The Rudolf Steiner Archive

12. The Eternity of the Human Soul from the Perspective of Anthroposophy

[ 1 ] Ladies and gentlemen! First of all, as with previous lectures I have had the privilege of delivering here, I must once again apologize for not being able to deliver this lecture in the local language. Since that is not possible, I must attempt to make myself understood in my native language. Secondly, I ask your forgiveness for having arrived here with a cold, which may also disrupt the lecture here and there. Now—ladies and gentlemen—when one speaks in the present day about a question such as the one announced for today’s topic, a question that is, after all, connected to the deepest needs, the deepest longings of the human soul, then the objection arises from the prevailing mindset of our time that such questions cannot be discussed at all in scientific or epistemological terms, that one must be content, when it comes to such questions, to remain with traditional beliefs, with what intuition and feeling tell us about these matters. This is simply the view that is customary today, and therefore everything that is presented from the standpoint of genuine spiritual knowledge—as it is to be put forward here—will be perceived today as something peculiar. Everything presented here, every point of view put forward, is intended to stand firmly on the same ground that has come to be regarded as scientific over the course of the last three to four centuries, during which the natural sciences—which have achieved great success—have truly reached their zenith. But if one accepts only the method of knowledge applied in contemporary science, then one simply cannot find a path up into those realms where the answers must be sought—insofar as they are possible for human beings—to questions such as those we wish to address today: the questions of the immortality of the soul and the eternity of the innermost being of the human being.

[ 2 ] Well, the viewpoint put forward here seeks nothing more than to continue the scientific method—but not merely up to those points from which one can gain a glimpse into that supersensible world, from which alone a possible perspective on the eternal nature of the human inner being can be gained. If one wishes to arrive at such an insight, one must first of all turn one’s attention to the concepts of knowledge themselves. One must ask whether a form of knowledge that seeks to remain within ordinary consciousness—as we apply it to natural phenomena, where we alter them through measurement, through experiments with scales, through counting, calculating, and so on—whether, if we remain within ordinary consciousness with this concept of knowledge, a glimpse into the supersensible world is possible at all, or whether a completely different concept of knowledge must be developed. And so that we may understand one another regarding such a different concept of knowledge, ladies and gentlemen, let me begin with a comparison; I do not intend to prove anything with this comparison from the outset, but only to make myself understood, so that what I will then add in a more demonstrative manner may be grasped correctly.

[ 3 ] In everyday life, we are familiar with two states of human consciousness that are very different from one another. We are familiar with the waking state, in which we remain from morning until evening, and we are also familiar with the state of sleep, for example, in which we are removed from the ordinary circumstances of life and from which arise the colorful, shimmering dreams—to which, if we take a rational standpoint, we do not attribute the same degree of reality as to what we experience in the waking state.

[ 4 ] But let us consider: What leads us, in the first place, to speak of the dreams that arise from the state of sleep in such a way that, while they certainly have an interesting character, they are often said to have a lesser degree of reality—or perhaps, in a certain sense, no reality at all—compared to what we experience while awake? We arrive at this assessment of the dream world solely because we awaken and, through awakening, enter a completely different state of consciousness. What happens when we awaken? We engage our will within our bodies and in our physical activities. It all comes down to the will, my esteemed audience. For even what we perceive through the senses while awake is essentially determined by the fact that, upon waking, we also engage our will in the senses, in the sensory organs; as the will, so to speak, enters our entire organism and takes hold of it, we become capable of connecting with the natural external world through our organism. And through what we experience after this engagement, we are able to assess the reality of the dream. Within the dream itself, we could never arrive at any view of the dream other than that it presents full reality. As long as we are dreaming, we regard everything that the dream presents to us in its colorful, iridescent diversity as real.

[ 5 ] Let us—my esteemed audience—assume a certain rather daring, paradoxical hypothesis. Just imagine for a moment that we would never wake up throughout our entire earthly life, but would instead dream continuously. We would then have filled our conscious earthly lives with all the images we know from our dreams. And one could certainly imagine—if necessary—that, despite this, through some natural forces or, if you will, through spiritual beings that drive us to our actions—to everything we do from morning to night—our external life would still unfold as it does. We would simply not accompany it with waking perceptions. We would be doing something entirely different, of which we know nothing, but we would dream our way through our entire earthly life. And we would never even entertain the thought that this is not true reality. For the idea of touching things or seeing them with our eyes, as we do in the waking state, would never, ever occur.

[ 6 ] So, we can never judge our dream state solely from the perspective of wakefulness. However, if one takes such matters seriously—if one does not, as with the usual events of life, simply brush them aside out of habit, but instead takes them seriously—then, precisely in relation to the deeper questions of the soul, this hypothetical perspective arises: Yes, isn’t it perhaps possible, from a higher vantage point, so to speak, to awaken anew from our ordinary, everyday waking state to a higher state of consciousness? Isn’t it conceivable that, just as one awakens from a dream into everyday reality, one might awaken from this everyday reality to a higher consciousness? That is to say, that there might be a higher state of consciousness from which we would assess the reality of the everyday world in which we live from morning to night, just as we assess the reality of a dream from our waking state?

[ 7 ] I initially presented this to you—my esteemed audience—as a question, a purely hypothetical question. The scientific perspective I am seeking to present here shows that it is indeed possible for a human being to experience such a second awakening—an awakening that appears just as that jolt back into life from sleep and dreaming does, just as the ordinary waking state appears; in the same way, on a higher level, the other awakening appears: when one awakens from this ordinary, everyday life to a higher state, from which this everyday life appears, just as dreams appear from everyday life.

[ 8 ] Now, in order to adopt such a point of view at all, one needs something I always refer to in this context as intellectual humility. This intellectual humility is not exactly characteristic of people today. People today may say to themselves: “Well, when I was a small child, I sort of drifted into life as if in a dream; back then I allowed—I had to, after all—the education imparted by my parents and by life itself to take hold of me. In my entire state of mind, I was a different person. That intellectual standpoint I have attained—I certainly didn’t bring it with me into the world; I developed it myself out of the dull, dreamlike state of consciousness of childhood. People today admit this, but that is as far as they go. For now they say: Well, I have this standpoint; whatever appears true to me from this standpoint is true. Whatever appears false to me from this standpoint is false. Through this standpoint, which I have once attained, I am the sovereign ruler over truth and falsehood, over error and correctness.

[ 9 ] Yes, this gesture of immodesty—one must not allow oneself to have it if one wishes to ascend to true insights into the supersensible world. One must tell oneself: Just as one has developed out of the dull, dreamy state of mind of childhood, so must one assume that, from the point of view of the soul to which one has now arrived—the one one occupies as an adult—one can continue to develop further. If one now brings about such further development, it will become clear whether a second awakening, as I have hypothetically constructed it, is possible.

[ 10 ] Now, of course, when one wishes to embark on genuine, rigorous spiritual research, one first turns to those powers of cognition and the soul that are already present. For when it comes to one’s soul constitution, a person cannot turn to anything other than what is already there. One can try to develop this further.

[ 11 ] Now there is a power of the soul which even the more discerning philosophers of today admit, when viewed correctly, already points to the eternal essence of the human being; it points to it, but people simply do not want to develop this power of the soul further. People simply want to engage in philosophical speculation about it. That is to say, just as a dreamer might not want to wake up but instead want to “continue dreaming about the dream” in order to gain insight into it, so too do people want to remain stuck in ordinary reality. People do not want to wake up a second time. The soul force I am referring to lies beyond the power of memory. Since there is, of course, no time for it—otherwise I might well do so—I do not wish to engage here in broad-ranging philosophical discussions, but rather to remain entirely within the realm of popular consciousness. But let us imagine, through this popular consciousness, how the power of memory actually works in human beings. Events that we may have experienced decades ago are brought up—purely in the imagination—from the depths of the soul, or, for my part, let’s say, from the depths of the human being, so that we do not formulate any hypotheses about the soul at all. From the depths of the human being, what was perhaps vividly experienced years ago is conjured up as a mental image before the human soul. What is actually present there? What is present is that in our memory we have something that differs from all other aspects of a person’s behavior toward the external world when they perceive that external world. In order to perceive the external world, it must be there. When the eyes see, what is seen must be there. When the ears hear, what is heard must be there, and so on. Perception presupposes the presence of what is to be experienced. In the case of memory, we have something in the soul that is not present now; something that, like a perception, may have been present a long time ago—a very long time ago, perhaps decades ago—but is no longer there, is conjured up before our soul through memory.

[ 12 ] The spiritual science referred to here takes this fact as its starting point, not through philosophical speculation, but by taking up this fact and subsequently further developing the soul through exercises. The question is this: If, through ordinary memory, we are able to hold in our mental images and thoughts something that is no longer present but once existed in our earthly life; might we not also, through certain activities of the soul, be able to form such mental images that relate to something that was never present in our earthly life—that is, a more highly developed form of memory, which is not actually memory at all, but rather a world of mental imagery where memory is so highly developed that something is imagined that was never even there? This can be achieved by truly developing one’s thought life beyond what one is accustomed to in ordinary consciousness.

[ 13 ] This is not a criticism—my esteemed audience—but simply a presentation of facts concerning the life of the soul. For the natural sciences and for ordinary consciousness, what is true for the practical person is simply that one’s consciousness is occupied with surrendering to external impressions and passively experiencing thoughts arising from those external impressions.

[ 14 ] But in order for this second awakening—this higher awakening—of which I have spoken to come about, one must devote oneself with all one’s inner energy and activity to the life of thought, to the powers of thought. I have described the matters at hand in my books *How to Attain Knowledge of the Higher Worlds* and *The Secret Science*; here I wish only to outline the basic principles.

[ 15 ] Regardless of one’s attitude toward reality, one grasps upon some manageable concept. It must be manageable so that one does not delude oneself. And, of course, it is said time and again that the worldview I am advocating here could also be a form of autosuggestion or something similar. Anyone who truly sees how the soul comes to the second awakening will, for objective reasons, abandon the idea that this could be some form of autosuggestion or anything of the sort. In other words: manageable concepts are brought into the center of consciousness. Then, through intense concentration of the soul and in a meditative state, all the soul’s power is directed toward maintaining these images in consciousness for a certain period of time. You will then notice something taking place within the soul’s powers that I can compare to the following: If you constantly strain the muscles of your arm, those arm muscles will become significantly stronger. In the same way, the soul’s powers are strengthened when you direct all your energy toward a recurring mental image. Depending on a person’s aptitude, this may take a few weeks for one person and many years for another. It depends entirely on the state of the soul that the person carries within themselves. But for genuine spiritual research, such exercises must be carried out.

[ 16 ] Then what occurs must not be confused with what is often called clairvoyance today, which, of course, is based on all manner of subordinate activities related to human organic functions. But what is acquired here—my esteemed audience—requires that every step during the practice be carried out with the same deliberation with which a mathematician thoughtfully solves his problems for the sake of mathematical science; so that one knows just as precisely how to practice, how to take each step forward with the soul, as the mathematician is accustomed to carrying out his work. The only difference is that the mathematician works with objective forms, whereas here one works with one’s own soul forces, which one brings forward.

[ 17 ] In this way, you finally come to realize: There comes a point when you realize: You are now living in a completely different mental power than before. Before, the power of thought was simply abstract. You could reflect on something through your thoughts; and now, now you experience the power of thought inwardly as a real force, just as you experience the power of growth, just as you experience the pulsation of your blood—now you experience thinking and acting as something real within you. Now one realizes that the power of memory, which also lives in thought, is—one might say—merely a dilution—if I may speak figuratively—of what one now experiences as a significantly intensified power of thought pulsing within one, just as organic forces pulsate. One experiences the reality of thought. And one experiences this reality of thought by truly feeling oneself now in something in which one has not felt oneself before. Until now, one has felt oneself in one’s physical body; now one begins to feel oneself in a second, higher human being.

[ 18 ] And this second, higher human being then takes on a very specific form. What we are as human beings—as we go about our daily lives—is due to the fact that we carry a spatial body, a physical spatial body. Now we experience what I would like to call a “body of time”; one could also call it an “etheric body” or a “body of formative forces,” as I have done in my books. For we experience something emerging like a powerful tableau—so to speak—an overview of our earthly life up to this point, starting from the moment we have reached and extending backward into early childhood. Just as one otherwise experiences only a spatial tableau, one now experiences a temporal tableau: this is one’s entire earthly life up to this point, appearing all at once in a comprehensible way. It is the first supersensible experience a human being can have—to have one’s own earthly life suddenly appear before oneself as a tableau.

[ 19 ] Now someone might say: Yes, but perhaps this is just a slightly more complicated mental image. One could also piece together in one’s mind what one has experienced and then form a continuous stream of memories from it. Then one could obtain this image as a mental image.

[ 20 ] And perhaps what you are describing to us—brought about, if only through a degree of self-deception, and acquired on the basis of your active thinking—is nothing more than such a mental image. That would certainly be the case if it did not differ in its content! For if one truly approaches these matters in the same way one is accustomed to approaching scientific matters as a scientist—in laboratories, in physics labs, in clinical settings, and so on—then one now examines: What is an ordinary mental image? We imagine how people have approached us, how they have done this or that toward us, how this or that has affected us sympathetically or unsympathetically, and so on and so forth. This mental image may also depict to us how natural phenomena have approached us. But it is always this “approaching” that is the main point in a mere mental image. In this tableau, to which I have now drawn your attention, it is not the case that things approach us, but rather that everything comes from within us. What appears to us here, above all, is how we, through the inner forces of the soul, approach natural phenomena and approach other people. Everything that emerges from within is revealed to us. It is true self-knowledge—real, concrete self-knowledge—that emerges here, initially with regard to our earthly life thus far. If we compare what we are surveying here, we must say: It relates to an ordinary memory image we form of our earthly life so far in the same way that a seal impression relates to what is in the seal: It is the true reverse image. And anyone who can make this comparison knows that this is now the first stage of a new insight, an elevated recollection—which, however, is no longer mere recollection but now constitutes an imaginative overview of earthly life. This is the first stage in which one feels that one carries within oneself this higher human being, the temporal human being; that this is not something the physical body conjures up out of itself, but rather something that has itself worked upon this physical body ever since we have been on Earth as human beings. For the forces that lie within this body of time—we recognize them as being of the same nature as the force of growth, as that which, for example, while we were children, wonderfully shaped our initially unformed brain—I would say amorphous brain—into that marvelous form that this brain gradually takes on, and so on and so forth.

[ 21 ] And when one immerses oneself in this human temporal body—this first stage of human supersensory experiences—one must, of course, initially reject the narrow-minded conception of the “I” that arises from simply resting within one’s human skin. Now one feels at one with the entire cosmos. One now truly feels, within one’s etheric body—one’s temporal body—as a part of the entire cosmos. And one gains a very real sense of this: If I cut off a finger from my organism, it is no longer a finger; the finger has meaning only in connection with the organism. Thus, by living one’s way into this temporal body, one gains the clear awareness: As a human being within this higher being, you have meaning only as a part of the entire etheric cosmos; you belong to the etheric cosmos. The “I” now truly recognizes its significance as an earthly human being and knows that the very sense of “I” that a human being has as an earthly human being is actually owed to the physical spatial body.

[ 22 ] Now—my esteemed audience—this is, however, only the first stage of that supersensible knowledge that can be acquired in order to sense the eternal nature of the human soul. It is the next stage that truly leads to that second awakening. For with the first stage we have achieved nothing other than self-knowledge of the earthly human being. The higher stage is now attained by using the same power with which one initially concentrated entirely on images in active thinking—that is, by using the same intensity of soul life to remove such images from consciousness; one must, however, always return to them again and again. All these processes involve nothing suggestive, but rather something that proceeds with the utmost composure, much like mathematical operations. Yet, by devoting oneself intensely to such images and thoughts—which one brings to the center of one’s consciousness in the manner described—one is, at first, completely absorbed by these images. It is more difficult to let go of them than of the passively acquired ideas of ordinary consciousness. One must therefore apply a greater force than is usually required to forget something or remove it from consciousness. But this is a good thing; for by applying this greater force, one attains a broader, higher state of consciousness.

[ 23 ] You need only—my esteemed audience—to honestly consider what occurs in human consciousness when the familiar, passively acquired ideas cease. Just imagine for a moment that visual perceptions cease and one knows—such experiments have indeed been conducted in psychological laboratories—that a person falls asleep. This is precisely what cannot happen to a human being when, as a researcher of the spirit, they have first concentrated all their soul power on certain mental images and then dispel them. Then a state sets in for them that I can call the deepest silence of the human soul, empty consciousness. And this “deepest silence of the human soul” actually conveys something extraordinarily significant. So, by removing the images that were first brought into consciousness with all one’s strength, one initially experiences empty consciousness. That is simply the case; one can wait, in a mere waking state, for whatever now arises in the inner life of the soul; but what does arise is something I can only describe as the deep silence of the soul.

[ 24 ] To help us understand this spiritual experience, let me use the following analogy. Imagine we are first in one of those large modern cities, where there is such a tremendous din and terrible commotion that you can’t even hear yourself speak when walking down the street. Then you move away from the city, walk five minutes further, and it grows quieter and quieter; another five minutes away, it grows even quieter, ever quieter—let’s imagine we’ve now entered the deep, silent solitude of the forest; we can say: Everything around us is silent. Our soul, in turn, falls silent along with the silence of our surroundings. But you see, we have not yet attained that silence of which I am now speaking—the deep silence of the soul. When one speaks of the silence of the forest in contrast to the din of the big city, one is saying that the noise ceases very gradually. When we reach a state of zero—the point where the loud din has subsided to nothing—we call that tranquility.

[ 25 ] But—ladies and gentlemen—there is something that goes even beyond zero! Just imagine: someone has a fortune; he keeps spending from that fortune until he has very little left—indeed, until he has less than nothing. We see that, especially nowadays, people don’t stop when they have nothing; instead, they keep spending. How do they do that? They go below zero; they go, as mathematicians say, into the negative—into what constitutes debt relative to one’s wealth, into what is negative relative to zero, into what is less than zero. Imagine this in terms of silence. We can move from loud clamor to stillness—zero—but we can go even further, descending into regions of silence that are a deeper silence than mere zero-silence. And into such regions, where there is a greater stillness than the stillness of zero, into such regions the life of the soul enters when, in the way I have indicated, it erases the ideas that have first been powerfully implanted in consciousness. Then the soul enters the waking emptiness in relation to inner experiences. Then, out of the deep silence of the soul, emerges the world opposed to the sensory world—the objective spiritual world—which, emerging from the noisy bustle of the sensory world, confronts us within this sensory world with its own processes. Thus, for the spiritual researcher who has reached the stage I have described, the spiritual world confronts the deep silence of the soul, and he finds himself in the spiritual world, step by step, just as a human being finds himself in the physical-sensory world through his eyes and ears. And the positive spiritual world reveals itself to the deep silence of the soul.

[ 26 ] And then one can continue with one’s exercises: Just as one can dispel a mental image, so too can one dispel this entire picture of life that one experienced—as I have described—at the first stage of one’s supersensory cognition as true self-knowledge, one can now dispel it with all one’s strength—dispel one’s temporal self—just as, in the moment of insight when one arrived at the temporal self, one had already dispelled one’s spatial self with one’s strong sense of “I.” Now one can cast aside the temporal self. And out of the silence of the soul, something is kindled within one—if, in the face of one’s own self-knowledge, the real self-knowledge, one has arrived at waking consciousness in the deep silence of the soul— nothing [contemporary] is revealed to you; rather, with the removal of your temporal self, you enter the world in which you were before you descended to take on the physical body prepared for you by your parents and ancestors. Out of the deep silence of the soul, alongside the simultaneous spiritual world processes, one’s own spiritual-soul being—which one was before descending into this earthly existence—reveals itself. Now one looks into the life one lived with other purely spiritual-soul beings before assuming an earthly—if I may say so—garment; the human being’s existence before birth, or rather before conception, now comes into view through the soul’s gaze.

[ 27 ] That—my esteemed audience—is precisely what the perspective presented here is all about. One does not begin to speculate from some arbitrary starting point in order to determine whether the soul is immortal or not. One expects nothing from such speculation. For that would be like someone seeking enlightenment from a dream, from the dream itself. One must wake up in order to gain insight into the dream. Now one awakens in the deep silence of the soul on a higher plane, and one gains insight into what earthly existence is. It is shaped by the existence one went through before passing through birth—or rather, conception—and descending into this earthly existence. Spiritual science, in the sense intended here, seeks to demonstrate the method by which a vision of the eternal within the human soul can be attained. With this, however—my esteemed audience—we have ascended to the second stage of spiritual knowledge, through which we can gain insight not only into the mysteries of the world but also into the mysteries of our own being.

[ 28 ] A third stage is reached when something that is not a cognitive faculty in ordinary consciousness becomes one—just as the faculty of memory is not a true cognitive faculty. We remember what we have experienced. Nor is any other faculty of the soul a cognitive faculty. And when I say that it is to become a power of cognition, then any scientists sitting there—I can understand that quite well; for I know very well how one must initially think about these things as a scientist; no one who is not fully familiar with the usual methods of the natural sciences should actually speak with full responsibility about the precise spiritual cognition asserted here— so if scientists have not gotten even a slight chill down their spine from what has been said so far, they will at least get one when I now also claim that a force which otherwise plays an immense role in ordinary life—but is not to be utilized scientifically in ordinary life—is now to be utilized as a cognitive force for the soul: This is the force of love.

[ 29 ] Love certainly plays an immense role in existence, but it is said to be blind. It must not be regarded in any way as a faculty of cognition. But, my esteemed audience, when one has driven the power of cognition so far that one has reached the deep silence of the soul, then within this deep silence of the soul there arises, above all else, what one might call the clear feeling: If you wish to know, you must first renounce the sight of the external sensory world. You must withdraw from your physical body, withdraw even from your temporal body. And then, so to speak, that coarser sense of self bound to the physical body fades away very strongly—even further than I have described earlier, where one already feels at one with the entire cosmic existence through the temporal body.

[ 30 ] But if, through exercises that are also described in detail in the books mentioned, one familiarizes oneself with this deprivation, which manifests as a real sensation —deprivation of the physical, deprivation of the temporal body—, and if one looks back at one’s existence as it was before descending into physical life on Earth, then one experiences something like a deep pain of the soul. And in fact, true higher knowledge is born entirely out of this pain.

[ 31 ] Do not believe—my esteemed audience—that, if one is honest, one can claim that higher knowledge is born out of pleasure! It is born out of pain. And one must gradually develop the capacity to endure this pain. When one develops resilience in the face of this pain, then, as a spiritual researcher, one learns to return again and again—albeit in a somewhat different way—to physical, sensory existence. For, as you will surely understand: what I have described as a moment of higher knowledge—acquired in the manner I have characterized—is something one always possesses only for a very brief time. Being a spiritual researcher does not mean one is constantly transported to a higher world; after passing through the higher world, one must return again and again to the ordinary, physical-sensory world. But one returns from that moment of higher insight having first learned, through deep pain, to do without this physical-sensory world. Then one gains a completely different perspective on this physical, sensory world. Then one must truly come to know what can be called a sense of sacrifice—the sense of sacrifice that consists in a person truly devoting themselves, with full consciousness, to another being, not merely out of instinct, but with full consciousness, to another being or even to other natural processes. While instinct in love acts in such a way that it, so to speak, anchors the feeling of love within the physical body, love—when it is elevated and developed as self-sacrifice to the other, to the spiritual world, and also to the physical-sensual world upon one’s return—can be developed in such a way that it unfolds as a soul activity free from the body.

[ 32 ] Then—my dear friends here today—this love itself gradually becomes a power of knowledge. And then one comes to know what one can actually come to know only when love becomes a power of knowledge. You see, through love we enter into a relationship with another being who may at first be a stranger to us, and we feel close to that being when we carry our own existence over into theirs. In a sense, we must build a bridge from our own being to the other being through love.

[ 33 ] When love awakens on a higher level—as I would say, in the way I just hinted at—then, like a foreign being, we regain our “I,” which we had lost along the path I have described. But how do we regain our “I”? By allowing that which we were in previous earthly lives—which is as foreign to us as another personality is in this earthly life—to be embraced by love that has been spiritualized, ennobled, and raised to a higher level. Our “I” is not restored to us until we can grasp it in love as something entirely foreign. We did not desire it. Whoever desires to see this “I”—how it lived in previous earthly lives, then passed through the time between death and a new birth, in which we can perceive ourselves from the deep silence of the soul before we descended into earthly life— by looking back at that earlier earthly life, as it was before this purely spiritual-soul life, we discover our “I.”

[ 34 ] But first we must—and I would say quite selflessly—have developed higher love as a power of insight; then the understanding of past earthly lives will come to us without our having to seek it. Then you will know: We had to go through these past earthly lives. And once we have ascended—my dear friends here present—so that we can see our own “I” as it was, and how it once had a body other than this one we have been carrying since birth up to this point in our earthly life, at that very moment we have reached the point where we can truly perceive ourselves as completely free of the body; that is, to live through the moment with full awareness—the moment we will truly experience when we pass through death. Then we will, in reality, shed the physical body.

[ 35 ] At the level of knowledge attained through love, we shed the physical body for the sake of knowledge. And we experience ourselves in the very same element in which we will be when, together with our eternal inner self, we pass through the gate of death into the spiritual world from which we descended to physical life on Earth. And so we experience immortality through knowledge, just as we first—forgive me for using the expression—experience “unbornness” through knowledge.

[ 36 ] But the eternity of the human soul consists of these two aspects: non-birth—for which we do not even have a word in our modern, sophisticated language—and immortality. Only by understanding these two as two sides of the eternity of the human soul can one truly grasp this concept. Today, in their intellectual conceptions, people unfortunately treat even these matters with a certain degree of selfishness. They tell themselves—without actually saying it aloud, but rather unconsciously—that what preceded our earthly life does not interest us, because we are here now. What interests us is that we are here. But what does interest us is what happens after death, because we do not yet know that.

[ 37 ] You see, that is selfishness. But true knowledge does not arise from that. True knowledge arises only in the selfless being. Therefore, no one can gain true knowledge of the immortality of the soul who does not have the will to attain knowledge of the soul’s unborn nature. For the eternal nature of the human soul is composed of the soul’s unborn nature and its immortality.

[ 38 ] This also opens up the prospect of repeated earthly lives, because on the third stage of knowledge—following full awakening into the spiritual world—memory extends not only into pre-earthly existence but also into the stages of earthly life previously lived.

[ 39 ] Now—my esteemed audience—we know that what truly lies before us is a second awakening of the soul. Out of the realm of dreaming, we use our will to connect with our physical body. Through this, we live in the world of space. Whereas otherwise the images flow by and we, as dreamers, accept these passing images as realities—when we awaken, we recognize their nature as images. But what is it that makes images images? They are images precisely because they do not, so to speak, have reality behind them; they stand there as images. As we awaken, we engage with our bodily functions. I would like to say: We see red as red, whether we are awake or asleep; we hear a sound, whether we are dreaming or awake. But when we are awake—having engaged our will in our bodily functions—we, so to speak, cross over into reality—I am not speaking [again] of philosophical speculations, but entirely within the realm of popular consciousness—we cross over into the tangible world. We are awakened by the fact that, in a sense, we do not confine our sensory perceptions to the image, but extend them beyond the tangible things. We are engaged in the very same element that presents the things of the world to us in sensory existence, in physical existence.

[ 40 ] We have now gradually become involved in the new world as spiritual researchers. Why have we done this, esteemed audience? If you compare human thinking, feeling, and willing—as they exist in the soul even during the waking state—you will see that it is, in fact, a kind of dreaming. In reality, we are only truly awake to the external world through our sensory perceptions and the thoughts that combine these perceptions. As soon as we look inward in our ordinary state of consciousness, we are, in fact, dreaming. Even our thoughts, when we turn inward, are more or less [dream-like images]—and all the more so our feelings and our will, which remain dreamlike; indeed, even our will remains dormant.

[ 41 ] For what do we know, once we have decided on a course of action, about how this action—which we have before us in our imagination—extends from that mental image down into our limbs, so that we begin to move them? It is only through spiritual science that we come to understand what is happening in the muscles, what is taking place throughout the entire organism; otherwise, what constitutes an act of will remains trapped in a state of slumber. At first, we have only the mental image. Then everything descends into the unconscious state. Then the mental image of the event reappears. And the fact that through willing, what souls can only dream of on their own—even in the waking state—we gradually integrate into the human spiritual life through intensified thinking, through the deep silence of the soul, and through love awakened to the power of knowledge—just as we integrate the will into physical existence upon ordinary awakening. Through this, we learn to judge—from the perspective of the eternal within the human being—the ordinary sensory-physical life we live between birth and death, just as we will come to recognize how, from the standpoint of sensory-physical life, we integrate the content of the dream. In this way, we enter into the eternal—with full awareness!

[ 42 ] Ladies and gentlemen! Time and again, on such occasions, I must say: Of course, the objection arises: These matters concern only those who wish to become spiritual researchers, who look into these worlds. No—my dear friends—the spiritual researcher himself actually derives some benefit from these things for humanity only when he has brought them down into ordinary imagination, into ordinary language, into ordinary life. And this can happen for anyone who hears these things from the spiritual researcher. Just as we have become accustomed to accepting the findings that the botanist uncovers with his complex methods, or that the astronomer uncovers with his complex methods, so too will we gradually have to become accustomed to accepting the findings that the spiritual researcher—after giving an account of his method, as I have characterized it today—the findings that the spiritual researcher uncovers, —you will accept them, and accept them all the more easily, my esteemed audience, because the relationship between ordinary common sense and these truths is the same as that between true aesthetic taste and a beautiful painting. One must be a painter to paint a beautiful picture; but one need not be a painter to judge the picture in its beauty! All one needs is good taste.

[ 43 ] One must be a parapsychologist to understand things as they have been described. But just as one need not be a painter to appreciate the beauty of a painting, one need not be a spiritual researcher to understand, with perfectly sound common sense, what the spiritual researcher says—just as one with good taste can appreciate what the painter paints—not to mention that today, to a certain extent, it is possible for anyone to become a spiritual researcher. Anyone who delves into the books I have mentioned and does the corresponding exercises can today—regardless of their profession or life circumstances—at least reach the point where they can verify in a completely reliable manner what I have spoken about this evening, and many other things as well.

[ 44 ] Ladies and gentlemen! What kind of knowledge is it that leads into the eternal realm of the soul? It is a kind of knowledge that does not merely engage the human mind. It is a kind of knowledge that engages the whole human being as knowledge. The eye is engaged by the world of color. The ear is captivated by the world of sound. The human intellect is captivated by the laws of nature. But the whole human being is captivated by the spiritual world, as I have indicated here today.

[ 45 ] Therefore, to explain this, please allow me to conclude with a personal remark—one that is not meant to be personal, but rather entirely objective. If one truly wishes to grasp what is revealed to one in the spiritual world, one needs presence of mind, for it slips away again quickly, so to speak; it is fleeting. That which is attained, so to speak, through an advancement of the power of memory is difficult to imprint on ordinary memory. One must exert every effort to translate what one perceives in the spiritual world into ordinary language and into ordinary memories. I would not be able to speak about these things if I did not try, by every means at my disposal, to truly bring down what can be perceived in the spiritual world into the realm of physically audible thought-words.

[ 46 ] You see, one cannot grasp this with the mind alone; the whole person must, so to speak, become a sensory organ—but a spiritually developed sensory organ. That is why I try every time—it is my custom; others may have different ones— that is why I try every time something presents itself to me from the spiritual world—not merely to think it through as I draw it out of the spiritual world, but also to write it down or sketch it with some characteristic strokes; so that the arms and hands, as soul organs, are also involved in the process—in other words, something other than just the head, which remains confined to abstract concepts. The whole person must be involved in these insights. In this way, I have filled entire wagonloads of notebooks, which I never look at again; they exist solely to be written in, to truly work into the physical world that which comes from the spiritual world—the world perceived spiritually— so that it can then be [shaped], truly clothed in words through thoughts—the very thoughts with which memories are otherwise formed or which are otherwise used in life—and can also be truly internalized. In this way, one attains a science that relates to the whole human being.

[ 47 ] Tomorrow, right here in this very place, I will demonstrate to you, my esteemed audience, how this science offers us the opportunity not only to understand the cultural development of humankind, but also, perhaps, to promote it socially; and how, in particular, this science serves as a foundation—a true, real foundation for a true, genuine pedagogy—the art of education. I will then describe tomorrow how human education and human development appear in the light of this spiritual-scientific worldview.

[ 48 ] Today I simply wanted to convey the idea of how this humanities-based perspective strives to restore to human beings—through a realization that is, in a sense, based on a second awakening—the soul in its eternity for a life lived to the fullest.

[ 49 ] We have, after all, had to experience—from our own sense of the times, distinguished audience—that scholarship itself has spoken of “the doctrine of the soul without a soul,” and in a certain sense—I will have to address this question tomorrow—even of religion without God.

[ 50 ] Spiritual science, as understood here, seeks once again to bestow upon the human being, with full intensity, the soul—the eternal aspect of the soul—and to restore to religious consciousness the religious-divine content necessary for human development and education, so that through this very process human beings may become aware of their full dignity and — in the awareness of this dignity, which arises from the recognition of the connection between their soul and the Eternal, with the primeval divine-spiritual forces of the world — come to realize that this dignity belongs to their true being, just as the physical body, and everything else that is part of and connected to everyday life, belongs to their life.

[ 51 ] This is precisely what so many, many people today long for as a form of knowledge, even if they do not fully realize it. What torments people today, what causes them to feel unease in their lives—what essentially makes them nervous, what drives them to the point where they feel as if their entire existence is being hollowed out—is the burning question of the eternal forces, the underlying temporal forces that we must develop in our ordinary and social lives; that—if people are to gain insight into these eternal forces—they must find the spiritual science referred to here, find methods that lead the human being to this insight, so that he, the human being, may also intervene in social life from the perspective of this insight in such a way that he regards himself and his fellow human beings not merely as something that is, so to speak, carried along by the current of earthly existence — which is born with birth and dies with death — but rather that they learn to see themselves as something that is guided through all eternities, led through humanity’s stellar destiny, through the cosmic destiny, for it is this cosmic destiny that gives all earthly destinies their true meaning.

[ 52 ] Anthroposophy seeks to speak to people about this cosmic meaning—the meaning of the Earth’s purpose. This is what it seeks to reawaken in the souls of people today and in the future as a feeling and sense of the connection between the human soul and all the eternal forces of existence.

[ 53 ] And that—my esteemed audience—if you are honest with yourselves, you will have to admit: That is what we need as people of the present. We will need it more and more as people of the future.