces are formed that call us to a new earthly existence. Thus, spiritual science arrives at the concept of repeated earthly lives, which has presented itself as a matter of course to modern thinkers, so that they could not help but let their thoughts flow into this world of imagination—for example, Lessing, who, as the fruit of his life, gave us *The Education of the Human Race*. Here one realizes what led Lessing to say that this view is the only way to comprehend death and immortality. This idea may be scorned because people have known it since time immemorial; in earlier times, people had not yet been led astray, as they are in our time, by the events of the external world and by what has transpired within human culture. The human soul has absorbed what India, Persia, Egypt, and Greece had to offer—what might be called the current of human development. Does it make sense for a soul, after having absorbed all this, to die forever? — No, it makes no sense. If the soul carries over into later times everything it has worked out and embraces new experiences, then it is the souls themselves that carry the old cultural achievements into the modern era. Even in the nineteenth century, despite the fact that external scientific conditions were as unfavorable as possible, people came to realize this.

[ 26 ] But how spiritual science itself, through the spiritual experiments of the spiritual researcher, arrives at evidence that cannot be disputed—that is a topic for tomorrow. It remains only to explain how this plays out further: that such a perspective is gained through the processing of the inner life of the soul. But in doing so, it also exerts a reciprocal influence on the inner life of the soul. On the one hand, we look back to see how we have placed ourselves in this life based on our deeds, thoughts, and feelings from previous lives. We feel that we must also endure this life with all that fate brings us, so that our school of life may continue. As we feel this, we tell ourselves: Our life, as it unfolds within and around us, is the effect of earlier causes we ourselves have set in motion. This is the doctrine of karma, which for the new spiritual science is not an old law derived from Buddhism, but one that is derived by the modern soul—shaped by the natural sciences—from within itself.

[ 27 ] This life itself unfolds in an upward and downward trajectory. In youth, many forces from past lives work in such a way that our physical constitution can rise. Our powers develop and grow richer and richer until the peak is reached, which brings us satisfaction. Then comes the descending phase of life, when the face becomes lined and the body grows weary. It is certain for everyone that this will come, and they need thoughts that impart strength. But someone who views human life in the spiritual-scientific sense—not merely theoretically or intellectually—will see that spiritual science gives strength, that it acts almost like an elixir of life when we recognize its truth. We feel what flows into our outlook on life, our hopes, and our life’s work, and we will always feel it once our culture has been brought into the light of spiritual science. There we feel how, in the course of earthly life, precisely that which does not disintegrate in death but is grasped by our will grows and must grow; and when the greatest vitality is attained, it has the power to enter into the spiritual realm and, having drawn strength from the spiritual world, to fashion a new life for itself.

[ 28 ] We do not consider the questions of immortality theoretically; we live and learn to feel the immortality of the soul by sensing, through an intuitive understanding of spiritual science, the richness of our soul flowing through us—a soul that tells us: As you approach the end of your life, you develop ever-stronger forces that do not perish any more than physical forces, which are [not] merely transformed but are eternal and immortal. In the growth of these powers, in their real existence, you feel your immortality. Immortality does not begin only when we are dead, but is already present during our lifetime. It exists because the human soul is present, and because human beings can already sense it within their bodies while they are alive. Spiritual science is not theory, but the lifeblood of existence, and if we understand it correctly, it becomes a life force. Thus, it does not drive us to speculate; rather, immortality is something the soul can perceive as something substantial and physical, which enhances the forces and carries within itself immortality as its deepest essence and [its deepest] quality. To perceive and feel immortality as the very foundation of one’s confidence in life—that is what must spring from spiritual science. And so we may summarize, in a variation of words, how the insights of spiritual science become the elixir of life:

They speak to the human senses
The things in the vastness of space,
They change with the passage of time
At the very core of their being.
Through recognition, the human soul
Unbounded by the vastness of space
And undeterred by the passage of time
Penetrates into the realm of eternity.