The Rudolf Steiner Archive

2. The Human Soul, Destiny, and Death from the Perspective of Spiritual Science

[ 1 ] Ladies and gentlemen! While it is certainly true that the great enigmatic questions concerning fate and death must always inspire people to reflection, this is especially the case in these fateful times, when the question of fate and the mystery of death are being stirred up—directly or indirectly—in so many souls by the immediate events of the day. Now, I have often pointed out in the lectures I have been privileged to give here from the perspective of spiritual science how questions—such as those concerning destiny and the nature of death—must, in our time and according to all signs of our era, gradually transition from an old way of thinking and feeling to a truly scientific way of thinking and perceiving.

[ 2 ] Just as a wave swept over the development of humanity two or three centuries ago, bringing with it the modern scientific worldview, so we perceive—as is evident in the spirit of our times—that spiritual science, the science of the questions of spiritual life, is now becoming an integral part of humanity’s cultural development. It must be emphasized, however, that precisely when spiritual questions and spiritual mysteries are to be examined in a scientific light, scientific research and scientific work must, in a certain sense, take on a completely different character than the scientific work and research conducted for the external natural world and for external natural facts.

[ 3 ] And that, ladies and gentlemen, is what—in so many circles, one might say—still arouses the harshest prejudices today against what spiritual science has to say. Not only do the general prejudices exist that arise against every new cultural movement—prejudices that have indeed arisen even in the broadest circles when spiritual science first dawned as the dawn of a new natural science—but there is also something quite special at play: humanity will have to relearn its understanding of spiritual science to a far greater degree than it has had to do so with regard to natural science. And even though, just a few centuries ago, it was still entirely inconceivable to humanity—contrary to all apparent common sense—to accept [not] that the Earth stands still [and] that the Sun does not stand still; but [rather] that the Sun stands still and the Earth moves around it, it is even further removed from the very nature of the human soul, given its current stage of development, to accept that spiritual life—the findings of spiritual science in the most eminent sense—must fundamentally contradict everything presented by outward sensory appearances, and that the very nature of research into spiritual realms must take a different form than outward scientific research.

[ 4 ] Let us try to bring to mind the most elementary, most primitive nature of external scientific research and observation! It consists, after all, in the fact that human beings first direct their senses—and also their intellect, insofar as it is bound to the brain—toward the external world, receive impressions from the external world, and form ideas, thoughts, and concepts about this external world. In these ideas, thoughts, and concepts that they form, they must then experience within themselves what is commonly called the laws of nature. Two points may be noted regarding this external research if one wishes to emphasize the difference between this research and what spiritual science seeks.

[ 5 ] On the one hand, one could say: Before this research, spread out before it externally, lies what is real; and from this external reality, the human spirit moves forward, the human soul’s perspective moves forward toward what it desires, toward what it seeks to attain, so that science of this external nature is, in a sense, a consequence, a result of the experience of external, real reality in this realm. The other point, which becomes evident to anyone who considers even briefly the soul’s attitude toward this external research, is that in this research—in this progression from the perception of the external world to the concepts, representations, and ideas we form—we proceed, as it were, from the full, rich reality, from reality rich in content, to that which is then, in our thoughts and representations, concepts is, so to speak, ethereal and thin compared to the full, rich reality of the external world. We feel it: When we face reality with our senses, we are fully immersed in it. As we form our knowledge and understanding of external reality, we distance ourselves from this full, rich reality. It has often been emphasized: We move toward a kind of gray inner experience, toward a thin “ethereal” state.

[ 6 ] Now the spiritual researcher must take the exact opposite path from the one the researcher of external nature must take in the manner described. The researcher of external nature has that nature before him and ultimately arrives at what constitutes the content of his knowledge, his science—that which lives within his soul. The spiritual researcher must start from what lives in the soul, and everything that can be called knowledge, science, inner imagination, or inner experience in thoughts and concepts—which is the result and consequence of external research—serves as preparation for the spiritual researcher. The spiritual researcher cannot start from something that is given to him externally; he must start from inner, powerful experience, and what is otherwise the content of science is merely preparation for that which the spiritual researcher can bring to life within his soul when he turns his gaze and attention away from all external sensory perceptions, from everything that the intellect can conceive under the influence of external reality.

[ 7 ] What the spiritual researcher experiences here, with external reality set aside—when he directs his soul’s gaze purely toward inner thoughts and imaginative experiences, when he turns his attention entirely inward—is the foundation for his research. What is happening within him—that is what matters. What is happening within him—this scope of inner experiences—can be characterized by saying: The path of the spiritual researcher lies through concentration of thought. But one must understand this concentration of thought as something that differs greatly from what is commonly called concentrated thinking in everyday life. It is not that it is something else entirely; fundamentally, it is merely an intensification of what we otherwise call attention in our external life; but it is an unlimited intensification of this attention.

[ 8 ] That one should take in ideas—which at first need not have anything to do with external reality—that one should take in symbolic ideas, ideas—not for the purpose of reflecting on these ideas as such, but rather to concentrate all the inner forces of the soul—which would otherwise be scattered across external reality—onto a single inner point, the point that one has directed into the center of one’s inner life through a concept—that is what matters. Then one is entirely within oneself; but one is not at rest within oneself. One is inwardly active and experiencing. Whoever maintains such inner concentration of thought for a sufficiently long time—and “sufficiently long” does not mean a few hours, but weeks and years of repeated inner activity—whoever continues this for a sufficiently long time, walks a path within their soul that ultimately leads them to experience a reality. Just as in ordinary perception one proceeds from reality to a soul experience, so in spiritual research one proceeds from concentrated inner experiences and arrives at a new spiritual reality. This new spiritual reality cannot be created internally. What one can do inwardly is merely preparation for spiritual contemplation. This spiritual reality must come to the individual at the end of the path of preparation. Whereas knowledge is otherwise attained as a consequence of observing external reality, in spiritual research reality is attained on the basis of knowledge that works and acts inwardly. No one can, in any way, create internally in the spirit what they ultimately arrive at. What one can do in the spirit is to walk the path that leads there.

[ 9 ] What I am describing here was felt, for example, by a thinker such as the one I spoke of yesterday, Johann Gottlieb Fichte, in that he was already able to know and intuit something of the knowledge of true spiritual science. He spoke beautiful words specifically in this regard:

Natural man cannot, by his own power, rise to the supernatural; he must be raised to it by the power of the supernatural itself.

[ 10 ] This means that human beings must reach out toward the supernatural, and the supernatural must receive them. That is what this is all about. We begin with the ethereal, with the subtle aspects of inner soul experience, and arrive at the full richness of spiritual reality.

[ 11 ] Certainly, distinguished guests, the objections that can be raised from a temporal perspective against such spiritual scientific research are natural—I would even say self-evident; in particular, the objection that will be raised time and again—that what the spiritual researcher experiences cannot possibly have any general, objective value, but rather consists of subjective experiences; that if a person wishes to gain knowledge, they are fundamentally dependent on defining the limits of their cognitive capacity and acknowledging that the supersensible is based on subjective experiences—is self-evident. This objection is so very justified because it truly applies to the beginning of the path, because the beginning of the path—as long as it consists of this preparation—truly involves inner struggles, inner conflicts, and inner psychological turmoil that are subjective and, fundamentally, concern only the individual who goes through them. But what one ultimately arrives at is something else entirely—something one does not summon from within, but rather encounters, something that accepts one. Just as one can ascend a mountain by various paths to the summit, but from the summit one ultimately looks out in all directions, so it is with the spiritual researcher: As long as the spiritual researcher is on his path, things concern him, so to speak, only personally; but once he has encountered spiritual reality, he stands before something objective, before something real, which is as rich in content for the spiritual researcher in the supersensible realm as the sensible world is for external observation.

[ 12 ] But there is one thing that must be taken into account as particularly characteristic when the spiritual researcher follows the path just described. Let us once again bring to mind what this path consists of: It consists in living—with one’s attention diverted from the entire external sensory world, with the most intense attention heightened to the infinite—solely within the images and concepts that one’s own soul can awaken within itself. In this way, one immerses oneself in an inner life that is gradually heightened and concentrated in this manner. Now here is the peculiar thing: The more one succeeds in driving this inner concentration to a certain point, the more one comes to experience an inner tension in which one says to oneself: “You are now completely immersed in what you have envisioned; you have forgotten your entire physicality and surroundings; you live only in your concentrated thoughts”—the more one reaches a certain stage—for before this, the inner experience of thought grows stronger and stronger—the more one notices that this inner life of thought undergoes a kind of extinction within itself, becoming less and less intense. And a peculiar experience arises that one could describe as follows: It is as if the thought on which one has concentrated were carrying one away with all one’s soul forces and dispersing into the general ether of the world. This is the result of this intense, heightened—one might say technically driven—internal concentration and increase in attention.

[ 13 ] To put it this way, using an analogy: For the sake of spiritual research, one must pursue inner concentration of thought to such an extent that the thought first grows stronger and stronger and then, as it unfolds its life within the soul, intensifies to the point where it dies away, and one, so to speak, dies with it in a soulful sense. The thought must first die within the soul—so one might put it—if it is to carry the person into the spiritual world.

[ 14 ] When one reaches a certain level of spiritual research, one has, as it were, attained what might be called an inner spiritual sensing and feeling one’s way through the world. The spiritual researcher knows at that very moment—when thought begins to fade—that he is now entering a sphere of experience, of intensely inner experience, where thought ceases, but where the life forces are experienced as a tension within oneself. The spiritual researcher knows that at this moment, what he experiences inwardly does not take place within the confines of his brain; he knows this through direct experience. He knows: You are now experiencing yourself outside your body. And in this experience, which becomes one of tension, consciousness, so to speak, dies away. And as consciousness begins to fade, an inner experience arises—an inner experience that is extraordinarily significant and deeply moving when experienced for the first time. The experience that arises is this: one gains the sense that living within the spiritual world is something entirely different from living within the outer physical world.

[ 15 ] And this is where it must be emphasized that it is so difficult to disseminate accurate concepts about the spiritual world because, given the ideas currently in common use, most people are, in fact, bound to imagine this world differently than it actually is. While one approaches the physical, sensory world in such a way that one can say, “There it is out there; one looks at it, one takes it in through one’s senses and intellect,” with the spiritual world and everything of that nature, it is as though, the moment it stands before one, all thinking subsides and something else emerges. What happens is that one feels as if one is being taken in by a world; one feels toward this world just as a plant or a stone out there would have to feel at the moment when they could recognize: “You are now being taken in by a human being’s knowledge, by a human being’s conception.” Just as the thoughts that flow in from the outer world feel absorbed by us, so too does the person who, through spiritual research, merges with the New with their entire being—as they feel their own imagination dying within them—feel absorbed by a world. That is what matters.

[ 16 ] Just as we grasp our thoughts, accept them, and allow them to become part of us, so we experience, as it were, the fate of thoughts. We ourselves become thoughts, so to speak, and feel as if we were a thought and were being grasped by supersensible beings—just as our thoughts are otherwise grasped by us—and as if we were now resting within these supersensible beings. We are within these beings. When we reach this stage, we perceive that there is an invisible world above us, but that we cannot experience it as some people imagine; rather, it must be experienced in such a way that all [thought-related activity] ceases and we enter, through experience, into a supersensible world. For a moment, it is as it would be, for example, with a person who strained his sight and hearing more and more, and who, with heightened sight and hearing, would become blind and deaf. In the same way, one becomes, as it were, blind and deaf to mental imagery, because one feels: You are now absorbed by the spiritual world. It is not that one experiences, but rather that one feels—one is being experienced. It must be emphasized again and again: The ascent into the spiritual world has a character opposite to that of the descent into the outer, sensory world.

[ 17 ] This is not about entering a ghostly world, but about an experience that is different in nature from ordinary experience. So one is inside—that is all one knows at this stage—one is inside a spiritual world. So one knows: Spiritual beings, as it were, hover above this sensory world, and you can be received by them, just as your thought is received by you. But one feels as if one were blind and deaf, for thinking and knowledge have died away. Ordinary science must first die away before one can enter the spiritual world. One feels as if one were blind and deaf, but groping one’s way through the spiritual world. The life forces one senses within oneself are strained, and one feels one’s way forward.

[ 18 ] But one knows what it means to be outside one’s body. The very fact of knowing this brings about a change in the entire human experience. And this transformation can best be characterized by drawing attention to something that has often been pointed out from this perspective: the changing experience of consciousness in human beings—for every normal person, within a 24-hour period—namely, the shifting experience of consciousness between sleep and wakefulness. As the spiritual researcher goes through what has been described, he learns to recognize through direct inner experience that the human being’s true, inner being—which transcends all that is physical—can be experienced within himself; and he learns to recognize—once he has experienced within himself the power to which this refers— he comes to realize that he can live through the experiences that otherwise remain completely unconscious during sleep—those experienced unconsciously in the human soul—with the power he has thus attained.

[ 19 ] It is not that the spiritual researcher does not need sleep—he does need it—but he can artificially induce states in which he is able to experience what a person otherwise experiences only from the moment of falling asleep until waking up. For the spiritual researcher knows that by experiencing—‘You are outside your body; you are carrying out an activity that does not depend on the brain and nervous system’—he comes to grasp through actual experience what is undergone from falling asleep to waking up. He comes to recognize that the human being’s true spiritual-soul entity is indeed outside the body, that when falling asleep, the human being leaves the body with his spiritual-soul entity, and that upon waking, the spiritual-soul entity re-enters the body.

[ 20 ] But now the spiritual researcher, by recognizing—as it were, through experience—what actually lies outside the body during sleep, he can also perceive, from this illuminated spiritual-soul aspect—this spiritual-soul aspect that lies, as it were, open before the eyes of the spirit—why the soul is unconscious from the moment of falling asleep until awakening, and why darkness and gloom spread around it. From the moment of falling asleep until waking, there lives within the soul—as I said—something that becomes perceptible to the spiritual researcher and that can be called the desire, always present in the soul throughout the entire physical experience between birth and death, to immerse itself in the physical body. This life of desire always fills the soul in the ordinary experience between falling asleep and waking. The soul always wants—and feels this will within itself—to return to its body, and this experience, this unfolding of this longing, clouds what is otherwise present in the spiritual-soul experience between falling asleep and waking up. And only when the soul immerses itself in the physical body—when this longing is fulfilled—can it unfold its supersensory activity; only then does it stimulate the physical body so that it becomes a mirror of external life.

[ 21 ] As the spiritual researcher thus comes to recognize what can actually be experienced in the soul—in the bodyless soul—he directly perceives that which is otherwise extinguished during sleep. But with the power he has attained, he is able to purify and clarify the spiritual-soul aspect of its content. But if a person wishes to bring about this purification and clarification, something else must occur within the spiritual researcher that characterizes this process. For we have seen: Essentially, the intensity of thought diminishes; essentially, the person feels intellectually blind and deaf, merely groping in the spiritual world. What must come into play so that the person can once again transition into spiritual seeing and hearing lies in a different realm. Something must be developed there—this is the second element of spiritual research, which otherwise lies dormant in life, as it were. And to understand clearly what must be developed there, one can direct one’s spiritual gaze to the following:

[ 22 ] Let us consider what is commonly called fate. This fate—how do we stand within its flow? We stand within it in such a way that—well, as we often say—the events of fate approach us and are experienced by us as if by chance. We feel separated in our inner being from what befalls us as experiences of fate. In the face of these experiences of fate, in order to fulfill the second element, the spiritual researcher must take a completely different stance than the ordinary person does. To understand this, let us look back on what we experienced in our youth—the various vicissitudes of fate—and consider ourselves today, consider what we actually are in relation to our true self. One can realize that one would not be what one is—not even down to the smallest detail—if one had not already experienced this or that stroke of fate, whether good or bad, in this ordinary life. The fact that at a certain moment one approaches this or that in such-and-such a way, or reacts to it in such-and-such a manner, depends on having experienced this or that in one’s destiny. If one simply asks with true impartiality: What is one, actually? Then one must admit: One is the result of one’s own destiny. The content of the soul—what one is capable of or can will—is the result of destiny.

[ 23 ] One can now, in a sense, use what lies at the heart of these thoughts as another spiritual exercise. The first spiritual exercise has strengthened us in concentrated thinking; the second is one that relates to feeling-volition, to the inner impulses of the soul—to what one actually is as an “I.” And what the spiritual researcher must undergo as this second exercise can initially be called meditation on the vicissitudes—well, let us say, for now, of one’s own destiny. Not theoretically, but through real inner experience, one must realize how one has actually fashioned what one is now out of oneself by having gone through this or that; in this way, one grows into one’s destiny, growing together with it. One grows out of one’s ordinary “I,” which believes in chance; one interweaves oneself with the current of destiny, becomes estranged, as it were, from one’s own inner self, merges into destiny, and knows oneself to be flowing onward with destiny.

[ 24 ] When this inner meditation bears fruit, something quite special occurs in the mind of the spiritual researcher. For the spiritual researcher may notice—once he has gone through this path of concentrated thinking, has experienced the dying away of thought, and has sensed higher supersensible beings — who, as it were, take him in just as we take in a thought — when the spiritual researcher has gone through all of this, he then experiences within himself, or rather observes within himself, something like an inner protest, an inner opposition to what he himself has accomplished through his entire spiritual research journey. And this protest can be expressed as follows: Through his concentrated thinking, the spiritual researcher reaches a point where he feels as if he has dissolved into his soul life. And he resists this dissolution. This inner protest—which is, in turn, a shattering experience—subsides, ceases, and is overcome when one performs the exercise of embracing destiny, when one immerses oneself in destiny. And just as one might say that the thought dies out in concentrated thinking once it has reached its highest energy, so one can say: By drawing into the current of fate, one perceives how the will itself—which is otherwise within the human being—is seized by the current of fate. Whereas we usually see the external world of destiny as something standing opposite us and our will as something within, in what befalls us as destiny we experience our own will; we learn to see this in our will, through which we shape ourselves in life. Our will is awakened and gradually pours out over our entire destiny. When one has undergone such an exercise for a long time, one experiences to the fullest extent what constitutes the second element of spiritual-scientific development. The second element is the awakening of the dormant will within our destiny. We awaken outside of ourselves in the flow of our destiny; we merge with what we are into what we otherwise call the external world.

[ 25 ] As we step outside ourselves in this way, new spiritual powers arise within us. This can be characterized as follows: Whereas we used to stifle our inner life through concentrated thinking, leaving us feeling blind and deaf to spiritual life and only groping our way into the floating, supersensory worlds, we now begin to live within these worlds as a self; we begin to experience a powerful, higher consciousness within higher beings. We no longer feel merely absorbed—as a thought might feel absorbed within us while remaining unconscious—but rather we enter a world of supersensible beings, becoming like their thoughts, yet in such a way that we are living, thinking beings within them, developing self-awareness within them.

[ 26 ] And with this higher consciousness comes something that may now be called an expansion of a soul power that is already present in ordinary life, but which in ordinary life extends only as far as the ordinary experiences of memory. We remember what we have experienced in ordinary life from a certain point in time after our birth; we can recall these experiences in our soul, and we can also say to ourselves: If we could not remember, we would not be who we are. It is thanks to our memory that we are who we appear to be. We must be able to look back on our lives. This ability to look back on our lives is expanded and intensified by the aforementioned meditation on destiny; however, it must be taken so far that we truly feel—just as we otherwise feel within our bodies—that we are present in the events of our destiny. Then a new soul force arises within us, outside our body, one that extends back beyond our birth. We now grasp how, through memory, we take in the events from a certain point after birth—events that lie before birth, which we have lived through in a spiritual life that preceded our birth— and we know that just as we become who we are in ordinary life through what we have already experienced in this life, so too have we, through those prenatal experiences, shaped ourselves from the spiritual world into the whole being of destiny and temperament that we are.

[ 27 ] In other words, through meditation on destiny, we expand our soul’s power into the power of remembering a life we experienced outside the body. And through this experience—which we had outside the body—we simultaneously gain insight into the entire nature of that life outside the body that we lived before birth. It is simply part of the experience that this expanded memory has that it comes to understand why it sought out this earthly existence through birth. It sought it out because it must link this soul life to this one as an effect of earlier earthly experiences, and it arises as an immediate inner experience that, from that specific point of development onward, is experienced just as color is for the sensory human being, what emerges is what one might call: the realization of repeated earthly lives—that realization of the human being’s complete life, which reveals him as one who undergoes repeated earthly lives and, between death and a new birth, time and again lives in the spiritual world, where what is experienced on Earth is processed.

[ 28 ] One cannot say that this spiritual experience, of which we are speaking here—this spiritual science—has not always been lying dormant in the finest minds of human development; our time simply seems destined to bring to light, as true knowledge, what has been lying dormant in those finest minds. If one wishes to be a truly enlightened person, one can look to a man like Lessing, admire him, and say: Well, he created something extraordinarily great, but toward the end of his life he also wrote *The Education of the Human Race* as his spiritual testament, and in this *Education of the Human Race* he also put forward, of his own accord, the hypothesis that human beings do not live on the physical earth just once, but pass through this life in repeated earthly existences. One might say that [he] had simply grown old by then; that he had already become frail. Certainly, one can feel very enlightened in making such a judgment; but however natural such a judgment may still be for our time, in light of humanity’s progress it is no different from the judgment held before Copernicus: that the Earth stood still, that the Sun moved around it and had to move, and that this was met with prejudice against Copernicus.

[ 29 ] The prejudice held today against the idea of repeated earthly lives is no different from this prejudice that has long, long lain dormant within people. And just as scientific progress has overcome all prejudices against the natural sciences, so too will spiritual-scientific progress overcome all prejudices that are raised against it. One must agree with Lessing in his work when he says: Should this hypothesis of repeated earthly lives—for spiritual science it is no longer a hypothesis, but something that can be experienced in the context of today’s debates, though Lessing still refers to it as a hypothesis— should it therefore—simply because it is found at the very foundation of the knowledge of the oldest indigenous peoples, simply because it dawned on the human mind before it was clouded and scattered by the sophistry of formal education—should it therefore be any less valuable than any other? One will recognize that what Lessing said—truly what I yesterday called “courageous [science]”—can indeed be elevated to the rank of genuine science.

[ 30 ] Then, when what has been hinted at here is truly grasped by people, they will think differently about the question of destiny than they do today; they will accept what destiny brings as something intimately connected to their very being; they will know that, through destiny, they are placed as conscious beings within the higher spiritual world. People will, so to speak, grow together with destiny in their entire worldview; destiny will be regarded as something that exists to lend human beings a higher self, just as our physical body lends us the ordinary, everyday self that we need in order to be a personality.

[ 31 ] And then, as a person grows into their destiny, what spiritual science has to say about death and its mysteries will gradually cease to seem incomprehensible to them. It is not for nothing—as I have mentioned here many times before—that the spiritual researcher arrives at the experience in which, on the one hand, he grasps concentrated thought and feels it fade away, and on the other hand, he finds the awakening of that which otherwise lives truly only within the human being in the entire stream of destiny — it is not for nothing that the experience he undergoes there has been called, in the true mystical worldviews, “approaching the gate of death.”

[ 32 ] For in fact, what the spiritual researcher experiences—even if not as immediate reality, then at least in a symbolic sense—is the experience of death. When the spiritual researcher, having arrived at the point of clarifying and illuminating the spiritual-soul aspect within himself through his two elementary preparatory experiences, experiences it in such a way that he must say to himself: You have left your physical body behind; you are looking upon this physical body; you know what it means to live outside the body. What the spiritual researcher experiences there only in a figurative sense when he approaches the threshold of death with insight is precisely what every human being experiences when he passes through the threshold of death; then the physical body, as it were, withdraws from the spiritual-soul aspect; and through this experience, that which is otherwise always present in the spiritual-soul aspect is extinguished.

[ 33 ] For the spiritual researcher recognizes that when a person is outside their body from the moment they fall asleep until they wake up, the longing for their body lives within them. At the same time, as he approaches the gate of death in the sense described, he recognizes how—through the actual experience of passing through the gate of death, through this real experience of death, through this dissolution, through this surrender of the body—this longing for the body is gradually eradicated from the soul. And as it is extinguished, it is as if a mist pervading the body were to emerge from it, and light were to shine forth. The human being is truly received into the sphere of beings that are otherwise supersensible and invisible; the human being is received just as thoughts are received by the human being, and dying means being received by the spiritual beings.

[ 34 ] But this moment of death—experienced as the human being looking back on the taking away of the body—is an experience that has consequences. Just as the spiritual researcher, by growing into his destiny, experiences an expansion of his memory, so too does the human being in general, when passing through the gate of death, experience an expansion of his memory by looking back on the life he has lived in the body. What presents itself at the moment of death triggers certain soul forces within the person, which are set in motion when he is received by the higher beings who take hold of him.

[ 35 ] And now something special happens. To understand this, we need to draw attention to something. In our everyday lives, what is the source of our self-awareness—this kind of consciousness through which we address ourselves as “I”? From the moment we fall asleep until we wake up, we do not address ourselves as “I”; we must immerse ourselves in our physical body to address ourselves as “I.” Essentially, every morning when we immerse ourselves in our body and use our eyes, ears, and other senses, we first become aware: We are an “I.” In our physical body, we attain our self-awareness. The spiritual researcher can observe this within himself by having to endure, from outside his body, the entire struggle to suppress and quell the craving for the body; he knows what higher powers of memory he must employ to be a self, and how he must grow together with his destiny. What he thus experiences is otherwise experienced through the sight of leaving the body.

[ 36 ] And another force comes into play: We can no longer enter a body. But what does come into play now is the memory that we were in a body. That is what is significant. In the life between death and a new birth, we would not attain a sense of self if we were, as it were, merely thoughts of higher beings; it is only because we can always look back on our past earthly life—because, instead of the spatial body of ordinary life, we have a temporal body after death—that we possess self-awareness. In our ceaseless looking back upon our temporal life, we recall this temporal life and thereby kindle our self-consciousness. Whereas our self-consciousness is kindled in ordinary life through the spatial body, after death it is kindled through what we call the heightened memory of what we were in the time between birth and death. Time takes the place of space in the conditions described after death. Thus we see how death, by its very nature, possesses an awakening power for the human supersensible being, and how what we experience in death grants us the ability to develop self-consciousness after death. Just as thought dies within us and our self must be kindled through immersion in destiny, so too will the human being, after death, kindle their self-consciousness by looking back on their earthly life.

[ 37 ] In this way, we gain a very real sense of what is otherwise called the soul-spiritual inner life of the human being; in this way, we come to feel the living, soul-spiritual core of the human being—the very core that Johann Gottlieb Fichte, to the extent that he was able to do so in his time, already sensed, as [I mentioned yesterday regarding him]. To yesterday’s passage, let us add another today, where, in his treatise on the Vocation of the Scholar, he speaks of how the soul feels when it is truly able to grasp its spiritual-soul essence, grounded in the eternal supersensible. There Fichte says: “And if all of you—rocks and mountains—who have piled yourselves up, were to come crashing down upon me…” /gap in the text].

[ 38 ] The task of spiritual science is to elevate to the level of scientific knowledge that which is perceived by the finest minds. Now one might say: Certainly, not everyone in our time can yet undergo the kinds of experiences described here that lead to a direct perception of the spiritual world. But that is by no means necessary. These inner experiences are necessary so that what can be said about the spiritual world may be brought up out of the abyss into which it is otherwise sunk. These powers are necessary for this retrieval; but once what has been said about the connection between human destiny and death has been shaped into ideas and expressed in the language of human concepts, then these soul experiences need not be undergone—instead, one perceives roughly what has been brought to light by the spiritual researcher, and one accepts it as true through the inner capacity for truth, just as one understands mathematical propositions when they are presented to us by someone who has formulated them. For this must be said again and again: Although every human being—without exception—is called upon, if they wish to undergo within themselves what has been described today, to gaze directly upon the spiritual world and to recognize the human being in its eternity, not every human being needs to do so. Every human being, however, can—provided they do not place obstacles and prejudices in their own way—truly recognize and correctly understand what spiritual research says. This is not contradicted by the fact that even today the majority of people say of the findings of spiritual research: “That is mere fantasy, pure nonsense; those are the figments of the imagination of a few thinkers”—that does not contradict it. In reality, people do not make decisions based on reasons, nor do they actually prove anything; rather, they make decisions based on habits of thought. And today’s habits of thought are the result of that very thinking, that very imagination, which had the specific task of penetrating external, sensory reality and which became accustomed to clinging to this external sensibility.

[ 39 ] It is only natural today that the majority of people, precisely because they have risen to this natural way of thinking, cannot even begin to grasp the law of development. But as natural as this is, the time is approaching when the arc of materialistic thinking will be stretched so far on one side that it must snap on the other. And everywhere there are signs that humanity is about to embrace spiritual-scientific thinking just as enthusiastically as it has turned to natural-scientific thinking. Today, people still raise all sorts of objections of one kind or another against this spiritual-scientific thinking; yet even regarding this, I would say that the finest minds in the development of humanity have had the right intuition. And Johann Gottlieb Fichte, in turn—whom I tried to portray yesterday as an exemplary guiding genius—refuted, as far as he could in his time, an objection that is so easily raised against the description and contemplation of the spiritual world with the following words. He says: “The doctrine of a Spirit—by no means arbitrarily posited—in whose higher power we all live, which unwise people believe they have thoroughly defeated when they call it mysticism—this is by no means fanciful; for it is grounded in substance, namely, in the innermost Spirit that is meant to animate all action. It would become fanaticism only if it were claimed that this view springs from a mysterious light granted only to a select few. This is the very essence of mysticism. If this claim were based on arrogance toward the sensory [gap in the text].“

[ 40 ] As I said: Fichte did not yet have spiritual science, but he had the seeds of it, and as these seeds are brought to fruition—precisely through a science that does not appeal to mere passive external observation but to the inwardly active powers of the soul, through a science that seeks to be a lived science—spiritual science emerges. But what this spiritual science seeks to bring to humanity is also meant to be a real force for humanity’s future and progress—a truly real force. Fate and death will, through spiritual science, take their place in life as integral parts of the total human experience. Just as we observe the processes of external nature and see how, at the very summit of these processes, that which is the human form and human being in this external nature takes shape, so humanity will gradually come to realize, precisely through spiritual science, that what lies at the innermost, spiritual -soul core, what he is in that through which he is connected to the Eternal—that this rests in the forces that otherwise confront us, incomprehensible from the outside, in fate and in the mystery of death.

[ 41 ] And one then regards this spiritual-soul core of the human being as a reality; one perceives outer life not as the cause, but as the creation of this real spiritual-soul core within the human being. One observes how that which connects the human being to the eternal forms his physical exterior and shapes everything one perceives in outer life. And then even those mysteries of life that are otherwise so difficult to unravel appear, through spiritual science, not as mysteries, but as something that sustains life, that gives strength in life’s blissful moments, but also offers comfort in life’s bitter moments. Therefore, because this is the case, I do not wish to shy away at this moment from presenting, so to speak, a specific finding of spiritual research that may be of particular interest to us now.

[ 42 ] We see people dying one after another in the prime of their lives; we see the outer body detach itself from the human being—today compressed into a brief moment—how the outer body detaches itself from the soul, which we must assume would otherwise have had the strength to sustain this physical life for years to come. And as we contemplate what has been revealed to us through this spiritual-scientific description of the human core, we ask ourselves: What is the situation for a person who sheds their physical body in the prime of life—that is, in the spiritual world, where self-experience arises through memory? For a human essence that would still have had the strength to permeate physical life for many years, what does this early death signify? How does fate unfold in this case? I believe we can best make sense of this by comparing the one who sacrifices himself for his homeland—as current events demand—to an ascetic who, in a certain sense, also sacrifices the physical aspect of his being.

[ 43 ] I have often pointed out here that spiritual science, when properly understood, is not an enemy of life, nor does it lead one away from life; rather, precisely because it grasps reality in its entirety, it promotes life—and that the spiritual researcher, precisely by pointing to the spiritual world, intends to say: In these spiritual sources lie forces that enrich life more than it would be without these forces and without directing one’s thoughts toward them. Spiritual research does not lead people to despise physical life, but rather to spiritualize it and to master the body. In doing so, however, it is also fully capable of pointing out the fallacy of a false asceticism—that asceticism which believes one can rise to the spiritual realm through the killing or numbing of the body, a process emanating from certain forces of the spiritual-soul realm. Certainly, one gains all sorts of things by killing or numbing the body in this way, just as everything that happens as a fact in the world has consequences. One gains all sorts of things; but what does one gain through such asceticism? True spiritual experience seeks to ascend into the spiritual worlds; false asceticism impoverishes life by bringing to fruition only what is already present in the spiritual-soul core of one’s being, because it does not ascend to new powers, but rather kills and numbs the physical body through powers that already exist. What does one gain from this? One gains a certain strengthening of inner forces, the possibility of experiencing the soul-spiritual core of one’s being in a richer, more meaningful way. But one gains this in the body and through the body—even if one gains it by killing and paralyzing the body—precisely by overcoming these bodily forces within the body. As a result, however, the situation is such that what the—in a certain sense—false ascetic attains relates to his personal, individual life; that when he passes through the gate of death, he possesses, in a certain sense, a stronger soul-spiritual core; and that he uses all the forces he has acquired to continually look back, in a personally individual way, upon what his earthly life was. He acquires a strengthened self-awareness of his own personality; through his asceticism, he cultivates, as it were, a supersensory egoism.

[ 44 ] Let us consider, on the other hand—I can say nothing other than, I wish to draw attention to the objective findings of spiritual research entirely without sympathy or antipathy—let us consider the one who is no ascetic, yet who sacrifices his body, sacrifices for his country and people, sacrifices in the prime of his youth, and carries within himself into the spiritual world a spiritual-soul core that could live on for a long time in the body; through all the circumstances surrounding his death—namely, through the circumstances that make his death a conscious death of sacrifice—he experiences a strengthening of these inner forces as well, forces that lead to self-awareness; but now, after death, this strengthening of the forces does not become a strengthening in looking back upon one’s own body, nor merely a strengthening of personal self-awareness, but rather a strengthening of the forces that are less inclined toward attachment to bodily life; the strengthened forces are, as it were, diverted from bodily life. The self-awareness that is strengthened in the ascetic more in relation to the supersensory-egoistic aspect is strengthened in the one who sacrifices himself on the battlefield for a great cause in such a way that the impulses of the will and the surging emotional impulses are strengthened. Everything that is less self-centered is strengthened. And so it comes to pass that those forces which such a person carries through the gate of death have strengthened the selfless aspect within him, and these remain with the community for which the individual has sacrificed himself, or with the cause for which the individual has sacrificed himself. The ascetic, in essence, spends what he has gained in strengthened powers on himself; the one who, in the prime of youth, sacrifices himself on the battlefield or otherwise for the great cause—he gives what fate demands of him for the common good of humanity, for the human community.

[ 45 ] This is also something that provides us with answers in specific cases to the mysteries of fate and death, and this is precisely what spiritual science will achieve: it will create within human consciousness a worldview that can make sense of the events amidst which the human soul must now navigate, as if emerging from the dark mysteries of the world. Certainly, everything that a person can experience regarding the mystery of death and fate is something they experience in the course of their entire life. Everyone lives in the spiritual, in the supersensible world, when they pass through the gateway of death; but just as everything in the external natural world happens and would happen even if human beings knew nothing of it, so it is nevertheless necessary for the progress of humanity that what happens out there in nature be brought into our understanding; for that is what moves humanity forward. Processes, objective realities, and facts—these are all things the spiritual researcher explores, but what takes place in the spiritual world must become knowledge. And just as, at a certain stage of development, nature became part of progress, so too must spiritual knowledge become part of cultural development from our time onward.

[ 46 ] When a person incorporates into their understanding that which exists independently of them, they advance their own kind. One can say, then, that anyone who has a sense for such spiritual understanding will, quite naturally, do their part to promote progress in the spirit of this spiritual science. I said at the very beginning of our reflection today that, given what is now happening in the East and West, it is particularly natural for us to ask about the mystery of fate and death. And if we look at it in such a way that we could say precisely this about the connection between fate and death in relation to the sacrificial life of the One who sacrifices Himself, then we can indeed say: We are living in a time when a great number of soul-spiritual essences—which could still be life-awakening and could still promote physical life—are ascending into the spiritual world. There they will be.

[ 47 ] In the physical sciences, one speaks of the conservation of forces—of the fact that no force is lost; through spiritual science, one will increasingly speak of a conservation of spiritual forces as well—of their indestructibility. These forces exist; they are part of the forces at work in the world. Not only do the souls of those who pass through the gate of death in a sacrificial death continue to live in the supersensible world, but what has emerged from the bodies as soul kernels—and what could still have lived on in these bodies—also lives on as a sum of specific forces. And when we spoke yesterday of the continued existence of the guiding spirits—not merely through tradition, but in a real sense, as if these guiding spirits were radiating something to the descendants of their people who live among the ranks of that people when that people is called to action—we can say the same of all these spiritual-soul essences that had to end their lives prematurely under the demands of the times.

[ 48 ] Doesn’t it seem to us, even in other respects, as if the events of the immediate present—as if this most terrible struggle humanity has ever experienced—were not the beginning of something entirely new? I believe that anyone who feels the full force and intensity of what is currently happening will have to say to themselves: It is the prelude to something that must come as something entirely new, in which those who were not compelled to leave behind life and experience for the physical world—those who enter the future without having experienced death or the pain of being wounded—will play a part. This time that is to come, however, will also be marked by all the forces that have passed into the spiritual world in the manner just described. Then one will have to say: Whatever may come, the forces that have ascended, unspent, from the physical world into the supersensible world will speak within the souls of the survivors and those born afterward in such a way that they will stand as calls to action.

[ 49 ] In a certain sense, one must say: Whoever looks up to these forces will demand a completely new life, and whoever considers the signs of the times—that is, what can be said about the signs of the times based on the insights of spiritual research, if one truly takes this to heart—will say: What is required of the living and the dead for the near future, according to the general course of human development, is that the materialistic, purely naturalistic view of the world be complemented by a living grasp of the spirit and an understanding of how human actions are permeated by the spirit, and that which thus ascends into the spiritual world as fresh human essences will understand these forces—what is happening below. Only when what is happening below feels the duty to nurture the spirit—only that will be understood by those who, in a sense, have newly fertilized the field on which the survivors are to work with their blood, and have newly enlivened it through their death.

[ 50 ] And I mean more than just a metaphor when I say: Spiritual science will [in the future be a reckoning] with these sacrificed forces; it will be experienced as a duty toward the sacrifices that are being made now—sacrifices that will have meaning only if they usher in a new age. That is why it is as if all those who are now ascending to the other world through sacrificial death are, in a very special way, uttering the words—as a call for a spiritual awakening of humanity—that Robert Prutz once spoke to Jacob Grimm, perhaps on much lesser occasions, with reference to [gap in the text] circumstances /[gap in the text]—now it is as if it were resounding as a warning from those forces that have passed prematurely into the spiritual world through sacrificial death and are permitted to spur us on to fulfill our duty with regard to spiritual life, are permitted to let it resound [gap in the text].

It is for the coming generation,
It is for the dawn of tomorrow.
It is for freedom and justice,
It is for life and death.

[ 51 ] Indeed, what can be achieved in the present through spiritual science applies to the dawn of the future, and what spiritual science can uncover about the mysteries of fate and death, applies not only to life as perceived by the senses, but to life and death, to the life that emerges from death, and to death itself, which gives rise to life.