The Rudolf Steiner Archive

Seventeenth Lecture

[ 1 ] Among the concepts of anthroposophically oriented spiritual science that must have the most fruitful, most intense, and also the most necessary effect on the development of the human soul as we look toward the future, the concept of prenatal human existence will be the most significant. Let us consider what, in this regard, will be added to those ideas and feelings that have long dominated Western humanity. When today a person of faith, belonging to any denomination, speaks of eternity or the immortality of the human soul, they initially think of nothing other than the continued life and persistence of the human soul after death. In the future, when the perspective of spiritual science has taken hold of a sufficiently large number of people, people will speak above all of the human soul’s pre-birth existence, of the soul’s sojourn in spiritual worlds before it descends to physical life on Earth, of everything that precedes birth or conception, as well as of what follows for this human soul after death. People today do not yet fully grasp the significance that such a discussion of pre-birth existence will have for the whole of human life—not only for inner life, but also for outer human life.

[ 2 ] Let us first consider what it means when we look at the developing child, seeing how, day by day, week by week, month by month, the features of the face take shape from within, how this or that feature emerges, smooths out, recedes, and so on. We do not yet fully realize what mysteries of existence we are actually glimpsing when we observe such a developing human being. With what depth of feeling will such a developing human being be regarded when the following awareness underlies our perception: before this human being was conceived or born, its soul-spiritual being was up in the soul-spiritual worlds, having experiences through soul-spiritual organs, just as during physical existence a human being has experiences through its physical organs.

[ 3 ] We can go one step further into the innermost depths of the human soul, and then, from this perspective as well, gauge the shift in views on this subject. Let us consider the various denominations that, drawing on their centuries-old traditions, speak to people today in their sermons and teachings about eternity and the immortality of the human soul. One should not speak of these things from a theoretical standpoint; one should speak from the standpoint of life; one should examine the nuances of feeling from which sermons and theological teachings regarding the eternity of the human soul most often spring. I am not referring here to the content of the doctrine, but rather to the motives, the sensibilities, and the feelings from which sermons and theological teachings spring. After all, quite apart from what is true, a person can have a feeling that springs from the innermost egoism of the soul: The soul must not perish when the body decays! There is indeed an element of inner selfishness of the soul in this desire not to perish. One cannot bear the event of dissolution; one thirsts for the human soul to remain in existence after death. This feeling of thirsting for immortality after death—that is what sermons and theological teachings appeal to first and foremost. This is what provides the foundation from which the eternity of the soul is preached to people of the most diverse denominations. One finds believers by catering to this secret, inner selfishness of the soul. Essentially, one tells people something they thirst for—and the opposite of which they certainly do not want to hear. By speaking to them of the soul’s continued existence after death, one finds a way into human faith. One would not otherwise find a way into human faith if the human soul did not, out of egoism, thirst for the indestructibility of the soul after death. Now we know from spiritual science that the human soul certainly continues to exist after death, and we have also been able to see from many descriptions given in the course of the work within this movement that, based on the science of initiation, one can speak with precision about experiences after death.

[ 4 ] We shall not speak at first of what actually lies beyond death, but rather of the motives behind the preaching of the doctrine of immortality. Spiritual science will not be able to appeal to these motives. In particular, it will not be able to do so when it comes to speaking of the existence of the human soul before birth or before conception, for, fundamentally speaking, this does not accommodate soul egoism. As a rule, people give little thought to what their state was like before birth or before conception, or to their experiences before they descended into an earthly body. This is more or less a matter of indifference to them, and they do not feel the same longing for it as they do for life after death. Support for this field can be found only among those who have a keen desire to understand the human being as a whole, and among those who have a keen longing to discover that force within the human soul which, as an immortal essence, truly underlies what we are in the outer physical world through our bodies. In our Western civilization—which, unless new forces are infused into it, is doomed to decline—there is little inclination and few concepts to which one can turn when speaking of this life of the human soul before birth or before conception. As you know, the churches regard this teaching as heresy, and the churches do not realize that, in essence, they are not actually teaching Christianity but rather Aristotelian philosophy. For when Aristotle’s philosophy was incorporated into church philosophy during the Middle Ages, the doctrine of the origin—the creation—of each individual human soul at birth, or rather with the formation of the human embryo in the mother’s womb, became firmly established within church philosophy. And so the belief gradually took hold that this denial of the pre-existence of the human soul was part of the true Christian doctrine. It is not. The true practical teaching of Christianity includes entering the spiritual worlds. Entering the spiritual worlds is not possible without the knowledge of the pre-existence of the human soul.

[ 5 ] But Western civilization is infected by these creeds; it has reached the point where we do not even have the linguistic tools to express what the truth is in this realm. When we still operate within a religious worldview—or within any rational philosophical worldview—we speak of the immortality of the human soul. By using the word “immortality” of the human soul, we are already implying that, fundamentally, we are merely negating death, not birth; for where would we find a common word that would point just as clearly to pre-existence as the word “immortality” points to post-existence? Where would we find a word like “unbornness” that has exactly the same validity in the face of true spiritual knowledge as “immortality”? This may be the best proof to you of what has been lost in the West, precisely through the influence of the denominations: the truth about the nature of the human being. This truth has been lost even in language itself. For we must awaken an awareness—even within language itself—that the human soul is eternal, that it exists just as much before birth as it does after death. We need a word for “pre-birth” just as we have a word for “immortality.” But then ask your sound logic—when you think of a pre-birth existence, a logic that truly thinks things through to their conclusion—whether you are still able to avoid speaking of repeated earthly lives. If you speak only of immortality—that is, of a post-existence—you can, of course, believe: “This one earthly life, and then an eternity of a completely different kind!” Logically, you will no longer be able to do so if you speak of pre-existence. Otherwise, you would have to ask yourself: “Well, how is it that the soul is not created at birth after all? Why should it be created at some point before birth?” In short, you inevitably arrive at the concept of repeated earthly lives when you speak of pre-existence. Basically, no one in earthly civilization has ever arrived at the concept of pre-existence without speaking of repeated earthly lives.

[ 6 ] But consider: if this doctrine of preexistence manifests itself not merely as a theory, if this view permeates the entire emotional life, and especially into the will of human beings, if a person feels themselves to be a being who has descended from spiritual worlds and incarnated in a physical body—what does that mean for the entire conception of this earthly existence! You are then conscious of being, here on this Earth, a messenger of the divine-spiritual world; you know that this life here is a continuation of a spiritual life. Everything we carry within us—our sense of duty, our abilities—is illuminated and imbued with power by this consciousness, for we know that the gods have sent us down into this physical existence. This physical existence is given a task that is not set by itself, but is set for it from the heavenly heights. This is, after all, the distinctive feature of spiritual science: that it does not merely speak against the intellect; it must also speak to the intellect, for things must be understood. But as we take in the ideas that come from the science of initiation, they permeate our entire human being; they permeate not only our thoughts, but also our feelings, our sensations, and our will, giving us an awareness of the essence of our whole being. How one positions oneself in the world with an awareness of the pre-existence of the human soul will be particularly significant for the civilization of the future. This will illuminate and empower people with something that is needed to break free from the forces of decline that would otherwise, without a doubt, drive Western civilization into barbarism at the beginning of the third millennium. But the individual spheres of life, too, take on a very special character when such a perspective can serve as their foundation.

[ 7 ] You have likely heard quite a bit here about the Waldorf School founded in Stuttgart. In a certain sense, it is intended to put anthroposophically oriented spiritual science into practice in teaching and education. What is particularly significant in the pedagogy of Waldorf school teachers is not the abstract principles that you might otherwise find in educational textbooks or in state-approved teaching guidelines, but rather, for example, the feelings with which the teacher enters the classroom. One of the feelings that has a particularly powerful pedagogical effect—and one that permeates every teacher because they were introduced to their profession from this perspective—is reverence for that divine seed which, day by day, week by week, month by month, pushes its way out from within the being that has descended from the eternal spiritual world into this physical world. The awareness that, through the gateway of the human body, the teacher has a connection with a being that has descended to him from spiritual worlds—this is what constitutes the deep reverence the teacher then feels for that human being, who is increasingly taking shape as a spiritual-soul being within the physical body. Whether one believes it today or not: A teacher who has this reverence for the developing human being possesses a secret power within, through which he teaches and educates in a completely different way than a teacher who lacks this reverence—one who believes that the human being came into being by detaching the physical body from the mother’s body. For one does not teach and educate solely with concepts and ideas; one educates, above all, with those mysterious forces and powers that pass from the teacher to the child as imponderables.

[ 8 ] An example can be cited here that may be considered particularly important. As a teacher, one might reflect on how to teach this or that child the idea of immortality. Isn’t it true that, according to today’s view, the teacher is the wise one and the child is the foolish one? The wise teacher reflects: How do I teach the foolish child the idea of immortality? — He might say to the child: Look at the butterfly chrysalis! Inside it sits a butterfly; it breaks free and unfolds after the chrysalis bursts open. It is exactly the same with your immortal soul within your body: the body is shattered. The immortal soul is simply not as visible as the butterfly, but it is visible to a supersensible perception; it flies into spiritual worlds. — Certainly, one can conceive of this and, through such a comparison, teach the child the idea of immortality. In my opinion, the child is not greatly helped when this idea of immortality is taught to them by a very clever teacher in the spirit of the present age, for the teacher does not believe in it himself! He has merely made it up. But if any of our Waldorf school teachers teaches the child about immortality in this way, it is quite different. For he himself believes in this image; he is imbued with the truth that the butterfly chrysalis and the emerging butterfly are ordained by the gods themselves to represent the image of the immortality of the human soul. He is imbued with this: There is the same phenomenon: on a lower level, the butterfly emerging from its chrysalis; and on a higher level, the soul emerging from the body. And this image was not created by you, but has been placed within nature by divine-spiritual powers themselves. — They believe in it with the same fervor with which the child is to believe in it, and it is this belief that matters. If the teacher has this faith, he will also instill it in the child; if he does not have it—if he holds it only as an abstract idea within himself—then his teaching will not bear fruit. For what matters are the feelings that flow into the classroom; what matters are the feelings that are kindled in our soul by the awareness of pre-existence.

[ 9 ] Only when we take seriously everything that follows from this prenatal existence can we truly grasp the connection between the human soul and the human body. If you pick up any textbook on the science of the soul—what is called psychology—today, you will find all sorts of theories about how the human soul affects the human body and so on. You won’t gain much insight from these theories; they are abstract flights of fancy, and once you’ve worked through them, you won’t know much more than you did before; for they merely put forward all sorts of hypotheses about how the soul affects the body.

[ 10 ] If one understands how the prenatal human being incarnates in the body, then one views the developing human being in the child in an entirely different way. There are two stages in the development of the human being. One stage occurs with the change of teeth around the age of seven. What does this change of teeth signify? It is a much more profound transformation in the entire human organism than is generally believed. But today people observe things only superficially. Once we become accustomed to viewing things from a spiritual perspective—as can be derived from spiritual science—what will we come to realize? We will say to ourselves: How remarkable! Until the change of teeth, the child does not form fully consolidated concepts; although the child remembers many things, it does not fix these memories into concepts; true intelligence has not yet emerged. Just observe a child closely once, and you will see how, in the course of the change of teeth, the capacity for true intelligence develops more and more. Today, people have absolutely no sense of the difference, for example, between a seven-year-old and a five-year-old child with regard to the development of intelligence. If one would only observe—Waldorf school teachers must observe this, for it underlies their entire teaching and education—how this soul gradually emerges after the seventh year, then one would immediately realize where to look when seeking to answer the question: Yes, where was all that which emerges as intelligence after the seventh year? Where was it hidden? It was hidden in the lower part of the body, active within the body. The very same force that emancipates itself at the age of seven and becomes intelligence was down in the body, shaping the body, and reached its culmination in terms of that shaping with the eruption of the second set of teeth. The force that pushes its way into existence in the second set of teeth has been at work throughout the entire organism. But it is a force that is active in the body only until the age of seven; after that, it has no further task in the body, and then it becomes intelligence; it was already intelligence before, but it was working within the body. Look at what happens in the child’s body up to the age of seven, and then look at what the child possesses as intelligence after the age of seven—you will find that it is the same thing. Intelligence descended at birth; at first it was not yet active as intelligence, as a soul entity—it only gradually becomes so after the age of seven: there you have “the concrete interaction of the soul with the body.” And now you can observe what was primarily at work in the human body up to the age of seven. Now you do not have foolish, abstract concepts of the interaction between body and soul—concepts pulled out of thin air, as they appear in our textbooks and manuals—but rather concrete insights into what has been at work in the blood and nerves, in the muscles and bones, over the course of seven years and then becomes the child’s intelligence.

[ 11 ] This is how one comes to know the human being in all his or her essence—in both his or her spiritual and physical nature—as one gradually delves into what spiritual science has to offer; now the human being appears before us in a completely different light. It is remarkable: materialistic science sought to understand the material world, yet could know nothing of the forces at work, for example, in a child’s body up to the age of seven. Now spiritual science comes along and truly teaches us about the material world; it penetrates right into the material realm. That is, after all, the tragedy of materialism: it becomes more and more abstract and no longer teaches us anything about the material world at all. What does today’s physician know about the liver and kidneys, the stomach and lungs—that is, about material structures? Once what I attempted to demonstrate during this year’s spring course in Dornach—namely, what can actually follow from spiritual science for medicine and the natural sciences—once that begins to penetrate our science, then it will become clear that spiritual knowledge is precisely called upon to shed light on the material essence, whereas a materialist stands before the whole world like a blind person before color. It is precisely material existence that the materialist fails to understand.

[ 12 ] A second stage in human life is sexual maturity, which manifests itself in males particularly through the change in voice and in females through physical changes as well; except that these changes are more widespread throughout the entire body and do not stand out as clearly in a single organ as the change in a man’s voice does; in both cases around the age of fourteen. Once again, a significant change in the organism. What is actually happening there? Yes, what actually changes after sexual maturity? The entire life of the will changes! Try comparing a nineteen-year-old with a thirteen-year-old and focusing on their concrete life of the will. The entire life of the will changes; otherwise, the feeling of love could not enter into the life of the will. Once again, such a transformation in the soul life! When we investigate this from a spiritual scientific perspective, we arrive at the following: We become increasingly integrated with the external world, especially during the period from the change of teeth to sexual maturity; we take in more and more of this external world, our will becomes more and more oriented, and we learn to bring our will into harmony with the things and processes of the external world. If one truly studies the entire complex at hand here, one finds that during this period the human being acquires the element of will—not from within, but through interaction with the external world. It was a profound intuition when the poet said: “Talent is formed in silence; character in the flow of the world.” Talent springs forth from within, while character—that is, the element of will—is formed in the flow of the world, in the exchange of inner forces with outer forces. But human beings must resist what comes to them from the external world; the inner self must react; the inner self must hold back what comes from the external world. This will-forming element, which approaches the human being through the interaction with the external world, is met by an inner force: in men, this force accumulates in the larynx; in women, in other organs; and this accumulation—this clash between the external element of will and the inner element of will—is expressed in the transformation of the larynx or similar organs. There, too, you can see the spiritual aspect of the external world at work within the human being.

[ 13 ] Now bring this together with the insights of spiritual science that you are already familiar with. We know that we descend from the spiritual-soul world into the physical world through conception or birth. On the other hand, we know that, in relation to our astral body and our “I,” we enter a spiritual world every time we fall asleep. The spiritual world that our soul provides us with works on shaping us until the age of seven and, from then on, becomes our intelligence. This intelligence is met—albeit from birth onward, but particularly strongly upon reaching sexual maturity, because that is when the exchange with the now-liberated intelligence takes place—by the element of will. And this struggle between the external element of will and the internal element of intelligence—between the spiritual realm we pass through in sleep, which we experience from falling asleep until waking, and the spiritual world we passed through before our birth or conception—the struggle between what we brought with us and what we pass through every night in sleep, is expressed in the development of our larynx, in the development of what is present in the organism at sexual maturity. Spiritual forces interact with spiritual forces. We journey through a spiritual world from the moment we fall asleep until we wake up; in this spiritual world lies the will that is communicated to us; within our organism lies the intelligence that we bring with us into physical existence at birth. We can thus understand the human body if we perceive it as the outward manifestation of what unfolds from the spiritual realm,

[ 14 ] Wherever we look, especially when we look into people’s eyes, we find that spiritual forces underlie the world, and we can only truly understand human beings when we truly take the interplay of these spiritual forces into account. Humanity will come to embrace this as it moves toward the future. Then it will be unable to comprehend how an age could ever have come to say: Here a sensory world spreads out; within this sensory world, atoms, molecules, and tiny particles are at work, whose collisions are supposedly caused by certain movements of light or electricity. — No, it is not atoms and molecules that are at work here; it is spiritual forces! Behind what is perceptible to the senses, the spirit is at work. This will be the great turning point: that human beings will no longer believe they are walking through a cloud of atoms and molecules, but will be conscious that with every step they are passing through spiritual worlds—and it is spiritual worlds that live within them, spiritual worlds that build them up and transform them. Just as materialistic belief and the mere doctrine of the afterlife have led us, as their ultimate consequence, to what is now taking place in Eastern Europe, so will the spiritual doctrine lead us into a future existence that is truly worthy of human beings. But only this—and this alone—can lead to a genuine social structure. Social structure must arise from the spirit, and until humanity recognizes this, things cannot get better; they must continue to get worse and worse.

[ 15 ] You have surely all allowed a saying of Christ from the Gospel to touch your soul many times: “Heaven and earth will pass away, but my words will never pass away.” What does this saying of Christ mean? It makes no sense to someone who believes in atoms and molecules, for such a person assumes that before this earthly existence with animals, plants, and humans, there was a nebular formation from which the sun gradually coalesced, from which the planets coalesced, and through this coalescence and swirling, plants, animals, and humans came into being. People who, like the well-known cultural historian Herman Grimm, say the following have a sound sense of reality: Future generations will struggle even to explain this madness of the Kant-Laplacean theory, for a carrion bone around which a hungry dog circles is a more appetizing sight than this theory! — That is what a person with a sound sensibility says. For when we look out into the world of the senses, what lies behind the colors, what lies behind the sounds? Not atoms and molecules, but spiritual forces that collide with our own spiritual forces, thus forming this tapestry of colors and sounds spread out around us, or this tapestry of warmth. So if what I already described in the 1880s in my introduction to Goethe’s scientific writings actually exists—namely, the metamorphosing sensations, and behind them a spiritual world—then we will perceive what one would see if one could now travel from Earth to another star and look at Earth from that star. There, one would not see what is in our surroundings—trees, clouds, plants, and animals—but would perceive only what lies within the human skin; and what you see on that star is not what the beings of those other stars see, for that has no significance for a foreign star. The light that shines toward you from other stars is not a phenomenon in the external world; it is a phenomenon within the beings who inhabit those stars—just as what lies within your own skin is the only thing visible to an observer on another star when looking toward Earth. Once you understand this, you will no longer say: “The Earth arose from a cluster of atoms that coalesced.” — We form ideals—but what would become of such ideals if the Earth were to revert to a cluster of atoms? The entire moral world would fade away, be forgotten, and be destroyed; everything that has ever emerged from ethical, moral, and religious ideals would vanish, if only matter and force were eternal. Force and matter dissolve into sensations. Eternal is the spirit we carry within ourselves, and this spirit also appears physically on another celestial body. That which lies outside the human body does not exist at all for another celestial body. Therefore, we can say: Nature surrounds us; we are born again and again; nature will no longer be there—nature will have made way for something else. Of all that exists now and will exist, only that which lives within the human body will remain. Based on a deeply intuitive insight, Jesus Christ therefore said: “Heaven and earth will pass away, but my words will not pass away!” Everything you see on the outside will pass away, but my words, which come from my mouth, will not pass away—they will endure!

[ 16 ] And now, from this perspective, let us look at the lie that pervades the world today! From the pulpits we hear it proclaimed that the human soul is immortal; at the universities we hear it proclaimed that matter and energy are eternal; and then come the cowardly compromisers who want to patch the two things together. It would only be honest if those who believe in the eternity of matter were to say: There is no eternity of the soul—and those who believe in the eternity of the soul must deny the eternity of the material; they must profess the truly Christian word: Heaven and earth will pass away, but my words—that is, the content of my soul—will not pass away! — The two are incompatible. If they were courageous, the materialist university professors would say, “Christianity does not apply to us.” And those who are called to proclaim Christianity would have to combat the materialism of the universities for the sake of Christianity. The fact that they do not do this—that they try to cobble the two things together—is the great lie of our time. And where a mindset of deceit prevails, there the seed spreads, there the germ of lying takes root, and there it creeps into other spheres of life. It has done so sufficiently over the course of time, because people did not want to appeal to knowledge alongside the concept of post-existence—knowledge that inevitably points to pre-existence, to prenatal life. Because people wanted to speak only of post-existence—which appeals only to the egoism of the soul, not to knowledge—this gives rise to all the untruthfulness in life that prevails today in so many areas, for the spirit of falsehood cannot be stopped once it seizes our very best, our innermost convictions.

[ 17 ] But these things can only be properly and fully appreciated in the context of a person’s entire life. Throughout the Middle Ages and much of the modern era, people spoke of what was “right” and “wrong.” Everyone naturally believed that they were right, and that whatever did not agree with that was wrong; and when people spoke of right and wrong, they spoke from the standpoint of logic. Logic was the great pride of humanity. Today, this is almost no longer the case. A doctrine has come over from America that has already taken hold in philosophy and has taken on a particularly grotesque form in Germany. This is no longer the logical doctrine of true and false; it is so-called pragmatism, the doctrine of utility. One believes something to be true not because one has logically understood it, but people like James and others say: Oh, come on, true or false is just another way of saying what is useful or harmful! — We notice that something is useful to us, so we say it is true; we notice that something is harmful to us, so we say it is false! In Germany, this has established itself as the philosophy of “As If,” and there is actually a thick book on the subject by a certain university professor named Vaihinger, who taught philosophy in Halle for many years. The philosophy of “As If” means roughly this: We do not know whether molecules or atoms exist, but it is useful to explain the world as if atoms did exist; we do not know whether good has any eternal significance, but it is useful to explain the world that way; we do not know whether there is a God, but it is useful for humans—more useful than the opposite—to view the world as if there were a God, and so on. I am merely expressing this in a few paradigmatic words. This philosophy of “as if” is the German adaptation of the American doctrine that what is useful is true and what is harmful is false.

[ 18 ] In addition to these views, there was yet another one in all ancient cultures. By the later Greek period, it had already disappeared; in the earlier Greek period, however, it is still discernible to all those who study this era not according to academic convention but in accordance with the truth. Back then, people did not speak of a view in the logical sense as being “true” or “false”; rather, they spoke of a view in such a way that they said it was “healthy” or “sick.” That meant something! Today we actually speak of health and sickness only when referring to the physical human being, for in everyday life we speak of nothing else at all. We know that forces originating from the cosmos make a person healthy or sick, but when we speak of the soul and the spirit, we no longer speak of healthy or sick; there we have moved into the abstract, into mere theory. In ancient cultures, people had the sense that when someone said something that was right, it meant: “Their spirit is well-ordered; they are healthy.” — When they said something that was wrong—what we today abstractly call “false”—people felt concretely: “That stems from a sick state of mind.” —“Healthy” and “sick”—these were terms applied to the soul as well, and they were what people perceived most strongly in relation to the soul. From this perception stems the word about which scholars later wrote lengthy philological treatises: the word “catharsis” in Greek tragedy, a word that originates from the Mysteries. According to Aristotle, catharsis takes place in the human soul when one watches a tragedy. Fear and pity are aroused, so that fear and pity lead to a kind of crisis, catharsis, and the person is purified through fear and pity. Here, the process that takes place in the human soul while watching a tragedy is described as a healing process emerging from the revitalized soul. Thus, in aesthetics and in art, you still find the concept of what is healing and what is harmful.

[ 19 ] We’ll have to come back to this! We must regain an understanding of the fact that what we abstractly call “the right thing” stems from the soul—descending from its pre-birth existence—subduing the body, organizing it, and causing it to yield as malleable material to the soul forces that make it healthy. That is the truth. What comes from a soul that cannot use its body as an instrument—that expresses itself in a distorted or obscure way through its body—that is what is spiritually diseased. We must learn once again to replace the concepts of “true” and “false” with “healthy” and “diseased.” We must once again feel that inner pain that can overcome us when anyone expresses incorrect views; we must feel the inner satisfaction that comes from the true. But we will not do so until we speak of pre-birth existence just as we speak of post-death existence; until we learn to use a word like “unbornness” just as we use “immortality”—which proves how far we have strayed from the knowledge of that spiritual world from which humanity actually originates.

[ 20 ] Such matters, which I have only briefly summarized today, are presented in greater detail in various treatises, lecture series, and books. From such reflections, you can see what a radical transformation it will mean for the entire constitution of the human soul when the very essence of spiritual science truly takes hold of human minds—when people in the world go about with an awareness of their being such as can be gained through spiritual science. Today, people are enslaved only to the egoism of the soul, which seeks to cling to a post-existence; they do not wish to advance toward a true grasp of the human soul, which had experiences before birth just as it will have experiences after death. Only those who can speak—not merely of immortality, but of a pre-birth existence—based on true knowledge can comprehend the full, complete eternity of the human soul. We can believe, because faith always arises from the desire for life after death; but we can know of pre-birth and post-death life as two things that are inseparable from one another. Knowledge pertains to the full essence of the human soul; faith pertains only to postmortem existence. This is what human beings must attain: knowledge of the spiritual; yet this is precisely what people today resist so strongly. True knowledge of the spiritual world can flow only from spiritual science. From it will come a state of the human soul that is healthy—not merely true—and physical healing will be a necessary result of spiritual healing. Then human beings will no longer view the Earth—as modern geology does—as a great mineral sphere, but will regard it as a spiritual being of which they themselves are a part. This is what we must strive toward. This should constitute the first part of my reflections today.