The Rudolf Steiner Archive

Fourth Lecture

[ 1 ] Spiritual Science is meant to show us, in all areas, the connection between the spiritual worlds and the worlds that we perceive through our senses while we are in our earthly bodies—worlds we seek to understand through the thoughts of our intellect. Now, through a series of reflections, we have been concerned in particular with the connections that exist between the life that the human being leads as a soul between death and a new birth, and the life that he leads here in his physical body. We always hold fast to the idea that, as long as a human being lives here within the physical body, they direct their thoughts toward the sphere they must pass through between death and a new birth. We hold fast to this thought directed toward that sphere, not to satisfy mere curiosity, but because our reflections on Spiritual Science have convinced us that the penetration of thoughts from that other world into this world also contributes to what this world here can attain in terms of uplifting, life-giving thoughts for action, thinking, feeling, and so on. We must hold fast to the idea that many of life’s mysteries can only be resolved if one has the courage to approach the enigma of death, as it were. Now, in order to once again bring the connection between the spiritual world and the sensory world before the eye of our soul from a very special perspective, we can start from a trivial observation that nevertheless encompasses many profound feelings.

[ 2 ] We start from the fact—which we have often discussed—of how a person passes through the gate of death. I say that we start from something that is commonplace, yet is connected to profound experiences that touch a person in the depths of their soul. When we encounter a person here in the physical world, we form the thoughts that can connect us to them; we develop our feelings toward them—our sentiments of sympathy or antipathy; we regard them with more or less friendliness or more or less hostility; in short, here in the physical world we establish a certain relationship with another human being. This relationship may be based on blood ties; it may also come to the fore only through the affinity of choice that emerges in life. All of this can be encompassed by what is meant at this moment by the “relationship between human beings.”

[ 3 ] When a person with whom we have shared some bond departs from the physical world and passes through the gate of death, what remains with us of that person is, at first, the memory—that is, a sum of feelings and thoughts that we have stirred within ourselves through our relationship with them, that we have brought to life within ourselves. And from now on, since the person has passed through the gate of death and left us, the feelings, mental images, and thoughts that connect us to him live in a completely different way than they did before, when he still inhabited the physical plane with us. When he inhabited the physical plane with us, we knew that at any moment the external physical reality could join what we had formed in our souls in relation to him, that we could confront the external physical reality with our inner experiences. We must also be prepared at all times for the fact that a person, through some new way of presenting themselves, may alter the feelings and emotions we have had for them up to that point, in one direction or another. We often do not think of the radical difference that arises when, suddenly or not so suddenly, the moment arrives when from then on we can carry only the memory of that person in our soul, when we know: he will no longer appear before our eyes, he will no longer take our hand. The image we have formed of him remains essentially what we have already formed. It is something quite radical that occurs in the relationship between two people. As I said, it is something that sounds trivial to the mind, but which has a profound impact on our inner life, in the specific instance where it occurs: the fact that memory becomes for us a human soul that, until then, had made an impression on us from the outside through its physical embodiment.

[ 4 ] But let’s now compare this memory with other memories we usually form from our experiences. After all, we live out a large part of our physical lives through memories. We are aware of what we have experienced. Let us say, for example, that we are aware of events that have passed us by, of which we have retained thoughts; we know that through these thoughts we can turn to times past in which the events in question took place. But if we now survey what we have in the greatest part of our memories—I say, in the greatest part of our memories—we carry within us in thought something that is no longer there: past events, events whose reality we can no longer encounter in the external world, which belong to the past.

[ 5 ] Once we have taken in the spiritual aspects of Spiritual Science, what we must call the memory of a deceased person—the memory of a soul that has passed through the gate of death—appears quite differently before our inner eye. It is quite different. We carry thoughts within us, but there is something real behind these thoughts—not in the external, physical world accessible to us, but in the spiritual world. That to which these thoughts refer is there, even though it cannot enter the sphere of our visibility. This is a completely different concept of memory than a memory of something that has passed away here in the physical world. If we wish to consider the fact before us in relation to the entire world, we can say: We carry within our soul thoughts of a being who is in the spiritual world. Now we know—and this must have become particularly clear to us from the reflections we have held over the last three evenings that we have been able to spend together here— that not only do the longings of the souls who are incarnated here ascend to the spiritual worlds, but also that the consciousness of the souls who have passed through the gate of death—who now live in the world between death and new birth—extends downward to what is taking place here in the physical world. We can say to ourselves: Those souls who live disembodied in the spiritual world receive into their consciousness from the physical world here whatever they are able to perceive by virtue of their spiritual vision and their spiritual looking down. In one of my recent reflections, I indicated how souls who still live here in a physical body are perceived by the so-called dead souls, in contrast to the perception they have of souls who, like them, live in the time between death and new birth. I have explained how the souls living in the spiritual world must always be active in order to have a perception—how, for example, they know: “Now another soul is near you”—but how, in order to look upon it, they must be inwardly active. They must, as it were, construct the image; the image does not arise of its own accord, as it does here in the physical world. In the spiritual world, one first has the thought of “being there” and must then, as it were, experience this “being there” inwardly so that the image arises. It is the reverse process.

[ 6 ] There is, however, a significant difference in the way the image is formed with regard to those souls who are already in the spiritual world and those who are still here on Earth in a physical body. While a person, in the life between death and rebirth, must create the image of a soul that is already in the spiritual world entirely from within themselves—and must be fully active in doing so—they feel more passive when it comes to a soul that is still living here on Earth; the image comes to them more readily. Thus, the activity required is less for a soul still living here on Earth than for a soul that has already shed its physical body; the inner effort is less. This is precisely how the difference is expressed for those living between death and a new birth. If you consider this, you will say to yourself: When the soul, having passed through the gate of death, enters the spiritual world in this way, it not only surveys those beings of the higher hierarchies or the human souls who also live with it in the spiritual world, but the world of souls here also appears before it, namely those with whom it had a relationship here before it passed through the gate of death. It is important to note this significant difference: while here on Earth, human beings essentially always have around them what constitutes earthly existence and can only grasp it in the spirit—the “only” here, of course, is to be taken very comparatively—the “other” world, the situation is exactly the opposite when the soul is in the spiritual world. What it sees there of its own accord is our world, the world that is the “beyond” from that perspective, whereas it must make an effort to constantly perceive the world in which it now finds itself, to constantly construct it. So there, the “here” is that which one must constantly work to attain, and the “beyond” is that which actually always presents itself as if of its own accord. But now, within this hereafter—which is the here and now for us, but seen from the other side is the hereafter—human souls appear with what lives within them, especially those human souls with whom relationships were formed during their time on earth. These human souls appear. But within, I would say, this sea of spiritual perceptions that are made here from the other world and within the human souls, memories of those who have passed through the gate of death sometimes emerge. Imagine this vividly. Let us imagine hypothetically that we lived at a time when no human soul remembered any of the dead. Then, of course, the dead would also see the human souls, but no memories of the dead would live within those human souls. Into this sea, which presents itself to the disembodied souls, now enter the memories—the memories of the dead. That is where they live. This is something that, through the free will of people and through the love of people, is added here to what the dead can always see from the other side. So this is something that is added.

[ 7 ] You see, here we have another point where important questions arise for the spiritual researcher, where the spiritual researcher must ask: What happens to the one who has passed through the gate of death when they now perceive, embedded within the flowing souls here in our world, the memories that these flowing souls have of the dead? What happens when they perceive these memories? In spiritual research, when such a puzzling question arises, one must first experience it thoroughly. One must immerse oneself in it. If one then begins to speculate on what the solution to such a question might be, what the answer might be, one will certainly arrive at the wrong conclusion at first. For the exertion of the ordinary intellect, bound to the brain, generally yields no solution at all. Through what constitutes inner effort, one can only prepare the way for the solution. The solutions to riddle questions that relate to the spiritual world truly arise in such a way that they emerge from the spiritual world like a gift. One must wait. One can really do nothing else but live fully within the question, meditating on it again and again, allowing the question to come alive in the soul with all the qualities of feeling it can evoke, and waiting calmly until one—the expression is truly used quite correctly—is deemed worthy to receive an answer from the spiritual world. And it usually comes to one from a completely different direction than one might expect. The answer then comes from the spiritual world at the right moment—that is, at the moment when one has sufficiently prepared one’s own soul so that it can receive the answer. That it is the right answer—well, that cannot be determined by theory, any more than anything about physical reality can be determined by theory. This can only be determined through experience itself. To those who always deny any spiritual reality and say: “This cannot be proven; everything must be proven”—to them I would simply ask whether any human being in the physical world could ever have proven the existence of a whale if it had not been found. Nothing can be proven that does not have to be demonstrated in reality in some way. Thus, in the spiritual world as well, one must experience that which is reality.

[ 8 ] Now, certainly, whatever enters into consciousness as a solution presents itself in the most varied ways, depending on how one has prepared oneself in the soul. Truth can present itself in many different ways, but it must still be experienced as the truth. If one allows this riddle, which I have just posed, to truly take root in one’s soul, then an inner image emerges—seemingly from a completely different direction—which, I might say, makes an inner claim to offer something regarding the solution to the riddle in question. The image of a person might appear, for instance, who is having their photograph taken or their portrait painted. In general, the image of some physical object appears, a representation of that physical object. And finally, everything that can be placed within the realm of the artistic and also of artistic representation appears. If you have a mental image of how physical life unfolds, you can say to yourself that this physical life unfolds in such a way that the human being faces external natural beings and natural events: these take their course. Human affairs unfold in the same way—that which human beings care for and weave together to meet their needs and so on, that which unfolds for them in history. But beyond that, human beings seek something that, in essence, has nothing to do with the immediate necessities of the world. The human soul becomes aware that if only nature and history were to unfold with the satisfaction of human needs, life would be barren and bleak. Human beings create something here in physical existence that goes beyond the course of nature and the course of needs. They feel the need not merely, let us say, to see some landscape, but also to recreate that landscape. They arrange their lives so that someone connected to them in some way can receive a picture from them and the like. From there, we can think of the entire realm of art, which human beings create here as a higher reality beyond reality, in addition to the ordinary reality of nature and history. Think of all that would not exist in the world if there were no art, if art did not bring forth—to what, we might say, is already there of its own accord—that which it is able to give from its source. Art creates something that, by necessity, need not be there. If it were not there, everything that is naturally necessary could still happen: One could imagine that without any reproduction or artistic representation, the course of life would proceed from the beginning of the earth to its end. One can imagine all that people would then lack. But theoretically it would be possible that our earth would be punished by the fact that no art could develop on it. In art, we have something that transcends life. Imagine everything created in art existing in the world, and people thus moving through the world; then you have, so to speak, two parallel processes: the necessities of nature and history, and that which is introduced as an artistic current.

[ 9 ] You see, just as art, in a sense, conjures up a spiritual world within physical reality, so too does the memory that takes root here in the soul conjure up another world within the world of those who have passed through the gates of death. For the dead, the world could go on without memories living in the souls here—memories born of love, born of all human relationships. But then, for the dead, the world that is theirs would go on just as a world would go on for us in which we could find nothing that goes beyond ordinary reality. This is an immensely significant connection: that through thoughts of love, through thoughts of remembrance, through all that arises in our souls in this way in connection with those who are no longer in the physical world, something analogous to what artistic creation is here is created there for those who are not in the physical world. And just as human beings must accomplish artistic creation from within themselves here in the physical world, must add something of their own, so too must the opposite occur for those who are in the spiritual world. It must be offered to them from the other world, by the souls who have remained here, who are still incarnated here; by the souls who view them more passively than those souls who are already with them in the spiritual world. What for us would be the course of nature and history, unfolding of their own accord, without art, without all that which human beings create beyond immediate reality—that would be, for the dead, a world in which souls not remaining within the physical world lived with memories.

[ 10 ] Such things, you see, are not known within the physical lives of human beings. One says, they are not known—. They are not known by what is ordinary consciousness, but by what is deeper subconscious consciousness, these things are known, and life has always been organized accordingly. Why did human communities place such importance on celebrating All Souls’ Day, memorial days, and the like? And those who cannot participate in a general day of remembrance for the dead have their own days of remembrance. Why is that? Because in the subconscious consciousness of human beings lives what one might call a dark awareness of what is brought into the world by the fact that memories of the dead are enlivened, especially enlivened. When the open soul of the spiritual beholder goes on All Souls’ Day or Remembrance Sunday or the like to where many people gather with memories of the dead, it perceives that the dead are present there, and for the dead it is then, though naturally conceived differently, as if here on the physical earth people were visiting a cathedral and beholding those forms they could not see were it not for the artistic imagination adding something to physical existence, or as if they were listening to a symphony or the like. It is, so to speak, that which arises beyond the ordinary measure of existence that presents itself in all these memories. And just as art inserts itself into the physical-historical course of human life, so do the memories of the dead enter into the picture that the souls receive of their world between death and a new birth. In such customs, which take shape within human communities, precisely that secret knowledge is expressed which the souls possess in their depths, and many a venerable custom is connected precisely with this subconscious consciousness.

[ 11 ] We view the interconnections of life with even greater admiration when we are able to penetrate them using the tools provided by Spiritual Science than when we are unable to do so. When the deceased encounters a memory of himself in the soul of a person who had a relationship with him here, it is always as if something were to meet him that beautifies his life, that elevates his life. And just as beauty for us is composed of what is art, so beauty for the dead is composed of what radiates upward from the hearts and souls of the people who remember their dead.

[ 12 ] This is also a connection between the world here and the spiritual world there. And this is a thought that is closely linked to that other thought which arises from much, much of what can be cultivated in Spiritual Science: the thought of the value and importance of earthly life. Spiritual Science does not lead us to despise the earth with all that it can produce, but rather Spiritual Science leads us to regard physical earthly life as a link within the totality of world life and as a necessary link; as a link that is oriented toward what is at work in the spiritual world and without which the spiritual world would not appear in its completeness. And when we now turn our gaze, so to speak, to the fact that beauty for the dead must spring forth from our physical world, the thought dawns on us that this beauty would be missing from the spiritual world if there could not be a physical world with human souls capable of developing, even within the body, thoughts—thoughts imbued with feeling and rippling with sensation—toward those who are not in the physical world. It meant a great deal, my dear friends, when in ancient times, for example, entire tribes would time and again devotedly remember the great ancestors in their festivals, uniting their feelings in remembrance of a great ancestor. It meant a great deal when they established such days of remembrance, for that was always a shining of beauty for the spiritual worlds—that is, for the souls standing between death and a new birth. And just as little—well, let’s say, to put it mildly—as it would be “unfoolish” for someone here on Earth to take particular pleasure in their own likeness, in their own portrait—that is, of course, something foolish, isn’t it?—so significant is the image that the deceased finds of themselves among those left behind here. For, my dear friends, we must bear this in mind: our earthly human being becomes something quite different for us when we, as the dead, view him from the spiritual perspective; we have often emphasized this. Here we are enclosed within our skin; here, what we call “we,” what we call “I”—precisely that which is enclosed within the skin—is what is of value to us. This applies even to the “selfless” person! For the “completely selfless people,” this may even apply to a greater degree than for those who consider themselves less selfless! What is enclosed within this skin is of value to us above all else; then comes the rest of the world. We regard this rest of the world as the external world. But this is precisely what is significant: that when we are outside our body, we become united with the external world; we live in this external world. This merging, this spreading out over the external world—I have described it often. And that which then relates to us as the external world does now—that is what we have lived out for ourselves right here between birth and death. The outer world becomes, we might say, in a sense our inner world; and what is here our inner world then becomes our outer world. Hence this significant experience, as I touched upon it in my *Theosophy*, upon entering the spirit realm: “That is you.”

[ 13 ] So our inner world here, which encompasses our ego—that is what we then look toward; that is the external world. And it is the case that the soul, which cannot be as egotistical in that way as it is here, looks back upon the thoughts that confront it as thoughts about itself. This is what confronts it like an external world, what may truly be incorporated into the scope of what we then call beauty, that which uplifts us, that which may then uplift us. Something is added to what constitutes an external world—namely, the memory of what we have experienced between birth and death—something that does not live in this life of ours, but lives in other souls, yet relates to us. This is truly the introduction of something that goes beyond us, that is, beyond our external world, just as the introduction of the work of art here is something that goes beyond ordinary, self-contained reality. As little as it is “nice” here for a person to be in love not only with themselves but also with their own image, it is just as natural there that one relates to what appears in the souls left behind as an image of oneself and is added to the other image one has of oneself, that one stands in relation to it just as one might stand here in relation to a landscape painting in relation to the landscape or the like. So it is that when this riddle-like question arises in one’s soul, one receives the image of the person and their image in the souls of those left behind, and from there one finds the path to answering such a riddle-like question. Speculation generally leads to nothing, but rather the ability to wait, to wait patiently. What one should strive for, with regard to the spiritual worlds, are actually the questions; the answers must arise through grace, through the grace revealed by the human soul.

[ 14 ] In the course of this discussion, I have just drawn attention to how people establish institutions, days of remembrance, and commemorative festivals in general that are connected to a deep knowledge not grasped by ordinary consciousness. This is connected to the fact that human beings possess, in the depths of their souls, a vague, comprehensive knowledge—I have pointed this out repeatedly here—and that the knowledge they grasp with their conscious mind is actually drawn from this comprehensive knowledge. I have pointed out how intelligent we actually would be if we could grasp with our conscious mind all that our astral body encompasses. But this astral body also moves through life with a much higher sense of knowledge than we usually believe. We do not value this knowledge of our astral body because we simply know nothing about it; but we can at least form a mental image of this more comprehensive knowledge of the astral body if we consider the following:

[ 15 ] You see, we live—we might as well admit it—more or less from one day to the next. We rarely consider events in their broader context. If we were to view them in that context, many things would appear quite, quite different to us. Just think about it: it can happen, can’t it, that we make a plan—we decide in the morning to do something we want to carry out in the evening. Then at noon something happens that prevents us from carrying it out that evening. We sometimes get thoroughly annoyed that we can’t carry it out that evening. We believe that it would have been much nicer, much better, if we had been able to carry it out. The astral body, with its more comprehensive knowledge—which does not come to our conscious awareness—knows it differently. In such a case, the astral body often sees: If you carry out the task you have planned for the evening, you will find yourself in a situation where you might fall and break a leg. It is certainly within the realm of possibility that we cannot avoid this at all; if we carry out what we have planned in the evening, there is simply a constellation of events beforehand that leads to us breaking a leg. We are not aware of this in our higher consciousness, but the astral body sees through it, and it now leads us into a situation through which we ourselves prevent what we intended to do that evening from happening. That the very thing we were so annoyed about has occurred is, in the overall context of our lives, sometimes extraordinarily wise. But this is not born of chance; rather, it is entirely the result of the wisdom of our astral body, which actually remains unconscious to us from the perspective of our higher consciousness. If we could understand why we do some things and not others—perhaps because we could not do something else, or because we are first being led to something else—if we could see through all of this, we would always perceive a connection in our lives that emanates from a wiser part of ourselves than that which resides in our higher consciousness.

[ 16 ] This connection already exists in our lives, but we do not fully grasp its full scope. And as soon as we truly hold the thought before our soul of how we are actually connected to the spiritual worlds, the matter becomes clear to us. Above us is a being who, in the strictest sense, belongs to us—a being from the hierarchy of the Angeloi, our guardian spirit. Even now, at the beginning of our reflections, we always turn to the guardian spirits of those who, out in the world, must directly meet the great demands of the times. This guardian spirit now looks into the connection. For a long time, a feeling has been active in human consciousness that certain connections we cannot grasp are grasped by this guardian spirit. But the boundaries between what we can grasp and what we cannot grasp with our consciousness are fluid. There are indeed people here who go through life with a certain inner contentment because they simply allow whatever comes their way to come to them, because they believe in the ruling wisdom, because they are imbued with the conviction that even that which can so easily provoke annoyance is permeated by the working of wisdom. It is, of course, sometimes difficult to believe in the ruling wisdom when something happens that goes so very much against our intentions. But this is precisely one of those impulses that truly connects us to the effects of the spiritual world—that we know how to submit to the ruling wisdom without becoming complacent or lazy as a result, without believing that this ruling wisdom acts independently on our behalf. The boundary is thus shiftable, and it is also shiftable with regard to action and the formation of intentions. Here, however, impulses enter ordinary consciousness that have something intimate and delicate about them. How often, don’t you think, does it happen that we resolve to do something at a later time? Now something comes along, we have the feeling that we must do this, which actually prevents what was planned for later. We have the feeling that we must act out of the necessity that presents itself and that we must not handle the matter roughly, for we know: if we handle it roughly, then it shatters before us, then it shatters into pieces. Alongside that toward which we direct our freedom, there is, more or less clearly, a person within us who wants to feel his way through life and who believes he can achieve much more through what he can feel than through what he can precisely define with his concepts. The boundary is shiftable.

[ 17 ] But the boundary is sometimes even more fluid, and this brings us to a point that really deserves close attention in relation to practical life. There are people—and in a certain sense we are all moved by what prevails in such people—who also have a certain longing, a certain desire to organize their lives, to navigate through the lines of life. Consider a striking example: You know a person who befriends another person. At first you say to yourself: I really can’t quite understand why he is befriending this other person; it isn’t clear to me; there isn’t really a proper relationship between these two people, yet he does everything he can to get close to this person. You can’t understand it, and sometimes you only realize much later why it happened: The person in question may not need that person for anything until much later. He befriended that person not because he experienced something in him that he liked, not for his own sake, but as a means to an end that would only come to pass later. He has “arranged” his life: by befriending them, this person has gained something that will enable them to help him later in a certain situation. And the result is that, with the help of this so-called friend, something actually happens that otherwise would not have happened.

[ 18 ] If you extend this idea to life in general, you will see how incredibly widespread it is that people first devise something they do not immediately want in the way they have devised it, but rather want it to be that way because they actually intend to make use of it only through its effects. One must therefore say: There are people who, in this way of arranging their lives, possess—we cannot call it wisdom, for we would feel an inner resistance to calling it wisdom— but who possess an immense shrewdness, a truly immense shrewdness, in doing something in earlier stages of their lives that is not meant to benefit them in those stages, but only in later stages of their lives. And we then have the feeling: I actually wouldn’t have thought this person was so clever, because when I meet with them, when I exchange thoughts with them, when I live with them, they are actually much more foolish than they need to be when they arrange their lives in this way.

[ 19 ] You see, this is because, in fact, what a person carries in their astral body can be more intelligent than what they carry in their ordinary consciousness. When a person forces his egoism down into the unconscious, when he does not live with a certain naturalness, but instead suppresses his egoism I would say, allows it to leap over, then his egoism also seizes his subconscious mind, and the human being who lives in all of us—but who otherwise guides us to take life in an elemental, immediate way—lives within him: he then guides him to harness life, to settle in, to create the conditions beforehand for a later time. There we see the astral body at work with its cleverness. But we now see it permeated, not by what we usually see at work in life, but we see egoism pushed down from ordinary consciousness into the astral consciousness, and we see that the human being actually goes through life with much more apparent, as we then say, “reflection” than is actually due to him according to his consciousness. Therein lie many dangerous aspects for the development of the human soul, and it is very important to be aware that, at the moment when one approaches that which otherwise works unconsciously within us, one must try not to approach it too strongly with one’s egoism. That is why this renunciation of egoism must be emphasized again and again for development toward the spiritual world.

[ 20 ] For beneath our ordinary consciousness there truly reigns something that may be permeated by the consciousness of our guardian spirit from the hierarchy of the Angeloi, and then what comes about is precisely that which can sometimes make us appear rash in the eyes of ordinary human consciousness, yet which is nevertheless subject to a certain rule that I sought to express very simply in one of the Mysteries by saying—or having a character say: “Hearts must often interpret karma.” — But if one goes beyond that, beyond what the heart interprets in karma, if one lets the intellect take the lead, then a strong dose of egoism sometimes joins this intellect. Or this egoism can prevail within it to such an extent that we find the person more cunning than they appear to us from their immediate consciousness. Then he has pushed the egoism down into his astral body. Then something enters the soul’s activity—not from the regular beings of the hierarchy of the Angeloi, but something Luciferic—something that causes the human being to revolve around a wider sphere than he would actually revolve around consciously according to his corresponding stage of development. We see that what is so necessary to emphasize, especially when approaching the development of Spiritual Science, is truly something delicate and intimate; for of course we are to expand our consciousness, but in expanding our consciousness we must also constantly strive to remove the obstacle that arises through the descent or ascent—it makes no difference whether one or the other—of egoism into a deeper or higher sphere of consciousness.

[ 21 ] You may ask: Yes, but how can we do that? It is easy to say that one should not remove selfishness from one’s ordinary consciousness. How can one avoid removing egoism from one’s ordinary consciousness? — Yes, you see, my dear friends, this cannot be achieved through rules, but only by broadening one’s interests. When one broadens one’s interests, one is already combating one’s egoism in some way. For with every new interest one gains, one steps a little outside of oneself. That is why we practice Spiritual Science the way we do—not merely catering to what people, out of their egoism, happen to want to hear, but truly broadening their interests. How often is the question asked again and again: Why are the books written in such an incomprehensible way? Couldn’t they be written in a much more accessible way? And one or the other makes suggestions on how the books could be written in a very, very accessible way. One must actually resist the urge to achieve this accessibility, for it only increases egoism. If it is so easy to enter into Spiritual Science, then anyone can enter without having to overcome their egoism. But in the work one must undergo spiritually—when one makes an effort—one must already set aside a portion of one’s egoism; and so one enters more selflessly into what one seeks to achieve through Spiritual Science when one must make an effort, rather than when it is presented in a completely popular manner. We have, for example, had to experience someone who said: There are so many people who have to work all day. If these people are supposed to sit down in the evening and read difficult books, they cannot cope with it. One should provide them with books that are very easy to read. — To this one had to say to him: Why should one prevent these people from using the little time they have to read books that have been written with full intention out of spiritual conditions? Why should they use this time to read writings that, while easy to read, trivialize things—even if they may convey the same meaning in words—and, by failing to place the soul in the same state, dragging down into trivial life that which is precisely meant to lead out of trivial life, including with regard to the way one lives it in a different sphere?”

[ 22 ] It will be of particular importance in Spiritual Science not merely to consider the “what,” but also the “how”; to gradually accustom oneself to immersing in mental images of a world that is, after all, quite different from the ordinary physical world, and thus to gradually form mental images different from those we have so conveniently formed from the physical world. And here, at the end of today’s lecture, I would like to consider a mental image that we will need again in our next lecture in a week’s time. But I want to consider it today so that you can see that it may even be beneficial to acquire new words for what takes place in the spiritual world.

[ 23 ] We have a word that describes the way a person lives between birth and death, a word that expresses something about life based on what we see: the word “aging.” We see the child fresh and round, with inner life flowing through the outer forms; we see the child, up to a certain age, brimming with inner life that pours into the outer form. Then comes the time when inner life no longer pours out in the same way, when we get wrinkles, when things change for us. In short, we trace this outer life from birth to death according to the way the physical body presents itself to us in the course of this life. We call this aging for the very simple reason that our physical body is young when we are born and old when we die.

[ 24 ] The situation is quite different with the etheric body. Our etheric body—if we are to use that term at all—is old by virtue of the forces that form it, even as it is being guided toward birth or conception. It is old precisely when we are just beginning our physical life; at that point it is fully formed and finely chiseled, possessing many, many inner formations—these are movements, but they are inner formations. These are taken from it in the course of life, but in return the power to live is increased, and it is a child when we die old. The etheric body undergoes precisely the opposite development as the physical body. If we say of the physical body, “we grow old,” we would have to say of the etheric body, “we grow younger,” and it is good to coin this expression: We “grow younger” with regard to our etheric body. We truly “grow younger” in relation to our etheric body, so that when we are born, we have directed the power of this etheric body toward everything enclosed within the human skin, whereas when we pass through the gate of death at a certain age, it has a kind of kinship with the entire cosmos. It has regained the powers that were taken from it. At the moment when we were children, its connection with the cosmos was interrupted; it had to send all its forces into the single space enclosed within the human skin; it was, as it were, compressed into a single point in the world. Now it becomes fresh again; now it is increasingly placed within the cosmos to the same extent that the physical body ages. We can say—the expression is, of course, very exaggerated—that while we become sallow and wrinkled, the etheric body becomes chubby and is once again a reflection of the outer force, the outer creative, bursting force, just as the physical body is an expression of the outer bursting, creative force at the beginning of childhood. We “grow younger” in relation to the etheric body. And the need will gradually arise to actually coin new terms in order to truly grasp the entirely different conditions of the spiritual world. It is important that we familiarize ourselves with this radical difference in the entire conception of the spiritual world as opposed to the physical world. We shall then take up our reflections from this point next time.