The Rudolf Steiner Archive

Second Lecture

[ 1 ] First and foremost, it is my heavy and sad duty to inform you that our dear friend, the leader of the Munich Lodge, Miss Stinde, is now among those we must count as having passed into the spiritual realms. She left this physical plane yesterday evening. It is impossible to speak in these first moments about this loss, which is so extraordinarily heavy and significant for our society; I wish only to say a few words to you at the beginning of today’s reflections regarding this event, which is so painful and significant for us.

[ 2 ] Miss Stinde is, of course, one of those who are well known—I might even say as a matter of course—among the widest circles of our friends. She is one of those who have taken our cause to heart in the deepest sense and have identified themselves completely with it. It was in her home and that of her friend, Countess Kalckreuth, that I was able to give the first intimate lectures on our cause in 1903, which I was to deliver in Munich. And one may say: From that very first time Miss Stinde drew closer to us, she committed not only her entire personality, but also her entire—so valuable, so outstanding, so deeply influential—working power to our cause. She left behind what had previously been dear to her as an artistic profession in order to place herself wholly and solely, with all her strength, in the service of our cause. And since that time, she has worked intensively for our cause, both within our inner circle and beyond, in a rare, objective, and entirely impersonal manner. For Munich, she was indeed the soul of our entire endeavor. And she was the kind of soul of whom one could say that, through the inner qualities of her being, she provided the very best guarantee that our cause could develop in the very best way in this place. You know, my dear friends, that the performances of the Mystery Plays and everything associated with them had imposed a huge workload on the people working for us in Munich for a whole series of years. Miss Stinde and her friend took on this workload in the most intense way possible, and above all, it must be said, in the most understanding way, in a way that sprang entirely from the innermost essence of our cause, from the will that can itself be born out of this inner essence of our cause. And one may perhaps also suggest that the intensive work Miss Stinde performed truly consumed her life force very greatly in recent years. So that one really must admit: This precious life force, perhaps somewhat too rapidly consumed in recent years, was dedicated to our cause in the most beautiful, in the most deeply satisfying way. And there is surely no one among those who knew Miss Stinde closely who could ever quite shake the impression that this very personality was among our very best workers. It is certain, my dear friends, that some aspects of Miss Stinde’s work were misunderstood here and there, and it is to be hoped that even those of our friends and supporters who, through prejudice, failed to recognize Miss Stinde’s work will, in retrospect, fully acknowledge the sunny, powerful energy that radiated from this personality. And those who, from our wider circle, were able to observe what Miss Stinde did for our cause will, together with all those who were closer to her, preserve the most faithful memory of her. Just as we can be certain of this regarding her, we may particularly emphasize the words that have had to be spoken so often in recent days in connection with the departure from the physical plane of many of our friends—and especially with regard to Miss Stinde, given the many trials she faced and the opposition our cause encounters in the world, these words must be emphasized: We, who faithfully and honestly profess our belief in the spiritual worlds, count among our most important and significant collaborators those who have merely changed the form of their existence but who, as souls, remain faithfully united with us, even though they have passed through the gate of death. Those veils that still often surround those incarnated in physical bodies are gradually falling away, and the souls of our dear departed—of this we are certain—are at work right here among us. And we need, my dear friends, precisely this kind of help. We need help that is no longer challenged from the physical plane, help that no longer has to take into account the obstacles of the physical plane. And if we have the deepest, most earnest faith in the progress of our cause within world culture, it is partly because we are fully aware that those who once belonged to us—even when they work among us through spiritual means from the spiritual world—are our greatest strengths. At times, the confidence we need in our cause will have to be strengthened by the knowledge that we thank our departed friends for being in our midst and that, united with their powers, we can carry out the work for the spiritual world culture that is incumbent upon us.

[ 3 ] With this in mind, I wanted to say a few words today about this painful event and simply mention that the cremation will take place next Monday at 1 p.m. in Ulm.

[ 4 ] I would now like to continue the reflections we began the day before yesterday. Isn’t it true that times such as ours, in which the mystery of death approaches the human soul in so many ways—as we emphasized the day before yesterday—remind us in a very special way to ask what clarity a human being can gain regarding the spiritual worlds? Times in which humanity is subjected to such severe trials as the present one is, are indeed made for the human soul to turn toward where the questions arise concerning the beings of the spiritual worlds. For who, my dear friends, would not wish to see the great mystery of life unfold in every aspect of what is happening today within a large part of the civilized world? And who would not suspect that great connections lie hidden behind such events as those unfolding today in our wider surroundings—events that pierce human souls and hearts with pain and suffering, but also with hope and confidence?

[ 5 ] Certainly, anyone who views world events with a narrow-minded perspective will judge such far-reaching events in light of what preceded them and what may follow. But anyone who observes the course of world events merely from the outside, without delving into anything esoteric, and compares earlier times with the present, will be able to realize how infinitely much can be connected, let us say, with what is now taking place in the world in a manner entirely different from the subsequent effects. There are many people today who say that the current warlike events are merely the result of external political conflicts, conflicts between individual nations, between individual peoples. Certainly, that is true. And it is not a matter of objecting, in the strict sense, to the truth of such a view. But if you take, for example, the conflicts that took place at the beginning of the Middle Ages between the peoples living in Central Europe and those in Southern Europe—above all, the peoples who had conquered the Roman Empire— then one can also say that these struggles, which took place there in the form of political conflicts, arose from political antagonisms that existed there and had their causes in these immediately apparent antagonisms. But now these struggles have run their course. They have brought about certain configurations of European life as a whole. If you just open a history book and look at what happened back then through the struggles of the Central European peoples with, let’s say, the peoples of the Roman Empire, you will say to yourself: A later configuration of the European world has emerged from an earlier configuration of that world. But if one wishes to fully appreciate what this is all about, then one must take the entire subsequent history into account. For this subsequent history, as it unfolded in Europe, could not have unfolded as it did had the struggles of that time not taken precisely the course they did.

[ 6 ] And what exactly is part of this European history? The entire way in which Christianity spread and took root in Europe is part of it! And if you look at the deeper connections, you can say to yourself: With everything that happened in the centuries that followed, the situation is such that these events, which unfolded over centuries, were connected in their cause to the struggles of that time. That is to say, the entire subsequent configuration of the European world, right down to its spiritual conditions, is connected to the events we have pointed out. And if you consider this in all its significance, you will say to yourself: through the way Christianity spread in Europe, through the form it took as the young Germanic peoples united their youthful vigor against the aging Roman peoples with what flowed into humanity as the ripest fruit, the Christian proclamation—through this, a certain European atmosphere was created into which the subsequent souls were placed.

[ 7 ] So how souls lived in the centuries that followed, how souls came to be in the centuries that followed—this is connected to these events. If, therefore, a person back then had said: “Well, what is this all about? It is a political conflict between the peoples of Southern and Central Europe”—he would have been right. But the one who would have said: “Look, the configuration of the spiritual culture of all subsequent centuries takes its origin from what is happening here”—he too would have been right, and he would have been right in a broader sense. By finding the obvious causes of something, by stating what the most immediate opposites are, one has not grasped the full gravity of the event. The things of this world are most intimately connected. And if we need inner strength, so to speak, to find the right power to defend our cause, then we need only remember that in a circle truly even smaller than ours, those who represented the great universal truth of Christianity at the beginning of the Christian proclamation sat together. I have used this comparison often before, but let us apply it once more today.

[ 8 ] There was a time that we can describe quite simply as follows: We see the ancient Roman Empire. We see it living entirely within the atmosphere of the ancient pagan worldview. We see this empire with its people, who, in a sense, form the upper class. Down there—truly even further down than our “down” is today, truly “down” in the ordinary sense—in the catacombs beneath the earth, we see the first, few in number, Christians, with something entirely foreign to the world culture above, yet something they carry so deeply in their hearts that the power with which they bear it is truly world-transforming. And, my dear friends, when we picture these catacombs: down there in the catacombs, with their thoughts directed toward the Christ impulse, we see the first Christians, and above their heads the Romans—you know, of course, how they treated the first Christians; I need not tell you. And if you picture the scene in your mind a few centuries later, how different it looks! What was above has been swept away, and what was despised and hidden below has risen from below to above. Certainly, the times and forms in which such things happen change, but the essence remains. Of those who today represent the outward culture of science, the outward spiritual culture—though this should not be taken literally or in a narrow sense—it can also be said that they feel they are “on top,” and they call what is being pursued in our ranks a worldview of a few sectarians, a few abnormal minds. But the one who truly penetrates the essence of our worldview and who, above all, imbues himself with it, may have the confidence that here, too, the bottom will one day become the top. And then the thoughts can come together—the thoughts of the transformed world that will emerge from the difficult times of our day—in harmony with what must take hold of humanity in the spiritual realm. For there is scarcely a greater similarity in the course of history than the similarity between our time and that which took place when the ancient Roman culture was still on top and Christianity, represented by a few faithful souls, was still at the bottom.

[ 9 ] I would like to point out—though I do not wish to narrow our sensibilities, which should be broad these days, too much by referring to these things in an overly precise, pedantic manner—that this is precisely what is good when we hold our own age and the Rome of the early Christian era before our minds as images for our imagination.

[ 10 ] Well, my dear friends, many who today oppose what we call Spiritual Science must undoubtedly sense how fundamentally different the principles of Spiritual Science are from those generally held by people who are today considered “normal.” But even here, if we wish to understand this properly, we need only consider how very different the first proclamation of Christianity was from what was customary among those considered “normal” at the time, such as the Romans. We must familiarize ourselves with such a thought whenever we are repeatedly told that one cannot reach the worlds we are speaking of here using the means that are legitimate means of knowledge. But we must also truly understand the more intimate work in our branches in such a way that we say to ourselves: This life in our branches is not useless in and of itself. It is not irrelevant to our cause itself that we come together in such groups and time and again renew not only our acquaintance with the theoretical results of our teaching—that is not what matters—but also the warm feeling and sensibility for the concrete things and beings of the spiritual world. Through this, we accustom ourselves to the manner of spiritual perception and feeling that indeed enables us to receive spiritual truths differently than those who are unprepared. Even in our branch meetings, we must occasionally speak of something from the higher, later stages of spiritual knowledge; we cannot always start from the beginning. But this familiarity with branch life must also afford the majority of our friends’ souls the opportunity to take in within themselves such things as I hinted at the day before yesterday—the special nature of the verification of our spiritual knowledge.

[ 11 ] One cannot verify these things in the same way one verifies external things: by pointing them out to people with one’s eyes. But anyone who has a sense for such things, as I hinted at last time, will—even if they do not themselves look into the spiritual worlds—feel how the value of truth is enhanced by the mutual support of spiritual truths. That is why I want to draw attention once more to how significant it is that, on the one hand, through years of observation, a certain perspective has emerged—namely, that one-third of the time of our life between birth and death is relived after death—and now a completely different perspective is being discovered: the perspective that we actually experience the life of sleep in a special form during this time, which we call the Kamaloka, and that this time also accounts for one-third of life on the physical plane. These two perspectives are entirely independent of one another and have been discovered from different starting points. And so we have also shown on other occasions how one always arrives at the same conclusion from three or four different perspectives. There the truths support one another. For this, my dear friends, one must also acquire a feeling! And from this can then arise what I would like to describe as a kind of natural, elemental sense of truth regarding these spiritual insights. I must often appeal to this, otherwise I could not speak of later, higher truths at the individual branch evenings.

[ 12 ] The day before yesterday we pointed out that the inner cohesion of our sense of self between death and a new birth is, as it were, strengthened by that panoramic overview we have of our last earthly life after death. There we survey our life, as it were, in a tableau of life. Just make it very clear to yourself what it actually is that one sees there. Here on the physical plane, we are accustomed, as human beings, to standing, so to speak, at a kind of center of our world horizon and seeing the world around us that makes an impression on our senses. We survey the horizon that can make an impression on us. In this normal life on the physical plane, we do not look inward, but rather we look outward. Now it is important that, if we wish to form a concept of the life immediately following death, we immediately become aware that this view of the panorama of life is immediately different from what we are accustomed to perceiving on the physical plane. On the physical plane, we look out from within ourselves; we see the world as our surroundings. There we are, looking out from within ourselves, not looking inward. Immediately after death, we have a few days during which our field of vision is filled with what we have experienced between birth and death. From the periphery, we gaze toward the center. We look at our own life, at the temporal course of our own life. Whereas we usually say: Here we are, and there is everything else, immediately after death we have the awareness: This distinction between us and the world does not exist; rather, we look from the periphery toward our life, and that is our world for these few days. Just as in ordinary perception on the physical plane one sees mountains, houses, rivers, trees, and so on, so one sees what one has lived through in life from a certain personal point of view as one’s now immediate world. And the fact that one sees this provides the starting point for the preservation of the “I” throughout the entire life between death and rebirth. This strengthens and fortifies the soul so that between death and rebirth it always knows: I am an “I”!

[ 13 ] Here in physical life, we perceive our sense of self—as I have often hinted—through our relationship with our physical body. You see, if you pay close attention to a dream, you will realize that in a dream you do not have a clear sense of self, but often a feeling of detachment. This stems from the fact that here on the physical plane, a person actually only feels their “I” through contact with their body. You can roughly visualize this as follows: you run your finger through the air—there is nothing! You continue—there is still nothing. But when you bump into something, you become aware of yourself. You become aware of yourself by bumping into something. And this is how the awareness of our “I” is brought about. Not the “I” itself—the “I” is an entity—but the “I”-consciousness, the awareness of the “I.” The counter-impact draws our attention to our self. So in physical life, we are “I”-conscious because we live in a physical body. That is why we have been given the physical body. In the life between death and new birth, we have ego-consciousness because we have received the forces that arise from the perception of our last life. We encounter, so to speak, what the spatial world gives us, and thereby gain our sense of self for the life between birth and death. We encounter what we ourselves have experienced between birth and death in the last life, and thereby have our sense of self for the life between death and rebirth.

[ 14 ] Now comes a completely different life, one that takes up a third of the time between birth and death, often referred to as the Kamaloka life. Here, our perception undergoes an expansion. Whereas in the first few days our perception is actually directed only toward ourselves, toward the life that has passed, and not toward the personality, this is quite different in the period that follows. Certainly, the power to know oneself as an “I” remains. But now—you can piece together for yourselves from individual books and cycles what I am now summarizing—something quite peculiar occurs: that to which the human being must first become accustomed, because the entire way of perceiving the world is entirely different from that here on the physical plane. A large part of what a person must go through after death consists in getting used to a different way of perceiving things. Here we see nature all around us. What we perceive as nature here in the physical world does not exist at all in the world that is our world between death and a new birth. To see nature as we do here, we have our physical eyes, ears, and our entire physical apparatus of perception. And with other organs of perception, this nature—as it is in its richness of color and other qualities—cannot be perceived. That is why we are endowed with a physical body, so that we may perceive nature. After death, in place of what surrounds us here as nature, the spiritual world surrounds us—which we describe as the world of hierarchies, a world of pure beings, a world of pure souls. Not matter or substance or objects that have color, but pure beings. That is the essential point. Therefore, it goes without saying that the surprise is greatest for those souls who deny the spirit here in physical life. For those who deny the spirit and believe nothing of it are transported into a world they have just denied, a world that is entirely unknown to them. They are forced to live in a world they actually wished did not exist.

[ 15 ] We are thus surrounded by a spiritual environment, by beings, by souls. And little by little, individual souls emerge from this general world of souls—everywhere there are souls whom we do not yet know; we know: there are souls everywhere, but we do not know them individually—the individual soul of a specific person gradually emerges more clearly, and especially at this time, the souls of the people with whom we have lived here on the physical plane come to the fore. We learn to recognize, as we face the multitude of souls among whom we are: this soul is one person, another soul is another. We become acquainted with these souls. First, we must come to terms with the fact that the entire way one relates to the world between death and rebirth is fundamentally different—and in ways beyond what has been hinted at—from the way one relates to the world here on the physical plane. Here we call the world “outside” of us. After death, we truly have the awareness that the world is within us. It seems like a paradoxical comparison, but it is indeed so: Imagine for a moment that you were to vanish completely here on Earth, that you would dissolve into mist. This cloud of mist, which is you yourself, spreads out more and more, and it only comes to a halt—let us for a moment consider the firmament as a being—as the firmament, there “where the world is boarded up,” as they say. You then feel yourself as this firmament and now see everything within it, so that you stand outside with your consciousness and see the world within. We feel in such a way that everything that occurs takes place inwardly. Just as a pain arises here within us, so after death the beings arise within us as an inner experience. This is brought about by the infinitely intimate nature of the experiences between death and new birth, the connectedness with them, so that one actually has them as an inner experience first. But there is a certain difference. You see, regarding such a soul that one begins to recognize, as I have described, one can initially know this: it is there; but it has no form, it is not yet perceptible. To make it perceptible, one must perform an inner activity that amounts to something like the following. Imagine this translated into the spiritual realm: I sense something behind me that I cannot see, so that I form the mental image that it is there, but I must perform an activity to arrive at this mental image. I would say it is comparable to making a drawing after feeling my way around an object. So inner activity is necessary for imagination to arise. I know: the being is there, but I must first create the imagination by connecting with the being inwardly. That is one way in which one can perceive souls. The other way is such that one does not perform this inner activity with such outstanding intensity, but rather that it arises of its own accord. It occurs without one having to do much to bring it about. It is as if one were looking at something here, but of course translated into the spiritual realm. And this difference can exist between two souls: from one soul one gains a perception by actively participating, from the other soul by the imagination presenting itself of its own accord: one need only be attentive. So one must point out this difference. For if you become acquainted with a soul in such a way that you need to be more active, that is a soul that has passed away. And a soul that reveals itself more of its own accord is one that is incarnated here on earth in a physical body. These differences really do exist. After death, human beings—with exceptions that we may also mention at some point—are in contact both with souls who have passed away and with souls who are still here on Earth. And the difference lies in the way one must be active or passive, in the manner in which the image arises from the soul one encounters.

[ 16 ] Now there is a concept, a quality, that we have discussed on several occasions, but which we would like to summarize once more in relation to this entire life—one that occupies a third of the time of the past earthly life and which we are accustomed to calling the Kamaloka life. When you live here on Earth and someone nudges you, you know it, you perceive it, you say, “He nudged me.” And the experience is generally different when someone nudges you than when you nudge someone else. And when someone says something to you, the experience here is different than when you say something. It is quite the opposite in Kamaloka life, where one relives the time between birth and death. There it is like this—let me use this rough example—: if you have given someone a push in life, you feel what they felt from that push. If you have hurt someone with a word, you go through the feeling that they went through. So one experiences things from the souls of others. In other words, one experiences the effects one has brought about through one’s own actions; in this return, one experiences everything that other people here have experienced through us during our life between birth and death. If you have lived with so many hundreds of people here between birth and death, then these many hundreds of people have experienced something through you. But here in physical life, you cannot feel what others feel and experience through you; rather, you experience only what you yourself experience through others. After death, it is the other way around. And that is the essential point: that during this journey back, we experience everything that others have experienced through us. So we go through the effects of our last earthly existence. And the true task of these years lies in our going through these effects.

[ 17 ] Now, as we go through these effects, the experience of them becomes a source of strength within us. This happens in the following way. Suppose I have insulted someone. This has caused them to feel bitterness. I now go through this bitterness during the Kamaloka period; I experience it as my own experience. Yes, as I now experience it, the power that must act as a counterforce asserts itself within me; that is, by living through this bitterness, I absorb into myself the power to remove this bitterness from the world. Thus I perceive all the effects of my actions and thereby absorb the power to remove them. And during the period lasting one-third of my past earthly life, I absorb into myself all the forces that can be expressed as the intense desire within us—within the now disembodied soul—to remove everything that hinders perfection, because it sets the soul back in its development.

[ 18 ] If you think this through, you will see that we create our own karma; that is to say, we harbor within ourselves the desire to become the kind of person who can erase what we deem worthy of erasure. Thus, karma is being prepared precisely at this time. We incorporate into our soul the power we must absorb between death and rebirth in order to bring about, in the next incarnation, the configuration of our life that we can regard as the right one. I would say that this is the technique of creating karma. To understand these things correctly—not theoretically, but in such a way that they penetrate deeply into our emotional and volitional power—one must realize that the entire emotional orientation of the dead person is entirely different from that of the living. The living person will be able to say with infinite ease: I pity this or that dead person for having to go through this or that, for which he may be entirely blameless! You might assume that someone has inflicted serious injuries on another, yet is not to blame for it. Now you might feel sorry for the deceased. This is inappropriate; for the deceased desires nothing more than for the strength to develop within him through which he can make amends. That is precisely what he regards as his good. You would be wishing him not to achieve what he most ardently desires to achieve. But to do so, he must go through all of this. For the positive develops through the negative. By realizing what one has done, one develops the strength to make amends.

[ 19 ] So one might say: At the end of this phase of Kamaloka, after reliving one’s last life, one has already determined how one wishes to re-enter this existence in the next incarnation, how one wishes to be with this or that person here and there, so that one may balance out this or that. Essentially, one determines the karmic conditions for the life one is about to enter.

[ 20 ] For the time being, we are acquiring from the spiritual world the powers through which we can shape human beings in general, and through which we can create a body suitable for our individuality. First, we have the plan of our karma. Now we must first shape the human being to fit it. This will take much longer still, but it will follow thereafter. From this, however, you can see that the essence of the Kamaloka period lies precisely in the fact that we are offered the opportunity to prepare our next incarnation in a moral and proper manner. Now we must be clear that every subsequent incarnation always depends on the previous one. We can see, after all, how the next incarnation is prepared. And we see that the entire nature of a person’s life depends on the way they lived their previous life. That this contradicts freedom—I will return to this later—is an objection raised by people who have not penetrated the matter; but it does not contradict freedom.

[ 21 ] When we look at individual people in this way, we find that they differ in a thousand ways; as many people as there are on earth, so many ways are they different. But we can distinguish categories. There are people who give the impression, from their earliest youth, that they are particularly suited to this or that. Isn’t that right? There are such people. Even in childhood, one can say that they will accomplish this or that. They throw themselves, as it were, into this life; they are active. They have a specific task and develop the strength for it. We find other people who are interested in many things, but they do not have such a distinct orientation toward anything in particular. They take in a great deal. They may even come to a specific task later in life that does not quite suit them; they might have been able to accomplish another in a similar way.

[ 22 ] In short, people differ greatly from one another in the way they act in life, and that is actually what makes life possible. For example, there are people who appear in life, and it is not in their nature, I would say, to have a great impact through outward actions; but they need only say this or that word, and it has an effect on people. They have an impact more through their inner being. Other people have an impact more through their outward appearance. This is closely connected with the way one lived one’s life in the previous incarnation. There are people who die young, let’s say before the age of thirty-five, to mark this boundary. Such people are, through this death, in a completely different situation than those who die after the age of thirty-five. If one dies before the age of thirty-five, one is still closer to the world from which one emerged at birth. And the age of thirty-five is an important threshold. There, one crosses a bridge, as it were. There, the world from which one emerged recedes, and one gives birth, more from within, to a new spiritual world. It is important that we distinguish this. And now a person dies before the age of thirty-five. If they are then reincarnated, the strength they did not use during the lifetime that would have followed the age of thirty-five grows within them in a certain way. Such people, who pass through death in an incarnation before the age of thirty-five and thereby save for this incarnation the forces that would otherwise have been exhausted had they lived to be fifty, sixty, or seventy years old—in them, this power they have saved is added to the forces with which they enter the next incarnation, and as a result, such souls are born into bodies through which they are able, mostly in their youth, to face life with strong impressions.

[ 23 ] In other words, when such souls—who died before the age of thirty-five in their previous incarnation—reincarnate, everything makes a strong impression on them. They are somewhat strongly indignant, they rejoice intensely, they have vivid feelings, and they are quickly driven to impulsive actions. These are the kinds of people who are then thrust deeply into life, who receive their mission. One does not die before the age of thirty-five in vain, but is then thrust into life in a very specific way. But if one dies after the age of thirty-five—things intersect with one another; dying before the age of thirty-five can also bring about something else; these are merely examples; it need not be so—this can lead to one not being so strongly influenced by the things of the worldly environment in the next life. One cannot become enthusiastic quickly, one cannot become indignant quickly. One becomes acquainted with things more slowly but more intimately, and thereby grows into a life in the next incarnation through which one acts more from inner life, without being so decisively led toward a specific life task. One will stand in life in such a way that one might prefer a different task, but can be called upon to carry out something special, perhaps even against one’s will. Because one has made oneself suitable through the previous earthly incarnation to act in a more subtle way, one is useful in a broader scope.

[ 24 ] For example, if a person—I have mentioned this case before—is led through the gate of death at a very early age, say at eleventh, twelve, or thirteen years old, they have a brief time in Kamaloka, but they are still very close to the world they left behind at physical birth. There, everything turns out differently. If one has precisely this in one’s karma, then such a life, which has already come to an end by the twelfth year, is followed by a review in the first days after death, but one experiences it in such a way that it approaches one more from the outside, whereas if one dies in the fiftieth, sixtieth, or seventieth year, one must do much more oneself to bring about the review. One achieves it through one’s own activity. And because one must experience this life after death in various ways, people are prepared in various ways for a next life. It may be that one is particularly active in a given life. If, as a particularly active person, one were to be taken from life prematurely, it would follow that in the next life one would be determined by one’s karma to be placed in a situation with a very specific life task, which one would then carry out without fail. One is, as it were, predestined. But if one is particularly active in one life and lives into old age, these forces become internalized. Then, in the next life, one has a more complex task. External activity then recedes, and the soul is faced with the necessity of developing inner activity.

[ 25 ] Human life is so complex as it unfolds from one incarnation to the next. We will continue these reflections the day after tomorrow. Now I would just like to conclude by telling you: When you are faced with a time such as ours, in which, within a relatively short period, an exceptionally large number of people are led through death in an abnormal way, then something quite abnormal is in the making. And that must first be prepared. Every year you see how the time of flowering bursts forth into the world in waves. If you look back at history, you can say: there, too, the blossoms appear in bursts. A great flowering was the time of Lessing, Herder, Schiller, Fichte, and Goethe. It is as if all the geniuses were gathered together in one place. Then it stops again, and so the world goes on in bursts. People do speak of such sporadic appearances of geniuses; then things take a different turn. In the spiritual realm, we have sporadic blossoming, a special sprouting. Now, in our own day, we see sporadic dying in the physical realm. Here again you have two things that you can juxtapose as images, and which are immensely meaningful as images. Great physical dying—that is the seed for a later, significant spiritual blossoming. Things all have two sides. From this point of view, we say to ourselves, again and again, seeking strength and comfort, but also gaining confidence in our hopes, in connection with our time and precisely out of the consciousness of our Spiritual Science:

From the courage of the fighters,
From the blood of the battles,
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.