The Rudolf Steiner Archive

Seventh Lecture

[ 1 ] We have reflected on what might be called the problem of death, drawing on various recent experiences, some of which have indeed been tinged with sorrow.

[ 2 ] First of all, I would like to draw attention today to some more general points related to this problem of death, which can be explored using the tools provided by initiatory knowledge. One must certainly have a mental image of what it is like for a person to pass through the gate of death, as this is often not what is thought. It is, after all, an understandable tendency of human nature to create a mental image of the realm beyond death—indeed, the spiritual realm into which we enter through the gate of death—as similar to the realm of the senses and the intellect in which we live between birth and death. I say it is an understandable tendency to create a mental image of this realm beyond death, so to speak, as a kind of continuation of the realm here; but this is a mistake. For it is already difficult to find words from the treasure of our language that make it possible to characterize the experiences between death and a new birth even to a reasonable degree. I have often mentioned that our language is designed for the physical world, and that we must, so to speak, internalize our relationship to words if we want to enable them to express what lies beyond death.

[ 3 ] After all, the way these words flow from the soul—when the soul is called upon to describe something that lies beyond death—is entirely different from the way words flow from us in the sensory world and in the world of the intellect. Rather, it is this way of speaking about the spiritual world, its beings, and its manifestations—a surrendering to this spiritual world and a allowing the words to flow through oneself.

[ 4 ] Words such as those I shared with you yesterday in reference to our dear Mrs. Grosheintz are not formed in the same way that words are formed when one wishes to express something in the external physical world; rather, they are formed in such a way that they are, as it were, poured into one’s own soul by the being in question, so that? the being in question gives them, pours them in, so that we do not then have the feeling that we are expressing through these words something we are looking at; but rather we have the distinct feeling: something is expressing itself through us, something that, so to speak, uses us merely as its organ to express itself, to objectify itself in spiritual speech. It is therefore a completely different process; it is a surrendering of one’s soul to the being one is dealing with, and such a surrendering that this being finds the means to express its own inner nature and its own inner experiences through our instruments. It is, to coin the term, not like an adaptation to something external, but like a surrender to the being in question, like a placing of the word at the disposal of this being, so that this being can then make use of our word itself.

[ 5 ] So it is a completely different way of approaching objectivity than the way it is here, in the world of the senses and the intellect. That is why one of the very first conditions for gaining a proper relationship to the spiritual world is a certain inner flexibility, a certain ability to adapt to the most diverse individualities, a constant capacity to step outside oneself and enter into other individualities. If one truly wishes to express with a certain accuracy—if I may use the word—what exists in the supersensible world and what lives within it, as is the case with one who has passed through the gate of death, one must above all be thoroughly healed of what might be called the earthly delusion of the ego; one must have come to the realization of thinking as little as possible about oneself, of placing oneself as little as possible at the center of one’s view of the world. If one has a strong tendency to speak much about oneself, to think much about oneself, then one must overcome this tendency, for this speaking much about oneself, this thinking much about oneself, is truly the worst path to self-knowledge. If one has a tendency to talk a lot about oneself, to judge all things in such a way that one is concerned above all with how one positions oneself in the world, what one means to the world: if one has this tendency, then one is ill-suited to find one’s way in the spiritual world or to express anything of the spiritual world.

[ 6 ] In a spiritual sense, one is most concerned with oneself when, in an earthly sense, one is least concerned with oneself, when, in an earthly sense, one thinks least of oneself; for what is most interesting to us in an earthly sense—the connection between the world and our own person—is, for the spiritual world, the most meaningless, the most insignificant thing of all.

[ 7 ] Therefore, we will always find that the path into true spiritual reality becomes very difficult for us if, at every opportunity, we feel compelled—driven by our inner disposition—to speak of ourselves, of what is to be accomplished through us, of what we might possibly be worth to the world, and so on.

[ 8 ] If we apply this method to everyday life, we find that we cannot cope even in our daily lives, which are, after all, also governed internally by spiritual forces and impulses. There, one can find the strangest of connections. I have met people who complain a great deal that they find it extremely difficult to get up in the morning, that they struggle to make the decision to rise. I have even met people who calmly admitted: if there were not an external necessity compelling them to get up, they would not want to get up at all.

[ 9 ] One can always find an inner connection between the whole nature of a person and such a tendency. These will generally be people who tell you a great deal about themselves, who talk at length about what they like and dislike, who tell you a great deal about what they have encountered here and there—whether to their benefit or detriment—and so on. Anyone who wishes to prepare themselves for a truly objective understanding of the spiritual world must pay attention to such connections; for we must observe life if we wish to enter into reality. And you can be assured of this: as human beings, we are, by our natural disposition, generally most hostile to nothing more than the demand to take life objectively; we are inclined toward nothing more than to regard ourselves with too much seriousness and external life with too little. One only gradually forces oneself to find words that can then truly become genuine, good guiding principles of life, and it is precisely in great geniuses that one can often see how they go through much to then distill all their wisdom of life into a single word. This then means something quite different than when it is uttered by just anyone in the ordinary course of daily life.

[ 10 ] I once pointed out—it was in connection with the lectures I gave in Norrköping—how easy it is to utter the powerful words of old John: “Children, love one another.” But it means something entirely different when a fool, some dandy, utters it into the world, than when John said it at the end of a rich life in which much, much had been endured here on earth.

[ 11 ] What matters in a word is not merely its accuracy, but also the depths of the soul from which it is spoken, the depths from which it springs. Thus Goethe, too, through a rich life, arrived at a beautiful word whose deep meaning one should strive to fathom; but not in such a way that one believes—by pointing to this word—that it can be understood in every situation. To understand it in that way is—I would like to coin the paradoxical phrase—far too simple. For any child can understand it that way. But how it must be understood, when one has grasped it like Goethe on the basis of a rich, indeed an exceedingly rich, life experience, is not something every child can comprehend. I mean the words: “Know thyself, live in peace with the world!” The connection between these two sentences—and this is what matters—shows us: There is no self-knowledge that does not truly lead to a life in peace with the world.

[ 12 ] I would really like to discuss all these things in as much detail as possible, because they are much more important than you might initially think. But I can only touch on them briefly and leave much of it—especially when it comes to such matters—to your own meditation. I would like to point out, however, that according to many, there is a lack of material for meditation! There is truly no lack of it, if one only has the good will to allow the material for meditation that presents itself in life to be offered by life as such. |

[ 13 ] Now, the one who passes through the gate of death is immediately, by that very fact, separated from all the material circumstances in which he lives and in which he is entangled here, as long as he remains in the physical body; he is turned away from them, for they are, after all, imposed upon him by his embodiment in the physical body. Above all, he is turned away from the many activities that have become dear to him in the life between birth and death and which, naturally, since he lacks a physical body, he can no longer perform after death. The whole way of life changes; the relationship to the world becomes completely different, and if, through meditation, you engage with the Vienna Cycle “The Inner Being of Man and Life Between Death and New Birth,” you will gain a mental image of the entirely different way one must relate to the world if one wishes to form correct concepts and ideas about this life between death and a new birth. One must simply live out fully the words that have been tentatively coined there, and strive to experience them deeply within oneself. This is urgently necessary in such matters.

[ 14 ] I have already pointed out in recent days that the moment of death can, in essence, only be compared externally to the moment of birth in the context of physical human life. For in the ordinary course of life, unless a clairvoyant insight supports a person, human beings do not recall events prior to their birth into the physical body. Through the faculties the Earth gives us, we do not remember how, nor even that we were born. If there are people today who believe that they know everything through sensory perception, they simply do not reflect on the fact that they cannot even experience the initial event of their earthly life through sensory perception, but only through being told that they were born, and furthermore on the basis of a conclusion that is often not conscious but nevertheless drawn unconsciously. There are—unless one wishes to resort to clairvoyant powers—only these two methods of convincing oneself that one has been born: having it told to oneself, or drawing a conclusion, the conclusion: Other people are born; I am similar to other people; therefore, I too must have been born at some point. A correct conclusion. And there is nothing else, in terms of earthly powers, to advance toward the fact of one’s own birth other than having it told to oneself or drawing this analogical conclusion; there is no method other than these two for earthly faculties. Thus, the effort to gain insight into one’s own birth already marks the beginning of the realization that it is not possible to find a foundation for truth in mere sensory appearances.

[ 15 ] The moment of death is quite unlike the moment of birth, in that one can always look back on the moment of death in the spiritual world, whereas one cannot look back on the moment of birth with the ordinary faculties of the physical body. In the spiritual world, one can always look back at the moment of death during the time between death and a new birth, from the moment one first brings it to consciousness. There it stands, though not as we see it with all its horrors from this side of life, but it stands there as a wonderfully glorious event of life, as an emergence of the human spiritual-soul being from the physical-sensory envelope, it stands there as the liberation of the impulses of will and feeling from the surging, from the objectively surging thought-being.

[ 16 ] The fact that a person is not able to immediately perceive the moment of death upon dying is not because we lack consciousness when death occurs, but rather because, on the contrary, we have too much consciousness. Just recall what is written in the Vienna Lectures: that we do not enter into a state of too little wisdom, but rather into too much wisdom—a wisdom that seems to flood us, infinite, approaching us from all sides. It is impossible for us to be unwise after death. This wisdom comes over us like a light flooding us from all sides, and we must, on the contrary, first learn to limit ourselves, to orient ourselves within that in which we are initially disoriented. Thus, through this attuning down of the highly attuned consciousness to the degree of awareness that we can bear according to our earthly preparation up to death, through this attuning down we arrive at what we might call the awakening after death. |

[ 17 ] After death, immediately after death, we awaken with too much intensity, and we must first temper this intense awakening, dampen it down to a degree that corresponds to the abilities we have developed through the experiences we have undergone in our various earthly incarnations. Thus, it is a struggle to assert ourselves amidst the consciousness that is overwhelming us from all sides.

[ 18 ] And now comes something in which we all—both after death and if we wish to properly enter into initiation—must, in a sense, first recover from the habits of physical-sensory life. To make myself perfectly clear, I would like to pick up on something here. When we began our Spiritual Science movement in Berlin, in a rather small circle, a wide variety of people initially joined us. We were a very small circle at that time. One person from this circle came one day, not long after we had begun our work, and declared that she had to leave, on the grounds that she had realized we were not on the right path: for what mattered was not seeking all the things we were seeking, but rather seeking unity. It was something like an idée fixe for this person. In a lengthy conversation, they elaborated on this idée fixe of unity, and then they left us to seek unity. Through this search for unity, with this idée fixe of unity, this person believed they were entering the supersensible realm. But this idea of unity is precisely the one that arises only from the ultimate abstraction of external physical life. For this striving for unity is, in fact, the most sensory thing a human being can strive for. One must be healed of this very striving for unity if one wishes to stand correctly in the spiritual world. Here in the sensory world, it is so natural for us to say: We must seek unity everywhere; we must seek unity out of multiplicity, out of diversity. — But this is something that has meaning only for the sensory-physical world here. For when we pass through the gate of death, we no longer have diversity, but rather that which appears before our soul as an overwhelming consciousness: once we have passed through the gate of death, we have nothing but unity around us, unity again and again. There, then, it becomes a matter of finding the multiplicity, the diversity, correctly. There we must strive for nothing other than to emerge from unity and enter into multiplicity.

[ 19 ] Now I would like to give you a truly apt mental image of how one enters into multiplicity from unity. Suppose you pass through the gate of death and enter this world of spiritual wisdom that floods our being. We first enter this world, which initially stuns us when we awaken within it. Let us characterize this world in such a way that we perceive the light flooding around us as a unity filling the world; this is how it appears to us. We do not even distinguish ourselves within it. So great is this unity that we do not even distinguish ourselves within it, that we ourselves do not have this distinction between ourselves and the world; rather, we belong fully to the world. Everything is one.

[ 20 ] But now let us answer a question—and I ask you to reflect not just a little, but quite deeply on the answer I am about to give—let us answer the question: What, exactly, is this unity into which we are being received? Imagine all the beings of the higher hierarchies, of which you are familiar with nine, or ten if we include human beings. In every hierarchy there is a great number of beings. They all think; it is not only human beings who think, but the beings of all these higher hierarchies. So imagine this entire multitude of beings into which we are received once we have passed through the gate of death. They are all around us. As we pass through the gate of death, we are received into the full abundance of spiritual beings. At first we do not perceive them, yet we are within them: what first engulfs us is precisely this unity. And what is this unity? It is the thoughts of all the hierarchies, merging into one another. What all the hierarchies think together—this world of thought of the hierarchies, undifferentiated, what one hierarch thinks, what another hierarch thinks—all of this merges into a unity. We grow into these thoughts of the hierarchies. This is the being of thought-light that engulfs us. This is that unity. So we live within the thoughts of the hierarchies flowing together into a unity. There we live within it.

[ 21 ] And what else is at stake in our life after death? What is at stake is that we establish a relationship with the individual beings we draw out of the sea of thought—where the thoughts of all hierarchies converge—and establish a relationship with the individual beings, with the multitude. After death, we must not only establish a relationship with the unity of the surging thought-beings of the hierarchies—for that is given to us—but we must work our way through so that we establish a relationship with the individual entities of the hierarchies. How do we achieve this?

[ 22 ] At first, we are overwhelmed by this surging, converging sea of thoughts from the hierarchies. Through what we have now acquired in the physical body, our own inner being remains at the threshold of death, which we are gazing upon, rising up out of the sensory envelope. This gives us strength of will, emotional impulses of will, and volitional impulses of emotion. We become inwardly aware of these as we contemplate the being that emerges from the body—the being we are after death. Through this, we are able, as it were, to draw out our rays of will. And when we now direct such a ray of will—which we draw from the power of death, which is born with death—into the environment, then we erase something in the world of thought at a specific point. And when we direct it elsewhere, we erase something at another point; thus we erase something at a third, at a fourth point—in short, we erase the world of thought surrounding us in the most diverse places through the forces of our will-impulses. And as we erase it, in the hollows of the surging sea of thought of the hierarchies, the Thought Hierarchy—if I may put it that way—the being that lives within it, in the spiritual world, comes to meet us.

[ 23 ] While here in the physical world we strive to form a thought about the things we see, in the spiritual world—because thought is available to us in abundance—we must erase that thought, do away with it; then the beings come to meet us. We must master our thoughts; then the beings come to meet us. And this power to master thought—to cast thought, so to speak, out of our field of vision so that the being may meet us in the sea of the surging world of thought—we obtain this power through the fact that, as the glorious starting point of our spiritual life after death, the sight of dying, of death itself, meets us and becomes our teacher in the act of erasure. For after death, death becomes for us the teacher of extinction, the inspirer of those powers of will through which we must extinguish our thoughts in the surging sea of light.

[ 24 ] This points to the entirely different way in which a human being relates to his surroundings before and after death. Just as he must, so to speak, proceed in the sensory world—by placing himself within it, surrounding himself with the air circle, and then waiting until something enters that air circle— In contrast, after death they must proceed in such a way that they have the circle of thought-light around them and must themselves extinguish within it that which they have in their field of vision in thought, because only then do the relevant beings appear to them. For here one is dealing with beings, as I have indicated in the book The Threshold of the Spiritual World. Thus one passes from unity into multiplicity, into diversity.

[ 25 ] Monism, in the sense in which many understand it, is merely an earthly worldview, and it is nothing but a shackle once one has passed through the gate of death; for there, in the most eminent sense, the necessity of monadism immediately arises—the necessity to seek out multiplicity. The search for unity is the final shackle of sensory, intellectual life.

[ 26 ] What, then, is it exactly that we are accomplishing here? It is an activity through which we create space for ourselves so that the hierarchies can approach us. We create space for ourselves. Our being is then spread out over the whole world—we have already pointed to these things repeatedly. —We create space for ourselves by creating these hollows, so that what is objective can appear to us post mortem, that is, after death. Nothing can ever appear to us objectively in the spiritual world if we carry our own being into the spiritual world. We can only perceive the other in the spiritual world if we erase our own being, our own essence, from the place where the other wishes to appear, and this is how it happens.

[ 27 ] In essence, this is the process that is now also necessary if one wishes to approach the dead in the manner I described to you yesterday at the end of the lecture, where there was a need to gain the ability to let the dead speak for themselves, to let the dead express themselves. Then one must try, where the dead person is, to remove oneself, to remove one’s own thinking and feeling, and where one has removed these, impulses emerge from the depths of being that, without our will, place the words in our mouths—words that must then come forth if we wish to express the objective essence of a human being not embodied in a physical body.

[ 28 ] You see that what is, so to speak, the weakest aspect of the human being here in the physical world—the will and the emotional impulses—since they are indeed the weakest and most obscure part of the human soul in the physical world—that what we have the least control over takes on special significance for perception in the spiritual world. In contrast, what is strongest here in the physical world—mental images—is actually the weakest in the spiritual world; after all, we even prefer to live in our illusions and mental images because that is where we have the most control.

[ 29 ] Illusions are of little use in the spiritual world; they only obscure the surging unity of the beings of thought. What matters is not the development of our imagination, but the development of our will and emotional life; and that is, after all, the essence of meditation. In meditation, what matters is not the mental image we create, but—as I have emphasized time and again—that we create the mental image with inner strength. What matters is the inner energy, the strength, the will, and the feeling and sensation we experience while meditating—that is, an element of will that we develop through meditation, and which we develop more strongly when we exert ourselves as we should during meditation, but in a spiritual sense.

[ 30 ] The greatest obstacle to genuine progress into the spiritual world is the habit of daydreaming and forming illusions about external reality, because this causes our will to grow weaker and weaker. One weakens the will most of all when one cultivates the very parasites of the imagination, when one forms illusions about all manner of external things; for the path into the spiritual world is not entered by distancing oneself from life, but by gaining clarity about the things of life. It is not an impoverishment of external life, but an enrichment of life that must lead us into the spiritual world. People would so much like to grow into the spiritual world not through strength, but through weakness. Weakness is when one is not interested in the external world, the world of external life, when one cannot fulfill Goethe’s maxim: “Know thyself, live in peace with the world.”

[ 31 ] Before I proceed with these reflections on death, I would like to point out that all human artistic activities must, in fact, be grounded in an interplay with those activities of the soul that are necessary for the soul after death. For artistic activity, it is precisely the element of the will that must be permeated by the spiritual world, rather than the element of perception. In our time of artistic decline, particularly in artistic work, the opposite is occurring. In our time of decline in worldview as well, it is precisely that aspect which refines the life of the imagination that is being emphasized. Consequently, in our time, artists are becoming increasingly dependent on models and examples. They can accomplish very little without them. Therefore, in our time, artists will increasingly isolate themselves within the realm of art. Yet true art can never emerge from such isolation; it is the very opposite of what ought to be.

[ 32 ] What happens, for example, when someone creates an artistic representation of a human being—whether in painting or sculpture—and does not concern themselves with the inner forces that constitute that person, nor with the dynamic aspect, but simply approaches the subject, takes a model, and treats that model in the same way one treats things when merely looking at them? Then they stray from the very principle of artistic creation. The beginning of creation is to cultivate an inner, volitional perception—not to look from the outside, but to penetrate inwardly and sense how the forehead curves, the nose protrudes, and so on. That is what it is all about.

[ 33 ] And this is especially true of nature. In nature, there is a genuine inner life at work within its activities. And here I would like to draw your attention to something that a person experiences immediately upon passing through the gate of death, but which remains largely unknown to them here in the physical world.

[ 34 ] When we paint, we prefer to paint what, I might say, extends across the surface of things. We paint light and shadow; we paint colors. Now, the external world is endowed with light and color for the very reason that it does not absorb light and color, but rather reflects them. There is the object, and it reflects light and color back to us. Minerals, for example, are minerals precisely because they do not absorb light and color within themselves, but repel them outwardly. Human beings, however, with their souls, live precisely within the colors. After death, they immediately enter into them; there they immediately find themselves in light and color; but here they do not find themselves within them. When the landscape painter stands before nature, he must have something of what lies between him and the landscape; he must be able to merge into it; he must, so to speak, bring something into the physical world that only truly comes to fruition once the human being has passed through the gate of death. This is what gives artistic creation its resemblance to standing within the spiritual world, even though the artist usually remains unaware of being permeated and interwoven by the spiritual world, and also remains unaware of the necessity that something be awakened by this permeation by the spiritual world. That is why the layout of our building is designed exactly as it is, because, as I have often explained, one must take into account precisely what is not there, not what is there. I would like to say that it is precisely the hollow forms, the recesses, that must be taken into account, not what is there. In this respect, the practical implementation of our Spiritual Science movement also marks a beginning that must be made within our current cultural movement.

[ 35 ] You see, such intrusions of the spiritual world into human life—that is to say, through the spectrum of death, as I have illustrated in the artistic works of yesterday and the day before—were quite common in a time not so long ago. Today it is something unusual, and as a gift of nature it will become increasingly so. It will be present as a gift of nature less and less. But the less a person here in this physical world is able to form relationships with the spiritual diversity, the more bound they will be once they have passed through the gate of death. The ability to create those hollow forms would be lost if human beings were to withdraw entirely from their connections to the spiritual world, as would necessarily happen due to the outward progression of worldly phenomena. The old clairvoyance must, after all, gradually be lost entirely. If we were unable to restore that relationship to the spiritual world through the development of Spiritual Science, humanity would lose the ability to live in the spiritual world after death, to be a truly living being. Through that which always remains with them—the looking back on life, in which the very act of looking toward death is something quite essential—they would be, as it were, spellbound by it, as if imprisoned within it.

[ 36 ] Therefore, it is evident that those who, if I may put it this way, pass through the gate of death strengthened by Spiritual Science, gain freedom—the freedom to act in the spiritual world—relatively quickly after death. Just consider how essential it is to be deeply connected to what Spiritual Science impulses can provide in order to live immediately after death in a way that is in harmony with one’s true nature—as is evident in the case that has been observed, and as expressed in the words spoken from Mrs. Grosheintz’s soul. So the point is that, through Spiritual Science strengthening, the human being receives a replacement for what their natural endowments once provided: the ability to develop a relationship with the supersensible and with spiritual phenomena.

[ 37 ] If one is able, purely through natural endowments, to perceive something like a death spectrum—and people in earlier times always saw such death spectra; we simply no longer know this today, for it is an ability that has been lost—then one sees this death spectrum through the separation of one’s body; this enables one to see the individual, distinct manifestations. One then cuts these individual manifestations out of the unity. And that is what matters: this cutting out of the unity, that one learns to perform this cutting out. But the possibility of learning to cut out is completely lost with atavistic natural clairvoyance, and it must be replaced by growing into Spiritual Science. It will be this strengthening through Spiritual Science, however, that will bring about the necessary ability for artistic creation in every field in the future. The sculptor, the musician, the painter, the poet—they will not be able to create unless they imbue themselves with what Spiritual Science can offer them. Today people still fear this. This fear comes to the surface when a sculptor, a musician, a painter, or a poet comes along and says: “Oh, Spiritual Science—that’s the kind of thing where I have to do all sorts of things and strive for all sorts of things; that kills the original artistic creative power within me.” — You hear this everywhere; but it is merely a fear of the strength that is necessary if artistry is to truly remain with humanity in the future. People today still fear precisely what must emerge within them as the strongest force. Times will come in the development of humanity when artistic abilities must mature through strengthening with Spiritual Science.

[ 38 ] However, that nonsense will no longer be able to take hold as it does today, where people, out of nowhere, proclaim themselves artists at the earliest possible age and then, in their own opinion, actually are artists. They will then believe that it is only because the world does not recognize them that this artistic talent fails to flourish. This nonsense will gradually come to an end. The art of the future will be an art of maturity, and it is only at a relatively late age that one will feel the inner maturity that leads to artistic activity. People will no longer believe that in later life one can no longer possess the forces—the “youthful forces,” as is often said—necessary for artistic creation; rather, they will find that it is precisely through deepening and strengthening with Spiritual Science that one first draws forth from one’s inner being the forces that will lead to artistic creation in the future. But people still fear these powers today, just as they often fear what must first be attained. That is why many artists often have a hopeless fear of bringing forth their deeper inner being, and when they hear that it is not the outer, earthly human being but the higher human being within them who is to create artistically, they fall into hopeless confusion. One can scarcely imagine a more utter confusion than that into which a modern artist has fallen upon realizing what the genius within the human being is—that which belongs to the spiritual world, that which actually creates within the artist. A modern artist expressed the utter fear he felt toward this spiritual world in roughly the following words:

“Genius is a terrible disease. Every writer carries a monster in his heart that devours all his feelings the moment they are born. Who will emerge victorious—the disease over man, or man over the disease? One must be a truly great person to keep one’s character and genius in balance. If the poet is not a giant, if he does not possess the strength of Hercules, he must forfeit either his heart or his talent.”

[ 39 ] One feels a shiver run down one’s spine—but a spiritual shiver—when such things are spoken. For what confronts us here is nothing other than a hopeless fear of that aspect of the human being which is connected to the spiritual world. And it is a very consistent statement, even though the author is not at all aware of how great the consequence was; for the fact that he speaks of giants and Hercules is tremendously characteristic. It is telling that precisely these words come to his lips—or to his pen, one might say.

[ 40 ] Thus, the view could even arise that human beings must achieve victory through what they are in earthly life—for that is implied in these words—while true knowledge will lead to the point where the genius within the human being, the healthy genius, will permeate and take hold of the human being, making him its instrument.

[ 41 ] Another modern artist adds some peculiar words to the sentences I just read aloud—highly peculiar words. He says:

“Let us recall the tragic demise of Laocoon as described in the Aeneid. The citizens of Troy naturally watch with horror and revulsion as the gigantic serpents strangle Laocoon and his sons. The spectators feel fear, pity, and likely also the desire to save the unfortunate victims; however different their emotional states may be, the act of will plays a highly important role for all of them... But imagine, amidst this agitated and shaken crowd, a sculptor who regards the terrible catastrophe unfolding before his eyes as the subject for a future work of art. Amid the general agitation among the screaming, raving, and praying people, he remains the calm observer. At this moment, all his moral instincts are suppressed by his aesthetic curiosity.”

[ 42 ] That’s supposed to be necessary to create a work of art! There are supposed to be people standing there, filled with the deepest compassion, who aren’t artists and can’t help, and there’s supposed to be that idiot, that dimwit, who has no idea of the pain all this causes. And this blockhead—he is supposed to be the true artist, the one who can depict this, who stands there in his dullness, merely observing the matter! We have come so far in the present day that people dare to demand: The artist should be a blockhead in the face of life’s phenomena, so that he can be “objective.” He is to tear pity and compassion from his heart, become a dull-witted fool, and only then, according to these words, can he depict something in such a way that it fills other people with interest.

[ 43 ] One cannot be more thoroughly gripped by the most abominable Ahrimanic forces than when one is capable of developing such a view of artistry. This is the decadence of our time, born of fear and dread of spiritual reality: not knowing that, if one wishes to be an artist, one must empathize with events with even deeper compassion, that one must have even deeper empathy, and must only have the ability, at a later moment, to look back at those same events objectively from this deep shared experience, so that we can love them as we might love a foreign being, and that from this even deeper shared experience we arrive at artistic creation. Our age has reached such a point in the perversity of its worldview that the opposite of truth is trumpeted to the world as the sum of wisdom. And I am convinced that there are an infinite number of people who even consider this dullness to be witty, and who regard this praise of artistic dullness as the ultimate discovery of what artistry actually is. Thus we stand within it in the present and must seek that foundation of strength from Spiritual Science which gives us the ability to know ourselves within it—in the world into which the human being also enters in the natural course of events when he passes through the gate of death.

[ 44 ] Thus, art can seem to us to be akin to death—that is, akin to a higher life. To be akin to death means to be akin to a higher life.

[ 45 ] In many respects, in order to enter the spiritual world, we must acquire the ability to arrive at different mental images and ideas than those that must fill us in order to understand the world we experience between birth and death. Rather, we must rise to the task of breaking through maya not merely in such a way that we find this maya to be the same everywhere and believe that if we get through somewhere, we are already inside the spiritual world. At different points in life, maya is of varying density. When we encounter different areas of life, we find that maya is of varying density; it is woven from different materials. Although it is maya, it is woven from different materials at different points in life.

[ 46 ] We encounter a child; we get to know it in this physical existence; we initially form mental images of the child’s nature based on the experiences we have gained, depending on how the child presents itself to us with its being within the physical body. We could make no greater mistake than to carry such a mental image uncritically into the spiritual world in order to truly recognize the being in question once it has passed through the gate of death.

[ 47 ] We ourselves have recently gone through a truly profoundly moving karmic event: that of Theo Faiss. We would be misrepresenting him if we were simply to extend the mental images we formed of the child based on how he appeared to us in the physical world, and if we were to project these mental images out into the spiritual world. It is precisely in such a being that we can sometimes find the greatest maturity soon after death. We may find interwoven the forces that the child brought into the physical world through birth, and which were not fully lived out in the physical world because karma did not permit it; we can find them interwoven into the cosmic forces, and we can gradually perceive how a mature soul, having struggled through death to cosmic existence, gradually grows into a life in the spheres. And if such a soul was a child in its last incarnation, we can perceive how it matures relatively quickly to direct the forces that merge into the cosmos. Then we come to know the human being after death, as if he were directing with his own being the forces that are in his death spectrum and that weave themselves into the cosmos. Thus the human being grows into that creative work that can be called the work of the heavens. Then his volitional feeling, his emotional element of volitional impulse, merges with the world outside. Just as we gradually adapt in the physical body as children, using our sense organs to adjust to the outer world, just as we grow into seeing there, so do we grow into the essence after death, into the essential; we grow into the unfolding of the will.

[ 48 ] And if we allow such phenomena to affect us in a truly spiritual-scientific sense, we will gradually come to realize how the maya of external life is woven with varying degrees of intensity in different places. It is difficult to penetrate in situations such as the death of a very young child, because most of what was an external appearance interferes with what must take its place so that we can form a correct mental image of what a human being is after death.

[ 49 ] There are, however, also people for whom the fabric of maya is relatively easy to penetrate, because the truth of their being has been able to deeply integrate itself into what lives within them as maya here in the physical world between birth and death. Such people exist—people who bring beautiful treasures of spiritual inner wealth down into the physical world at their birth, and who are able to weave into the very essence of who they are that which they have brought down from the spiritual world. These are the human beings whom we must love infinitely for the sake of what the creators, so to speak, have made of them in their love; with them, we often do not ask why we love them, but rather our love for them seems to us a matter of course. Such beings are, as it were, living witnesses to the spiritual world, because they already bear an extraordinarily strong resemblance to their spiritual being here in the physical world, and because the fabric of maya can be unraveled—albeit only through love, but quite quickly through it—so that one is then able to look into the depths of the soul.

[ 50 ] When dealing with such people, a certain tenderness—an intimate tenderness—is required, because they carry down so much from the spiritual world into physical existence, and because after death they stand, as it were, as if they were living witnesses to the infinitely profound fact that in all revelations here in this world, the impulses of the spiritual world also live on. When we behold such people after death, they appear to us as if they wanted to say to us: This is how we were before, and that we were so in the deepest, deepest inner truth is now confirmed, now that we have passed through the gate of death. — Thus they stand there as apostles of faith even after death, as apostles for the faith that enables us to believe in the life we spend here in the physical world.

[ 51 ] There, too, stands our departed friend Sibyl Colazza, standing there like an apostle for the belief that the world in which we live is permeated by spirituality. And here we must explain why it was precisely in her case that the peculiar phenomenon occurred whereby, in the light of her spiritual being, that which she had already lived out in the physical world—through the “veil of outer life”—for everyone who came to know and love her had to be confirmed. Hence the different tone in the words that had to be spoken from her soul, because the individual lay precisely in what I have just spoken of:

And it filled this being
Your voice, which eloquently
Through the very nature of the word

More than in the word itself
Revealed what lay hidden
In your beautiful soul;

[ 52 ] Notice that the depiction of the past, the imperfect tense, merges into the present tense because the vision of life in the body merged with the vision of life after death. This is expressed even in the words themselves. So necessarily does the word flow, which must be shaped from the spiritual world. So that it must be said: your voice animated this being, which, through the nature of the word, revealed more eloquently than the word itself what is hidden in your soul—“is,” not “was,” but “is”—continues to work, is there.

But the devoted love
Of compassionate people
Revealed itself fully, without a word:

[ 53 ] — one could also say “revealed” —

This being, of noble, quiet beauty
Of the creation of the world’s soul
Proclaimed to a receptive sensibility.

[ 54 ] — one could also say “proclaimed” —. The two tenses converge here.

[ 55 ] Now let us consider a soul like that of our friend Fritz Mitscher, who, to our great sorrow, died so young—a soul that revealed itself to those who came to know him in such a way that one can describe his nature in the most beautiful sense of the word by coining a term that may sound abstract and dry, but which truly captures this essence: an objective person. Fritz Mitscher was a thoroughly objective person. There were hardly any moments when Fritz Mitscher would have spoken of himself. Even when he did speak of himself, this “speaking of oneself” was, in essence, only apparent. It was merely that he characterized his relationships to this or that person in the external world. His self was almost nowhere—I cannot say at the center of his attention; it was not even on the horizon of his attention. And it was characteristic of him that—as is natural when an older man converses with a younger man about all sorts of life advice, so that the conversation turns to himself —that when he was supposed to speak of himself, he would in a certain way even slip away from the subject and divert the conversation from himself to what he was experiencing around him, characterizing it with the art with which he was already able to characterize, which he had gained from Spiritual Science. He was thus an objective person, a person of objectivity. He did not think about what he meant to the world; he did not think about how his ego positioned itself in the world. In the most eminent sense, he had only factual interests everywhere—those factual interests that are so characteristically expressed when one is not at all concerned with the way such factual interests position themselves in the world.

[ 56 ] Fritz Mitscher was one of those people who, from an early age, applied the same zeal to revealing his deepest truths to anyone in a casual conversation with the utmost objectivity; he was one of those people who always apply the same zeal there, because they are interested in the cause and not in the person or in projecting their own personality onto the world. And when he spoke before an audience, it was the purest, most chaste immersion in the subject matter, never a loss of self in the spiritual impurity of speaking about oneself. That was so characteristic of him. And that also enabled him to such an eminent degree to truly perceive the world in such a way that, through the medium of the idea, of thought, of the mental image, one enters into the world—not emerging from it, but entering into it. Thus, through thought, through the idea, through the mental image, he immersed himself ever more deeply into the interconnections of the world: in this way he lived together with the world, lived with his ego—because he spoke so little of it—precisely within the things themselves and not merely within his own skin.

[ 57 ] It is, in essence, such people who alone truly understand what ideals are in the world, what it means to live in ideas and ideals. Living in ideas and ideals is not merely: having ideas and ideals—one can certainly have those; they are as easy to pluck in life as blackberries—but it is not merely a matter of having ideas and ideals; rather, it is a matter of having ideas and ideals in their intellectual purity, and this is what so many people flee from. People flee from thinking in droves. Oh, my dear friends, one need do nothing more than summon imagination before one’s soul, summon real imagination before one’s soul—the imagination of truly pure thought, of life in pure thought, in thoughts and ideas free from sensuality—to set forth this chaste source of the soul’s existence, and then try, just once, to place the spectres of humanity around it, and one will find: in droves people flee from this chaste source of the senseless world of thought. Oh, that is something sober, dry, that is something that tears love from one’s heart, it is something cold, icy—they say, and they flee, flee in droves, and only a few, a few remain standing, in spiritual chastity. These are the true philosophical souls; these are the people truly predisposed to philosophy. Among them are such natures as Fritz Mitscher was.

[ 58 ] Therefore, for such individuals, it develops almost as a matter of course that they grow into these contexts—in the most natural way possible; indeed, I should say that they allow themselves to be carried into these contexts by their karma. This was precisely the case with Fritz Mitscher to the very highest degree. Nowhere could one perceive in him that he wanted to take a position out of some intention, out of an intention conceived in the physical body. Everywhere it was the case that he allowed himself to be led by the current of karma to the tasks. This, in turn, is the true nature of a philosopher, who must rather be led to the tasks than push himself toward this or that task out of an egoistic will. For such genuine philosophical natures know all too well in their deep inner feeling—and in their impulses—that one is, in fact, never truly ready for a task, and that one can really only believe one is ready for a task if one is excessively vain, that one is actually always anticipating something of what one will only be able to accomplish later. For only when one has this attitude does one sense in one’s life something of what inner calling is. And life then becomes, in a certain way, permeated by this: Know thyself! — For one learns to know oneself best when one speaks and thinks little of one’s ego. Then what one does and works for in life is permeated by this: Know thyself, live in peace with the world!

[ 59 ] This was Fritz Mitscher’s motto. Such a life then continues into the spiritual world and remains what it was, except that in the spiritual world the seed becomes the fruit. We must then refrain from the line of thought—which would indeed be unrealistic—of asking ourselves: What would have become of such a being if it had been able to remain longer in the physical world? That is an unrealistic line of thought. The realistic perspective leads us precisely to the great and wondrous fact that such a soul is received into the spiritual worlds, and that what it is now called upon to accomplish in the spiritual worlds relates to what it experienced here between birth and death just as the fruit of a plant relates to the seed, so that life here is truly a seed-life for the spiritual life after death.

[ 60 ] Thus, especially in the case of a nature that lives in objectivity, when one considers it after death, the words that characterize this objectivity of the view of life must sink into the soul, but also the relationship to the surrounding world: to be within the world and to be within the world with one’s being. Thus it was necessary to speak of Fritz Mitscher, whereby precisely this difference between the seed here and the plant that continues to develop there stands out before the soul as the defining characteristic. This is how I explain to myself why the words turned out exactly as they did:

A loss that pains us deeply,
Thus you vanish from the field,
Where the spirit’s earthly seeds
In the bosom of the soul’s being
Matured for your celestial senses...

A hope that brings 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.

To beings of pure love of truth
Your longing was intimately connected;
To create from the light of the spirit
Was the earnest goal of life,
Which you pursued tirelessly....

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

Hear our souls’ plea,
Sent to you in trust:
Here, for our earthly work,
We need strong power from the realms 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 realm of the spirit.

[ 61 ] Thus Fritz Mitscher could truly be the embodiment of that which was expressed—yet which was, in reality, a reality shared by many of our departed friends upon their entry into the spiritual world: They will become our most effective collaborators in the realm of spiritual life that we are called to cultivate; they will be those to whom we look up with special gratitude when we must consider the tasks of present and future spiritual development—tasks that can only be realized with difficulty and slowly within our earthly existence, using solely the forces incarnated in physical bodies. Thus, it seems to me, regarding our friends who have passed through the gate of death, as if it were entirely appropriate to entrust them—as well as our friend Christian Morgenstern—with the request to remain with us, so that through their powers much may be accomplished in our spiritual movement that simply cannot be achieved with merely earthly powers.

[ 62 ] This, above all, is what we must offer as a final farewell to such individuals, and it must be stated clearly, especially in the case of our dear friend Fritz Mitscher, who, with the vigor of his youth and in the manner we have described these past few days, will be our strong supporter and a true source of comfort—comfort where comfort is needed. It is often needed.

[ 63 ] There are many things, especially in the recent period of our work, our creative endeavors, and our striving, that truly bring home to us just how great the obstacles—the very real, not imagined obstacles—of the physical plane are; how strongly human prejudices oppose what must be accomplished by us; and in what contradictory ways they often stand in our way.

[ 64 ] One need only take an example like this: People out there, outside our Spiritual Science movement, write pamphlets—what I am saying now is truly not said for any personal reason, because I feel myself to be merely a weak instrument of the spiritual movement that is meant to carry us— so the people out there write pamphlet after pamphlet about how our followers accept everything without scrutiny, on good faith and trust, as if there were nothing in our circle but blind faith. That is how our movement is characterized out there: as if we were all just blindly faithful fools who follow only on the basis of the trust they have. That is how it is out there!

[ 65 ] Within these walls, things sometimes don’t look so rosy when it comes to this trust—if one places value on the kind of trust that lies deep within the soul and not merely in words on the surface. So there is a great contradiction between what people accuse us of in their pamphlets and what should be present in such abundant abundance within the walls of our society. It is a glaring contradiction. For if it could really have happened—and I say this without criticism and, above all, without bitterness, and without wishing to offend anyone in the slightest—if it could have happened that, in light of various things I said here in the fall, it could have been written: Dr. Steiner is squandering his occult research on such matters—and by “matters” here I mean what I brought up at the time— he is thus squandering his occult powers on such things as were spoken of back then—if that could have been written, then it is clear proof that that trust, of which we are accused out in the world as being unique to us, even though it is often present in the higher strata of consciousness as maya, is not, after all, so extraordinarily firmly rooted in the deeper powers of the soul.

[ 66 ] After all, what is presented here as a teaching is not based on any authority and is never demanded to be believed as dogma. This is stated precisely with the intention that it be examined in every detail. But to set oneself up as a judge over what I myself should extend my occult research to and what not—that is a tyranny of the mind which, in the most eminent sense, does not spring from what must naturally be present to a certain degree—not in order to receive Spiritual Science, but which must be present, I would say, for the sake of society. It is a tyranny of the mind that arises from a subconscious lack of trust. One does not need trust to receive teachings; but in order not to dictate to the spiritual researcher what he is to receive from the spiritual world, but rather to assume that the representative of Spiritual Science himself knows what he has to do and must decide for himself regarding that which falls within the scope of his research, this requires a trust that can never in any way be detrimental to the movement, because it does not go beyond the personal sphere, because it does not touch upon the teaching. But it points to a fact—as many similar facts demonstrate—that great obstacles and difficulties already exist, and that it is already necessary for us, ever further and further away from everything that resembles a desire to act, to do within our spiritual movement, as a duty, that which arises from an insight into inner necessity. This duty will always be fulfilled, even if it is made as “bitter” as possible, taking the word “bitter” in the ordinary sense of life.

[ 67 ] But precisely when we realize that we can entrust these beloved departed with a kind of personal mission—to be with us through their powers and to work together with our own—a sense of security arises within our movement that the physical world could never provide.

[ 68 ] And so something supernatural flows into our movement, into the remembrance of our dear departed, and into the impulses themselves—something that does not arise merely from what we sometimes cannot even experience here to inspire our work in the physical world. It arises, so to speak, from the possibility that supersensible impulses flow into the maya of our society’s work, that we know ourselves to be secure, because what we do is not merely what takes place outwardly on the physical plane, but in this concrete sense there is also present that which is supersensible, since our dear departed have remained with us, even if not in physical being, our dear departed, so that we know ourselves to be secure in the work that is felt within the stream of spiritual becoming.

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

[ 69 ] Thus we truly speak of our dear departed as our comrades, our colleagues, our fellow workers—as those whose presence reigns invisibly among us. In this way, we concretely grasp the invisible being, physically shake our friend’s hand one last time in the visible world, and then, after death, receive this hand spiritually from the supersensible world. And in this exchange of handshakes, we see the symbol of the work within a society that is not meant to speak only for the physical world, but to call upon the supersensible worlds to participate in its activity as well. For such work, for such labor, we wish to build a place here on this hill. May there be a place here for such work!