The Rudolf Steiner Archive

7. The Essence of Eternity and the Nature of the Human Soul in the Light of Spiritual Science

[ 1 ] Yesterday I had the opportunity to speak to you from a general perspective about two significant questions—death and immortality from the standpoint of spiritual science—and this evening I would like to address a few specific points that may shed light on these questions. Just as it was possible yesterday, in light of the two major questions discussed, to point to two important experiences of the human soul—which, in fact, always raise these questions, more or less explicitly or implicitly, from the hidden depths of the human soul— so today, too, we can take as our starting point two inner experiences—two experiences that constantly direct the human soul toward that idea which must actually make the intellect feel dizzy when it attempts to grasp it in any definite way: the idea of eternity. And when the human soul often feels compelled to say that it has some connection to eternity in contrast to the transience of the outer physical form, it might seem as though such questions arise rather from the longings of the human soul, which yearns for a destiny other than that which lies between birth and death. But even here we can set aside all wishes and desires, even all thirst for knowledge, and point to two experiences of the human soul that align it with the idea of eternity. These are experiences of the deepest, most inner moral feeling. For what could the human soul feel more deeply, more earnestly, than the invincible striving for everlasting perfection? One need only, so to speak, delve into one’s own inner self with true impartiality, and one will have to admit that one would be untruthful toward what the soul aspires to be if one did not say: An invincible striving for perfection, for a more meaningful existence, is inherent in this human soul. That is the first experience.

[ 2 ] The other experience, however, which can assert itself just as strongly, is that at no moment in our lives—no matter how old we may become—can we deny how far we are from what shines before us as the ideal of perfection, how deeply imperfect we feel in comparison to what we truly want to be according to the innermost essence of our soul. The striving for perfection and, at the same time, the necessary acknowledgment of imperfection awaken in the human soul a longing for an eternal striving—a striving that is unhindered by those external laws of coming into being and passing away, which we cannot seriously imagine could impose any limits—internal limits—on our striving for perfection. Thus we can clearly see that human beings do not raise the question of the immortality of the human soul out of mere desire or wish, but out of the longing to serve the highest moral order they envision—to strive for the highest ideal of moral perfection, which they must set forth from this, in the highest sense, moral longing— —but that is the question of eternity.

[ 3 ] As mentioned yesterday, the German philosopher Hegel put it so beautifully: The immortality of the human soul, as a quality inherent in the nature of that soul, cannot begin only after a person has passed through death; rather, if there is something in the human soul from which one can recognize that this soul has a claim to an imperishable existence, then this must also be evident in the life of the soul within its physical existence. Immortality cannot begin only after death; it must already be present in life—in this physical life. — Thus, the question of the nature of eternity also directs us to an investigation of the nature of the human soul, so that from this nature of the human soul we may recognize to what extent it is conceivable—indeed, necessary—to conceive of the soul as transcending the laws of the body’s transience. And if we—as was also hinted at yesterday—if we wish to investigate this nature of the human soul, then, if we are to meet the genuine, if not the prejudiced, demands of modern science, we must separate this human soul from its connection to the body. For we were able to point out yesterday that it is also impossible, for example, to investigate the nature of hydrogen as long as it is bound to water; if we wish to investigate hydrogen’s own nature, we must separate it from its connection to water. And so we know, of course, that in ordinary, external, everyday life, the soul is connected to everything we might call the physical organism: we perceive through our body, look outward, observe things through the external, physical sense organs; we think about things through that thinking which is bound to the instrument of the brain; and when we feel and will, we are also bound to our physicality. Just as hydrogen is bound to water and cannot be recognized within the water, so too the nature of the human soul cannot be recognized in the way it appears to us in ordinary life, where it is firmly bound and, for our consciousness, not separated from external experiences and those inner experiences that arise from physicality.

[ 4 ] Now, as we said yesterday, every night when a person sleeps, there is, in essence, a detachment of their soul experience from their outer physical life. However, in the course of today’s lecture, we will be able to demonstrate—by approaching it from the so-called spiritual-scientific perspective—what was presented yesterday, so to speak, merely as an assertion of spiritual science and proven only logically. For now, however, let us accept it as it was presented yesterday as an assertion or proven logically: that, so to speak, the life which we experience in the innermost soul, is not something that merely flares up like the flame of a candle, but rather something that, as an independent entity, merges into physical life in the morning upon waking and leaves it again upon falling asleep—thus relating to this physical life in the same way that air relates to the lungs. But it was already stated yesterday that something—one might say, to paraphrase Frohschammer—makes it “tangibly” impossible for us to investigate this independent, soul-life separate from the body when we have it before us or within us from the moment we fall asleep until we wake up. This is impossible because, at the very moment of detachment, unconsciousness also sets in. Thus, in this normal life, we cannot undertake such an investigation. We could only become independent of the physical realm if we became conscious of the soul as it ebbs away, as it withdraws from the physical body.

[ 5 ] But there is, in fact, a way to consider an intermediate state—one that is by no means being discussed here in the sense of a superstitious “science of dreams,” but rather in the sense of the strictest scientific rigor: It is the dream state, that peculiar state of dream life in which we experience, on the one hand, images being conjured before our soul, but on the other hand, the course of these images differs entirely from the life that these images lead in their context within normal, waking daily life. The dream state is an intermediate state between wakefulness and deep, dreamless sleep. Perhaps—to put it this way for now—we can discern something about the nature of the human soul from the strange illusion of the dream. In doing so, however, we must apply the same strict, logical, and scientific principles of research to dream life as are otherwise applied in the field of science. And so, lest we extend this discussion too far, let us immediately turn our attention to a very specific dream through which we wish, as it were, to recognize how remarkably dream life can shed light on what is actually taking place within the soul. I would just like to preface this by saying that when such examples from life—for instance, from the world of dreams—are recounted here, they are not fictionalized accounts but events that actually took place—for this is the only way conscientious research can proceed. The dream in question is as follows: There was a middle school student who had a special talent for drawing. As a result, in his final year of middle school, he was given a very difficult drawing to copy. Everyone else received easier templates. It had become standard practice at that middle school for students to submit several such copies of drawing templates at the end of each year. And it so happened that this student, precisely because he had a special talent for drawing and was given that difficult template, was unable to finish it all year long—not even by the end of the school year. This made him very anxious, and his anxiety intensified as the end of the school year approached. And although the compassionate administration of that school fully recognized that this was natural and did not harm the student, he had nonetheless gone through this experience; he had endured those episodes of anxiety. It is now interesting to follow this person’s life as it unfolded. Naturally, he continued to demonstrate his special aptitude for drawing. And, recurring periodically, he would have a very specific dream that always lasted several nights and then passed. The dream consisted of him—even into old age—feeling as if he were transported back to his final year of middle school, where he felt himself striving to draw and draw, yet unable to finish. And the anxiety he experienced there—so intense that he always woke up trembling—was so strong in the dream that it could not be compared at all to the fear he had actually endured. After a break of several years, the dream would always recur periodically. One cannot understand this unless one considers this strange dream experience in the context of the rest of that person’s life. What was peculiar, in fact, was that every time this man had come through such a dream experience, he felt that his drawing abilities had, in a certain sense, grown; he could draw better lines, could better express what he imagined, and had become more skilled. Thus, this person’s life appeared to be a step-by-step process of perfecting his drawing skills, and each stage was initiated by the characteristic anxiety dream.

[ 6 ] You will not find it unnatural if spiritual science now attempts to offer the following explanation for this dream. It is natural that something like an improvement in drawing ability cannot occur suddenly in human nature—that it requires preparation—but it appeared as though it had always occurred seemingly suddenly after that nightmare. This is also easy to explain: certain inner processes, extending into the body itself, had to take place first—more subtle rhythmic-physiological processes—because we have, after all, bound everything that relates to the external world to the instruments of the body. Changes had to take place within the body’s instruments. These changes apparently occurred slowly and gradually during those periods in which consciousness had no inkling that heightened abilities would manifest. For a while, one experiences it in consciousness as if the same intensity of abilities were present. But from below, in the depths of the entire human organism, what the individual would later need was already being prepared as the heightened drawing abilities rose into consciousness. And how did what was fermenting and working down there manifest itself? It manifested itself in that, at first—at the very moment it was able to burst into consciousness—it played out in the half-consciousness of a dream, expressing itself through dream images. Even before the will was in a position to make use of these abilities, they emerged from the hidden depths of the soul into the dream experience, which essentially bears only an outward resemblance to what is actually developing at the very core of the soul. We can observe two things: the transition from a process taking place deep within the subconscious—or, let us say, the unconscious—physical organism to an emergence, first into the semi-conscious images of the dream and then into full consciousness. Who could still doubt that the very same forces, which later appear in consciousness as an enhancement of artistic abilities, are simply the transformed abilities that previously worked deep within the physical organism? After all, they manifested themselves, so to speak, in their half-transformed state in the dream images. That is one thing we have, so to speak, clearly before us: the possibility of thinking in this field of spiritual science in the same way that natural scientists think. Every physicist will understand that pressure is transformed into heat. It belongs to this very same way of thinking when one says: What later appears in consciousness as drawing abilities had first been at work in a different form at a deeper level; it was this process itself that first prepared the organs, and only once the organs were in place could the enhancement of these abilities occur—just as a person must first work on a machine in order to then use it. What ultimately emerges as a usable instrument must first be prepared by the same spiritual force. What ultimately appears as the result is itself what first prepares the organs in the depths of the soul’s organization.

[ 7 ] The other point is this: how strangely dreams work—and this is perhaps even more interesting for a deeper examination of human nature. What does this have to do with what has happened there—with the transformation of the soul forces at work in the depths of human nature into conscious ones, with what plays itself out there as states of anxiety in strange images belonging to a long-past lifetime? One thing is that it is the emotional context, and not the life of the imagination, that is at work in that person. What the person has gone through—the anxiety they have experienced in their soul—is a force that is much more intimately connected to the soul, to one’s very innermost being, than the powers of imagination, which are, after all, borrowed from the external world in ordinary life. But the dream reveals itself to be more intimately linked to the life of the soul than the conscious imaginative life of the day precisely because it presents itself in images in such a way that we, so to speak, place before us images that do not resemble imagination but rather an inner experience, the life of the soul. We can see this clearly in dream images: in their seemingly strange connections, our emotional life is at work. Everywhere, the images that flit before us in dreams are the incidental; they live and unfold in a seemingly arbitrary manner—arbitrary in comparison to the regular connections we see in the outside world.

[ 8 ] Here, for example, we can observe the following. Once, in the distant past, a person did not like another person because he did not particularly appreciate that person’s work, and had formed a certain impression, a certain emotional response, toward that person. By now, he had long since forgotten the things associated with that person. Many years later, he dreamed of that person again, but now that person was not a human being but a little puppy that barked unpleasantly, only for the barking to then give way to a language whose sound was reminiscent of that person’s speech. And in the dream, the puppy could fit into a context quite arbitrarily. But there was something that turned out differently than one might have wished. One wished that this person were not entirely offended. And so one said something to the little dog, and the little dog barked in such a way that it said: “What you did to me was bad, but it doesn’t matter; it will be all right again—it was just a misunderstanding.”—What does the little dog have to do with that person? If we consider logical thinking—all thinking trained by the external world—then the little dog truly has nothing to do with what is actually happening. But if we consider the state of mind of the person in question, the way he related to that other person, we see that this is faithfully reflected in a much later “dream.” But when it comes to the shaping of the image, our mind reigns freely; it transforms what it feels into the symbol of the little dog; it transforms dream consciousness, everything, into seemingly arbitrary images. But only [what] we call the logical causal connection—a connection we derive from the external world—is arbitrary; but it is entirely lawful for these ideas—however different they may be from the external world—to be interwoven with what our mind, our inner self, carries forward from the events of life. The soul thus shows us in a dream: it is more within itself than when it is connected to its bodily members. When it looks outward, when it is connected to its organs, it lives with everything external, with everything we can learn from the school of life. In dreams, the soul does not adhere to what it experiences from the outside; there it forms its emotional states solely in ideas, and these bear the exact imprint of emotional life. From this we can see that what we call our emotional life—and subsequently our volitional life—is more intimately connected with the deepest foundations of our soul than mere imaginative life. And now let us apply what has been revealed to us through an observation of the dream world in the case of that person with the nightmare to a consideration of the entire human life from birth to death. There we see something remarkable: that with our coherent memory—with what we regard as the actual content of our soul life—we can, in normal life, trace back only to a certain point in our childhood. Beyond this point, a person cannot recall anything. What certainly happened before that can only be told to us by other people—parents, older siblings, and so on. Undoubtedly, everything we come to know later—our conscious inner life; the content of what we can think of as the continuous stream of inner life, what stirs, weaves, and lives within us—was already present before that. The fact that we become aware of our “I” from a certain point in time onward is no proof that it was not there before, that it only began to develop from that point onward. The fact that we know something has nothing to do with reality. The fact that we only become aware of our “I” from a certain point onward has nothing to do with the fact that this inner life was already present before that.

[ 9 ] But now, when we look closely at a child’s life—in a unique way—we realize just how it already exists. Is it not true of this childhood life that we can say: The life of dream and sleep bears a resemblance to what we sense, in an indefinite darkness, of our conscious soul life? Human beings, so to speak, sleep or dream their way into earthly existence: the way a child engages with its surroundings, the way it carries what it experiences over into later moments, the way it forgets things and allows new ones to enter—this entire way of life of the child bears a resemblance to the life of sleep and dreams. Human beings “sleep” their way into life; they “live” their way into this earthly existence with a diminished consciousness, with a soul life that has been toned down. But how much do they owe to this toned-down soul life! It is profoundly true, as Jean Paul said, that we learn more in the first three years of life than in the three “academic” years. But something else is also true: In the first years of life, when we have no way of bringing our soul life into consciousness, we can observe how thoroughly work is being done—first and foremost on the formation and organization of our physical body. The finer organs of human physical life are still undefined—even external science must admit this—and indeed, for those who can sense such things, it is a profoundly mysterious matter how the child learns the most important things in the first years of life, which we might express as follows: In a wondrous way, the child rises from being unable to walk to standing upright, from being unable to speak to being able to speak. All of this, however, is connected to the development of our physical organs, to their refinement and plastic shaping. Do we not see here, on a grand scale, something similar to what happens with our dreamer who is having a nightmare?

[ 10 ] As we were able to say about him: During the dream period, what first takes place in the organs—and only later emerges into consciousness—is that the dreaming child’s soul first works on the formation of the body, on the shaping of bodily life. It is a transformation of what later appears consciously into forces that work in the unconscious on our bodily organization, so that we must say: Everything we later experience—the content of our soul—which is present in our memory as a continuous stream of consciousness, is therefore subdued because it has other tasks there besides calling upon consciousness; there it must work on the formation of the body. If we pursue this line of thought in the spirit of modern thinking, we see that we must regard the soul as the primordial source: not as a result of the physical constitution—just as the flame is a result of the candle—but as that which acts upon the physical constitution, that which shapes this physical constitution in the first place.

[ 11 ] I already mentioned yesterday that it is only natural that today’s scientists and those who blindly follow them would not admit this. But a truly unbiased assessment of modern findings in particular reveals that spiritual science is correct in its assertions and that we are moving toward a time when the findings of spiritual science will be recognized. Today it is easy to say: Doesn’t this then demonstrate, in relation to spiritual science, that, for example, a certain part of our brain, through its peculiar furrowing, actually draws our attention to how dependent we are, in our speech and linguistic concepts, on a material structure within our brain? Yet it is precisely this idea, understood in the right sense, that reveals the independence of the soul’s life, so that we can recognize how it is the soul that shapes the body, not the other way around. We need only correctly distinguish between what lies in the mere line of heredity and what appears to us as directly inherited. What we have inherited manifests itself in us even without our coming into contact with the outside world. We could send a person to a remote island; he would certainly grow a second set of teeth, because this is rooted in heredity, but everyone knows that if we cut him off from human language, he will not be able to speak or think on the basis of his inherited characteristics alone. This can only be evoked from the outside, by the thought being spoken in his surroundings. Conversely: those convolutions of the brain that later serve as the neurological basis for speech are themselves formed only through the influx of language as an instrument.

[ 12 ] Thus, the fact asserted by the materialistic—or, to put it in more modern terms, monistic—worldview can serve precisely as a pointer to spiritual science. This leads us to the idea that the soul works on the body and that we have no grounds for regarding this spiritual aspect as a mere function of the physical. And the deeper one goes, the more one realizes that, from the very first atomic or cellular formation of the body, this spiritual aspect must be at work in life. This, however, implies that the soul confronts us as something that must have existed before the beginning of the first atom of the physical body. We look back upon a soul life, because it must have existed before physical life—it must have existed as a purely soul-spiritual life. We see the eternal activity of the soul; we see that we cannot conceive of the soul-spiritual as emerging from anything physical or corporeal, but rather from the spiritual, and must assume that our soul, before entering into corporeality, existed in a spiritual existence and lived through a spiritual realm. This is how all those who were able to reflect on the matter without prejudice thought. And one finds everything that must lead up to this thought—albeit presented differently—in Aristotle. But Aristotle now makes a strange leap here: the soul emerges directly from a divine existence, detaches itself, as it were, from a divine existence, enters into human existence, from which it detaches itself again at the moment of death. This idea—that in every individual life a particular soul separates itself from God—fails to stand up to an unbiased observation of life.

[ 13 ] Let us consider how our soul develops during our earthly life. No one will deny that our inner life—particularly in terms of our emotional state, our moods, and our overall disposition—is always shaped by our past experiences; for example, people who have been annoyed all day may become grumpy toward those around them in the evening, and one can often tell from their facial expressions or the way they enter a room what has affected them during the day. Thus we see how our mood is connected to what we have experienced previously. But when we consider our inner life—how we see it entering into our present earthly existence—it appears that there are, so to speak, preexisting dispositions of the soul’s emotions and will. These are so distinctly pronounced that even a philosopher who was mistaken in this regard—Schopenhauer—believed that these dispositions of mind and will, the entire character of a human being, are given at birth and remain unchanged throughout one’s entire life. This is not the case. Unbiased observation shows that we can make progress even with regard to the shaping of our will and character. But Schopenhauer’s error could only have arisen from the fact that a person displays a certain disposition—one expressed in the fundamental nuance of their character, which we do not find at all different if we only consider it properly—that we confuse with a mood we acquire through the events of ordinary life. We enter the world in such a way that this character, this disposition, is already manifest in such a way that we carry this disposition forward through our present existence. It is impossible—if one does not fantasize but relies on real facts and serious observation—to think of the disposition with which the soul enters earthly existence as anything other than a disposition we have acquired in life. When we observe a child, we see, to be sure, that it does not yet have an imaginative life; but in the way the child rejects something, feels sympathy or antipathy, moves, and so on, in this we already see the fundamental mood that we certainly encounter in later life as well, and about which we cannot help but think that it does not stem from a beyond, not from an immediately divine existence, but that it is the result of earthly lives—just as a mood unfolding on a small scale—so that we can say: From the way we view the soul, we arrive at the concept of repeated earthly lives, of that law [which states] that, while we belong to ourselves in our innermost essence, we pass from life to life on Earth with this innermost essence, and that between each death and [every] new birth, our soul is embedded in a purely spiritual existence. The totality of a human being’s life thus unfolds continuously in such a way that, on the one hand, it exists in the physical body between birth or conception and death, and, on the other hand, in a spiritual world between death and a new birth.

[ 14 ] These points could be elaborated on at length, but that is not what is important or essential today. What is more essential, however, is to show how—through a thought experiment, so to speak—it can be confirmed that the soul is an independent being that works on its physical organization. This experiment, however, cannot be conducted in the same way as external laboratory experiments. What Goethe presciently put into words applies to these in a special way:

Mysterious in Broad Daylight
Nature cannot be stripped of its veil,
And what it chooses not to reveal to your mind
You cannot force from it with levers and screws.

[ 15 ] Those who would like to reinterpret Goethe, however, emphasize the “not” as if it were impossible to reveal what lies behind things. Thus, the spiritual experiment cannot proceed by our making use of our physical tools, but rather in such a way that human beings actually transform their own soul life, their own inner being, into a tool. A more detailed account of this can be found in *Knowledge of Higher Worlds*. Today, we shall offer only a brief outline of how the soul makes itself into an instrument for looking into the spiritual world.

[ 16 ] We must be clear about the fact that the soul must first turn inward, becoming independent of all external life. This involves the person consciously performing what otherwise occurs naturally at the moment of falling asleep. Everyone knows that at that moment the soul loses the ability to use its physical organs—it can no longer see outward, hear, and so on—but in normal life this simultaneously causes it to [sink?] into the darkness of unconsciousness. We must achieve the former, and the latter must not occur. Through a special training of the will—which is possible—the spiritual researcher must be able to truly allow that inner stillness of the mind to take hold, where, as in the moment of falling asleep—but at will —silences everything that speaks to him through the senses; he also silences the ordinary thinking he has cultivated through external observation; he also silences what we can recall, insofar as our life is stimulated from the outside, through joy and sorrow—we must artificially suppress all this, making the soul pure, freeing the soul from all external impressions. And then we must reach a state where, through our sheer will—through our strong will—we can introduce something into the soul upon which we direct our entire soul life in strict inner concentration or meditation. Through this, the soul is transformed into an instrument of the spiritual world. What can we instill into the soul? Not ordinary ideas—their purpose is to reflect the truth as it exists in the external world. If we merely form images of what is happening outside, then we cannot properly detach ourselves from them; we cannot make them our own, the inner content of the soul. We must therefore form ideas that, while connected to life, are composed in such a way that they arise, so to speak, purely from our own volition.

[ 17 ] Let us suppose that a person who wishes to make his soul an instrument of spiritual life says to himself—and what is said here is feasible, and whoever puts it into practice will already see the results in his practical life: I want to imagine what love is in the deepest moral sense. – Here we must take external events as our starting point, though we cannot truly fathom the external world. Thus, we will not be able to fully comprehend the concept of love, but we can conceive of a quality of love. We will not simply conceive of a quality of love, but rather create a symbol from a loving act—an image that appears arbitrary but is nonetheless connected, in a certain emotional context, to what exists within us as the experience of love. We form the image of a glass of water that is not quite full; we keep pouring out the water in small amounts, yet each time the water does not decrease but instead increases. An image that is fantastical, dreamlike, downright crazy when compared to the external world—but we are, of course, aware that for us this is merely a symbolic image. We cannot fully comprehend what love is, but there is one quality of love that we can feel. The person who loves gives, and by giving, becomes increasingly capable of loving. We give our very best, but love makes us ever richer and richer. It is precisely because we give ourselves more and more completely in love that it multiplies.

[ 18 ] This abstract idea does nothing to nurture our soul. But by consciously doing what the dream does unconsciously—transforming a person into a little dog—and by bringing this image so firmly into the center of our consciousness that we now direct all our conscious activity toward it, then such an image takes hold of us. Such an idea has a completely different quality than when we give ourselves an abstract definition of love. Even the person who forms this idea can sense this. It is precisely such images—which do not serve to depict external reality but rather take effect through what we feel in them, through what they mean to our inner life—where the one is connected to the other not according to the laws of the thought process but according to the laws of the inner life, [...] through the mediation of feeling—these must now live in our consciousness as ideas, as images that fill our soul, and we must devote ourselves to such ideas, excluding all other aspects of life. This is often a long, inner life’s work, but if we carry it out, then we become spiritual researchers—and in no other way. One might justifiably object: Yes, if this must be practiced unwaveringly for many years—often for years on end and with great energy—then not everyone is in a position to become a spiritual researcher and to convince themselves of the reality of the spiritual researcher’s statements.

[ 19 ] But how many people today are convinced of what goes on in the observatories? After all, what one learns from the outside is only the superficial aspect; the essence is explored by those who work in the laboratories, and it is from this that others form their worldview. It is true that anyone can perform these exercises in any lifetime, but depending on one’s disposition, one will only progress to a certain degree. The spiritual researcher, however, must use such exercises to detach the soul from the body. In doing so, he enters a state similar to sleep and yet quite different, in that the entire external world falls silent, all worries and sorrows fall silent, erased as if by sleep; yet we are not surrounded by the darkness of unconsciousness, but rather experience something we have not experienced before, something of which we previously had no inkling; indeed, we experience it so clearly that we now perceive something within our soul, something beyond our physical senses—indeed, outside of them—so clearly that we pass through an intermediate state that is even uncomfortable; and when we have taken it to a certain degree, we feel: Now you are experiencing your soul life; now you are in such a state within yourself that you are experiencing not what comes from the outside, but rather what “arises” only within the soul—to use Jakob Böhme’s expression—what exists only in the spiritual realm. But one merely experiences it, and at first one cannot conceptualize it in the same way one was accustomed to conceptualizing external perceptions. Why not? The inner experience clearly shows us how one is outside the body; the brain has been shaped solely for the concepts to which we are accustomed. Now we are experiencing something new; the brain is not prepared to put this into concepts. We therefore experience it in such a way that we feel foolish, like a child who cannot yet express in concepts what it is experiencing.

[ 20 ] And when one then continues such spiritual exercises with energy and inner moral strength—with energy drawn from within oneself—one first feels how resistance after resistance stands in our way; but now our own brain, our entire body, seems like a block of wood that cannot keep up. And only as we persist—with strong moral resolve—do we feel it gradually drawing near: that what we have experienced ourselves, we can also think about, and we can then perceive it as well. We feel and see how, during these spiritual exercises, something is happening within us once again—something that otherwise only occurred in the early years of childhood—namely, that we are, so to speak, sculpting with the tools of our soul, reshaping our body; and when we feel: “Now we have made the great effort that a child makes playfully with its awake body; now we have done something similar—we have worked on our body”—then it becomes possible for us to recount what we have experienced, and only when it is recounted is it spiritual science. And when it is told, then everyone can understand it through their common sense, just as they do with what is explored in life. This is the path to experiencing the soul in its independence through genuine, spiritual experimentation, [so] that we know: It is this soul that, from its spiritual-soul content—whenever it has acquired it—first works on its physical organization, just as we become aware that the child works on its physical organization with the formative forces it has brought with it from its previous life.

[ 21 ] And now let us once again survey our life between birth and death; then we will see it in ascending and descending lines. There we see how, little by little, the inner forces work their way up—forces we see coming over from a previous life—how indefinite features give rise to definite ones, and how clumsy movements transform into skillful ones: we see this as life sprouting forth. Then one part is handed over to consciousness, while another continues to work until we feel that life is moving in a descending line, until we feel that this, our instrument, is now in a descending phase. Now, however, we feel that this life has continually been enriched; we have taken in something new. Thus we feel that [what] which has a predominantly formative influence in our present life—which lays down the fundamental traits of our character—comes from a previous life; yet we are powerless—because our life, our interaction with the outside world, carries over from a previous life, because this life is a gift from the past—to immediately “infuse” into life what we have received as enrichment. We then feel that it is forming and taking shape as a force. If only our mind, our will, can grasp what we have gained, then when we pass through the gate of death, we will be able to prepare for our future life. We need do nothing more than correctly grasp that what we acquire in this one earthly life is, in essence, only what the intellect possesses; but that the fundamental orientation of our mind, as it enters into life, must come from previous earthly incarnations. And so we see confirmation of Lessing’s statement that the life of the imagination cannot carry over from a previous life. Nothing we imagine can originate from a previous life. For ideas are expressed through language, and for many people, all imagination is merely a byproduct of language. But we acquire language in this life; language must be learned anew. In any case, high school students would have to acknowledge that even if they were incarnated in ancient Greece, this does not make learning the Greek language any easier. It must be learned anew. Only the fundamental orientation of the soul, the will, and the character is the result of earlier incarnations; it is what is carried over from the imaginative life of past lives.

[ 22 ] Friedrich Hebbel once wanted to write a play, for which he drafted the first version. In it, Plato—reincarnated—was to appear as a student who could not understand Plato. This would have demonstrated how what was an immediate life of the imagination cannot be carried over from one existence to another. What Plato experienced back then is transformed into a life of the mind, into a disposition of the mind, into a mood of the soul, and thus finds its way into a new existence. Therefore, it must become clear to us that the objection—that one does not remember past lives in ordinary life—cannot hold. We remember them in such a way that our present life, in its emotional content, appears to us as a repetition of the past, but not in the same way that we recall the past in our imaginative life. For the imaginative life is precisely what characterizes present-day memory in this particular incarnation. Thus we see that, precisely when viewed from the perspective of a genuine contemplation of life, what we must acknowledge—the fact of repeated earthly lives—appears to be confirmed; even the most enlightened minds have been compelled to recognize it. One can, of course, excuse Lessing by saying that he wrote *The Education of the Human Race* in the frailty of old age. In the same way, people excuse themselves when faced with greater minds, even when a work such as *The Education of the Human Race* presents itself as the final result, the ripe fruit of a rich life. Such minds then believe that the spirit of such a person has grown weak. What they fail to acknowledge is that they cannot make the leap from the standpoint they still recognize to the standpoint to which the spirit of these individuals has soared. But even this excuse does not hold up in the face of another assertion that Lessing made at the height of his life, in the *Hamburg Dramaturgy*, which contains something that ties in with what spiritual science must lead to if it continues to pursue the ideas developed both today and in the past. The contents we hold in our souls between death and a new birth lead an independent, purely spiritual existence. This, however, acknowledges the existence of a purely spiritual world. What modern Enlightenment thinker did not shudder upon hearing that a spiritual world beyond the material is posited? And who would not exclaim: Have such enlightened minds as Lessing and others worked so hard just so that we might return to the old, superstitious notion of the existence of a spiritual world? But one could counter this by citing statements from those very same enlightened minds—for example, Lessing’s own words:

Do we no longer believe in ghosts? Who says so? Or rather, what does that mean? Does it mean this much: We have finally reached a point in our understanding where we can prove the impossibility of ghosts; certain irrefutable truths that contradict belief in ghosts have become so widely known, and are so constantly and consistently present even to the humblest man, that anything that contradicts them must necessarily seem ridiculous and tasteless to him? That cannot be what it means. “We no longer believe in ghosts” can therefore only mean this much: In this matter—about which almost as much can be said for it as against it, which is not decided and cannot be decided—the currently prevailing way of thinking has given the arguments against it the upper hand; a few hold this way of thinking, and many seem to want to hold it; these are the ones making the noise and setting the tone; the vast majority remain silent and indifferent, wavering between one view and another, listening with pleasure to mockery of ghosts in broad daylight and recounting tales of them with horror in the dark of night.

[ 23 ] This is certainly an uncomfortable passage for modern materialistic natural science. However, even in the course of the nineteenth century, we could cite many thinkers who, driven by an inner necessity—even if not yet based on all the considerations that have since been advanced by spiritual science (since this was not possible at the time)—arrived at the only possible assumption: that the human soul experiences repeated earthly lives. That is why Lessing also emphasizes so strongly that this is the only possible assumption regarding the life of the soul beyond birth and death. With this, however, we rise to a truly meaningful idea of eternity, for now life is not merely a void into which we are cast by something outside of ourselves, but now we sense: What we have brought into this life, we have carried over from previous lives; we have earned it in previous lives. But what we now experience is transformed; when we pass through the gate of death, it is processed in such a way that we acquire the forces through which we can reshape our future body. We see growing within this incarnation what will take shape within us as a living force in a future incarnation. Thus we see how eternity comes together as something concrete; we do not feel eternity as an infinite void stretching forward and backward, but rather as eternity comes into being, as the soul lives its way into eternity—so deeply that it feels again and again: “This is what I carry over from earlier stages of existence; in later lives, I make use of what I have acquired in earlier ones—it is what gives me form; and in the same way, through my present life, I can earn a claim to the future.” – And from these individual entitlements to the future emerges a concrete, a real idea of the nature of eternity. For when we add future-secure work to future-secure work, we expand into eternity in relation to our hopes for life. We feel the true, real idea of eternity, not the empty idea so often held up to us. And we can feel it only by contemplating this entire inner life—not merely in terms of concepts, but in terms of our entire state of mind, our moods, and the life of the will. If we take in this threefold nature of the soul—how these forces transform into one another, how what matures in the life of the imagination passes into moods of the soul, only to emerge as such in the next life, to emerge as the life of the will—then we grasp the entire life of the whole human soul.

[ 24 ] We need only do one thing to transform what spiritual science can offer us into a hope for eternity that is not merely well-founded, but built upon genuine knowledge. We need only to view the soul not from one aspect but in its entirety, and then we will come to feel how true it is when we say: In thinking, in feeling, and in willing—in the whole nature of the soul—the world reveals itself to us, insofar as we are grounded in it, insofar as we will be grounded in it for all eternity. That which—let this be added once more—does not live within us as theory or as abstract science, but pours itself into our entire being like an elixir of life, so that we not only fathom eternity but experience —experience how it builds itself up from its individual building blocks—is encapsulated in the saying from the second Mystery Drama, which expresses what the soul can feel when it feels its own life, when it feels what it itself must carry over from one earthly life to the next as a foretaste of eternity. Thus a true recognition of our self, of our soul life, calls out to us, if only we grasp this soul life through true self-knowledge:

Worldly thoughts live within your mind,
Worldly forces weave within your feelings,
Worldly beings work through your will.
Lose yourself in worldly thoughts,
Experience yourself through worldly forces,
Create yourself from beings of will.
Do not end in the distance of the worlds
Through the dreamlike play of thought
Begin in the expanses of the spirit
And end in the depths of your own soul:
You will find divine goals
By recognizing yourself within yourself.