The Rudolf Steiner Archive

14. The Relationship Between Human Life on Earth and Life Between Death and Rebirth

[ 1 ] It gives me great satisfaction that, as it were, while passing through, I am able to speak to you again today, and I would like to take this opportunity to elaborate further in a certain direction on some of the topics that were the subject of the last two lectures I had the privilege of delivering here. At that time, I spoke about the relationship of the human being to the spiritual world, insofar as it can be recognized by shedding light on the processes that take place unconsciously to ordinary consciousness during sleep, and insofar as they can be illuminated by shedding light, from a spiritual-scientific perspective, on the experiences that a human being undergoes in the spiritual world between death and a new birth.

[ 2 ] Today I would like to speak about how the life that a human being spends here on Earth between birth and death is, in a certain sense, a transformed reflection of what is experienced in the spiritual worlds between death and a new birth. One can understand human life on Earth only when one can relate the individual manifestations of this life to their counterparts in the spiritual world, where, one might say, the human being spends the greater part of his existence.

[ 3 ] Now I would like to begin by focusing primarily on the soul’s expressions in human beings, insofar as these earthly soul expressions can be related to experiences in the spiritual world. You can see from what I have presented here in my last two lectures that the experiences of the human soul in the spiritual world between death and a new birth are fundamentally different from those a person has here between birth and death. Here, between birth and death, a person experiences everything through the mediation of their body—whether it be their physical body or their etheric body. Nothing that a person experiences here on Earth can be experienced without being grounded in the physical. One might, for example, very easily believe that thinking is a purely spiritual act and, as it takes place in the human soul here on Earth, has nothing to do with physical existence. This is true in one sense. But no matter how independently spiritual human thinking may be, it could not take place here in earthly existence if human beings could not rely on their bodies and the processes occurring within them. I would like to use a comparison that I have often employed here on this occasion. When a person walks on the ground, the ground itself certainly contains nothing essential that constitutes the person; the person carries what is essential within their own skin. But as a physical being, the person could not exist in physical existence at all without the support of the ground.

[ 4 ] And so it is with thinking, which exists as a process of the soul. By its very nature, it is certainly not merely some brain process, but it could not take place if it did not have the brain as its support here in physical life. Only by viewing the matter in the light of this image can one form a correct conception of the spiritual nature and also of the physical conditioning of human thought. In short, there is nothing in human beings here in earthly existence that does not have to rely on physical existence. In relation to our physical existence, we carry our organs within us: lungs, heart, brain, and so on. In ordinary, healthy life, our consciousness is not filled with the perception of our internal organs. In fact, we only become aware of them when we are ill in some organ, and even then only in a rather imperfect way. We can never say that we know an internal organ through direct perception unless we study anatomy—and even then, we have only the dead organ before us, not the living one. We can never say that we have such a perception of an internal organ as we do of an external object. This is precisely what is characteristic: that during our earthly existence, we do not know the inner workings of our body through direct consciousness. In fact, what a person here on Earth knows least of all is precisely what they usually regard as the most valuable aspect of physical existence: the interior of their head. For when they begin to become acquainted with it, this is generally the most unpleasant experience—headaches and everything associated with them. In spiritual existence, between death and a new birth, the exact opposite is true. There we truly know our inner self. It is as if, here on Earth, we did not see the trees and clouds outside of us at all, but instead looked primarily within ourselves and said: There is the lung, there is the heart, there is the stomach. — In the spiritual world, we look into our inner self. Only what we see is the world of spiritual beings, the world we come to know from our anthroposophical literature as the world of the higher hierarchies. That is our inner world. And between death and a new birth, we actually feel ourselves to be the whole world—when I speak of the whole, this is only a figure of speech, but it is nonetheless the full truth— we each feel ourselves to be the whole world. And within ourselves, precisely at the most crucial moment of our spiritual existence—between death and a new birth—we feel and experience the world of spiritual beings, and we are conscious of them. It is equally true that we have an awareness of our inner being as the spirits of the higher world, just as we have no awareness here of our inner being—of the liver, the lungs, and so on. This is precisely the characteristic feature: that, fundamentally, in spiritual experience everything is reversed compared to physical experience here. It is only through the science of initiation that one gradually comes to understand how to conceive of this reversal.

[ 5 ] But there is, in fact, a fundamental process—or rather, I might say, a group of processes—that relates precisely to this inner coexistence with the beings of the higher hierarchies. If it were always the case that we perceived the world of the higher hierarchies only inwardly in the spiritual world, we would never come to our senses. We would know, of course, that these and those beings live within us, but we would never come to our senses in the spiritual world. That is why there is a rhythm in the experience between death and a new birth. This rhythm consists of our alternately looking within and experiencing that world of spiritual beings described in our anthroposophical literature; then we, so to speak, dim this consciousness. We relate to this spiritual inner world in the same way we do here in physical life when we close our eyes and no longer hear with our ears—when we sleep. But sleeping means something different here. When we—if I may put it this way—turn our attention away from the world of spiritual beings within us, we begin to perceive ourselves. It is, however, as if we were outside ourselves, yet we know that this “outside ourselves” is ourselves. Thus, we alternately perceive ourselves in the spiritual world, or we perceive the world of spiritual beings.

[ 6 ] You see, this rhythmic process, which repeats itself over and over, could be compared to two things here in our physical earthly existence. One could compare it to inhaling and exhaling, but one could also compare it to sleeping and waking. Both are rhythmic processes here in physical earthly existence, and both can be compared to what I have just described to you. But the point now is not merely to have some abstract knowledge of such processes in the spiritual world—which take place between death and a new birth—and, I would say, to satisfy spiritual curiosity; rather, the point is to recognize earthly life as a reflection of the super-earthly. And one must ask oneself: What is taking place here in earthly life—what, like a memory—which, of course, human beings do not possess in ordinary consciousness, but like a memory that beings of the higher hierarchies, Archangels would possess—what is taking place here in physical earthly life that is like a memory of this immersion into the world of spiritual beings and, in turn, of this experience of one’s own self in the spiritual world? What is taking place here?

[ 7 ] Well, if, in the time between death and a new birth, we did not have that experience through which we look within ourselves and experience the world of the spirit, there would be no morality here on Earth. What we retain from this experience of the beings of the spiritual world as we pass through embryonic life and enter earthly life—what we retain—is the inclination toward the moral life. The inclination toward a moral life is all the stronger in a person the more clearly they have experienced this communion with the spirits of the higher world between death and a new birth. And anyone who looks into these things with the right spiritual insight knows that immoral people here on Earth, as a result of their previous earthly life, had a too dull experience when they looked into this spiritual existence. But then again, if we could experience only that which unites us with the beings of the higher world between death and a new birth—if we were never to come to our senses in the spiritual world—then we could never, here on Earth, attain freedom, a sense of freedom, or an awareness of our personality, which is, after all, essentially identical to the sense of freedom. Thus, by developing morality and freedom here on Earth, morality and freedom become memories of that rhythm which we experience above in the spiritual world—between death and a new birth—in the manner described.

[ 8 ] But by turning our gaze to the soul, we can describe even more precisely what remains in the soul as an echo: on the one hand, that union with spiritual beings; on the other hand, that spiritual self-awareness which we experience alternately with it. What remains with us as an echo here in earthly life within our soul—of that union with the beings of the spiritual world—is the capacity to love. This capacity to love is more intimately connected to moral life than one might think. For without the capacity to love, there would be no moral life here on earth. Every moral life arises from the understanding we show toward the souls of other human beings; it arises from the striving to accomplish what we do out of an understanding of the souls of other human beings. The way we behave selflessly toward other people—that is, how we can become moral through love—is essentially an echo of our coexistence with spiritual beings in the world between death and a new birth. And what remains to us of this—I would say—lonely experience—for that is how it presents itself—of the lonely experience of our self in the spiritual world? For we feel lonely when we, so to speak, exhale. Inhaling is like experiencing the spiritual beings; exhaling is like experiencing our own self. But the feeling of loneliness—you see, the echo of this feeling of loneliness—is, here on earth, the capacity for memory, for recollection. We would have no memory as human beings if this were not an echo of the very feeling of loneliness just described. We are truly human in the spiritual world in that we can—I cannot say “withdraw into ourselves”—but rather free ourselves from what is within us in terms of higher spirits. Through this, we are human beings, independent human beings in the spiritual world. And here on Earth, we are independent human beings in that we can remember our experiences. Just imagine what would become of your independence if you could only ever live in the present with your thoughts. After all, it is your remembered thoughts that constitute the very basis of your inner life. Memory is what makes us personalities here on Earth. This memory is precisely the echo of that experience of loneliness in the spiritual world that I have described.

[ 9 ] Well, why do we descend from the spiritual world down into the physical world in the first place? You can gather from what I described here last time that the forces that bind us to the higher spiritual beings are indeed growing weaker. Here in physical life, we grow old because the forces that bind us to the physical Earth are growing weaker; over there, the forces that bind us to the spiritual beings are growing weaker. Above all, the forces that enable us to perceive ourselves within the spiritual beings and to be human—an independent human being—are also growing weaker. First, within the spiritual world—quite a long time before we descend to Earth—we lose the ability to live together with the spiritual beings. As I mentioned last time: together with the spiritual beings, we form the spiritual germ of our physical body; but we send that down first, then we take the etheric body and follow. I described that to you last time. First we lose the ability to live with the spiritual beings of the spiritual world; that ability gradually fades away. And we feel how, through the forces of the Moon, we are drawing ever closer to the Earth. We feel ourselves as a self, but we feel this ability to grasp and maintain ourselves within the spiritual realm less and less; it grows weaker and weaker. We feel more and more as if we were losing consciousness within the spiritual world. This leads us to feel the need to anchor what we can no longer carry within ourselves—this sense of self—to something external, namely our body, to anchor it to a body. I would say that we are gradually forgetting how to fly and must learn to walk. You know, this is a metaphor, but the image certainly conveys a truth, a reality. And so we settle into our bodies. The feeling of loneliness is anchored in the body and becomes the capacity for memory, and we must first reclaim the sense of community here on Earth. And this reclaiming truly reveals its full significance when we study the state of sleep from a spiritual scientific perspective.

[ 10 ] From a certain perspective, I described this state of sleep to you the last time I was here. I would now like to add to the preliminary songs I described back then. I know that such things are easily misunderstood. It happens time and again that people say: “Well, last time he described to us what a person experiences between falling asleep and waking up, and now he’s telling us something else.” Yes, my dear friends, if I tell you one time what a court councilor experiences in his office, that is not a contradiction to my telling you the next time what he experiences in the circle of his family. These things simply intertwine. And so you must realize that when I tell you about the experiences between falling asleep and waking up, there are many other elements involved—just as a court councilor’s life includes family life in addition to his office life.

[ 11 ] And so, between falling asleep and waking up, a person actually experiences a kind of reverse replay of what they did during the day. It is not merely that, from the moment of falling asleep until waking—sleep can also be brief, in which case events simply overlap—it is not merely that, between falling asleep and waking, a person has a sort of retrospective view of their daytime experiences, an unconscious retrospective view—it would, of course, have to be an unconscious retrospective view— no, if the soul truly becomes clairvoyant during sleep, or if it clairvoyantly recalls what it experienced between falling asleep and waking up, then it becomes evident that a person truly experiences in reverse what they have experienced since their last waking. So if one lives a regular life at night, one goes through, in reverse order, what one has done during the day. The most recent event takes place immediately after falling asleep, and so on. The entire sleep process has a remarkably balancing effect. I can tell you nothing other than what can be investigated through spiritual science. If you sleep for a quarter of an hour, the beginning of sleep, so to speak, knows when the end will be. And in that quarter of an hour, you also relive what you have accomplished since the last time you woke up. It is distributed quite evenly, as wonderful as that may seem. And this reliving is, I would say, something that lies between full reality and illusion. It is like this: When you have a memory of something you experienced in physical life twenty years ago, as a healthy, level-headed person you do not think, “You are experiencing this now”—rather, it is inherent in the memory itself that you relate it to a past experience. The one who clairvoyantly perceives what the soul experiences in a retrograde manner during sleep does not relate it to the present, but rather to the future after death, and knows: just as the person who remembers what they experienced twenty years ago knows that it was twenty years ago, so too does the one who clairvoyantly perceives the state of sleep know that this has no significance for the present, but that it is the model for what is to be experienced after death: that we must thus go through it in reverse, repeating all the deeds we have done on Earth. That is why this image in sleep is half reality and half illusion, for it relates to the future. For ordinary consciousness, it is thus an unconscious re-experiencing of what the human being must go through in the soul world, as I have called it in my book *Theosophy*. And the intuitive and inspired consciousness, as I have described it in my book *How Does One Attain Knowledge of the Higher Worlds?*, derives from the observation of sleep what a person must go through in the first stage after death. These are not things constructed out of thin air, but rather things that are simply observed once the gift of observation has been acquired. Thus, from the moment of falling asleep until waking up, the human being experiences without his body what he did with his body while awake.

[ 12 ] Now we come to an extraordinarily subtle concept. Imagine for a moment that we must relive our actions externally with our ego and our astral body. The more love we are able to develop, the more we acquire the ability to do this. This is the secret of life as it relates to love. If a person can truly step outside of themselves in love—loving their neighbor as themselves, so to speak—then they learn what they need during sleep to be able to relive, fully and without torment, precisely what they must relive. For in that state, they must be completely outside of themselves. If a person is a loveless being, this creates tension when they must relive, outside of themselves, the deeds they have committed out of lovelessness. This constricts them. Loveless people sleep—if I may put it figuratively—with constricted chests. And so, while we sleep, what we plant within ourselves through love in life actually becomes quite fruitful for us human beings. And in what develops there between falling asleep and waking up—as is evident from the description I have just given—we have that which passes through the gate of death and then lives on out there in the spiritual world. It is in the states between death and a new birth that our communion with the spiritual beings of the higher worlds is lost; we regain it in embryonic form during our earthly life through love. For love reveals its meaning when the human being, with his “I” and his astral body, is outside his physical and etheric bodies during sleep. A person’s being expands greatly between falling asleep and waking up when they are loving, and prepares well for what is to happen to them after death. A person’s being contracts when they are unloving, and prepares poorly for what is to happen to them after death. It is primarily in the unfolding of love that the seed lies for the events that will unfold after death.

[ 13 ] Memory is something extraordinarily fleeting during our earthly life, between birth and death; after all, there are only images stored in our memory. Consider how little of the events we experience actually remains with us in the form of memories. Just imagine for a moment the nameless pain one might have experienced at the death of a loved one, and vividly picture the inner state of mind in such a case; then imagine what that inner experience feels like when, ten years later, you allow the memory of what you experienced back then to come to life. It has faded, becoming almost abstract. So it is with our capacity for memory. It is pale and abstract compared to the full vitality of our lives. Why is our memory weak and shadowy? It is, after all, the shadow of our own experience between death and a new birth. Within that lies the capacity for memory, which in fact gives us our very existence. What gives us flesh and blood here on earth gives us, between death and a new birth, the capacity for memory. There, memory is full of vitality and strong—if I may use these spiritual terms—but it draws upon the flesh and grows weak. And when we die, for a few days—I have described this many times, and you will find it in my books as well—the last remnant of memory is still present in the etheric body. As we pass through the gate of death and look back on our past earthly life, this memory fades away. And from this memory emerges that which the power of love on Earth has given us as strength for life after death. Thus, the power of our memory is the inheritance we have from our pre-earthly life, and thus the power of love is the germinative force for what we have after our death. In this way, earthly life relates to the spiritual world.

[ 14 ] But I had to compare what a person experiences in connection with the higher beings of the spiritual world—alternating with their experience of the self in the spiritual world—with breathing: inhaling and exhaling. In a sense, one can also recognize in our breathing process—and in what is connected to it, namely the processes of speech and singing—a reflection of this breathing in the spiritual world. And this is how it works: Isn’t it true that our life in the spiritual world, between death and a new birth, actually unfolds in this way: Looking inward into one’s own inner being, becoming one with the beings of the higher hierarchies; looking outward from one’s own inner being, becoming one with oneself. This proceeds like inhaling and exhaling. There we breathe only into ourselves, and breathe ourselves out again, and this breathing is a spiritual act. Here on Earth, this breathing process, as I have just described, becomes memory and love. And indeed: memory and love also work together like breathing here in physical earthly life. And if you are able to observe this physical life correctly with the eyes of the soul, you can always observe—even physiologically—the interplay of memory and love in an important manifestation of breathing: in speaking and singing.

[ 15 ] Study the child up until the time of tooth replacement. One of the most interesting aspects of studying a child up until this time is how the power of memory gradually develops. At first, it is quite rudimentary. The child has a certain capacity for memory, but this memory does not become an independent faculty until around the time of the change of teeth. It is immensely interesting to observe how the power of memory develops during the first stage of human life. It is not actually fully developed until the child is ready for school. Only then can we rely on the child’s memory. If we rely too heavily on a child’s memory at an earlier stage, we make the person rigid and, in later life, emotionally sclerotic. For the child—up until the change of teeth—what matters is that impressions of the present are accurate. We should only begin to rely on memory between the change of teeth and sexual maturity.

[ 16 ] Today, our physiological science has not yet advanced far enough to describe the details of the process just described with precision. Spiritual science can do this, and physiological science will certainly follow in its footsteps, for these things can also be discovered through very precise observation of human nature. We can say that when we produce a sound or a tone, the head is involved first and foremost. But it is the same faculty within the head—the inner, soul-based faculty of memory—that, so to speak, shoots into the sound and the tone; this comes from above. And you surely cannot imagine that any being could speak without having the faculty of memory. If one were always to forget what lies in the sound or tone, one would of course never be able to speak or sing. On the one hand, it is precisely the embodied memory that lies in the tone or sound. On the other hand: as for the role that love—even in the physiological sense—plays in what becomes speech and song through the breathing process, you have clear evidence of this in the fact that it is only in the second important epoch of life—when love finds physiological expression—that the full inner richness of tone even begins to emerge in the male sex; this comes from below. There you have the two elements together. From above, that which physiologically underlies memory, and from below, that which physiologically underlies love: this forms the tone of speech and song. There you have the reciprocal interaction. In a sense, it is also a breathing process that runs through the whole of life. Just as we inhale oxygen and exhale carbon dioxide, so within us the power of memory unites with the power of love, meeting in speech, meeting in sound. And we can say: In human beings, speaking and singing are a mutual interpenetration of the power of memory and the power of love. This holds extraordinary significance for the revelation of the true mystery of tone and sound.

[ 17 ] Thus there is indeed some truth in what older languages express by calling the sum of the world’s forces and world’s thoughts the Logos, which is the otherworldly, the supersensible aspect of that which is physically expressed in language. We do not merely breathe in and out the higher beings; rather, we speak, so to speak—although this speaking is at the same time a singing—between death and a new birth, in this interplay between merging with the spiritual beings of the higher world and returning to ourselves; we speak with the beings of the higher hierarchies. For it is, at the same time, a spiritual form of speech. When we are in a state where we become one with the beings of the spiritual world, we behold them, even if only within ourselves. When we detach ourselves from them again and return to ourselves, we are left with the afterglow; there we are ourselves. There they express their own being within us; there they tell us what they are; there the Logos lives within us. When we return to ourselves on earth, it is the reverse: there we express our own essence when we speak and sing. For it is the human being’s own essence that we express in song and speech. We express our entire being in the process of exhalation; while we receive the entire being of the world in the Logos when we shed our connection with the spiritual beings between death and a new birth.

[ 18 ] The fact is, however, that when we undergo the transition from the spiritual world into the physical world, we simultaneously pass, as it were, through the great forgetting. Who, through ordinary consciousness, perceives in the faint, shadowy power of memory the echo of what we actually were as a self in the spiritual world? And who still recognizes in language—in that part that arises from memory—the lingering vibration of the self? And who, with ordinary consciousness, recognizes in the form of language—in singing and speaking, in the shaping of language’s plasticity—the echo of the beings of the higher hierarchies? Nevertheless, is it not the case that the one who understands how to listen to language without its utilitarian aspect—who can listen intently to what the sounds express through their very own essence—that such a person does indeed gain a sense, especially if they have an artistic sensibility, of how more is revealed in speaking and singing than what ordinary consciousness perceives? And why, then, do we transform ordinary language—which we possess here on earth as a means of utility—why do we transform it through song, by stripping away its characteristics as a means of utility and making it an expression of our own being in recitation and song? Why do we transform it in this way? What are we doing there?

[ 19 ] Well, we can get a clear picture of this if we tell ourselves: Before you descended to this Earth, you were in the spiritual world, and you lived there just as it has been described. Then the great forgetting set in. In what your mouth utters, in what your soul remembers, and in how your soul loves, you do not recognize the echo of what you were in the spiritual world. But in art, we take a few steps back from life, so to speak, and we take a few steps closer to what we were in our pre-birth life and what we will become in our afterlife. And while, on the one hand, we can recognize how memory is the echo of what we had in our pre-earthly life, and how the unfolding of love is the seed of what we will have after death—when, through spiritual knowledge, we bring the past and future of human existence into the present, so to speak— in art we summon into the present itself—to the extent that this is possible for human beings within their physical organization—in art we summon into the present that which binds us together with the spirit.

[ 20 ] You see, what gives art its true brilliance is that it transports us, in a naive way, into the spiritual world in the here and now. Those who are able to look into the innermost depths of human life say to themselves: People usually remember only the things they experienced in their immediately preceding earthly life. But the power through which they remember these earthly experiences—this power is merely the weakened form of the power of their true self-existence in pre-earthly life. And the love that human beings can develop here as universal love for humanity is the weakened seed-power of that which will fully blossom after death: the past and the future. And just as, for example, in singing and in declamatory speech, what a person is—namely, memory—must truly unite with the way a person can give themselves to the world—namely, love—so it is in all art: In the present, a person experiences the harmony of their self with the external world, and unless a person is capable, so to speak, of bringing their inner self—be it sound, be it tone, be it the act of painting, be it any other artistic expression— without being able to bring to the surface what they are—what life has made of them, which is, after all, the content of their memory—they cannot, in one sense, be an artist. And one who, in the most explicit sense, wishes to be an egoist even in their art is no true artist. Only the person who has a sense of, so to speak, flowing out into the world, of becoming one with others—the person who possesses the unfolding of love—can unite this unfolding of love with his own being. Altruism and egoism merge into one. They flow most intimately and naturally in the performing arts, but they also merge into one in the visual arts. And when, through a certain deepening of our powers of insight, we reveal how human beings are connected—through the past and the future—to a supersensible world, we can also tell ourselves that, in the present, human beings intuitively experience this connection precisely in the creation or appreciation of art. And in fact, art never fully realizes its potential unless it possesses, in a certain sense, a kind of resonance with something religious. Not that it must be religiously pious; even lighthearted art can possess this resonance with the religious.

[ 21 ] But clear proof of this can also be found in how art itself has developed. Art was, after all, originally one with religious life. What constituted art was thoroughly interwoven with religious ritual in the earliest days of humanity. What human beings shaped as images of their gods was the source of sculpture. Let us recall, for example, the Samothracian Mysteries, to which Goethe alludes in the second part of his *Faust*, where he speaks of the Cabiri. I have attempted to recreate these Cabiri in my studio in Dornach. What did I discover? It was something very interesting. I simply set myself the task of discovering, through observation, what the Cabiri must have looked like within the Samothracian Mysteries. And just imagine: I ended up with three jugs—albeit jugs designed with sculptural artistry! I was astonished myself at first, even though Goethe also speaks of jugs. The matter only became clear to me when I realized this: these jugs stood on an altar; something resembling incense was placed inside them; the sacrificial word was chanted; and through the power of the sacrificial word—which in earlier times of humanity still possessed a vibrational force quite different from what it does today—the sacrificial smoke took shape as the image of the deity that was being sought. Directly within the religious ritual, there is the accompanying song, which finds its full expression in the sculptural form of the smoke.

[ 22 ] Humanity has indeed separated art from religious life. And Schiller is right when he says: “Only through the dawn of beauty do you enter the realm of knowledge,” which is usually printed in books as: “Only through the morning gate of beauty do you enter the realm of knowledge.” If an artist makes a spelling error, that error is naturally passed down to posterity. It is, of course, written as: “Only through the dawn of beauty do you enter the realm of knowledge.” In other words: all knowledge is derived from art. Fundamentally, there is no knowledge that is not intimately connected to art. Only knowledge that relates to the external and the utilitarian seems to have no connection to art. But this knowledge can extend in the world only as far as what the mere color-grinder knows about painting. As soon as one goes beyond—in chemistry or physics—what mere mixing of colors entails—I am speaking figuratively; you know what I mean—science becomes artistic. And when the artistic is grasped in the right way in its spiritual essence, it gradually transitions into the religious. Art, religion, and science were once one. But we must also begin to sense their common origin within them. We can do this only if, within human civilization and human development, we return once more to the spirit; if we take seriously the relationships that exist between human beings here in their physical earthly existence and the spiritual world. We must come to this realization from the most diverse points of view.

[ 23 ] Today I would like to focus on one of these perspectives in order to describe to you, once again from a certain angle, how human beings are connected to the spiritual world. I hope that we will be able to continue these reflections here in the not-too-distant future.