The Rudolf Steiner Archive

Seventh Lecture

[ 1 ] My dear friends, we first remember those who stand out in the vast fields of current events:

Spirits of your souls, watchful guardians,
May your wings bring
The pleading love of our souls
To the earthly people entrusted to your care,
So that, united with your power,
Our plea may shine with help
Upon the souls it lovingly seeks.

[ 2 ] And for those who have already passed through the gates of death as a result of these events:

Spirits of your souls, watchful guardians,
May your wings carry
The pleading love of our souls
To the beings of the spheres entrusted to your care,
So that, united with your power,
Our plea may shine forth in aid
To the souls it lovingly seeks.

[ 3 ] May the Spirit we seek through our striving for spiritual knowledge—the Spirit who brought healing to the Earth and freedom and progress to humanity through the Mystery of Golgotha—be with you and your heavy responsibilities!

[ 4 ] This evening, I would like to share some insights into the connection between our physical world and the spiritual world by drawing on some more intimate events within our own movement. Within this intimate, closed circle, such a thing is indeed possible. And above all, I know that I can answer for these communications before those who became our members during their physical lives, who will remain so throughout their further lives, and to whom some of the facts I intend to speak of today pertain.

[ 5 ] It was just in the past few weeks, my dear friends, that karma led to my having the opportunity to speak at the cremation of dear friends, since I happened to be staying at the very place where it took place. And this whole situation was likely also connected to another fact—the fact that, in connection with these individuals, I was particularly able to receive certain remarkable impressions of their existence in the spiritual world, after they had passed through the gate of death only a short time before, indeed only days earlier.

[ 6 ] As I have often mentioned: whether one receives impressions of this or that aspect of the spiritual world depends on various circumstances. Above all, it depends on how strongly one is able to establish a truly inner connection—a strong inner connection—with the souls in question. This can turn out in such a way that sometimes one lives in the belief that one must have a very special connection with this or that soul. And yet, that is often not the case. With some souls, one only comes to realize through what one subsequently experiences that such a connection was actually easier to establish.

[ 7 ] Now, my dear friends, it was precisely in the three cases I would like to discuss first that I felt the most intense need to receive impressions immediately after death that were connected to the very essence of these souls. I would say that in these cases, it simply happened of its own accord. Isn’t it true that when one is to speak at a funeral service, one can of course address a wide variety of topics, but in these three cases there arose a kind of inner necessity to connect truly deeply with the essence of the souls in question, as it were, to put this essence of the souls in question into words during the cremation ceremony. But it was not as though I had set out to characterize the essence of these particular souls specifically at these funeral services; rather, it arose as an illuminating necessity that it must be so. I do not mean to say that it must be the same in other cases. This illuminating necessity arose in the case of one of the souls because—and I say this not as a law, but as an experience, as a lived reality—because, immediately after death, I received impulses from the spiritual world to characterize this essence of the soul. I did not need to form words; the words arose, the words came. And we shall see later, my dear friends, why this was so, from a few hints that can already be given regarding the further life of the soul in question after death.

[ 8 ] First of all, in order for the whole matter to be understood, I must say a few words about the special nature of such experiences. If one wishes to form impressions here in the physical world, one confronts things. One thinks about them, depending on whether one sees, hears, or touches them; one knows that it is oneself who is forming these thoughts. When one is dealing with a soul that has passed through the gate of death, one immediately realizes that everything one does oneself—perhaps in thoughts or words—actually distances one from the being in question; that it is necessary to surrender oneself entirely to what is taking shape within. And if one wishes to put these impressions into words, one must indeed have within oneself the capacity for these words to form within one, so that one can do nothing to make these words form in just this way. One must be able to listen inwardly to the words. And by listening inwardly, one simultaneously has the certainty: these words are not spoken by oneself, but by the being who has passed through the gate of death.

[ 9 ] This was the case when, in recent weeks, one of our older members passed away from the physical plane. An older member who, over a long period of many years, had truly and deeply integrated herself into our movement, bringing to life within herself—through her feelings and emotional experiences—the ideas and mental images that our Spiritual Science can offer. With immense devotion, this individual had identified in her soul with all that surges and flows through our Spiritual Science. Now it was a matter, so to speak, of surrendering to this impression emanating from this soul. And curiously enough, it was the case—as could be observed—that even a few hours after physical death had occurred, not merely certain word-impressions, but impressions already taking shape as audible, real words emerged as a characteristic of the soul in question. Nothing else could be done with these words except to attempt, as far as possible, to perceive purely what the soul in question was speaking through one’s own inner being, for one must certainly call it such speech. And so these were the very words that I then spoke at the cremation. They were the words which, as I said, were not my words, but were the words—and I ask you to consider precisely the words I am now using—that came from the soul in question, who had passed through death:

Across the vastness of the world I will carry
My feeling heart, that it may grow warm
In the fire of the sacred working of power;

In the thoughts of the world I will weave
My own thoughts, that they may grow clear
In the light of eternal life;

Into the depths of the soul I will dive
With purposeful thought, that it may grow strong
For the true goals of human endeavor;

In God’s peace I thus strive
Through life’s struggles and with worries
Preparing my self for the higher Self.

>Seeking peace in the joy of work,
Perceiving the existence of the world in my own being
I wish to fulfill my duty to humanity;

Then I may live in expectation
Toward the star of my soul,
Which grants me a place in the realm of the spirit.

[ 10 ] And then, when I spoke those words again at the end of the eulogy, I found myself—without having planned it—changing them at the very end and saying:

Then I may live in anticipation
Contrary to the stars of my destiny,
Which have assigned me a place in the realm of the spirit.

[ 11 ] Now it was clear what it was. It was an attempt on the part of the individual in question to imprint upon her own being—which had now passed through death—what she had absorbed over the years through thoughts, ideas, feelings, and sensations related to Spiritual Science, in such a way that the ideas and feelings became forces that shaped and molded this individual, this being, after death. So this individual had used the ideas and mental images of Spiritual Science to, as it were, sketch out and shape their own being; but to shape it in such a way that this being would then truly continue on in the spiritual world in a soulful manner.

[ 12 ] Shortly thereafter, we lost another friend of our movement, another member, to the physical plane. And in the case of this member, too, there was an urgent need to characterize the being. But it could not happen as it had in the case just mentioned. In the case just mentioned, the words, as they were expressed, were such that one could say: A soul that had passed through the gate of death expressed itself as what it felt itself to be and what it wanted to become; it expressed itself. In this second case, it was as if one had to confront one’s own soul and contemplate, spiritually, the nature of the soul in question. Then this soul also expressed itself, but it did so in words that drew their material for self-characterization from the observing soul itself. So that what the soul that had passed through the gate of death did was merely an inspiration to articulate what one now felt regarding its essence, after it had passed through the gate of death. And so the following words arose, which had to be sent on at the cremation ceremony:

You walked among us,
The gentle grace of your being
Spoke of the quiet power in your eyes
A peace that enlivens the soul,
Flowed in the waves,
With which your gaze
To things and to people
Carried the weaving of your inner self.
And it permeated this being
Your voice, which eloquently
Through the nature of the word more
Than in the word itself
Revealed what lay hidden
In your beautiful soul,
Yet which also revealed itself wordlessly To devoted lovers
And sympathetic souls
This being, of noble, quiet beauty,
Proclaimed a sensibility Receptive to the creation Of the world’s soul.

[ 13 ] Once these words had been spoken at the beginning and end of the eulogy, the cremation began. And it was now possible to observe, my dear friends, that this moment—mind you, not the moment during which the words were spoken, but the moment when the heat of the furnace took hold of the body—that this moment was the one in which—I will speak more precisely about this later—a kind of first conscious moment after death occurred. I say “moment of consciousness” and mean this: immediately after death, there is indeed a looking back at what appears in the etheric body as a tableau of life. But this passes after a few days. Now, at that very time, it was necessary for a fairly long period to elapse between death and the cremation. Death occurred on Wednesday evening at six o’clock; the cremation took place the following Monday at eleven o’clock. So the fading away of this image, this tableau of life, had already begun. So the first moment of some consciousness following the tableau of life occurred when the heat of the furnace took hold of the body. And then it became clear that the way of seeing, the way of viewing the whole world, is different for such a being who has become spirit than it is for the human soul as long as it is in the physical body. In the physical body, we perceive the things of space in such a way that they remain stationary when we move away from them. If there is a chair here and I see it, and I then walk a little further away and look back, the chair is still there. I look back at it. If I walk on, the chair is still there; it remains stationary. While we live in the physical body, this is not the case for events that unfold in time. The events we have allowed to pass us by in time do not remain stationary. An event that has passed us by is gone, and when we look back, we can only look back in memory. Only our past connects us to the event. It is not so for a spiritual being. It sees events as having come to a standstill, just as we here see things in space as having come to a standstill. And so the first impression the soul had, of which I spoke, was that of the funeral service with everything that was done and said there. This funeral service had, of course, already been over for five to ten minutes, but for the deceased it was still there, standing there, just as for the physical human being only the things in space stand there. And the first impression was looking back on what had been spoken there; that is, above all on the words that now resounded to her, on the words I have just read aloud. It is truly the case, as Wagner said out of deep intuition: “Time becomes space.” It is that which has passed, not past for spiritual experience, but it stands there, just as things stand in space for physical human beings. So that was the first impression after death: this funeral service and what was spoken there. In this case, it was such that this looking back and, as it were, observing what had happened at the funeral service cannot be called a definitive awakening of consciousness, for afterward the twilight state set in again, of which I shall speak, and only after some time did such an awakening of consciousness occur again. Once again, slowly and gradually, the flash of consciousness occurs. It takes months until it is so fully present that we can speak of the deceased being fully surrounded by the spiritual world. But later, precisely through a subsequent flash of consciousness, an intense need manifested itself in this particular personality to keep returning to this moment, to look directly at this very moment, to take this moment clearly in hand. This is in full harmony, as I will explain shortly, with what can be known about the entire behavior of the human being after death.

[ 14 ] A third case is one that will particularly touch our dear Berlin members deeply; it is the case of our recently deceased friend and member, Fritz Mitscher. Fritz Mitscher passed through the gates of death shortly before his thirtieth birthday, before reaching the age of thirty. He would have turned thirty on February 26, which is coming up soon.

[ 15 ] For Fritz Mitscher, as his thoughts turned to his own being after death, what emerged above all were the impulses within his own soul—his contemplative soul—that sprang from his such intense devotion to our spiritual movement. In this regard, he was truly an exemplary figure. An exemplary personality in the sense that he, who was by nature inclined toward the pursuit of scholarship, truly developed this aptitude more and more out of an inner necessity, a deeper inner need, to place all the scholarship he had acquired in the service of the Spiritual Science movement. He was thus precisely one of those personalities who are so necessary in the development of our worldview of Spiritual Science. What the present needs is for external science, for external scientific endeavor, to be utilized by the soul in such a way that this external scientific endeavor, as it were, flows into the insights gained from the spiritual world, toward which we wish to incline ourselves. And this inspired the youthful soul of Fritz Mitscher. So that one could not help but feel, even just by observing him here in life: He is on a very, very right path in relation to our movement.

[ 16 ] Now my friends will recall something I said on the occasion of another death years ago: It is precisely in the case of such personalities, who have, so to speak, absorbed within themselves what physical science can offer in the present, that it turns out, when they pass through the gate of death prematurely, that they become significant collaborators after death in our spiritual movement, which is, after all, not dependent solely on those souls who dwell here in the body. Were it not for the powers of the souls who have passed through the gate of death with earthly knowledge and remain there in connection with the will that is to flow through our movement, we certainly could not, in our present materialistic age, cherish the hope that we must cherish to the extent that it is justified, namely that we are making progress.

[ 17 ] And so something emanated from Fritz Mitschers’ soul that can be summed up in words I could not express any other way than exactly as I am about to read them to you now, and which were also spoken at the cremation:

A hope that brought us joy,
Thus you entered the field,
Where the spirit-blossoms of the earth
Through the power of the soul’s being
Wish to reveal themselves to the seeker.

Your yearning was deeply connected
To the purest love of truth;
To create from the light of the spirit,
Was the solemn goal of life,
Which you pursued tirelessly.

You cultivated your beautiful gifts
For the bright path of spiritual knowledge,
Unperturbed by the world’s contradictions,
As a faithful servant of truth
You walked with sure steps.

You exercised your spiritual faculties,
So that, brave and steadfast,
On both sides of the path
They pushed error away from you,
And created space for truth.

To shape your self into a revelation
To shape your self into pure light,
That the soul’s solar power
Might shine powerfully within you,
Was your life’s care and joy.

Other cares, other joys,
They scarcely touched your soul,
Because knowledge appeared to you as light,
That gives meaning to existence,
Appeared as the true value of life.

A hope that brought us joy,
Thus you entered the field,
Where the spirit’s blossoms of the earth,
Through the power of soul-being,
Wish to reveal themselves to inquiry.

A loss that pains us deeply,
Thus you vanish from the field,
Where the spirit’s earthly seeds
In the bosom of the soul,
Matured in your sphere of perception.

Feel how we gaze lovingly
Toward the heights that now
Call us onward to other work,
Extend to the friends you’ve left behind
Your strength from the realms of the spirit.

Hear our souls’ plea,
Sent after you in trust:
For the work on Earth, we need
Strong power from the lands of the spirit,
For which we thank our departed friends.

A hope that brings us joy,
A loss that pains us deeply:
Let us hope that you, far yet near,
Shine upon our lives, never lost,
As a soul-star in the spiritual realm.

[ 18 ] Such words, my dear friends, are, after all, so characterized that they must be regarded as arising from identification with the soul that has passed through death. They arise as a necessity, even if they are not spoken by the soul itself—even if only the impulse comes from the soul itself—they arise as a necessity through the forces that have emanated from the soul, precisely so, down to the smallest detail, to be spoken exactly as they have been spoken. I truly had nothing, nothing else in mind with these words other than the words themselves, just as I have now read them to you. Therefore, it was something deeply moving for me when, on the night following the funeral, the soul of our Fritz Mitscher—not yet out of his consciousness, but certainly out of his being—responded, as it were, to what had been spoken at the funeral; responded by uttering the following words:

To shape my self into a revelation
Of pure light,
So that the soul’s solar power
Might shine powerfully within me,
Was my life’s concern and joy.

Other cares, other joys,
They scarcely touched my soul,
For knowledge appeared to me as light,
Which gives meaning to existence,
As the true value of life.

[ 19 ] It never even occurred to me, when I was writing these two stanzas, that they could be rephrased so that every “you” could be changed to “me” and every “yours” to “mine.” It was simply vivid to me:

To shape your self into a revelation
Of pure light,
So that the soul’s solar power
Might shine powerfully within you,
Was your life’s concern and joy.

Other cares, other joys,
They scarcely touched your soul,
Because knowledge appeared to you as light,
That gives meaning to existence,
As the true value of life.

[ 20 ] And now the words had been rendered in such a way—and could be rendered in such a way—that, without changing anything grammatically, only “Dir dein Selbst” could be changed to “Mir mein Selbst” and “Dir im Innern machtvoll strahle” to “Mir im Innern machtvoll strahle,” and so on.

[ 21 ] Here you have a curious connection between what has been spoken here and the soul that had passed through the gate of death; a connection that shows that what had been spoken here did not return from the soul merely as an echo, but rather as something transformed in meaning. I would just like to note that, when these words were formed, a certain feeling truly passed through my soul as if by necessity, which provided the underlying nuance for this: It was the feeling as if it were a necessity for me to give this very soul a certain commission as it passed through the gate of death. We know, after all, how much in today’s materialistic age is at odds with our spiritual movement; how little the world today is suited to this spiritual movement. And one can truly say—especially when one sees through what is possible to accomplish in the earthly body—one can truly say: Support is needed! And it was this feeling that found expression in the words:

Hear the plea of our souls,
Sent to you in trust:
For our earthly work here,
We need the mighty power from the realms of the spirit,
For which we thank our departed friends.

[ 22 ] It seemed to me that this soul felt a sense of duty—as if urging the seeds it had taken root here to be put to further use specifically for the advancement of our Spiritual Science movement.

[ 23 ] You will have seen that, despite all their differences, there is something in common in these three cases that are so familiar to us. What prevails is that thoughts about the essence were stirred in the observing soul—in the very soul that was particularly inspired to contemplate through karma, precisely because it had to speak at the funeral—and that there was, as it were, a necessity to express this essence.

[ 24 ] In the case of the first personality I spoke of, it was truly so—you know, of course, in what sense I say such things: merely to serve the cause of knowledge, not to engage in any sort of self-aggrandizement—that I had also come to know this personality on the physical plane after they had entered society. One does witness quite a bit of what goes on while the personalities are here in our society; but our friends will know that it is not my way to inquire particularly about living conditions or the like, or to ask this or that about what the personalities in question lived through in their physical life here and so on. It was not a personal satisfaction, but, I would say, a satisfaction of understanding for me when I went on to characterize that one personality in a short eulogy, describing what she was like in her soul, how she had lived her life here on earth. I had nothing before me but the soul after death. Not only did she speak these words, which I had first read, but I had the soul before me as she now was after death, as her nature was after death. I had nothing else before me. I actually knew hardly anything about what had happened to her before she joined our society, nor did I know much about the life that had not taken place in meetings and so on, or the occasions when one otherwise meets our members from time to time. I knew nothing else. Yet in this very case, as if obeying an inner necessity, I had felt compelled at the funeral to speak about certain life circumstances—circumstances that pertained to her entire life; the relationship of the deceased, who had reached a ripe old age, to her children and to her life’s work. And as I said, it was not a personal satisfaction but a satisfaction of insight when the relatives then told me: We actually recognized the person in question so well from what was spoken there, for every word characterizes her quite intensely. So the picture of the individual life during the physical life’s course had also been captured, for which there was only the possibility—now that this life had contracted within the soul—of seeing the results contracted within the soul. But what particularly interests us in terms of insight is this: that we perceive in this very soul the intense necessity of directing the spiritual gaze toward one’s own life after death. For it was truly not to my credit that I was able to characterize this very life of the personality in question; rather, the process was that, although the personality was not conscious at that time, it nevertheless directed its soul being—thereby preparing itself for its later, conscious life after death— directed the forces that were to become conscious later toward its own life, toward its own experiences. And what I had to say was then to be seen in these mental images, which consisted of the soul directing itself toward its own experiences. So I had to describe what the personality unconsciously thought about itself after death. And what is important to us here, what must be emphasized, is that the personality, after death, felt the intense necessity to unconsciously direct its gaze precisely toward its own being.

[ 25 ] In the case of the second personality, which had, so to speak, awakened as the heat took hold of the body, it later became apparent—during such sporadic reawakening — in the way she behaved toward what was characteristic of her being at that moment, that she felt the need, as I already said, to reach back to this being, to these words that characterized her being, as if to grasp them again. And precisely in language—if one can call it language, what is expressed in the relationships of souls, whether they are in the body or not, and are already spiritual beings, already dead—in the way one can speak of that communion, one must certainly say: when I was then able to perceive a later awakening in this personality, I had, so to speak, to feel a sense of bliss that these words, which I was able to formulate there, had come to me. For it became apparent that this was truly a good interaction with the deceased. One could gather that the soul of this deceased person—you know, this is speaking figuratively—expressed itself in such a way that it said: “It is good that this is here. It is good that this is in this place.” Such a feeling manifested during this second awakening, as if the deceased were showing that something has, so to speak, been reinforced in the spiritual world by the fact that it has also been expressed here on the physical earth in human words, and that this is something she needs, and that it is good for it to be fixed even more firmly through the physical earthly word than she herself was able to fix it. Thus, there was a need for her to fix this. And it is a relief to her that it has been strengthened in this way through fixation.

[ 26 ] And in the case of our dear friend Fritz Mitscher, you can see quite clearly that, on the night following the cremation, he immediately took up and made use of what had been said here to clarify his own nature to himself, to gain clarity about himself and his own nature.

[ 27 ] In all three cases, then, we are looking toward our own being. Of course, such things are initially those that touch our soul and our heart through their purely human value, through their purely human connection. But spiritual insights can only be gained from the immediate world if they choose to reveal themselves to us through grace. One cannot force them; one must wait for them. And it is precisely in these matters that one sees how strangely karmic connections work.

[ 28 ] When I was in Zurich myself, the day after the second of the aforementioned figures had passed away there, we walked past a bookstore, and I saw a book in the store that I had read years ago. Given the way I live, I wouldn’t be able to find the book so easily in my so-called library, which, however, is in a rather disorganized state due to my having lived in many different places. Perhaps it no longer exists at all. Years ago, I had read a book by the Viennese philosopher Dr. Ernst Mach, and it was available as a used copy right there in the bookstore. I wanted to read it again, or at least look at it again. And when I got to the third page, something immediately caught my eye that I had long since lost sight of, namely a very interesting remark by Ernst Mach about human self-knowledge, about the difficulty of self-knowledge in humans. I quote almost verbatim what is written on page 3 in the note on the “Analysis of Sensations” by University Professor Ernst Mach:

[ 29 ] When I was young, I was walking down the street one day when I came across a person who gave me the impression: What an unpleasant, repulsive face this person I’ve just met has. And I was quite startled when I discovered that it was my own face that I was encountering, staring back at me from a mirror. — So he was walking down the street, and through mirrors facing each other, his own reflection was thrown back at him. And when he saw himself, he said: “What a person with an unpleasant, repulsive face is coming toward me.” — And immediately afterward, he adds another such remark about a lack of self-knowledge. He says: “One day I returned tired from a journey and boarded a bus. I saw another man getting on across from me and thought: What a shabby schoolmaster is getting on there! And lo and behold, it was myself. The mirror in the bus had shown me my own image. — And Professor Mach adds: So I knew the demeanor of my social class better than my own.

[ 30 ] It is something that serves as a reminder of just how difficult human self-knowledge is when it comes to one’s purely external appearance. One does not even know what one looks like physically, even if one is a university professor. You can see this in this very candid example.

[ 31 ] It is indeed interesting that this particular example can be cited in connection with these cases, for, isn’t it true, here in the physical body the example itself shows you that self-knowledge need not be all that much of an obstacle to what one has to achieve on Earth. One can be a famous professor and have as little self-knowledge as the man expressed. But I mentioned this example for the reason that it is remarkable that this example from physical life came to mind when the soul was led to consider anew how the dead person feels the necessity to grasp and contemplate their own being. Here in the physical world, one can indeed, I would say, manage without self-knowledge for all that pertains to the purely material aspects of our lives. One cannot, of course, gain knowledge of the spiritual worlds—we will speak of this again in eight days’ time—without self-knowledge. But for purely external material circumstances, one can manage without self-knowledge. As soon as the soul has passed through the gate of death, however, self-knowledge is the very first thing it needs, and this is shown to us especially by the experiences I have cited. Self-knowledge is what must be taken as the starting point.

[ 32 ] You see, the materialist usually gets stuck on the question: Yes, does consciousness persist beyond death? — Now, it is a finding of spiritual research that when the soul has passed through the gate of death, it does not in fact suffer from a lack of consciousness, but rather has an excess of consciousness. The fact that a kind of awakening occurs only later is not because one must acquire a new consciousness after death, but because one has too dazzling a consciousness, too much consciousness, and this must first be gradually tempered. You will find more details on this in the Vienna Cycle, which has also been published. After death, a person has too much consciousness, overwhelming consciousness, and must first find their bearings in this world of overwhelming consciousness. And as they gradually progress to this point, they become less conscious than before. They must first dampen this consciousness, just as one must first dim sunlight that is too strong. So it is a gradual dampening of consciousness that one must do. One cannot, therefore, speak of an awakening as in the physical world, but rather of a recovery from the excess of consciousness to the degree one can bear, depending on what one has experienced here in the physical world. For this, something is necessary: In order to find one’s bearings in this all-pervading light-consciousness after death, the starting point is the recognition of one’s own being; this requires that we be able to look back upon our own being in order to find, as it were, the guidelines for orienting ourselves in the spiritual world. The lack of self-knowledge is precisely the obstacle to consciousness after death. We must find ourselves in the all-pervading light. And now you see why the need arises to characterize the deceased, in order to meet them halfway in this process of self-discovery.

[ 33 ] This is something that emerges for us as a kind of general insight from such intimate and deeply moving experiences. After death, once the etheric tableau of life has vanished, a process of development begins—a gradual unfolding—that arises as we come to know our own life here on Earth, which we gradually perceive emerging from the spiritual worlds. For this is our sole pursuit after death, once the tableau has passed. That which is in the spiritual world is around us. But what we must primarily become acquainted with is our own being. And in this, the mental images we know only from Spiritual Science are of great benefit to us, for they provide us with means of orientation for spiritual knowledge. Thus you can see from the first case: what appeared as self-criticism was only possible through what was absorbed from Spiritual Science; to look upon one’s own being in such a way that words like these could take shape: “In worldly thoughts I will weave my own thinking, that it may become clear in the light of eternal becoming.” This is, after all, a condensed version of the many ideas expounded in Spiritual Science and used here to provide a self-characterization of one’s own being. Or “Into the depths of the soul I will plunge my thoughts, that they may become strong for the true goals of human activity.”

[ 34 ] But what we actually aim to achieve with these things is this: to lift our Spiritual Science movement out of the purely theoretical realm and gradually transform it into something the soul can grasp in a living way—as it were, into a stream in which we truly live, move, and have our being; so that we know what is happening in the spiritual world around us, just as we know in the physical world that the air in which we breathe is all around us—something that the uneducated can and do deny. This is the future destiny of humanity: to know something of the fact that just as the air is for and around the physical body, so too is the spiritual world all around us for the soul’s experience—a world that corresponds to the soul—just as the air corresponds to the body—shaping the soul, weaving the soul, and permeating the soul.

[ 35 ] Now, we are also able, in a sense, to address in detail the fate of the soul after death. And it is precisely for this reason that, especially in our time, such matters are, I would say, examined more intimately, because through our great but also painful historical events, death, so to speak, breathes its breath through the world, and our time claims so many victims. This is a special call to engage specifically with the event of death in our time.

[ 36 ] Now we know, my dear friends, that when a human being passes through the gate of death—that is, when they have surrendered their physical body to the earth, to the elements of the earth—the I and the astral body have stepped out of the physical body. We saw in the second case that the etheric body had already been shed during cremation; the etheric body departs within days. But now, especially in our time, it is only natural for us to raise a question. So many people in our day pass through the gate of death in the prime of life. By transferring a purely physical mental image into the spiritual realm, where it applies even more than in physical life, we can ask ourselves the question: What becomes of the etheric body of those who have passed through the gate of death, which detaches itself after a few days? What becomes of such a youthful etheric body? The person in question, who passes through the gate of death at the age of twenty, twenty-five, thirty, thirty-five, or even earlier, sheds his etheric body—but an etheric body that could have served his physical life for decades, that could still have worked here in physical life, that still had forces for decades. According to karma, they could not use these forces, but the forces are still within them. They could have continued to work here in physical life for decades. The physicist rightly thinks: No forces are lost; they are transformed here. In the spiritual realm, this applies even more. The forces here in a young man who fell on the battlefield, forces that could have sustained physical life for decades to come—these forces do not vanish into nothingness; they are there. And even now we can say, prompted precisely by the events of our time: these forces pass into the being of the Folk-soul of the people concerned. It absorbs these forces, and these forces of the etheric body are at work throughout the folk-souls. These are real spiritual forces that remain with the human being, in addition to what he carries through time with his ego and his astral body—his individuality—between death and a new birth. The only thing that will matter is that it be understood as far as possible in the future that these forces are also present within the folk-souls, that they are present within the general activity that the folk-souls will unfold—as forces, not as beings. There they will be the most fruitful, I would say, the most sun-radiant forces.

[ 37 ] I would like to cite an example that is once again close to home, one that at first glance has nothing to do with current events, but which, due to the way it occurred and what became of it, can at the same time give us a glimpse into all those cases where an unspent etheric body is shed after death, which has occurred following a youthful life. We experienced the death of the child of one of our members last fall; the child was seven years old. The death of this child occurred in a particularly peculiar way. It was a dear child and, as far as is possible for a seven-year-old, already an extraordinarily spiritually active child at the age of seven; a dear, good, and spiritually very active child. Now, the child’s death occurred because, at that very moment, the child was in the spot where a moving truck overturned; as it fell, the truck crushed the child, causing the child to die of suffocation—in a spot where perhaps no truck had driven before, nor would one drive afterward, but only at that precise moment. Moreover, one can observe even from the outside that this child, due to all sorts of circumstances—which, in the external materialistic worldview, are called coincidences—was at that very spot at the exact moment the truck overturned. It had gone to fetch some food supplies for its mother and had left a little later that evening because it had been delayed. Had it left five minutes earlier, it would have long since passed the spot where the cart overturned. Moreover, it went out through a different door than it was accustomed to; just that one time through a different door! At the other door, it would have passed to the right of the cart. The carriage fell on the other side. If one truly examines the entire incident from a Spiritual Science-karmic perspective, it is one of those cases where one can clearly see how the external logic—which is rightly applied in external physical life—is flimsy and inapplicable. I have used an example of this on several occasions. The example of the man who walks past a river and falls into the water right at the spot where a stone lies. The external observation will, of course, assume that the man stumbled over the stone and fell into the water, thereby meeting his death; one will also hold to the opinion that he drowned. But if he had been autopsied, it would have been revealed that he had suffered a stroke, and that he fell into the water dead as a result. That is, he fell into the water because he was dead, and did not die because he fell into the water. Cause and effect are confused. You find such judgments in science at every turn, where cause and effect are confused. What seems quite logically justified in external life can be completely wrong. Now, of course, in the external view, the case of little Theodor Faiß will also be described in such a way that one says: Well, that is an unfortunate coincidence! In truth, however, the child’s karma was such that the I, to put it plainly, ordered the cart to tip over in order to fulfill the child’s karma. Here we have a particularly youthful etheric body. The child could indeed have become a man and lived to be seventy years old. The forces were present in the etheric body—enough to last seventy years—yet they had passed through the gate of death after just seven years. The entire event took place in Dornach. The father, who had enlisted in the German army at the time, was not present at all while this was happening; he died very shortly thereafter, having been wounded in the war. The entire event took place in the immediate vicinity of the building, and since that time we have had the forces of this child’s etheric body in the aura of the Dornach building. And whoever has to work on this building and can perceive the spiritual forces at work there will find within it the forces of this child. So that, quite apart from what has now passed into the spiritual world as the I and the astral body to work in the life between death and new birth, the etheric body that remains has now united with the entire spiritual aura of the Dornach building. Such things are insights that are at the same time connected with deep, meaningful feelings, with important, meaningful feelings. For these are not insights that one receives dryly, like numerical facts, but rather with a soul filled with deep gratitude. For naturally, mindful of such insight, I will never for a single moment lose sight of the fact—whenever I myself have even the slightest part to play in the Dornach building—that these forces are forces working with me and helping me in the construction. Here, precisely what is theoretical knowledge unites with immediate life. Mindful of such knowledge, my dear friends, it will be clear that now, when so many unfinished etheric bodies here on Earth are passing through the gate of death, we can foresee what will happen when the sun of peace returns, after the twilight of the present war. Then the forces—the etheric forces—of those who have passed through the gate of death, the gate of suffering, will truly be present and will seek to unite with the souls working here on Earth for the good and progress of the Earth. But it will be necessary for there to be people on Earth who have an understanding of these things, who can be conscious of the fact: up there in the spiritual world, in the etheric bodies that have remained behind, are those who have made the sacrifice of their time. They wish to work their way into this Earth. They will only be able to work fruitfully if there are receptive souls here who themselves wish to connect in thought with what comes to them from the spiritual world. Thus, for the fruits of this time of ours—which is indeed great, yet heavy and painful—it is infinitely important that a spirit-affirming insight creates thoughts that can then unite with the thoughts descending from the etheric bodies of those who have sacrificed their lives. This is precisely what points out to us that even in these difficult events, which are marked by suffering and death, we are also marked by greatness; that we receive from these difficult events the admonition that they are meant to lead us into a time more inclined toward the spirit than the time that has passed, so that it does not come to pass that, as it were, the sacrifices made must look down upon an earthly world to which they have given themselves in order to work for its progress and salvation, and in which they find no opportunity to intervene because the souls are not there who send them receptive thoughts. Thus we must also grasp Spiritual Science as something living, as something living that is necessary for the time to come, precisely in view of the events of our days. And this is what I have repeatedly summarized in the spirit and sense of our reflections in the words:

From the courage of the fighters,
From the blood of battle,
From the suffering of the forsaken,
From the sacrifices of the people
The fruit of the spirit grows—
Guiding souls with spiritual awareness
Toward the realm of the spirit.