The Rudolf Steiner Archive

During the course of this evening's discussion, questions were asked and various concerns were raised, for example:

Elisabeth Vreede reads out a postcard from Holland calling for the immediate introduction of a council system.

Rudolf Steiner: I would like to say something in connection with what has just been said. I will start from a book by Professor Varga about the proletarian movement in Hungary. Professor Varga was People's Commissar for Economic Affairs during the Hungarian Council Republic. He was one of the leaders of the Hungarian Soviet Republic, along with a few other people, who fled and are now interned at Karlstein. He has now written an extremely interesting book, 'The Economic Problems of the Proletarian Dictatorship', in which he explains how he and his colleagues intended to implement this Soviet Republic in Hungary. In between, he intersperses remarks about the experiences gained during the short period of the existence of the soviet republic in Hungary. Now this whole treatise is very interesting because the Hungarian soviet republic was, so to speak, a significant experiment that was so instructive because the consequences can be better surveyed in the relatively small territory of Hungary than in the vast territory of Russia.

The first thing that is remarkable about this book is that it is an eminently professorial work, something quite alien to real life. One gets the distinct feeling that here is someone who has revolutionized an entire country but who has never looked into the real forces of the national economy. Professor Varga stands squarely on the ground of Lenin and Trotsky; only Varga and his colleagues in Hungary had to deal with a smaller area than Lenin and Trotsky in Russia. And that is why many things came to light in Hungary that will only come to light in Russia at a later time. Naturally, Professor Varga does not attribute the failure of the Hungarian experiment to the inherent impossibility of this entire abstract striving and working, but claims that the cause of the failure was that it could not be carried through to the end because the Romanian military power attacked from the flank.

Take one of the main points that we are confronted with. This example is particularly valuable because we are not dealing here with just any Marxist theorist, but with a man who has organized an entire country according to his abstractions, who could do whatever he wanted. He wanted to be a practitioner, and one must ask: could he be one? Professor Varga was indeed obliged to make arrangements that would now bring the Hungarian economy to its feet in a social-democratic sense. He had to emphasize that the real standard-bearers of his reforms are the urban industrial workers, who naturally have the improvement of their living conditions as their driving motive. But now he shows that initially nothing else can come of it than that these actual standard-bearers must experience a significant deterioration in their living conditions during the initial period in which the council republic is introduced; the only ones who gain are the farmers in the countryside. So what does Professor Varga conclude from this? He concludes that the industrial proletariat, those who actually had the only interest in such a revolution, will not achieve what they want to achieve in the near future, but that it is the rural peasants who will achieve it. But he thinks that these conditions will improve for the urban industrial proletariat later on – namely, indirectly through the countryside. All that was needed was to educate the urban industrial proletariat to the point where it would realize that it would have to go hungry and live in rags for a while before things got better.

This is a capital mistake, which is the most absolute consequence of current abstract thinking on social issues. The result would not have been that things would have improved through the detour via the countryside, but that the entire industry would have gradually been wiped out. The cities would have gradually been abandoned and everyone would have moved to the countryside; production would eventually have been limited to the mere exploitation of land and soil. All other forms of life would have gradually disappeared, meaning that we would have reverted to certain primitive human conditions. If you think about it, that must be the conclusion from Professor Varga's remarks.

The second interesting thing is what we find in his social structure. Varga is a Leninist, a Trotskyist, a Marxist, so he sees not people, but only categories, in everything that is active in the social organism. He does not see personalities of flesh and blood, but categories. In the existing social organization, he sees the military, the lawyers, the civil servants, and even the proletarians as categories of people. His limitation consists in his wanting to transform the entire existing state into a huge economic cooperative. It is very interesting to see how he deals with the three links of the social organism. He begins by dealing with the second link, the political state. He peels this second link very finely. He lists the individual categories nicely: lawyers, officials, and so on, and declares: all of them will be abolished. - So actually the whole political state will be abolished. And the spiritual life? Professor Varga actually only knows economic life. He says: the intellectual life consists of teachers. He takes comfort from the fact that they generally fall into line, and that for economic reasons, while the first category, the category of lawyers and civil servants, does not fall into line with the new regime and must therefore do proletarian work. Now, in the threefolding movement, we have also found that teachers always ask: Yes, but who pays us? Varga finds that most of them submit and merge with economic life. The others are sent away. So it is not about the intellectual life at all, but about the economic life of the teachers; only the economic life remains.

It is interesting to see how the establishment of the council republic was taken in hand with a certain iron energy. The companies were simply expropriated; however, some consideration was given to foreign countries. That is, the companies were taken over with all their assets and liabilities, and this made it possible to treat the foreign owners of companies differently from the domestic ones. The aim was to municipalize certain companies and to nationalize others. And now something interesting happens. The election of works councils was decreed. As a rule, it was decreed that a works council should be elected from the proletarian workforce. These works councils were such that they did not understand anything. And then Professor Varga says: The “success” was that the people who had advanced from manual labor to become works council members just sat around all day doing nothing, and the actual misery remained. He thinks that things have gradually improved. He does not accept that the misery has grown ever greater and greater; nor does it follow from his experiences that it has diminished. So now the works councils were at the head of the companies, and even in the beginning there was a great deal of corruption among them. Now he says: corruption was also present earlier – it was the same with the bourgeoisie – only now there are more people who can steal, and that is why the figures have naturally increased. According to Professor Varga, however, it would have improved later if there had been more agitation. He also says: in order to manage the centralized economic life, there had to be production commissioners. So they first elected works councils from within the factories – not the kind we wanted in Stuttgart and Württemberg, who should have worked hard to familiarize themselves with economic life and then had to form a works council. But that did not suit people like Varga. They simply voted – what else could they do if they wanted to regulate things from a utopia? The production commissioners were pulled out of the works councils. They were involved in general orders, in the shutdown of factories, in the concentration of branches of industry, and so on, but also in the discipline of the workers. These production commissioners were the actual central officials in economic life.

Now, it is interesting: Professor Varga's entire book is a Marxist thicket of the most abstract kind from beginning to end. He describes the reforms that are to become reality with such matter-of-factness that it makes the same impression as if, for example, a person like Lenin were describing them. And Varga knows how to explain these principles in a way that is plausible for most minds today. Anyone who is familiar with these things knows that the most terrible utopian spirit reigns precisely where people want to put things into practice today. You can't think of anything more utopian than what was supposed to be done in Hungary. Wherever Varga talks about his experiences, he talks about something bad and evil. In council-ruled Hungary, corruption, worker revolts, and so on went hand in hand with such confusion that people said it was good for the people that the Romanians came, because otherwise they would have made fools of themselves even more miserably. It would have been a terrible destruction from within.

The entire 140-page book is a Marxist thicket that should have been practical. With such a thicket, they wanted to set up an entire country as an economic cooperative. But in the middle of a few pages, you suddenly find a sentence that completely falls out of the rest of the narrative and that makes you feel like it's not the same Varga at all, but something foreign. For example, he talks about the great usefulness of the production commissioners and remarks in a parenthesis: ... if the right personalities are in their place. — It is the same with the parenthesis that it is not possible at all to get along with these institutions until “the greedy, selfish ideology of these people” has changed. The Marxists always claim that ideology arises from the economic relations of production. So, if Varga had any kind of healthy, consistent thinking, he would have to say to himself: We Marxists have been claiming for more than seventy years that ideology must arise out of the relations of production, that ideology must arise as a superstructure like smoke that develops out of it. So when we set up our big economic house in Hungary, then the ideology must arise from it, which, after all, has no other meaning than to rise like smoke from economic life. — But Varga does not say that; rather, everywhere he talks about the basis of his institutions, it comes to light — even if only in subordinate clauses: it will only get better when people's greedy ideology has changed. That is, he waits for the time when people will have a way of thinking that is not geared towards the greedy and the selfish; he waits for the transformation of the greedy ideology into a selfless one. Now, that cannot follow directly from the economic mode of production, because he admits that it leads everywhere to the opposite. So he simply waits for this transformation to come of its own accord. One sees: Where it was essential to base the new structure on a change of direction in spirit, where it was essential to come across the concrete spiritual, Varga has nothing but a small subordinate clause, which, however, was meaningless for the whole development in Hungary. That is precisely the sad thing.

Today, in the broadest sense, we are faced with the opinion that one comes from the abstract to the concrete. This emerges from the appeal that Miss Vreede just read, which probably comes from the Netherlands. It proposes some sort of council, but it does not contain the necessary subordinate clause that something will only come of it if the appropriate personalities are in the appropriate places as councils. That is what matters: that you approach the matter from the concrete end. You can talk as much as you like, but none of it will help; the only thing that helps is to bring spirit and soul into the personalities. We have been completely squeezed out, no longer have any idea that it is important to bring strength, spirit and soul into the personalities. That is what the threefold social order is striving for.

I have related this about the man in Hungary so that you can see the spirit in which the things that are created today arise and the reasons why they must break down. Everything that appears like this book and then has to make such a strange confession shows us that it cannot be done with the old spirit. This is what can be seen everywhere today: You can claim anything in theory, but when someone like Professor Varga, who was able to set up something new, sets up something according to his ideas – then you can see how it works.

I say this so that you can see how nonsensical such demands are, like the ones on this correspondence card that Miss Vreede just read.

If we really grasp Spiritual Science, it gives us strength and confidence in life. How can we introduce it into our life so that it may help us to advance? Many people think that when they acquire knowledge in this sphere and accumulate spiritual truths it is not a help but a hindrance in a sound human life. Why, they ask, do we need all this knowledge of the spirit, why should we have to learn so much about the development of the earth and of a whole planetary system? Why do we need this at all? We are true theosophists, they say, when we strive to find the higher self within us and are enabled thereby to advance as human beings. There are others whose minds are more theoretical and who enjoy hearing of the different members of man's being, of the development of mankind through the different epochs of culture, and of the regular, numerical periods. They wish to learn of all these things as quickly as possible, noting down the most important truths in a few words and circulating them in a catechetical form. But we must affirm that neither of these notions correspond in any way to what Spiritual Science can mean to us, and does mean to those who have adopted the right attitude to life through It.

It is true that we must begin by learning that man consists of a physical body, an etheric body, an astral body and an Ego. But it is a mistake to think that by enumerating them we know something of man's being for when we do this we merely schematise. We really know something about man only when this knowledge is applied to life. But this is impossible unless we realise that the essential thing is not only to know the names of these four members, but how they are connected within the human being. When we look upon a human being, it is essential to know how his etheric body is connected with his physical body, whether the etheric and astral body tend towards each other and seek a close connection, or whether they are loosely connected. A closer observation shows that the relationship between these members of the human being changes in the course of mankind's development on earth. In the past, this relationship was different and, in the future, it will be different from what it is to-day.

If we study the ancient Egyptian in the first thousand years of Egyptian culture, thus looking upon ourselves in past incarnations, we shall find in him a human being whose physical, etheric and astral bodies were loosely knit together. But when we consider a human being of the present time, we find instead a more intimate and a closer connection between his different members. And in future, this connection will become closer and closer. This explains why we have to pass through the different epochs of culture. When we say that man reincarnates so and so many times, we may also ask: Why does he reincarnate?—Because the connection between his enveloping members always changes, so that the human being whom we meet in the external world during the different epochs, also changes. When we were Chaldeans, we had a quite different bodily constitution from that of to-day, and in the future, we shall again be differently constituted. Because of these differences our experiences as human beings are different.

It is now essential to develop the right kind of thoughts regarding the true relation of man's inner nucleus passing from incarnation to incarnation, with its enveloping sheaths—the astral body, the etheric body and the physical body. In reality, ordinary science does not know anything about the deeper laws ruling from one incarnation to another. It deals only with what is external. It ignores even the deeper significance of the laws ruling the external sheath. We may convince ourselves of this by considering some of the connections accepted by ordinary science or rejected by it.

It is very interesting to note that for a long time science was inclined to ascribe free will to man. Yet I have pointed out to you that in many respects modern science denies the existence of free will. It refers us to external scientific research which tells us to observe the external course of life. For example, statistics can establish how many suicides occur in a particular place. A certain regularity may be ascertained in regard to these suicides. Statistics show that this occurs at certain regular intervals. A certain number of people is simply condemned to commit suicide. How is it possible then to speak of free will?—One might go still further by drawing attention to the technique of insurance calculations which formulate and reckon out how many of a certain number of people will still be alive after thirty years. This is expressed arithmetically. Death and birth are thus imprisoned within external laws of Nature. Ordinary science admits this. It will, however, be forced to admit very different things also, for it is already evident that certain facts are coming to the fore which will compel people to think in a spiritual-scientific way. Generally speaking, science is not readily inclined to accept new ideas. In this direction it follows a very strange habit. One can hear people declaiming that in the Middle Ages there were men who opposed Kepler's discoveries. The greatest efforts were needed before his teachings could assert themselves against the dark minds of his age. The very people who more than others now draw attention to this fact, are those who adopt the same attitude, not only towards Spiritual Science, but also towards scientific facts which force us in the present time to seek spiritual laws.

A physician in Berlin, for example, ascertained certain numerical connections which appear in the course of human life. This doctor, Fliess [Wilhelm Fließ (1858-1928)] by name, began to register the connections between births and deaths by following them up in different families. For example, a female member of a certain family died on a certain day. Her first grandchild was born 1428 days before her death, the second grandchild 1428 days after her death, so that in this case the grandmother's death lies symmetrically before and after the birth of a grandchild. In the space of 7 times 1428 days after her death, a great-grandchild was born. By following up this case, we come to definite numerical connections, which finally determine in a very wonderful way the relationship between cases of death and birth. Fliess ascertained this in many instances. But apparently modern science does not wish to recognise it, because it goes too much against its own direction.

Even improvements in health-conditions are based on numerical connections. When we compare the number of deaths through tuberculosis during a certain epoch, with the number of deaths of the preceding decades, we again find that this is regulated by certain numbers. Doctors say that by hygienic measures they have been able to diminish the cases of death through tuberculosis. But Fliess proved that this decrease can be reckoned out on the basis of arithmetical connections. This is most inconvenient to modern science, but in the end it will be forced to admit the existence of objective arithmetical laws. It will return to the sentence of Pythagoras: "Number is something which rules everything that weaves and lives". With our soul we calculate, but the higher Spirits made these calculations long ago and set into the course of life something that is in keeping with numbers. The Pythagorean saying, "In calling the world into being, God is a mathematician" seems to come into play. On the other hand, if this is so it would strengthen the attitude of ordinary science which denies that man's inner being has any share in the destiny of his life. For if birth and death are connected in such a way that the distance between them is equal to 7 times 1428 days, it is possible to calculate when we have to die and in that case our inner being really appears to be imprisoned within violent external conditions.

Apparently, we must renounce speaking of special laws which rule our inner being. External reasons may however be adduced which tell us that this isn't quite right after all. According to calculations, a certain number of suicides may indeed take place at a definite place, but is it possible to determine arithmetically what person will commit suicide? According to the theory of probability it is possible to calculate the probable duration of human life. But I do not think that anyone will admit that he will have to die on the day fixed by arithmetical calculation. These laws based on mathematical formulae are of no consequence to man's inner being.

But how do matters stand when Fliess proves that 1428 days lie between a case of death and two births? Does this prove anything in regard to the inner laws of our Ego? For it is impossible to recognise right away the connection between the inner nucleus of our being and the external course of life. How can we explain this with the fact that we follow Karma, that we must follow our inner Ego? This is not easy to grasp.

Let me explain this by an analogy—it is quite possible that two events, two strains, two facts connected with each other should follow completely different courses. Consider this: when you travel from Baste to Zurich you go by train. You consult the time-table to find out when your train leaves. You become, as it were, intimately connected with the figures. Your thoughts, your objectives and so on are dependent on them. (There are, of course, many other figures in the time-table). But is it not the case that alongside this sequence of facts there is another (sequence of facts) that has to do with the development of your soul: that you want to progress or "catch the train?" When you consult the time-table it tells you nothing about yourself—whether you are good or bad, wise or foolish and is of no importance for the soul's being. Similarly, the figures that result from the calculations of Fliess are of no importance for the Karma of our life. We catch a certain train in life, entering a definite stream controlled by laws which are connected with our inner being only through things that we ourselves bring about. We decide which train to catch. In the same way we have to decide, through the inner laws of our Karma, to enter a certain stream of life which is then determined by arithmetical laws.

I speak of these things because those who seek the spirit should more and more acquire a feeling that life is complicated; it is something that cannot be encompassed by slack, easy thoughts. Those who think that it is an easy matter to grasp the whole of life, and that a few sentences taken from Spiritual Science suffice for this, are very much mistaken. We must be willing to penetrate more and more into these connections. We should acquire a feeling which shows us that the thoughts that lie at the foundation of the world's structure, are also valid for the human being. If no connection whatever existed between external laws and human Karma, our whole life would fall asunder.

Two facts can prove this. In Spiritual Science we endeavour to make the best possible comparisons. In a certain way the numbers in the timetable are connected with practical life. Even though it does not concern the time-table whether or not you travel to Zurich, even though you do not see any connecting link with your journey, the time-table is nevertheless connected with human conditions. For men have compiled it in such a way as to correspond, not too awkwardly, to the conditions of life. It is adapted to human conditions of life in general. Something similar is the case with human Karma and the stream of life which it controls. The Beings of the Higher Hierarchies fixed the "time-table" in accordance with numerical conditions, which are then discovered in the regular numbers of statistics. Outwardly, these correspond to human conditions in general. When we reincarnate, we may have an easy or a difficult life. Not in every family do we come across the law according to which a grandchild is always born 1428 days before or after its grandmother's death. But when we consider that 1428 is divisible by 28, that it is equal to 51 times 28, then it is easier to understand this numerical connection. These calculations will not always give the number 1428, but as a rule we find a multiple of 28 between the death and the birth of any member of a family. The multiples may be 30, 17, 26 times 28, and so forth, but they will contain the number 28: this is included regularly.

In accordance with the time-table we have the possibility to catch different trains, and according to our Karma we may arrange life in an easy or a difficult way. I mention this to indicate how complicated these conditions really are.

I also wish to point out that a moral conclusion may be drawn from all these truths. This constitutes the immensely important element given by Spiritual Science. We may say: I live in this world and I find in it numerical connections which show me how external life is regulated. It required long periods of human cultural development before this was discovered. But how much do we really know of these regular laws? Here we must admit that we know very little indeed. Slowly and gradually we discovered something of this divine wisdom. But just as we discover the most beautiful and important facets of wisdom, the wisdom admonishes us to be humble; it shows us how little our thoughts are able to encompass life.

This will stimulate us to continue striving for the Light. This moral feeling, this reverence which we have for the wisdom contained in the universe, is what we may acquire, so that we become better human beings. We acquire this feeling towards wisdom, it takes hold of us, when we recognise how near it was to us during our life between death and a new birth. When we have to come down to a new earthly existence, we choose the train by which we travel, so that we may fulfil our Karma. It is then that we choose our family-ties. If someone were to ask us now which family would be the best for our present incarnation, we would have no idea. If we had to depend only on our own forces, we could not make the right choice.

Before our incarnation we are far wiser than afterwards for at that time we make the right choice. The feeling that now we are not cleverer than before we were born, cannot fill us with pride in regard to our own achievements. For during our existence between death and birth we were filled with other forces besides those we have the moment we step into physical existence.

When we enter physical life, the substances of the earth's realms pervade us and exist within our body. On laying aside the physical body when passing through the portal of death, the Beings of the Higher Hierarchies receive us and we share their substance during our existence between death and a new birth, even as here we share the physical substances of the earth. These physical substances assert themselves—for example, iron streams through our blood in accordance with external laws—and similarly the Beings of the Higher Hierarchies assert themselves between death and a new birth by working within us, and it is their wisdom which pushes us towards the right stream of life. The Beings of the Higher Hierarchies are filled with the wisdom which we need, even as we are filled with physical substance. Humility is therefore a justified feeling, it is the moral consequence of the knowledge that during our physical life we have absorbed only a very small portion of the mighty wisdom of those Spiritual Beings.

Between death and a new birth, we are embedded in the Beings of the Higher Hierarchies. If we do not submit to them, this would be the same as trying to live on earth without taking in certain physical substances, such as hydrogen, oxygen, and so forth. It would be absurd to live without complete submission to the Beings of the Higher Hierarchies. Those who bear in mind the fact that between death and birth we must completely surrender to the Beings of the Higher Hierarchies will ask themselves: What is the best preparation for that existence? And they will give themselves the following answer: The best preparation is to unfold, already during the present earthly life between birth and death, a feeling of devotion for the divine-spiritual world. If we are pervaded by the right feelings, the truths which we receive will change into feelings of devoted surrender. Humility and reverence for the spiritual world will then live in all our feelings.

If we begin to think and live in this way, we shall also discover the true balance in the environing world, for thoughts of this kind regulate and harmonize all our other feelings.

Many mistakes of the external world are brought into the spiritual-scientific movement; they are mistakes which do not come from Spiritual Science, but which are brought into it from outside. For example, a person may be diligent and active in the outside world, but his activity might be characterized by saying that he is ambitious and does too much; he ruins his forces and does not notice that he should observe certain limits in his work. When such a person enters Theosophy, he will come across quite different ideas from those which he had in the external world. But he also brings into Theosophy his own characteristic qualities. He may, for example, hear that a certain amount of study is needed for the soul's progress. He begins to study,—yet he should learn to notice how much he can really do in accordance with the forces allotted to him by his Karma; he should not pursue theosophical studies which surpass his strength. Also, if for example, he becomes a vegetarian he must ask himself whether it agrees with him or not. Otherwise he will ruin himself.

The disciple of Spiritual Science must maintain the right balance. He must know if he can really follow the strictest obligations. A calm and humble observation of his Karma, of his own capacities and forces, may be acquired by accepting in the right way what Spiritual Science can give us. Those who have advanced furthest in occultism, faithfully observe the rule of maintaining the right balance. Some people try to force matters, when external circumstances obstruct a real training; they strive with all their might towards the aim which they have in view, work spiritually like slaves to obtain an immediate answer to the problems which rise up. But those who have really progressed, never do this. First of all, the existence of a definite problem should be clearly envisaged, and then the disciple of Spiritual Science should ask himself: Are you at this moment capable of obtaining a full answer? Wait (he should say to himself) until the Beings of the spiritual world send 3ou this answer. A true disciple of the spirit if he has to strain and push at the outset will give up for the time being. He knows that he must wait, and he can wait because he is filled with the knowledge of the eternity of life and that Karma, which he never forgets, gives each man his due. Then comes a certain moment in which he obtains a strange inner hint ... it is then that the Powers of the spiritual world may give him an answer. Perhaps after many years, even after many incarnations. But it is characteristic of a right attitude to be able to wait, to practise patience, to unfold soul-harmony.

Those who allow themselves to be influenced in the right way by the teachings of Spiritual Science will learn to master their feelings and sensations, so that they are always able to maintain a harmonious balance. If we adopt this attitude, our Ego sends forces into the astral body, so that the astral body absorbs the truths which come from the spiritual world, in the same way in which a sponge absorbs the water into which it is dipped. Spiritual knowledge gradually passes over into the astral body, and the astral body is pervaded by it.

We live in an age in which it is necessary, and in which it will be more and more necessary, to pervade the astral body with spiritual wisdom. The times change more and more, and they change also in regard to the crossing of the threshold of death. In future epochs, when man again returns to the earth, his astral body if not imbued with spiritual knowledge will not find its way about the spiritual world and will be filled with darkness. But if it is filled with the truths which we now absorb, it will become a source of light and it will shed this light on its environment, thus perceiving the wisdom which we take in here on earth, in the light of the spiritual world.

If we now ask ourselves why this future light of the spiritual world does not yet exist, we may say: It has not yet come, because in the past a primordial wisdom existed which could be impressed on man without any effort on his part. It existed as an inheritance which man had received from the old Moon. With this inheritance he could penetrate into the spiritual world. This lasted until the Christian era, when man could no longer obtain spiritual wisdom in an immediate way. In the present time he must first fill his soul with spiritual-scientific truths, which will constitute the power enabling him to enter the spiritual world, guided by the light in his soul. Human conditions change from epoch to epoch.

Every form of occultism knows that a wisdom exists which came from the old Moon and was still active, in its last traces, during the 15th and 10th century A.D. When the human being entered the spiritual world, he could see the light, which shone without any effort on his part. But in the present time, the whole wisdom of the past, which existed as an old inheritance, may unite with the human soul, but the soul no longer shines when we cross the threshold of death. Only the wisdom which we take in through Christ, by saying, "Not I, but Christ in me", will become a shining light, when in future we cross the threshold of death. We therefore take in the Christianized Spiritual Science in order that our astral body may become a source of light and that we may lift it out, when we cross the threshold of death.

When we take in this Christianized Spiritual Science and fill our astral body with it, it does not remain mere wisdom, for it permeates our feelings. We then learn to know the life-conditions of the past planetary stages of Saturn, Sun, Moon, and finally of the earth.

If you penetrate livingly into the descriptions in my Occult Science, you will be able to feel that the description of Saturn has an entirely different note from that of other planetary conditions. In the description of Saturn, you will be able to feel that conditions there are described with a certain harshness. Your soul will feel it. And this is essential. The Sun-existence will be experienced as if it contained a blossoming, growing life, and in the description of the Moon you will feel a dark, melancholic note in the conceptions pertaining to it. A sensitive person will even be able to taste it, he will feel its flavour on his tongue.

Fools may object that there are discrepancies in the descriptions and that a uniform style was not maintained. But we should realise that these differences are essential, and why. We should know why a melody of three definite notes must re-echo in the words of these descriptions, and when we know this, we are able to transform this knowledge into feelings which we send out into the world. These feelings undergo a change. The wisdom absorbed by the astral body changes into a freely willed surrender to the conditions of the world, and this takes hold of our etheric body. If we are wise, we shall prepare the path for this. The forces which enable us to descend into our subsequent incarnations form the etheric body and pervade it. If during our earthly life we have filled our etheric body with genuinely devout feelings and it then dissolves in the universal All when we die, we hand over to the universe an etheric body filled with devoutness, an etheric body which may be of benefit to the whole world. If on the other hand we have not been devout, but materialistic, the etheric body which we lay aside after death will have a destructive and explosive effect when it dissolves in the universal ether. In the same measure in which we gain wisdom, we help not only ourselves, but indirectly the world also, by acquiring better forces. And in the same measure in which we unfold devout feelings, we help the world in a direct way, for devoutness is imparted to the whole world.

Spiritual Science is not only able to bestow wisdom and unfold devout feelings, but it also gives us confidence and makes us aware of the body's vital forces. The conscious connection with the spiritual world in itself gives us these vital forces.

Fichte was aware of this connection of forces. He, too, had this confidence in life, so that when speaking of man's being he was able to say: Because I know of my connection with the eternal and that my innermost being is rooted in the eternal, I have such confidence in life that I am able to say: I look up to you, ye rocks and mountains; fall down upon me, crush my physical body; clouds, cover up everything that constitutes my being; thunder, split up everything which pertains to me; I shall nevertheless defy your might! Life-confidence streams out of the consciousness that we are rooted in the spirit's eternal essence. Can a man thus rooted in the spirit's eternal essence ever grow weak? It is Spiritual Science which gives him his strength, constantly pouring into him something of this strength.

What happens with this life-confidence? Wisdom gives the astral body the power enabling us to overcome more and more the obstructing forces and gives the etheric body its right structure. But the force which streams into our body through the knowledge of our connection with the eternal, is confidence in life, which penetrates into the very forces of our physical body. Maya, illusion and deception withdraw from us, if we are equipped with these forces. It is an illusion to say that our physical body decays into dust when we die. No! The structure of our physical body, the way in which we formed it, is not an indifferent matter. If this confidence in all that is eternal lives in the physical body, we give back to the earth this confidence in life which we gained for ourselves. We strengthen the earth-planet with the forces acquired during our life. Through our physical body we give the world confidence in life. The decadent part of our physical body is only a Maya. When we trace the physical body beyond death, we see that the amount of confidence in life which we acquired during our earthly existence streams into the earth.

We thus strengthen our astral body, our etheric body and our physical body by wisdom, devoutness and in life-confidence, the best forces which we were able to develop as human beings for the whole evolution of the earth. In this way we work upon the planet earth and we acquire a feeling which shows us that man does not lead an isolated existence in the world, but that the forces which he unfolds within himself are of value to the whole world. Every speck of dust bears within it the laws of the universe; similarly every human being builds up or destroys the world by what he does or leaves undone. We may give something to the progressive process of the world, or deprive it of something, and we may crumble away from it by ignoring it, by failing to acquire confidence in life. These sins of omission contribute to the decay of our planet, whereas the wisdom, the devoutness and confidence in life which we acquired, help to build it up. We may thus gradually obtain an idea of the feelings which Spiritual Science can give us, when it takes hold of the whole human being.

Wherever we, as human beings, have striven for knowledge, whether as mystics or realists or in any way at all, the acquisition of self-knowledge has been demanded of us. As has been repeatedly emphasized on other occasions, however, this knowledge of the human soul is by no means as easy to achieve as many people believe—anthroposophists sometimes among them. The anthroposophist should be constantly aware of the hindrances he will encounter in his efforts. The acquisition of self-knowledge is absolutely essential, however, if we are to reach a worthy goal in world existence and if our actions are to be worthy of us as members of humanity.

Let us ask ourselves why must self-knowledge be so difficult for us. Man is truly a complicated being, and if we speak of his inner life, his life of soul, we should not begin by regarding it as something simple and elementary. We should rather have the patience and perseverance, the will, to penetrate always more deeply into this wonderful structure, this organization of the divine-spiritual powers of the world, which can appear as man.

Before we investigate the nature of this self-knowledge, two aspects of the life of the human soul may present themselves to us. Just as the magnet has north and south poles, just as light and darkness are present in the world as the principle poles of the light, so there are two poles in man's life of soul. Both these poles can appear when we observe a person placed in two contrasting situations in life. Suppose we are watching someone standing on the street who is entirely lost in the contemplation of some strikingly beautiful and impressive natural phenomenon. We see how still he is standing, moving neither hand nor foot, never turning his eyes away from the spectacle presented to him, and we are aware that he is engaged in making an inner picture of what he sees. We say that he is absorbed in contemplation of what surrounds him. That is one situation; here is another. A man is walking along the street and feels that someone has insulted him, injured him. Without much thinking, he is roused to anger and gives vent to it by striking the person who insulted him. We are there witnessing a manifestation of forces springing from anger, a manifestation of impulses of will, and we can easily imagine that if the action had been preceded by thought no blow need have been struck. We have now pictured two extremely different deeds. In the one there is only the forming of a mental picture, a process from which all conscious will is absent; in the other there is no thought, no forming of a mental picture, and immediate expression is given to an impulse of will. These two things present us with the two extreme poles of the human soul. One pole is surrender to contemplation, to forming mental pictures, to thought, in which the will has no part; the second pole is the impelling force of will without thought. We have arrived at these facts simply by exoteric observation of outer life.

We can go into these things more deeply, and we come then into those spheres in which we can find our bearings only by summoning the findings of esoteric research to our aid. Here another polarity confronts us—that of sleeping and waking. We know the esoteric significance of the relationship between sleeping and waking. From the elementary concepts of anthroposophy we know that in waking life the four members of a man's being—physical body, etheric body, astral body, and I—are organically and actively interwoven but that in sleep the physical and etheric bodies remain in bed while the astral body and I are poured out into the whole great world bordering directly on our physical existence. We could also approach these facts from a different point of view. We might ask what there is to be said about contemplation of the world, forming mental pictures, thinking, and the will and its impulses during waking life on the one hand and during sleep on the other.

You see that if one penetrates more deeply into this question it becomes evident that in his present physical existence man is, in a certain sense, essentially always asleep. He sleeps differently during the night, however, from the way he sleeps during the day. You can be convinced of this in a purely outer way, because you know that one can wake in the esoteric sense during the day, that is to say, one can become clairvoyant and see into the spiritual world. The ordinary physical body is asleep to this observation, and one can rightly say that it is an awakening when man learns to use his spiritual senses. In the night, of course, we are asleep in the normal way. One can therefore say that ordinary sleep is sleep in relation to the outer physical world; daytime consciousness at the present time is sleep in relation to the spiritual world.

These facts can be considered in yet another light. On deeper scrutiny one realizes that in the ordinary waking condition of physical life, man has, as a rule, little power or control over his will. The will quite detaches itself from daily life. Observe attentively what we call the human will, and you will see how little man has in his control during daily life regarding the will impulse. Only consider how little of all you do from morning to evening is really the outcome of your own thinking and forming of mental pictures, of your personal, individual decisions. When someone knocks at the door and you say “Come in!” that cannot be called a true decision of your own thinking and willing. If you are hungry and seat yourself for a meal, that cannot be called a decision made by the will, because it is occasioned by your condition, by the needs of your organism. Try to picture your daily life, and you will see how little the will is directly influenced from the human center. Why is this the case? Esoteric teachings show us that regarding his will man actually sleeps by day; that is, he does not really live within his will impulses at all. We can evolve better and better concepts and mental pictures, or we can become more highly moral, more refined individuals, but we can do nothing regarding the will. If we cultivate better thoughts we can work indirectly upon the will, but we can do nothing directly to the will that concerns life. This is because in our daily life our will is influenced only in an indirect way, namely, through sleep. When you are asleep you do not think; you do not form mental pictures. The will, however, awakes, permeates our organism from outside, and invigorates it. We feel strengthened in the morning because what has penetrated into our organism is of the nature of will. That we do not perceive this activity of the will, that we know nothing about it, becomes comprehensible if we consider that all conceptual activity sleeps when we sleep. To begin with, therefore, we will offer this suggestion for further contemplation, further meditation. You will see that the more progress you make in self-knowledge, the more you will find confirmation of the truth of the words that man sleeps in his will when he is awake and sleeps in his conceptual life when he is asleep. The life of will sleeps by day; the life of thought sleeps by night.

If man is unaware that the will does not sleep during the night, this is because he only understands how to be awake in his life of thought. The will does not sleep during the night, but it works then in a fiery element, works upon his body in order to restore what has been used up by day.

There are thus two poles in human beings, the life of observation and forming mental pictures and the impulses of will, and the human being is related in entirely opposite ways to these two poles. These are only the two poles, however. The whole life of soul lies in various nuances between these two poles, and we shall come nearer to understanding this soul life by bringing the microcosmic life of soul into relation to what we know as the higher worlds.

From what has been said we have seen that the life of forming mental pictures is one of the poles of one's soul life. This life of forming mental pictures is something that seems unreal to externally, materialistically minded people. We often hear the thought expressed, “Oh, mental pictures and thoughts are only mental pictures and thoughts!” This is intended to imply that if one takes a piece of bread or meat into one's hands, this is a reality, but a thought is only a thought. By this is meant that one cannot eat a thought, and thus a thought is not real but “only” a thought. But why? Basically, because what man calls his thoughts are related to what thoughts really are as a shadow-image of an object is to the thing itself. The shadow-image of a flower points you to the flower itself, to the reality. So it is with thoughts. Human thinking is the shadow-image of mental pictures and beings belonging to a higher world, the world called the astral plane. You represent thinking rightly to yourself when you picture the human head thus (this is not absolutely correct but simply sketched schematically). In this head are thoughts, which I shall represent with these dashes. These thoughts that are in the head, however, must be pictured as living beings on the astral plane. Beings of the most varied kinds are at work there in the form of teeming mental pictures and deeds that cast their shadow-images into human beings, and these processes are reflected in the human head as thinking. Continuous streams move from your head into the astral plane, and these are the shadows that establish the life of thought within your head.

As well as what we can call the life of thought, there is yet another life within the human soul. In ordinary life one distinguishes (this is not entirely correct, but I say it so that one can receive a concept from ordinary life) between a life of thought and a life of feeling. Feelings fall into two categories: those of pleasure and sympathy and those of displeasure and antipathy. The former are aroused by good, benevolent deeds; antipathy is aroused by evil, malevolent deeds. Here there is something more than and different from the mere forming of mental pictures. We form mental pictures of things regardless of any other factor. Our soul, however, experiences sympathy or antipathy only regarding what is beautiful and good or what is ugly and evil. Just as everything that takes place in the human being as thoughts points to the astral plane, so everything connected with sympathy or antipathy points to the realm we call Lower Devachan. Just as I could draw lines earlier between mental pictures and the astral world, so now in relation to feeling I can point upward to Devachan or the heavenly world. Processes in the heavenly world, or Devachan, are projected, mainly into our breast, as feelings of sympathy or antipathy for what is beautiful or ugly, for what is good or evil. In what we can call our experience of the moral-aesthetic world, we bear within our souls shades of the heavenly world or Lower Devachan.

There is still a third province in the life of the human soul that we must strictly distinguish from the mere preference for good deeds. There is a difference between standing by and taking pleasure in witnessing some kindly deed and setting the will in action and actually performing some such deed oneself. I will call pleasure in good and beautiful deeds or displeasure in evil and ugly deeds the aesthetic element, as opposed to the moral element that impels a person to do good. The moral element is at a higher level than the purely aesthetic; mere pleasure or displeasure is at a lower level than the will to do something good or evil. In so far as our soul feels constrained to give expression to moral impulses, these impulses are the shadow-images of Higher Devachan, of the higher heavenly world.

We can easily picture these three separate stages of activity of the human soul—the purely intellectual (thoughts, mental pictures, observation), the aesthetic (pleasure or displeasure), and the moral (revealed in impulses to do good or evil deeds)—as microcosmic images within human experience of the three realms which, in the macrocosm, the great world, lie one above the other. The astral world is shadowed in the world of thought, the intellectual world; the Devachanic world is shadowed in the aesthetic sphere of pleasure and displeasure; and the Higher Devachanic world is shadowed as morality.

If we connect this with what was said previously concerning the two poles of the human soul, we must experience the pole of intellect as that which dominates the waking life, the life in which man is intellectually awake. During the day man is awake regarding his intellect; during sleep he is awake regarding his will. Because at night he is asleep regarding his intellect, he becomes unconscious of what he is undertaking with his will. What we call moral principles and impulses are working indirectly into the will. In fact, man needs the life of sleep in order that the moral impulses he absorbs through the life of thought can come into effective activity. In his ordinary life today, man is capable of accomplishing what is right only on the plane of intellect; he is less able to accomplish anything on the moral plane, for there he is dependent upon help coming from the macrocosm.

What is already within us can bring about the further development of intellectuality, but the gods must come to our aid if we are to acquire greater moral strength. We sink into sleep in order that we may plunge into the divine will where the intellect does not intervene and where divine forces transform into the power of will the moral principles we receive, where they instill into our will what we could otherwise receive only into our thoughts.

Between these two poles, that of the will that wakes by night and that of the intellect that is awake by day, lies the sphere of aesthetic appreciation that is continuously present in man. During the day man is not fully awake; only the most prosaic, pedantic individuals are always fully awake in waking life. Human beings basically must actually dream by day, they must always be able to dream a little when awake; they must be able to give themselves up to art, poetry, or some other activity that is not concerned wholly with crass reality. Those who can give themselves up in this way form a bond that can enliven and invigorate the whole of existence. To give oneself up to such thoughts is to a certain extent like a dream penetrating into waking life. You know well that dreams enter into the life of sleep; these are real dreams, dreams that permeate the other consciousness in sleep. This is also something that human beings need by day if they do not wish to lead an arid, empty, unhealthy waking life. Dreams come during sleep at night in any case, and no proof of this is required. Midway between the two poles of night dreaming and day dreaming lies the condition that can live in fantasy.

So here again there is a threefold life of soul. The intellectual element in which we are really awake brings us shadow-images of the astral plane when by day we give ourselves up to a thought, wherein originate the most fruitful ideas for daily life and great inventions. Then during sleep, when we dream, these dreams play into our life of sleep, and images from Lower Devachan are shadowed into us. When we work during sleep, impressing morality into our will—we cannot perceive this directly, but certainly we can perceive its effects—when we are able to imbue our thinking during the night with the influence of divine-spiritual powers, then the impulses we perceive are shadowings from Higher Devachan, the higher heavenly world. These are the moral impulses and feelings that live within us and lead us to say that human life fundamentally is justified only when we place our thoughts at the service of the good and the beautiful, when we allow the very heart's blood of divine-spiritual life to stream through our intellectual activities, permeating them with moral impulses.

What we present here as the life of the human soul, first from outer, exoteric observation and then from observation of a more mystical character, is revealed by deeper esoteric research. The processes that have been described in their more outer aspect can also be perceived in man through clairvoyance. When a man stands in front of us today in his waking state and we observe him with the clairvoyant eye, certain rays of light are seen streaming continually from the heart toward the head. If we wish to sketch this schematically, we must draw the region of the heart here and show the continuous streamings from there to the brain, flowing in the head around the organ known in anatomy as the pineal gland.

These rays of light stream from the heart to the head and flow around the pineal gland. These streamings arise because human blood, which is a physical substance, is continually dissolving itself into etheric substance. In the region of the heart there is a continual transformation of the blood into this delicate etheric substance that streams upward toward the head and flows glimmeringly around the pineal gland. This process, the etherization of the blood, can be shown in the human being throughout his waking life. It is different now, however, in the sleeping human being. When a human being sleeps, the occult observer is able to see a continual streaming from outside into the brain and also in the reverse direction, from the brain to the heart.

These streams, however, which in sleeping man come from outside, from cosmic space, from the macrocosm, and flow into the inner constitution of the physical and etheric bodies lying in the bed, reveal something remarkable when they are investigated. These rays vary greatly in different individuals. Sleeping human beings differ greatly from one another, and if those who are a little vain only knew how badly they betray themselves to esoteric observation when they go to sleep during public gatherings, they would try their best not to let this happen!

Moral qualities are revealed distinctly in the particular coloring of the streams that flow into human beings during sleep; in a person of lower moral principles the streams are quite different from what is observable in a person of higher principles. Endeavors to disguise one's nature by day are useless. In the face of the higher cosmic powers, no disguise is possible. In the case of a man who has only a slight inclination toward moral principles the rays streaming into him are a brownish red in color—various shades tending toward brownish red. In a man of high moral ideals the rays are lilac-violet. At the moment of waking or of going to sleep, a kind of struggle takes place in the region of the pineal gland between what streams down from above and what streams upward from below. When a man is awake, the intellectual element streams upward from below in the form of currents of light, and what is of moral-aesthetic nature streams downward from above. At the moment of waking or of going to sleep, these two currents meet, and in the man of low morality a violent struggle between the two streams takes place in the region of the pineal gland. In the man of high morality and an outstreaming intellectuality, a peaceful expansion of glimmering light appears in the region of the pineal gland. This gland is almost surrounded by a small sea of light in the moment between waking and sleeping. Moral nobility is revealed when a calm glow surrounds the pineal gland at these moments. In this way a man's moral character is reflected in him, and this calm glow of light often extends as far as the region of the heart. Two streams can therefore be perceived in man—one from the macrocosm, the other from the microcosm.

To estimate the full significance of how these two streams meet in man, we must first consider what was said previously in a more external way about the life of the soul and how this life reveals the threefold polarity of the intellectual, the aesthetic, and the moral elements that stream downward from above, from the brain toward the heart; we must also grasp the full significance of what was said about turning our attention to the corresponding phenomenon in the macrocosm. This corresponding phenomenon can be described today as the result of the most scrupulously careful esoteric research of recent years, undertaken by individuals among the genuine Rosicrucians. (see Note 7) These investigations have shown that something corresponding to what has been described in connection with the microcosm also takes place in the macrocosm. You will understand this more fully as time goes on.

Just as in the region of the human heart the blood is continually being transformed into etheric substance, so a similar process takes place in the macrocosm. We understand this when we turn our eyes to the Mystery of Golgotha, to the moment when the blood flowed from the wounds of Jesus Christ. This blood must not be regarded simply as chemical substance, but by reason of all that has been described as the nature of Jesus of Nazareth, it must be recognized as something altogether unique. When it flowed from His wounds and into the earth, a substance was imparted to our earth which, in uniting with it, constituted an event of the greatest possible significance for all future ages of the earth, and it could take place only once. What happened with this blood in the ages that followed? Nothing different from what otherwise takes place in the heart of man. In the course of earthly evolution, this blood passed through a process of “etherization.” Just as our blood streams upward from the heart as ether, so, since the Mystery of Golgotha, the etherized blood of Christ Jesus has lived in the ether of the earth. The etheric body of the earth is permeated by what the blood that flowed on Golgotha became. This is important. If what has thus come to pass through Christ Jesus had not taken place, man's condition on the earth could only have been as previously described. Since the Mystery of Golgotha, however, there has existed the continuous possibility for the activity of the etheric blood of Christ to flow together with the streamings from below upward, from heart to head.

Because the etherized blood of Jesus of Nazareth is present in the etheric body of the earth, it accompanies the etherized human blood streaming upward from the heart to the brain, so that not only do these streams that I described earlier meet in man, but the human bloodstream unites with the bloodstream of Christ Jesus. A union of these two streams can come about, however, only if man is able to unfold true understanding of what is contained in the Christ impulse. Otherwise, there can be no union; the two streams then mutually repel each other, thrust each other away. In every age of earthly evolution, we must acquire understanding in the form suitable for that epoch. At the time when Christ Jesus lived on earth, preceding events could be rightly understood by those who came to His forerunner, John, and were baptised by him according to the rite described in the Gospels. They experienced baptism in order that their sin, that is to say, the karma of their previous lives, karma, that had come to an end, might be changed, and in order that they might realize that the most powerful impulse in earthly evolution was about to descend into a physical body. The evolution of humanity progresses, however, and in our present age it is important that man should learn to understand that the knowledge contained in spiritual science must be received and gradually be able so to fire the streams flowing from heart to brain that anthroposophy can be understood. If this comes to pass, individuals will be able to comprehend the event that has its beginning in the twentieth century: the appearance of the etheric Christ in contradistinction to the physical Christ of Palestine.

We have now reached the moment in time when the etheric Christ enters into the life of the earth and will become visible, at first to a small number of people, through a natural clairvoyance. Then in the course of the next 3,000 years, He will become visible to greater and greater numbers of people. This will inevitably come to pass; it is an event of nature. That it will come to pass is as true as were the achievements of electricity in the nineteenth century. A certain number of individuals will see the etheric Christ and will themselves experience the event that took place at Damascus. This will depend, however, upon such human beings learning to observe the moment when Christ draws near to them. In only a few decades from now it will happen, particularly to those who are young in years—already preparation is being made for this—that some person here or there has certain experiences. If only he has truly sharpened his vision through engaging himself with anthroposophy, he may become aware that suddenly someone has come near to help him, to make him alert to this or that. The truth is that Christ has come to him, although he believes that what he sees is a physical man. He will come to realize, however, that this is a super-sensible being, because it immediately vanishes. Many a human being will have this experience when sitting silently in his room, heavy-hearted and oppressed, not knowing which way to turn. The door will open, and the etheric Christ will appear and speak words of consolation to him. The Christ will become a living comforter to men. However strange it may as yet seem, it is true nevertheless that many a time when people, even in considerable numbers, are sitting together not knowing what to do and waiting, they will see the etheric Christ. He Himself will be there, will confer with them, will cast His word into such gatherings. We are now approaching these times, and the positive, constructive element now described will take hold of the evolution of humanity.

No word shall be said here against the great advances made by culture in our day; these achievements are essential for the welfare and the freedom of human beings. Whatever can be gained in the way of outer progress, however, in mastering the forces of nature, is something small and insignificant compared with the blessing bestowed upon the person who experiences the awakening in his soul through Christ, Who will now take hold of human culture and its concerns. What thereby awakens in human beings will be unifying, positive forces. Christ brings constructive forces into human civilization.

If we were to look into early post-Atlantean times, we would find that human beings built their dwelling places by methods quite different from those used today. In those days they made use of all kinds of growing things. Even when building palaces, they summoned nature to their aid by having plants and branches of trees interlace with one another, and so on. Today, human beings must build with broken fragments. We make all culture of the outer world with the products of fragmentation. In the course of the coming years you will understand even better how much in our culture is the product of destruction.

Light is destroying itself within our post-Atlantean earthly processes. Until the time of Atlantis the earthly process was a progressive process, but since then it has been a process of decay. What is light? Light decays, and the decaying light is electricity. What we know as electricity is light that is destroying itself within matter. The chemical force that undergoes a transformation within earthly evolution is magnetism. Yet a third force will become active, and if electricity seems to work wonders today, this third force will affect civilization in a still more miraculous way. The more of this force we employ, the faster the earth will tend to become a corpse and its spiritual part prepare for the Jupiter embodiment. Forces have to be applied to destroy the earth in order that man can become free of the earth and that the earth's body can fall away. As long as the earth was involved in a progressive process, this was not done, since only the decaying earth can use the great achievements of electricity. Strange as this sounds, it must gradually become known. We must understand the process of evolution to evaluate our culture in the right way. We shall learn thereby that it is necessary for the earth to be destroyed; otherwise, the spirit will not become free. We shall also learn to value what is positive, namely, the penetration of spiritual forces into our existence on earth.

We thus realize what a tremendous advance was signified by the fact that Christ necessarily lived for three years on the earth in a specially prepared human body in order that He might be visible to physical eyes. Through what came to pass during those three years, human beings have become ripe to behold the Christ Who will move among them in an etheric body, Who will enter into earthly life as truly and effectively as did the physical Christ in Palestine. If human beings observe such happenings with undimmed senses they will know that there is an etheric body that will move about within the physical world, but they will know that this is the only etheric body able to work in the physical world as a human physical body works. It will differ from a physical body in this respect only, that it can be in two, three, even in a hundred, a thousand places at the same time. This is possible only for an etheric, not for a physical form. What will be accomplished in humanity through this further advance is that the two poles I have mentioned, the intellectual and the moral, will more and more become one; they will merge into unity. This will come about because in the course of the next millennia human beings will learn increasingly to observe the etheric Christ in the world; more and more they will be permeated in waking life, too, by the direct working of the good from the spiritual world. Whereas now the will sleeps by day, and man is only able to influence it indirectly through thought, in the course of the next millennia, through what from our time onward is working in us under the aegis of Christ, it will come about that the deeds of human beings in waking condition, too, can be directly productive of good.

The dream of Socrates, that virtue be able to be taught, will come true; more and more it will be possible on earth not only for our intellect to be stimulated and energized by this teaching but, through this teaching, for moral impulses to be spread abroad. Schopenhauer said, “To preach morality is easy; to establish it is most difficult.” Why is this? Because no morality has yet been spread by preaching. It is quite possible to recognize moral principles and yet not abide by them. For most people the Pauline saying holds good, that the spirit is willing but the flesh is weak. This will change, through the moral fire streaming from the figure of Christ. Through this, the need for moral impulses on earth will be increasingly clear to man. Man will transform the earth in so far as he feels with ever-increasing strength that morality is an essential part of the earth. In the future, to be immoral will be possible only for people who receive immoral help, who are goaded in this direction, who are possessed by evil demons, by Ahrimanic, Asuric powers, and who strive for this possession.

This is the future condition of the earth: there will be a sufficient number of people who increasingly teach morality and at the same time offer a moral foundation, but there will also be those who by their own free decision surrender themselves to the evil powers and thus enable an excess of evil to be pitted against a good humanity. Nobody will be forced to do this; it will lie in the free will of each individual.

Then will come the time when the earth passes into conditions which, as in so much else, are only described in the great definitions of Oriental occultism, Oriental mysticism. The moral atmosphere will by then have gathered considerable strength. For many thousands of years Oriental mysticism has spoken of this moment in time, and since the coming of Gautama Buddha it has spoken especially strongly about that future condition when the earth will be bathed in a “moral-ether-atmosphere.” Ever since the time of the ancient Rishis it was the great hope of Oriental mysticism that this moral impulse would come to the earth from Vishva-Karman or, as Zarathustra proclaimed, from Ahura Mazdao. Oriental mysticism thus foresaw that this moral impulse, this moral atmosphere, would come to the earth from the being we call the Christ. It was upon Him, upon Christ, that the hopes of Oriental mysticism were set.

Oriental mystics were able to picture the consequences of that event but not the actual form it would take. They could picture that within a period of 5,000 years after the great Buddha achieved Enlightenment, pure Akashic forms, bathed in fire, lit by the sun, would appear in the wake of one Who could not be recognized through Oriental mysticism. A wonderful picture in very truth: that something would come to make it possible for the Sons of Fire and of Light to move about the moral atmosphere of the earth, not in physically embodied form but as pure Akashic forms within the earth's moral atmosphere. Five thousand years after Gautama Buddha's Enlightenment, so it was said, the teacher will also be there to make known to human beings what these wonderful forms are, these pure forms of Fire and Light. This teacher—the Maitreya Buddha—will appear 3,000 years after our time and will be able to teach people about the Christ impulse.

Oriental mysticism thus unites with the Christian knowledge of the West to form a beautiful unity. It will also be disclosed that he who will appear 3,000 years after our time as the Maitreya Buddha will have incarnated again and again on the earth as a Bodhisattva, as the successor of Gautama Buddha. One of his incarnations was that of Jeshu ben Pandira, who lived a hundred years before the beginning of our era. The being who incarnated in Jeshu ben Pandira is the same one who will one day become the Maitreya Buddha and who from century to century returns ever and again in a body of flesh, not yet as Buddha himself but as Bodhisattva. Even in our age there proceeds from him who later will be the Maitreya Buddha the most significant teachings concerning the Christ being and the Sons of Fire—the Agnishvattas—of Indian mysticism.

Those things by which man can recognize the being who is to become the Maitreya Buddha are common to all genuine Eastern mysticism and to Christian wisdom. The Maitreya Buddha who, in contrast to the Sons of Fire, will appear in a physical body as Bodhisattva, can be recognized by the fact that at first in his youth his development gives no intimation of the nature of the individuality within him. Only those possessed of understanding will recognize the presence of a Bodhisattva in such a human being, manifesting between the ages of thirty and thirty-three and not before. Something akin to an exchange of personality then takes place. The Maitreya Buddha will reveal his identity to humanity in the thirty-third year of his life. As Christ Jesus began his lifework in His thirtieth year, so do the Bodhisattvas, who will continue to proclaim the Christ impulses, reveal themselves in the thirty-third year of their lives. The Maitreya Buddha himself, as transformed Bodhisattva, speaking in powerful words of which no adequate idea can be given at the present time, will proclaim the great secrets of existence. He will speak in a language that must first be created, because no human being today could find the words with which the Maitreya Buddha will address humanity. The reason human beings cannot yet be addressed in this way is that the physical instrument for this form of speech does not yet exist. The teaching of the Enlightened One will not stream into human beings as teachings only but will pour moral impulses into their souls. Such words cannot yet be uttered by a physical larynx; in our time they can be present only in the spiritual worlds.

Anthroposophy is the preparation for everything that will come in the future. Those who take the process of man’s evolution seriously resolve not to allow the soul's development to come to a standstill but to ensure that its development will eventually enable the spiritual part of the earth to become free, leaving the grosser part to fall away like a corpse—for human beings could frustrate the whole process. Those who desire evolution to succeed must acquire understanding of the spiritual life through what we today call anthroposophy. The cultivation of anthroposophy thus becomes a duty; knowledge becomes something that we actually experience, something toward which we have responsibility. When we are inwardly aware of this responsibility and have this resolve, when we experience the mysteries of the world so as to arouse in us the wish to become anthroposophists, then our experience is right. Anthroposophy must not, however, be something that merely satisfies our curiosity; it must rather be something without which we cannot live. Only when this is the case do we experience in the right sense; only then do we live as living building stones in that great construction that must be carried out in human souls and that can embrace all humanity.

Anthroposophy is thus a revelation of true world phenomena that will confront people of the future and will confront our own souls, whether still in a physical body or in the life between death and a new birth. The coming upheaval will concern us regardless of whether we are still living in the physical body or whether we have laid it aside. People must acquire understanding of the earth in the physical body if it is to take effect between death and a new birth. To those who acquire some understanding of Christ now in the physical body, it will make no difference, when the moment comes to behold Christ, whether or not they have already passed through the portal of death. But if those who now reject understanding of the Christ have already passed through the portal of death when this moment arrives, they must wait until their next incarnation, because such understanding cannot be acquired between death and a new birth. Once the foundation has been acquired, however, it endures, and then Christ becomes visible also during the period between death and the new birth. Anthroposophy is thus not only something we learn for our physical life but also has value when we have laid aside the physical body at death.

This is what I wished to impart to you today as an understanding of humanity and a handle in answering many questions. Self-knowledge is difficult because man is such a complex being. The reason for this complexity is that he is connected with all the higher worlds and beings. We have within us shadow-images of the great world, and all the members of our constitution—the physical, etheric, and astral bodies and the I—are worlds for divine beings. Our physical, etheric, and astral bodies and I form one world; the other is the higher world, the world of heaven. For the divine-spiritual beings, the higher worlds are the bodily members in high, divine-spiritual worlds.

Man is so complex because he is truly a mirror-image of the spiritual world. Realization of this should make him conscious of his intrinsic worth. From this knowledge, however, that although we are pictures of the spiritual world we nevertheless fall far short of what we ought to be—from this knowledge we also acquire, in addition to consciousness of our worth as human beings, the right attitude of modesty and humility toward the macrocosm and its gods.

Rudolf Steiner's Answers to Questions at the End of the Lecture

Question: How are the words used by St. Paul, “to speak in tongues” (I Cor. 12:10), to be understood?

Answer: In exceptional human beings it can happen that not only is there present the phenomenon of speaking in the waking state but something otherwise present only in sleep-consciousness flows into this speaking. This is the phenomenon about which St. Paul spoke. Goethe spoke about it in the same sense; he has written two most interesting treatises about this phenomenon.

Question: How will one understand Christ's words of consolation?

Answer: Human beings will feel these words of consolation as though they arise in their own hearts. They can also be received through physical hearing.

Question: What is the relationship of chemical forces and substances to the spiritual world?

Answer: There are in the world a number of substances that can combine with or separate from each other. What we call chemical action is projected into the physical world from the world of Devachan—the realm of the harmony of the spheres. In the union of two substances according to their atomic weights, we have a shadowing of two tones of the harmony of the spheres. The chemical affinity between two substances in the physical world is like a shadowing from the world of the harmony of the spheres. The numerical ratios in chemistry are really an expression of the numerical ratios of the harmony of the spheres, which has become dumb and silent owing to the densification of matter. If one were able actually to bring material substance into etheric dilution and to perceive the atomic numbers as the inner formative principle, one would hear the harmony of the spheres.

We have the physical world, the astral world, the Lower Devachan, and the Higher Devachan. If one thrusts the body down lower even than the physical world, one comes into the sub-physical world, the lower astral world, the lower or evil Lower Devachan, and the lower or evil Higher Devachan. The evil astral world is the province of Ahriman and the evil Higher Devachan the province of the Asuras. If one drives chemical action down beneath the physical plane, into the evil Devachanic world, magnetism arises. If one thrusts light down into the sub-material—that is to say, a stage deeper than the material world-electricity arises. If what lives in the harmony of the spheres is thrust down farther still, into the province of the Asuras, an even more terrible force, which it will not be possible to keep hidden very much longer, is generated. One can only hope that when this force comes—a force we must conceive as being far, far stronger than the most violent electrical discharge—one can only hope that before some discoverer gives this force into the hands of humanity, human beings will no longer have anything immoral left in them.

Question: What is electricity?

Answer: Electricity is light in the sub-material state. Light is there compressed to the utmost degree. An inward quality, too, must be ascribed to light; light is itself at every point. Warmth can extend itself in the three dimensions of space. In light we must speak of a fourth dimension; it can extend itself in a fourfold way; it has the quality of inwardness as a fourth dimension.

Question: What happens to the earth's corpse?

Answer: As the residue of the ancient Moon evolution we have our present moon that circles the earth. Similarly, there will be a residue of the earth that will circle Jupiter. Then these residues will gradually dissolve into the universal ether. On Venus there will no longer be any residue. Venus will manifest, to begin with, as pure warmth, then it will become light, and then it will pass over into the spiritual world. The residue left behind by the earth will be like a corpse. This is a path along which man must not accompany the earth, however, because he would thereby be exposed to dreadful torments. There are, however, many beings who will accompany this corpse, since they themselves will by that means develop to a higher stage.

 Reflected as sub-physical world: Astral World ............. the province of Lucifer Lower Devachan ........... the province of Ahriman Higher Devachan .......... the province of the Asuras 

Uebersinnliche Mensch und Die Fragen der Willensfreiheit und Unsterblichkeit nach Ergebnissen der Geisteswissenschaft. (Free Will, Immortality. Lecture given at Stuttgart, Germany, April 24, 1918)

All serious investigation of man has always taken as its starting point the recognition that his being is spiritual. For it is quite obvious to anyone, a philosopher, for example, studying the nature of man that the kind of science that operates within the world of the senses is not able to reach the real essence of man, or at least, if it is thought that this essence can be comprehended by an understanding limited by the senses and bound by the normal operation of the human brain, as is more or less believed by the materialistic form of monism, then we find that our need for a deeper kind of knowledge remains unsatisfied and we are left with the feeling that something further is needed to show that the real being of man is to be found outside the world of the senses. I would like to bring to your notice one of the very first thinkers in the spiritual evolution of humanity who, through tremendous effort in his own thinking, even told his students at the university and those who heard his lectures elsewhere, how in the inner life of the soul one can get away from the situation which prevents the recognition of what the being of man really is and come to a point where this is possible. This is Johann Gottlieb Fichte. And he tried in what one might call a paradoxical way to show his audience what kind of activity the soul had to develop in order to find its way from the sensible to the super-sensible. For instance, he said to the audience at the beginning of his lectures, “Try to think the wall.” Well, of course, this was easy. The audience tried to put itself into the position of thinking the wall. Then after he had let the people think the wall for a while he said, “Now try to think the person who has been thinking the wall.” Fichte knew what he wanted, and even contemporary witnesses have described the scene—how the effect was immediate and convincing, how the audience was completely nonplussed when they tried to think the person who had thought the wall, and how their thinking was in a way paralyzed when they were unable to reach the goal put before them.

Goethe always studied these questions concerning the theory of knowledge from a particularly human viewpoint, that is, he was most concerned with those things in life which bear fruit, and there is a saying of his, which is greatly illuminated by Fichte's demand and the results it had, and this is that Goethe said he managed to lead a sane and wise life because he avoided thinking about thinking. Goethe always sought to be aware of the real nature of life wherever his soul was engaged and he felt that the attempt to think thinking put a person, keeping to the ordinary means of thinking, into an impossible position. Despite this, anyone beginning to investigate the super-sensible worlds can only rely on the thinking at the outset, for he very soon sees that what the senses can teach him or what can be achieved by combining sense phenomena only raises questions that lead man away from his real being. In his thinking he is within himself, and in employing the power of his soul to penetrate the inner activity of his thinking he can expect to find something that will lead him to the real being of man.

Now it is very odd that the further we get, the more effort we make with our thinking as employed in ordinary life, the greater our doubts become of finding in it a gateway into the world where the real being of man is. In fact, at last we become convinced through this experience of our thinking that—if I may use a somewhat crude expression—we can no more think thinking than we can wash water.

And yet, the real method, the real way of penetrating to those worlds where the real being of man can be known, or, as we shall see later, be experienced, is by way of the thinking. However, this method does not use the thinking as we do in everyday life or in science, but thinking is developed in a particular way so it becomes quite a different power in the soul from what it was before. And this is the basis for understanding any investigation of the super-sensible worlds—that we learn to experience how the thinking can be developed into something quite different in the soul from what it is in ordinary life and science.

Now I have often described the main essentials that have to be undertaken in order that the thinking becomes a different power in the soul from what it was before, and so today I shall not go into the things that the thinking has to perform to get, as it were, outside itself and become this new power in the soul. I shall just mention a few things to characterize what is actually achieved when this comes about. You can find a more detailed description of how the thinking is handled in my book, Knowledge of Higher Worlds and also in the second part of my Occult Science. Today I would only like to emphasize that there are certain inner exercises that the thinking has to undertake. These concern only the soul and consist in taking particular mental images into the consciousness and in being related to them in such a way that the soul is really able to experience something within the thinking. This can happen only when the thinking is inwardly permeated by something that is not normally present. The experience then achieved is the first step toward investigating the super-sensible worlds. It comes about by strengthening the thinking by meditation (the various kinds of meditation and concentration are described in the books mentioned above), and it makes us aware that the kind of thinking employed in ordinary life and science is not suitable for the investigation of super-sensible worlds. In particular we notice that in using our ordinary thinking we do not become conscious of the forces that lead us into the super-sensible worlds. And such exercises of the thinking, and a real inner experience of it, convince us more than any purely materialistic theorizing that a bodily instrument, the physical organism, is necessary in order that we can think as we do in ordinary life between birth, or rather conception and birth, and death. And because the bodily organism is necessary, because our thinking is dependent upon the bodily instrument for all that it achieves, our thinking cannot free itself from its connection with the physical world, and we cannot use this thinking for penetrating any world except the one in which it is not possible to find the being of man. We see that because our thinking is bound to the physical instrument we are prevented from penetrating into the super-sensible worlds. We observe this when we stop all outward perception in meditation, when we intentionally blot out the operation of our senses and bring to a standstill all our inner feelings and sensations, devoting ourselves inwardly in meditation entirely to a certain thought, in order to concentrate all the powers of our soul upon this thought, and thereby strengthen our thinking.

It is precisely in our meditation that we learn how we make use of the body in order to think, and our experience brings us a greater conviction concerning the dependence of the thinking upon the physical organism than any theoretical materialist could do. But we also notice that in living within the physical organism, the latter makes something possible that could not exist without it, that the thinking is given something it could not have were there no physical organism. I hope I may be permitted to make such a paradoxical statement. Its truth will become apparent as we proceed. What we notice is what has to remain of the thought afterward if our soul life is to be sound, and this is the memory of it. It is essential in our soul life that in addition to our thinking we must also have memory. If a person were not able to hold on to what he thinks he would not, for our ordinary physical world, be a normal person. Everything depends upon our being able to preserve our thoughts in our memory. And now we observe in our inner methodical training of our thinking that the physical organism is necessary in order that memory of our thinking is retained. But here we also notice that our thinking can be released from the physical organism—only not the kind of thinking that becomes memory.

What I have just said leads the scientist of spirit on a particular path. It leads him to realize that memory, as it normally exists in the human being, is a power that is only significant in the physical world and that it has to be separated from the activity of thinking. Just as the chemist arrives at the mysteries of the material world by separating substances from one another in the laboratory, so, too, the scientist of spirit has to proceed with the various functions of the soul, but his spiritually-scientific analysis consists in purely inward processes of the soul, and this is even more the case with the synthesis, the putting together again of what has been separated. Thus the necessity arises of separating the activity in thinking which leads to the normal memory, from the actual activity of thinking itself. But how can we do this?—This is the question which now arises: Analogous to the way certain substances are treated so that constituent elements that are dissolved in it can be extracted from it, how can we extract that part of the thinking that leads to memory so that something finally remains? This comes about by constantly dwelling on certain thoughts and pictures for a very long time, even if only for a very short period each day, and by laying the emphasis in this not on seeing that a memory remains, but on observing what we do when we are occupied in thinking. Then we observe that something lives in this thinking activity, which, it is true, we also always have in everyday life and in ordinary scientific investigation, but which remains unconscious, does not reach into our consciousness. I will make this clear by the following: Let us assume we perform an external action connected with our profession or business. In doing it we are constantly producing the same thing. A person has to choose a job which leads him to perform the same action every day. This is the main thing, for our everyday lives at least, to make something which can be produced by our action. The result is the main thing. But alongside this, something else frequently takes place and even when it concerns an external action, we can regard it as something most important and essential in our ordinary lives. In carrying out the same task every day we become more skilled, our hands become more alive so that we not only produce the necessary product, but we also intensify our own activity. Perhaps we do not often notice this intensification of our activity. But we can do so.

What I have described here about ordinary life, where it naturally has quite a different significance, must be applied by the scientist of spirit to the inner experience of his thinking, of the kind of thinking that he employs in meditation, when he immerses himself in a state of forgetfulness so far as his surroundings and various experiences are concerned. And he will then find, as long as he does not overdo the individual meditations—I shall speak further about this later—that in constantly and intensively pursuing such an inner development of his thoughts he will come to observe not the thoughts but the activity itself that works in his thinking. He observes that there is such an activity of thinking through the intensification of his own experience. And it is in feeling this activity of the thinking, in strengthening this activity so that he can be conscious of it in a way that does not come about in ordinary life and science, that he fashions something in his soul that he can then separate off from the memory-activity of his thinking. For the continuation of such exercises as have been described brings about a quite definite result. And this result is that a person, in these moments which he himself controls, can immerse himself to such an extent in a new activity, which the thinking now produces, that in this new activity memory actually disappears, and he is left solely with an experience of his activity. In developing and experiencing his thinking in this way, the thoughts themselves vanish and he lives entirely within his thinking activity. The curious thing is that having grasped this point where we live solely within our inner activity, we notice that in this inner activity of the soul we are without memory as we know it in normal life. Something else is present. I would like to use an illustration to show how our whole soul life is now altered by what happens in our thinking.

There is a well-known occurrence in the life-story of the poet Grillparzer. I am not mentioning this in order to prove that Grillparzer, as far as his capacity enabled him, took the same view as is put forward here, but because his experience provides us with a lever for what has to be produced rather more artificially if we wish to rise to an investigation of the super-sensible being of man.

Grillparzer had conceived the whole outline of his Golden Fleece. He had thought out the plan, the individual events and how they were related, in short, he had conceived his drama, The Golden Fleece, in thoughts. But the remarkable thing happened that later he forgot the form in which he had conceived it. He was absolutely unable to remember it. But, lo and behold! one day at the piano as he played a piece that he had played at the time he had conceived The Golden Fleece, his memory suddenly came to life again, and the whole thing was once more present in his mind. How did this come about? Well, it shows us that the inner activity, which was the same both times he played, enabled him to find the same thought content that he had before. As I have said, this is a step toward the kind of thing we are discussing here, but only a step. We have only to proceed further on the same path in the appropriate way.

For the peculiar thing that the one meditating, the scientist of spirit, arrives at is that on the one hand he feels his ordinary memory dying away—though naturally only for those times when he is practicing spiritual investigation—while on the other something else can arise that is not of the nature of memory but comes about in another way. This is the activity in which he has immersed himself. This activity constantly reappears. And then, when we have accustomed ourselves for a while to separating the activity of thinking from the thoughts that remain as memory, we notice that the whole mood of our soul life has become different under the influence of these exercises. When we have reached a certain point in the development of our soul through these exercises we notice something that can fill us with dismay—we notice that we can experience things where no memory of them remains. And because they leave no memory behind, they remain as processes of our experience, constantly in movement, in a way real dreams, but dreams that have great power over our inner soul life. And so in this kind of “empty” consciousness that is unable to preserve any memory of what it has thought, we very soon become aware how our own experiences come to us as if from outside us, in the way that sense perceptions come to us. This does not come about through the activity of the memory, nor through our normal effort to produce thoughts. The impression we get is more or less of our whole life as far back as the moment to which we can normally remember. Our thoughts appear as real entities; they appear to be alive. They do not appear as they normally do in our memory, but they approach us as living beings. Our thinking altogether assumes quite a different character under the influence of these exercises. It really becomes quite a different power in the soul. And I would like to add a further illustration to show the surprising way this change in our thinking activity can work.

Imagine that a statue stands before us—it has a definite form. Then imagine that the moment could arrive when this statue would begin to walk, to live. We would then experience something that goes against the laws of nature. Naturally this could not happen. But I want to use this illustration because something comes about in our soul life which can be compared to this. With the thoughts we have in ordinary life and that result in memories, we have in our inner experience the impression that these thoughts have to be passive copies that imitate the outer world, that they do not have their own inner life and that if they were to lead their own lives, then our soul life would, through this inner life of our thoughts, lead its existence in pure phantasy, in dreams, hallucinations and even more serious states. In our ordinary soul life our thoughts really do have something that can be compared with the forms of a statue. Here I have no intention of saying anything against the value of sculpture. That would of course be stupid. But we can nevertheless compare a dead statue with the kind of logic that operates in our ordinary thinking where we are not conscious of the actual activity in our thinking, of that which joins our thoughts together, which unites and divides them. Whereas the statue is unable to take on life, to become active, our inner logic, the inner weaving and life of our thoughts can be taken up into our consciousness, can become inwardly alive; in the same way an inner, living and logical being can arise out of the “logic” of the statue, a being that we feel to the extent of having the impression that we are in a quite different world. From this moment onward we know that what in the first instance freed itself from the memory, the actual activity of thinking, has now freed itself from dependence upon the physical organism.

The scientist of spirit is aware at this important point in his development that he has released his thinking activity from the physical organism, that his soul, inasfar as it moves in thoughts, has left his bodily organism, and that he is no longer in his body.

However paradoxical this may appear, it is true. This experience of the scientist of spirit has been characterized in earlier lectures here, and it can frequently be referred to because it describes something that has a shattering effect on the soul when it reaches the point I have just been talking about. For we cannot get away from the fact that the development which the scientist of spirit goes through involves inner upheavals and the surmounting of difficulties which we should know something about. This has no objective value. But if we are to speak about the ways and methods employed in investigating the super-sensible being of man, we should not omit this aspect. But now I must add that the way the science of spirit works, as I have been describing it here, can come into being only in our own time. For everything that comes into being in the course of the cultural evolution of humanity has naturally to appear at a particular moment. The scientific way of thinking was made possible three or four centuries ago by the inner conditions of human evolution existing at that time. Likewise, before our time it would not have been possible to train the powers of the soul in the way I have described. There had first to be a training of several hundred years in scientific method before thinking could acquire the necessary power to undertake such a development.

In earlier times, hundreds or even thousands of years ago, there were always people who penetrated into the spiritual worlds, though they proceeded along a different path and used different powers for their development, using methods that are no longer suited to humanity as it has evolved today. These methods have to be changed, just as the way we look at nature has changed during the course of time. Nevertheless, the observers of the spirit in the past also reached the point referred to here, where they were embraced by this living, weaving power of thought, the objective power of thought that permeates everything. And they described the moment when the soul can have this shattering experience as the soul's approach to the gate of death.—This whole experience makes us aware that having cultivated the activity of thinking to the extent that it has been transformed in the way I have described, we actually enter into this living state of thinking. Alone, we are faced with an inner—not a physical—danger. This is the danger of not being inwardly able to carry what is otherwise our normal everyday self-consciousness into the world we now experience. It is the danger of entering a world where we are powerless in our souls to take our self-consciousness with us, where at first we seem to lose ourselves so that we actually reach the state of approaching the gate of death. But in approaching it, it is as if we had left ourselves behind. This losing ourselves, this no longer feeling in possession of ourselves, is a shattering experience. And in becoming completely one with it, we get to know something further—that the self-consciousness that we have, which arises at the moment to which our memory stretches back, the moment when we are aware of ourselves as an ego, this self-consciousness is really more bound to the physical organism of the body than the other powers of the soul, so that when we loosen our connection with the bodily organism we face the danger of not being able to say “I” any more, of losing ourselves. We recognize what is taken from us when we go through the gate of death, when death really divides the spirit-soul nature from the physical-bodily nature. We really achieve what I would call a theoretical but living experience of what death is from an objective, spirit-soul viewpoint.

This is a shattering experience. And this is why those who knew something about it called it the approach to the gate of death. But now we have actually to follow the path that has been described as leading to this significant experience. Only in following the exercises described in my book Knowledge of Higher Worlds and in the second part of my Occult Science can we understand how these exercises are fashioned out of the experiences of the soul. In addition to this we also proceed along another line of development which runs more or less parallel to the first, and which prevents us from losing ourselves when we approach the gate of death with our consciousness. The scientist of spirit has therefore to undertake something else if he is not to lose himself at this point but rather can take himself with him into this other world. On the one hand we have seen that in order to reach this point we have to develop our thinking, to separate the power and activity of thinking from the power in the thinking that leads to memory, but now on the other it is necessary to develop the activity of our will, again with the help of certain exercises of the soul.

And here it must be said that this development of the will involves separating something from it that belongs to it in normal life, that—to use an expression from chemistry—something must be extracted from it. Of the normal activity of our will, especially when seen from the scientific viewpoint, we know that however filled with ideals we are, the will remains full of emotions and the like, which motivate it. These have to be present or the will would not function in ordinary life.

Now in order to progress along the path parallel to the first one, the scientist of spirit has to do exercises which enable him to separate the will from all those things that have to be present within it, because there must be motivation that stems from our physical nature, from our ordinary soul life, and so on—this kind of motivation, which for our ordinary life appears to be the most essential and most valuable, has to be separated from the will. Of course, this separation should not affect our ordinary lives or we would become quite useless or even worse, but such a will that is free of our everyday will should be brought about only in those moments when we wish to investigate the spiritual worlds. And here again there are exercises to achieve this. You will also find these in the books I have mentioned.

Whereas the aim of the thought exercises is to strengthen the thinking, to immerse ourselves in the experience of our thoughts that we place in the center of our consciousness, the aim of the will exercises is to gain an increasing control in shutting out the normal activity of the will, and to command an inner peace in the whole life of the soul. Our ordinary soul life is filled with the remains of the motives of our will, our cares and other feelings, in short, all those things that arise out of our ordinary soul life. The object of the exercises is to learn to suppress all this consciously.

Here the scientist of spirit brings something about which in ordinary life can only come about unintentionally. In order to describe this I must refer to our experience in ordinary life of the 24 hour cycle with its changing rhythm of waking and sleeping. It is not necessary now to go into what happens when the transition from waking to sleeping occurs. But everyone knows from his own trivial observation of life that the activity of our senses disappears in a particular order without any direction on our part—it would serve no purpose to describe this further here—and that even what finally remains, an inner feeling of ourselves, a consciousness of our own life,—that even this disappears too. Then we remain in a state of unconsciousness.

The scientist of spirit now discovers that when a person is in this unconscious state he is nevertheless within the being of his soul. He discovers this when in undertaking a particular development of his will he learns to produce a condition which on the one hand is similar to the state of sleep, but which on the other hand is so radically different from it that one could even say it is the very opposite of the state of sleep. The development of the will is aimed at eliminating all the activity of the senses, a condition that is normally achieved only in deep, unconscious sleep. This involves the same thing with the activity in our thinking, in our feeling, and in everything connected with the motives in our will.—The whole life of our senses and of our soul has to be suppressed by our own conscious intention. Having acquired the requisite power to achieve this we notice that we are able to bring our physical, organic life to a standstill. In sleep we achieve this without any effort on our part, but now we no longer need to remain unconscious, we do not enter into sleep, but experience the transition in a conscious state. The power that enables us to suppress our organic activity also enables us in another way and at the same time to lift our spirit-soul consciousness, which is now our activity of will, out of our body, so that we are no longer, as in sleep, withdrawn from our body in a state without consciousness—I do not have to explain all this today, as nothing in our discussion depends upon it—but we are fully conscious in sleep and are aware that we are no longer in that which lives in us, but that nevertheless our consciousness has not disappeared. Consciousness is fully present, including self-consciousness and the ability to know ourselves as an ego.

The reason this state is radically different from the state of sleep is that in sleep we have no consciousness, but here we leave the body consciously in such a way that we are able to look at the latter as we would look at a table or any other object. Thus we withdraw consciously from our body and are fully aware that we are outside it because we are able to perceive it as an object outside ourselves, just as we normally see physical objects outside ourselves.

To anyone who has never heard anything about these things or can gain no understanding of them, they can naturally appear only paradoxical and unreal. Despite this, it is a real process, much more real than the processes normally at work in the soul. By means of it the soul now manages to experience itself in the will to the extent of complete consciousness.

And now our experience goes further, but in describing it, we are bound to make it appear purely pictorial, as if only a symbol or perhaps even an allegory were meant. But this is not the case, for our inner experience is absolutely real. In this state where the will is detached from our normal soul activity, and where it is conscious, we come to experience something in us that is always there, not as substance, but as spirit-soul consciousness. We become aware of a second person in us that is always present in everyone, though it cannot be brought to light by our normal consciousness. Of course, if we were to say in the normal way that each person bears a second person within him, we would frequently be understood to mean something pictorial or contrived. This is not what is meant here. We really do become aware that we carry a second person within us that really has a consciousness and is witness to all the activity of our will in normal life.

We are never alone. In the depths of our being there is a true being evolving, watching what we do, a being that is in constant activity and which we gradually come to know when we do the exercises that have been described. But before we can make closer acquaintance with this being we have to overcome another shattering experience in our souls. The other similar experience I described as the approach of the scientist of spirit to the gate of death. This one can be described as follows: In our spirit-soul experience we become aware of what weaves in the world as pain and suffering. We experience the basis, the being, of this pain and suffering. We come to know for the first time what pain and suffering are in the soul. This we must do. For in experiencing this pain and suffering we develop the ability to grasp this inner conscious being in us as an immediate inner spirit-soul experience. We can say that a person who has an open heart and mind for what surrounds him in the world will in many respects find much that is beautiful, exalted in it and will see it as the flower of the world. A person who undertakes the exercises described knows that the flower of all the beauty, the exalted nature and the glory of the world rises as if out of the ground, the earth, of the pain that weaves through the world.

Of course people can come forward with their human wisdom and say that such a statement could make one despair of the wise direction of the world, even of the wisdom of God, for why has God not seen to it that the beautiful, the wonderful, the exalted can appear without this foundation of pain?—Such people produce objections out of their human wisdom without having any deep feeling for the iron necessities of existence. Anyone who asks why the exalted, the beautiful, the flower, cannot exist in the world without the basis of pain is more or less in the same position as a person who demands of a mathematician that he should draw a triangle whose angles do not add up to 180 degrees. Necessities simply exist. They do not contradict the wise guidance of the world.—All the exalted nature and beauty of the world evolves out of what we experience in the depth of our souls as pain, just as the flower of a plant has to evolve out of its root. This leads us to a deeper conception of life and of the world, it shows us in which fundamental elements of life beauty, exaltedness and wisdom have their roots, and that these could not exist, that the power to experience them could not exist, if we were not to acquire this power which is present only inasmuch as it grows out of pain.

Now the question arises: Why is it that we experience pain just at the moment when we permeate this inner observer, this inner consciousness of the soul with life? Why just then?—Although this is more difficult to understand, I would nevertheless like to describe it as exactly as possible. It begins when, having developed the will, we experience in our newly-evolved activity of the will what the inner observer is that weaves and lives within us. Our first experience of it seems to contradict all we have experienced in our soul life since we have been able to think. It is rather like—only to a far greater degree—thinking something through most carefully, and then someone comes and disproves our argument, showing it to be untenable. What rises up out of the depths of our will is felt just like such a living refutation.—A very remarkable and odd experience! It is just this something that comes about in the life of the soul, that begins like the pain of a refutation of our own soul life, that finally evolves and intensifies to the experience of our feeling the flowing stream of pain that moves over the mother earth of existence. It is this experience of pain which makes what rises up out of the will increasingly more concrete and more real.

We then come to a full realization of what this is. We gradually come to understand why it appears like this in the form of pain, for we now become aware of what normally cannot be experienced at all in the way of thinking and willing in our everyday lives, namely, what lies at the root of our ordinary experience, what actually has evolved in the depths of the soul throughout the whole of our life, and which we grasp when we have begun to become scientists of spirit. We experience part of our soul life that is normally hidden and what remains with us when everything is removed from our soul life that is bound to the instrument of the physical body. We experience the part of us which goes through the gate of death, which when we die goes on into the spiritual world. And because this part of us that goes into the spiritual world is not at first fit to live in purely spiritual surroundings, is not suited to the life we have developed, but simply exists in it without being properly adapted to it, it therefore appears to us at first in the form of pain and suffering. In the form that it develops it is really destined for another kind of experience. So now we know how the part of us that goes through the gate of death when our body disintegrates is present in the soul, and lives in the soul as its immortal core. In our inner experience we are like a plant feeling how it gradually prepares the forces in its growth that lead to the formation of the seed in the flower, which having lived a different life in the earth, can then develop into another plant of the same kind. We become aware of a new seed of life within us.—And just as the seed grows out of the forces of the plant and can become a new plant, so, too, we now experience that this seed of life, enclosed at first within pain, can lead to a further life on earth. The only difference is that whereas the plant can be destroyed by the conditions existing in space and time so that not every seed develops into a new plant, there are no such conditions or hindrances in the spiritual world when we have passed through the gate of death, but we proceed through the spiritual world and appear in a further life on earth. Then we have to seek out another body with which to unite ourselves, and which we fashion in joining ourselves to what is produced by our father and mother. We take what exists through heredity and impress our own organization upon it so that we can enter into a new life on earth.

In following this path I have described, the scientist of spirit comes upon two factors in his inner life of the soul. The one is that he feels the danger of losing himself, the other that he acquires consciousness in his otherwise unconscious thinking. The consciousness which he normally possesses is in danger of becoming lost. But the other kind of consciousness which arises out of the will can now be employed in entering into the world. At first we experience only pain in this seed of life in the will, but if the exercises are continued in the right way we discover that the pain in fact reveals mysteries of the world to us, for what really happens is that we take this consciousness which lies in the soul into a condition which we normally experience as emptiness, and which, if we could feel it, makes us powerless, but that now it ceases to be pain and we awaken to a life which may be compared to the awakening of the senses when they have been fashioned in the embryo and are then able to perceive the physical world.

When these two factors I have described are united, they become a new sense organ, which Goethe calls the “spirit eye” and the “spirit ear.” This is now really present. Our thinking, which has been developed to the point described, is united as activity within this new consciousness. A fully developed spirit-man, now existing entirely outside the physical body, is experienced by the soul within itself and lives together with it, and this spirit-man now lives within the spiritual world. In being within the spiritual world the spirit-man possesses a higher stage of memory, not the kind of memory that arises when thoughts reappear, but when what is present in the spiritual world appears before us as living being.

Then also everything we have experienced in time before we were joined to a physical body, before our previous death and conception and birth, all this appears before us as living being. The experiences of former lives on earth come into view. A higher kind of memory arises. Paradoxical as it may seem, this is something that can be developed. In the young child, faculties that are needed in ordinary life are not yet present and have to be developed. These make us competent in life. The new memory leads us to a perception of ourselves as spiritual beings within the spiritual world. We experience ourselves as spirit within the spiritual world. And just as we are surrounded in the physical world by physical beings that are of the same nature as our physical organism, in the spiritual world as spirit-man we are with beings of a spiritual nature. Such spiritual beings never appear in physical life. They have their tasks in the spiritual world and do not alternate their lives like human souls between a spiritual life between death and birth and a physical life between birth and death. We experience all this as a spiritually objective world before us. We must in no way imagine that this world is a mere repetition of the physical world.—I will discuss this aspect in greater detail on another occasion, I would only stress now that the whole way in which the spiritual world is experienced is different.

Now since people compromise themselves today when dealing with truths about the spiritual world, I will also have to compromise more than is normally the case with the prevailing approach to life when I now give you a further illustration. Let us assume that in our spiritual experience we are concerned with a human soul that passed through the gate of death many years ago. It can then happen, in the way that one spirit perceives another, that we can feel this soul of the dead affecting us. But it is not as some would imagine that we see a very much refined material picture, or the sort of nebulous ghost as imagined by trivial and superstitious kinds of clairvoyance, but in a quite different way the spiritual enters the consciousness which has arisen out of the stream of our will. In order to characterize how the spiritual is now experienced, I must say the following: Assume that as human souls we have thoughts. The thoughts live in us. Assume that a thought could experience itself, in which case it would say: I am in the human soul. The thought would not be like something that we copy from the outer world, but would realize that it exists in a world; it would know this. Thus the connection with the spiritual world is much more real than the connection with things in the visible world, though it is a different kind of connection. What lives in the spiritual world enters our consciousness so that the latter, which we ourselves have just now taken into the spiritual world in the way described, becomes aware of other consciousnesses he now meets. Our consciousness is now aware of living with spiritual beings.

We can therefore be aware of a soul that wishes to help us or draws toward us from the spiritual world—it can be a human soul or a soul that has never incarnated in the physical world—and such a soul we experience as living within our own consciousness. We see then that in our everyday lives we really have the spiritual world living within us in our consciousness. But because ordinarily we are not aware of this, we do not normally find these spiritual beings in our usual consciousness. But when we have something spiritual to carry out, where inventiveness is required, we can feel that the activity of the soul of a person who died long ago flows into our consciousness.

It is only natural to cite personal experiences in connection with this, though not out of any immodesty. There was, for example, the soul of a person who died many years ago, and who had quite special artistic gifts which were taken through death and then gave help when certain artistic things were being done. Having acquired this spiritual perception we are able to distinguish between what originates in ourselves—although we could please our pride and vanity more by ascribing it all to our own gifts—and what lives in us that originates in the spiritual world and the beings belonging to it.

And if someone says this could all be an illusion, hallucination, then we would reply that there are also certain types of philosophy which maintain that everything we see is only a creation of our eyes. We have only to think of Schopenhauer's statement “The world is only idea.” This had such an effect on one person that he told Goethe that when he closed his eyes the sun was not there—A more recent scientist who is by no means averse to including the more marginal areas of research in his work, commented that we have long since discovered that the man is dead and can no longer open his eyes, yet the sun is still moving through the universe.

I know all the various kinds of objections that can be brought against this, but it is nevertheless essentially apt. In the science of spirit we learn to distinguish between what is real in the world and what is merely thought out or simply experienced in the soul. Only life can teach us about the world of senses. In our spirit-soul experience only our own soul can be the arbiter and can recognize the reality of the beings and events that we perceive. If we can do this, then all the objections vanish, just as the objections of the philosophical idealists vanish in face of the realities of the physical world. Even in the physical world reality can only be experienced. There is no logical proof that can be advanced; only in life itself can we learn to distinguish the real from dreams and hallucinations.

Thus, too, in the spiritual world we learn to distinguish what is dreamed from what really is.

Today I only wanted to go as far as to show how through the investigation of the spiritual world we can acquire knowledge of our own spiritual being that belongs to this spiritual world. This particular way of looking at the spiritual world, which is based on an inner development of the soul, could only arise in the age of science as we now know it, which has been a kind of preparatory training for the further development of the soul. And it is quite understandable that having immersed itself for a time in the greatness of the scientific way of thinking, humanity has rejected the possibility of the soul attaining real knowledge of the spiritual world.

Every person, whether he is a scientist of spirit or not, can take in knowledge of this spiritual world and appreciate the degree of truth it contains. This is no different from being able to value the truths and products of chemistry for our ordinary lives without actually being chemists. The scientist of spirit completely understands when those who are immersed in ordinary science and have become familiar with the faculties of the soul that share in it, who have learned to use and develop these faculties for a method of investigation that has resulted in the tremendous successes of modern science (which the science of spirit fully recognizes)—he completely understands when such people must believe for a while that it is not possible to have a science beyond the one bound to the development of the senses and of the brain, that is, which is founded on the kind of thinking that is bound to the physical organism.

But what we can experience proves that the province of real knowledge can be widened to include the spiritual world, and that we really can investigate our spirit-soul being which proceeds through births and deaths in repeated lives on earth. A brilliant scientist of the 19th century, Du Bois-Reymond, quite rightly emphasized that the approach to knowledge which has led science to its great successes does not lead us beyond the sphere of nature perceptible to our senses, and therefore could not fathom the depths of existence. He was able to express this inability to know, this “not knowing,” because he himself was immersed only in the faculties of knowledge that can comprehend the outer world of the senses. And he said that if we wanted to undertake something in order to get beyond the natural world, we would enter into supranaturalism, that is, we would immerse ourselves in the spiritual world. But then he said, Where supranaturalism begins, science comes to an end. He did not yet know—and there is good reason why he could not know—that the faculties of our mind which are sharpened and strengthened in observing nature cannot lead to the spiritual world, but that these same faculties first have to transform our thinking and our will so that they can evolve differently from the way they do in ordinary science. Then they have to bring themselves to life, to acquire strength, in order to penetrate up into the spiritual world.

And so we must admit that, from one viewpoint at least, what Du Bois-Reymond said was right—that we cannot penetrate to the spiritual world with those faculties of acquiring knowledge which have brought success to natural science. But we can develop these very same faculties by a purely inner and spiritual method to lead us into the spiritual world. Then our knowledge does not remain purely passive (though in this form it has contributed much to science), but becomes something living. It is like the transition from the statue to living logic, to inner life, when the soul itself becomes living logic which can be permeated by what it finds flowing out from the will. Thus we can only experience what the spirit is when knowledge is awakened to life which lives as living knowledge in the living world of the spirit, when knowledge is awakened to life which normally is bound to the world of the senses and to the physical organs, but which now leads the human being to living knowledge. It is in turning knowledge into living knowledge, in discovering a new man, an inner being in us that we rise to the spiritual world, in which we live as spiritual beings among spiritual events and other spiritual beings. In this way we rise to the world where our true origin, our true task and our true purpose lie.

The soul whose passing we mourn today showed the full, most noble strength to exchange this earthly life with that other into which she was called to enter. And the friend was ready to receive the revelations of that other world, as she was always ready to receive the revelations of this earthly world. We, my dear mourners, raise our souls to this soul, in union with all the loved ones, in the pain for the dearly departed here. We sympathetically unite our souls with the souls of our dear relatives and look up to the soul that has departed from this earthly world and its way of life. And when we try to explore, feelingly, discerningly, what lived in this soul, when we imagine it free from all that was earthly, when we want to listen to it where it speaks from its deepest conviction, from its deepest feeling and will, then we, my dear mourners, may well feel as if we were hearing this dear, this powerful soul speak words like these:

In world-wide expanses I will bear
My feeling heart, that it may become warm
In the fire of sacred activity.

In world thoughts I will weave
My own thinking, that it may become clear
In the light of eternal becoming-life;

I will dive into the depths of souls
With devoted contemplation, that it may become strong
For the true goals of human activity;

In God's peace I strive so
With life struggles and worries,
My self to the higher self preparing;

Longing for a joyful peace,
Sensing the world in my own being,
I would fulfill my duty to humanity;

Then I may live in anticipation
of my soul's star,
which in the spiritual realm grants me the place.

A life full of work, a life full of strength, a life full of lively concern and human duties, which she was assigned in her earthly life, in her present phase of life, has come to an end in our beloved friend, and in such a way that one word comes to mind and to the soul when this life is to be characterized by the nature of her personality, a word in which much, much can be included. But nothing, I think, is in this word that should not be included when looking at the personality who has left us: an “anima magna” in the noblest sense, a beautiful soul in the best sense of the word, and a soul that knew how to pour out what radiated in her in glorious beauty for all those who were close to her or came into the slightest contact with her, so that one became partakers of the love, the goodwill, the strength that emanated from her. Everyone around her could perceive the strengthening and revelation of intimate soul beauty.

Such a soul has passed from us, and we feel our relationship to her, which is truly felt, like the setting of a sun that we have so gladly seen around us.

But again, my dear mourning friends, when we turn our spiritual gaze to this evening of life after a life of work, we are overcome by the most heartfelt consolation from this soul itself, consolation in many respects.

One can think of the life ideal of many ancient souls who, when they came to the realization of the evening of their lives, said that they would not want to come to this evening of their lives without the soul being able to enter in a corresponding way into the spiritual worlds into which they are to submerge when the gate of physical life is closed. Countless spirits in ancient times felt the same way: May I be granted an evening of life so that I may go, feeling, into the spiritual world. Those who had not yet taken in the feeling of their connection with the spiritual world felt, as it were, their purpose in life slipping away. What a beautiful feeling and sensation this woman had been given in what she had around her in her old age, and that is why such a purpose in life, which brought her closer to the spiritual world. It is hard to imagine a more beautiful entry into and life in the spiritual world than was the case with our friend.

When you look back on her life, you see a life dedicated to taking care of the smallest, most insignificant things in life, that powerfully wanted things from the details of life and yet was again inspired to embrace all the details of life in a grand sweep. who had the joy and the good fortune to approach this soul, it was exemplary through its noble, through its strong activity, exemplary through the care in the individual, exemplary in the most loyal action.

And then again, this soul, who has fulfilled her life through work, effort and worry, felt the need to live and immerse her soul in the revelations of spiritual life. She also had this need in an exemplary, truly exemplary way. My dear suffering friends and friends of my dear friend, from the revelation of spiritual life to which we profess, one receives a conviction for spiritual knowledge, admittedly through a saying of Goethe. But standing in this conviction, one feels the truth of Goethe's saying so strongly that one can hardly feel the truth of this saying in any other field: “What is fruitful is alone true!"

Oh, how often one had to think of our dear departed when one contemplated her strong, exemplary life! In her, the connection with the spiritual world proved truly fruitful. With her whole soul and her whole heart she stood in the elements that take hold of us and flow through us when we seek the connection with the spiritual worlds. She repeatedly felt imbued, flooded and strengthened when she really wanted to experience the connection with the spiritual world, and then the forces flowed into her physical upright posture.

Truly, our spiritual current, my dear friends, feels fortunate to be able to be united with such souls. And it can do so, for on the one hand it must tell itself that it receives from these souls as much as a glorious gift of right living as it gives; and on the other hand, when it can be seen what spiritual science can be to such souls, spiritual science also feels strengthened and invigorated, and strength flows to it from such souls. That is why such souls are living stars in the midst of our spiritual current, and we look up to them as we would to certain stars. Because we look up to such living stars, we are comforted in our pain, and we feel this comfort even when we can no longer see the loving eye or hear the dear voice. If it can be a consolation for the dear ones that many souls united with our friend in true friendship unite in outer pain and mourning, then they can truly be sure of this consolation; they can be sure of the consolation that comes from the awareness, at least the outer one, the consolation that turns to a feeling that can be truly consoling, especially for such a soul.

We will consider and feel: Now she has left us, now she will no longer reach out to us, now we will no longer feel the warmth of her heart, no longer have her benevolent gaze resting on us, now we will no longer see her strength in the physical world. When we feel all this, we turn to the other feeling, especially when we are faced with such a soul, to the feeling that this soul is an infinitely precious gift of our life on earth. And let us consider every moment in which she was allowed to devote herself to us in this physical world, which we think back on with love and loyalty, as a gain, and then let us consider every moment in which we can no longer have her in the physical world, as such, in which we want to hold fast to the love and devotion that she so richly deserved.

Let us no longer look at the moments when she will be physically gone from us, but let us look at the moments she gave us and let us cherish those moments in our memories. They will be rich and full of important things. Such was this soul that the memory of her can be more than abundant. If we do not find only sorrow in their absence, we will find strength and power among the many other things. The sight of them shows us a soul in which the value penetrates into one's own soul, into the anima.

Souls of this kind are among those through whom the gods reveal how much they love the world. Lives that flow in this way, blessing, full of work, full of devotion in love, which are then also allowed to reap the fruits in children and children's children, and which, in the insight into this satisfaction from their earthly life, are allowed to look within themselves, such souls are the ones through whom the gods reveal their love for the world to man. And when such a soul departs from us, then our own souls feel as if they are united in spirit with the spirit that flows through all worlds, with the living force that goes through all life. Then we are closer to understanding these words, which are given to the human race, than we are in the ordinary moments of life, when we feel united with the noble soul that hovers over our life, the fleeting life, and then we do not say in a different sense than usual; Our Father, who art in heaven, hallowed be thy name, thy kingdom come, thy will be done on earth.

A sense of the world permeated our friend's soul, a sense of the world that constantly spoke from the heartfelt interest she had in intellectual life. And, my dear friends in mourning, you have to resort to the words of a great ancient sage if you want to find words that shape that which filled this anima magna:

“No longer shall your breath alone be in harmony with the surrounding air, but henceforth your mind shall also be in harmony with the rational essence that surrounds everything, for the power of reason is poured out upon us all and permeates everyone who wants to draw it to themselves, just as the air permeates those who can breathe it.”

This world view of the ancient Roman sage lived in our friend's heart. But in addition, she had a living understanding of the union of the individual human soul with the whole; she had everything that the human soul can fulfill in our time, when it seeks the path through the earthly shell up into the spiritual worlds. And when she felt this sense of life in our sense, our friend, that the spirit surrounds us and wants to be breathed in like the air - truly, honestly and sincerely, lovingly and urgently, she often felt through her soul: “I was born of God” - of God, with all that my physical shell, my earthly life, has done.

But then, when such a soul rises into the spiritual world, when it seeks that which can shine forth from the spiritual worlds, then, in its search in the spiritual worlds, an inkling, a belief, a knowledge of those worlds arises in it, which are exalted above space and time, above birth and death and above the stars. Then that feeling begins, which the old Roman sage could not yet have, that feeling that truly makes the sight of death a new birth, that makes the sight of death appear as the birth of the soul for the spiritual worlds.

The soul here felt surrounded by reason, by spirit, by world thoughts in the earthly world. So the soul, which can feel, which has been initiated, feels the soul of the friend. When she delves into her reasons, she feels how she finds the way to the world that is beyond space and time, in which physical death forms the entrance to the connection with the Christ, who reveals Himself through the mystery of Golgotha, who reveals Himself anew in the understanding soul in every moment. And then such a soul finds the true conviction, which no soul can find more sincerely than the soul that hastened ahead of us, the word: In Christ we die. - Everything she gave us in her life, when we saw her among us, for years and especially in the last times, is an affirmation of her being imbued with the Christ impulse. This is an affirmation of what she felt when she constantly turned to the mystery of Golgotha, the wisdom that can flow into all human souls that want to receive it. Thus we find her death, which for her was consciously a new birth, in intimate union with the Christ. She died in the Christ.

But that gives us the strength of thought to know that we are united with her in spirit, to find the main consolation beyond all pain and grief: As true as she hastened into the spiritual world, clothed in the luminous and powerful thought, “In the Christ I shall resurrect,” so true as the word, the powerful word that resounded from her, will it arise in her soul, and we shall resurrect with her and be united with her.

In this union, my dear mourners, we shall plant in our souls the thoughts that should be directed, as often as we are allowed, to the soul of our dear friend, to the exemplary way in which she lived out her time on earth for us, to the strength and heavenly light that radiates from her. When we turn our thoughts to her in loyalty, we vow that when we leave her earthly shell, we want to feel that so strongly in all of us, with our best thoughts united in her, forever, until we see her through the power of the spirit in which we want to live intimately united with her.

Because this soul was so deeply imbued with this spirit, inspired by the longing for the light that speaks from the spiritual worlds, it is, my dear friends, that when I tried to feel so united this morning with the soul hurrying into the spiritual world, that I could hear the words that seem to me that soul would say if it followed the purest impulse of its self, followed that which radiated from the star of life as long as it dwelled among us.

They shall become conscious in our hearts, these words, which seem to me to be words that the hurrying soul calls out to us in this last moment when we are allowed to dwell with its earthly shell, calling out to us, admonishing us, worrying about our own path in our spiritual world. These are words through which we ourselves will feel the strength to sense our unity with the soul and to find our way into the spiritual world. It seems as if this soul were speaking to us in the words that we want to carry faithfully in everlasting remembrance of her:

In the world's expanse I will carry
My feeling heart, that it may become warm
In the fire of sacred power;

In world thoughts I will weave
My own thinking, that it may become clear
In the light of eternal becoming-life;

In the depths of souls I will dive
devoted thinking, that it may become strong
for the true goals of human endeavor;

In the peace of God, I strive
with life's struggles and worries,
preparing my self for the higher self;

Longing for a peaceful peace,
sensing the cosmic existence in my own existence,
I would like to fulfill my human duty;

Then I may live in anticipation
of my soul's star,
which grants me a place in the spiritual realm.

A hope that makes us happy:
So you entered the field,
Where the earth's spiritual blossoms,
Through the power of the soul,
to show themselves to research.

Your love of truth
was akin to your yearning;
to create from the light of the spirit
was the earnest goal in life
to which you strove tirelessly.

You cultivated your beautiful gifts
To the bright path of spiritual knowledge,
Undeterred by worldly contradictions,
As a faithful servant of truth,
Secure in your stride.

You practiced your spiritual organs
So that they would bravely and persistently
On both sides of the path
pushed error aside
and created space for truth.

To shape your self to reveal
pure light,
so that the soul's solar power
might radiate powerfully within you,
was your life's care and joy.

Other concerns, other joys,
They barely touched your soul,
Because knowledge appeared to you as light,
Which gives meaning to existence,
As the true value of life.

A hope that makes us happy:
So you entered the field,
Where the earth's spiritual blossoms your sense of the spheres matured.

Feel how we lovingly look
into the heights that now call you
to other work.
Pass on to your abandoned friends
your strength from spiritual realms.

Hear our plea,
In the confidence sent to you:
We need strong power from the spiritual realm here to do our work on earth,
which we thank our dead friends for.

A hope that makes us happy,
a loss that hurts us deeply:
Let us hope that you, far away,
Shining undimmed upon our life
As a star of the soul in the realm of the spirit.

As we envision You through the innermost workings of our minds, so, dear friend, You appear to us, our soul clearly living, in order to work in the realm of that spiritual life to which we have devoted our hearts, to which we have devoted our souls in loyalty, to which You have also devoted Your soul and heart in loyalty. Truly, a hope that makes us happy. And today, we stand before the loss, which pains us deeply, with our dear mother, who is so close to all our hearts, and who, with such deep, loving understanding, kindred spirit, followed his path through life with me, not just followed it, but prepared it for you with the deepest inner knowledge of your nature, with the deepest inner love. We stand there with our dear siblings, some of whom must be far away, devoted to the duty that the times demand of so many people in the present. We stand there and can only say to our dear mother and dear siblings one word of comfort at your mortal remains: It may be a consolation, a consolation that lasts over time, that you, dear friend, have won the love of so many kindred souls who will always be willing to share the pain that your mother and siblings are experiencing.

You grasped that which permeates us as our spiritual being, as your own being. But deep in your soul glows a persistent, earnest exploratory urge, an exploratory urge that has always been intrepidly turned towards the truth, the truth alone as the shining light. I often spoke with you about your life here on earth, but often it was also as if you pushed aside what the earth could give you for your earthly life, because the spiritual light stood brightly and shiningly before you, to which your soul wanted to devote itself completely, to whose reflection your soul turned.

When people got to know you better, it was as if, deep down in your soul, you wanted to express the conviction, which never lingered in your consciousness, through this or that word: I will not have to worry about my earthly path in this incarnation. — And so, what could cause you such worry became less and less valuable to you. Instead, more and more a beautiful, wonderfully bright harmony of our spiritual life dawned on you, and what appeared to be weakness on the outside, appeared to be strength to the soul. A hidden spiritual world shone gloriously out of your soul, a rich life and striving out of the narrow horizon, and the spiritual world shone wonderfully for you. If more years had been allotted to you, what lived humbly and chastely as a spirit of research in your noble soul would have ripened into the most beautiful fruit. It was pure and chaste like those souls of researchers who work their way up from the deepest chasms, from which souls of researchers must work their way up. One of those souls in whom the powers develop slowly and gradually, so that they can then also take on that form that transforms the urge to research into the ability to teach.

So you, my friend, were on the way from research to teaching. If, as was symbolically expressed in your outer being, that which permeates so many with error and false ideas about the light of spiritual existence could not touch you, then on the other hand it was your strong will to penetrate to the very sources of existence, to seek knowledge for yourself and to give this knowledge to your fellow men. And Your strong, strong will knew how to illuminate itself with that keen sense that was able to see through error that stood in the way of truth. That was how it was. You spoke of that which You already knew how to proclaim from the source of spiritual life, as one of the first who, connected by their very own power with the divine foundations of the world, knew how to put clear truth in the place of error, which, misunderstanding and misjudging our spiritual striving, comes to us from all sides from the world. That is why You promised to become a loyal fellow warrior in that host, which wants to be devoted to the holy, eternal truth, to illuminate and warm the fleeting time, so that it may stand firmer and fit into the stream of eternal being.

In principle it is self-evident to you that you are connected with what we call the spiritual life. And that is why this being, in its quiet but unyielding zeal, had such an infinitely harmonious effect on all the souls of friends, strengthening and invigorating these souls again and rekindling in them the spark that must ignite in man if he is to find the way from time to eternity. And even if what appeared to be Your earthly life-force was sometimes weak, Your inner spiritual life always presented itself to us as an especially strong and powerful energy that knew how to walk the path it had chosen out of realization with sure steps. You stood before us as a promise of the future, as a dynamic fighter for the cause that was one with your innermost self, with which you had made this innermost one.

It cannot be for us at this hour to speak only words of comfort for those souls who must remain behind, for the dear mother and the dear brother and sister souls. For all those who were devoted to you in intimate friendship, it is fitting to live in holy sorrow since you have left this earthly field. But through the trust in the spirit that inspires us, in the spirit that lived so strongly in you, we also trust in the pain of our souls that he will find the strength to always look up to you in the regions where you will dwell and we are not lost to you through the beautiful, glorious treasures that you through your higher self, which you strove to develop during your earthly existence, collected.

You know, dear soul, how much at risk that is in our spiritual current, which is so close to our hearts, is endangered by the contradictions of the world, by error and misunderstanding. You know how we, standing here at your mortal remains, look up into the spheres that receive the spiritual. You know how difficult it is for the souls in the bodies to fight against conscious and unconscious enemies with what is so dear to us. You know how we look to You with the request to continue to unite Your power with ours. You know how we do not trust in what people encounter in the visible world. You know that we hold to the invisible world because we know that it is permeated by the souls of those who belonged to us and have left their earthly place of life. But we, who work below, want to ask You to work among us with the powers that are now at Your command.

When that which sometimes surges within us and all too strongly challenges our strength asserts itself, then it will be You who is at work in our striving. So, never lost, so united with us in intimate love, we would like to live with You in thought, to whom You will be unforgettable, far and near. And You will be able to do so, from the spiritual regions that have received You, to send Your strong powers down to us.

I see unspent powers in the life from which death has taken You away after a short existence. But you have passed through the gate of death with soul powers that are blissfully strengthened by the power of Christ, by that power of Christ, which you knew how to take in as spirit-knowledge, in your most inner feeling, in the secret of your heart, in your rich knowledge, which you knew how to take in as a living power that keeps alive throughout eternity that which which we know how to connect with this Christ-power.

You have understood how to solve the riddle of spiritual science for yourself, so that you let it enter into the center of all your longing and searching that which gives meaning to the earth, which, as the striving of humanity, is incorporated in all earthly life: the power of Christ. Strengthened and invigorated by the power of the Christ impulse, you have passed through the gate of death; with the power of the Christ impulse you are in spirit. And that in you which is connected with this power of the Christ impulse will turn to us who seek this power of the Christ impulse, so that your fire may become one with our fire, in order to achieve those goals of humanity that must incorporate into the earth's striving and working out of eternity into time.

United with the light-filled power of Christ, we now look up to You with love, to our strong support, to our bitter loss, but also to our confident consolation.

So go into the light-filled world and be assured that our love follows You, as we are certain that Your light will be with us.

A hope that makes us happy:
So you entered the field,
Where the earth's spiritual blossoms,
Through the power of the soul's being,
Want to show themselves to research.

Pure love of truth being
Your longing was kindred;
To create from the light of the spirit,
That was the earnest goal of life,
Which you tirelessly pursued.

You cultivated your beautiful gifts,
To walk the bright path of spiritual knowledge
Unperturbed by the contradictions of the world
As a faithful servant of truth,
Securely walking.

You practiced your spiritual organs
So that they might bravely and persistently
On both sides of the path
Push error aside
And create space for truth.

To shape your self to a revelation
of pure light, so that the power of the soul's sun might radiate mightily within you, was your life's concern and joy.

Other concerns, other joys, they barely touched your soul, Because knowledge appeared to you as a light,
which gives meaning to existence,
as the true value of life.

A hope that makes us happy:
So you entered the field,
Where the earth's spiritual blossoms
Through the power of the soul's being
Want to show themselves to research.

A loss that deeply pains us,
So you disappear from the field,
Where the spirit's seeds of the earth
In the womb of the soul's being
Matured in your sense of the spheres.

Feel how we look lovingly
Into the heights that now
calling you to other work.
Give your strength from spiritual realms
to your abandoned friends.

Hear our souls' plea,
sent to you in trust:
We need strong strength from spiritual realms here
for our earthly work,
Which we thank to our dead friends.

A hope that makes us happy
A loss that hurts us deeply:
Let us hope that You, far and near,
Do not lose our lives, but shine
As a star of the soul in the spiritual realm.

Dear mourners! Our dear friend Harald Lille has left us young. He has covered a part of his life with us in common work, common endeavor, common striving. We got to know him, and in him we got to know what can work so that our thoughts and feelings follow his soul as it now ascends into spiritual worlds.

Since your soul left your body, dear friend Lille, all the moments in which I was able to get to know you have once again come to my mind. The memories brought me the image of your character, which now presents itself to us, the mourners, here in this moment, as we look up to your soul that has fled into the spiritual world and say goodbye to you on the physical plane. And this image presented to the soul is to give your image to this our mourning community:

The hand of fate, superhuman in its sway,
Taught you the art of measuring, forming
And the power of technology to master.

But this was only the shell of your being.
Deep within, a mighty yearning pointed
Towards the path of spiritual solar heat.

And this longing pointed you from the north
to our Goetheanum,
where the power of technology unites with the workings of the spirit.

And there you found the warmth of soul
that you wanted to give to your heart
as the content of being you were striving for.

Now carry into the spiritual heights
what you have found
through the power of the soul: divine powers.

A good many years ago now, our dear friend Lille came to our spiritual scientific community to pursue a common goal, to work together and, above all, to live together. He was educated in the technical sciences of our technical art. He brought this into our community from the outside world. But within him was something given from eternal worlds. An intimate urge for warmth of soul, for such warmth of soul that wants to be illuminated by the light of the spirit, in which man's true being must breathe, to which man's true being belongs. And how, one might say, naturally these two poles of our friend's life came together, where he could work in both directions, where he could put his technical skills at the service of a great cause together with us, but where these technical skills only serve the greater good in the external world to the extent that this cause is to be permeated by everything that the true human soul must strive for as its innermost spiritual being.

Our friend's inner being was attuned to this warmth of soul. His always kind and friendly face, his intimate and radiant eyes, spoke of the longing for this warmth of soul, which wanted to be illuminated by the light of spiritual knowledge, and to work in the service of the spiritual development of humanity. He felt a deep need to do work in the service of humanity, work that he could imbue with the consciousness of belonging to the spirit of humanity in its truth. And so he worked among us, always working diligently in the knowledge that, like every smallest part that can be worked by us, he wants to place himself in the service of the whole human movement.

Then fate took him back to his Nordic homeland, and in this Nordic homeland, to which he basically already carried the germ of the disease that developed to such an extent that our friend left this physical world, in this homeland, where he then had to stay for some time, he experienced the whole chaotic surge of our present time, he experienced all that rises up from the troubled social life and vigorously demands new forms in the development of humanity. There he became more and more mature, inclined to unite what he had drawn from spiritual insights with what he must have experienced through pain from the revolutionary movements he had gone through in his homeland.

And so he came back to us, with the germs of disease in his body, but with a soul that was striving towards the place of work that he had found within our community. From the way our friend Lille came to us at that time, it could be seen that what we were able to put into human striving and human development was the center of his entire soul's longing. He was again radiant with inner spiritual sunshine when he arrived at our Goethe Building. But the germ of a serious illness was already living in him. His soul was always courageous and striving towards the light. But his superhuman destiny had determined that this clock of life would run out early. And so he was also seized by the disease that had seized many at that time. You could see how, when he was lying in the care of our dear member, Mrs. Wirz, he was struggling on the one hand with the thing that had befallen his body. As always, he aspired to lofty heights, aspired to the content of spiritual knowledge, aspired to the warmth of the sun of the soul, his truly loving, noble inner self.

Then he would seek recreation in the mountains. And one may think, my dear mourners, that it was precisely during this search for recreation that the longing to return to the Goetheanum repeatedly passed through his soul. What he had experienced at this place, what he had experienced, that carried him, that was what really brought about in our friend - we may say it to you, dear friend, here so close to your ascent into the spiritual worlds - that mood that ultimately made him find no difference between the world he had to go through and in which he had only a short time to live, and the world he was to enter to work in as spirit and soul. The strength of his conviction, the depth of his insight, they really were visibly working spiritually in our friend's dear soul. It was what always confronted one, even in the face of painful defeat, when one looked at this countenance that could see the light to the very end.

And driven by this longing for the central spiritual place with which he had so connected his own soul, he came when our college courses were opened at the Goetheanum a short time ago. He was able to take part in the first eight days of these college courses. He attended them as a seriously ill person, heading towards death, but with a soul that was fully involved in all the knowledge that was to be acquired as a new human asset, like someone who felt called to work in this world or in another on the impulses that were to be given. And when I was allowed to see our friend again in his last days, it seemed to me as if, as a result of his striving in courage and for the light, I might say that the words of thought had finally become more and more deeply rooted in him. Even if that which of me here belongs to the physical world, may disintegrate, I am connected with the spiritual striving that I have acquired here, I belong to it in such a way that my power should be devoted to it also in other worlds, which I may enter. For him, this connection with the spiritual, which he had chosen and which had created a longing in him, was at the center of all his soul experiences, one may well say, until the last hour. He was no longer able to participate in the last part of our vacation course. But he was in the neighboring hospital, and with all the instincts of his soul he participated in it. And so he awaited the last day of his life on earth, not unlike the first day of his spiritual life, which he lived courageously and striving for the spiritual light. His thoughts lived in the stream of thought that filled his soul: courageously towards the light! — This thought permeated his soul in the last days.

And we look at this soul. It was so healthy as a soul, despite the sick body with which fate had clothed it, that it was a matter of course in its life that it stepped out of the portals of the universe to this earthly mission, and that it felt within itself all that is proper to all human souls when they inwardly behold their true being, that she felt that man on this earth has a mission to fulfill, given to him by the gods of the universe, from which she, after all, is born in her true being. A noble vision of this divine permeation of everything, that is what always filled him, even when our friend Lille was engaged in practical life. A vision of God in the most beautiful sense of the word, that is what made him say to himself: This soul of mine is born of the divine.

And he sought spiritual knowledge because he wanted to live here and die here within this physical earth in the power of Christ, and he felt that he needed spiritual knowledge that would shine through his soul with true light in order to find his way to the life and death in Christ. And so he connected himself through our spiritual science with a genuine, true Christ consciousness. As he felt born of the Divine, so he felt alive and so he lived towards death in genuine, true, living Christ consciousness. He felt the Christ living in his soul through spiritual knowledge.

And from the power of this Christ that permeated him, the man received the assurance that No matter what worlds the human soul must live through, through how many deaths it must pass, how often darkness must fall into its light, out of all lives, out of all deaths, out of all darkness, the human spirit, destined for eternity, must rise again and again. Being raised in the Holy Spirit arose for him from his consciousness of God, from his experience of Christ through spiritual knowledge.

So we look at the soul of our friend, my dear mourners, as she now departs from us. We will no longer be able to look into your eyes, dear friend, which always look so kindly. We will not see your features here in the physical world again, they are so filled with the longing for the spiritual. But we will keep them in our hearts, these features gazing longingly out of the spiritual eye. We will unite our thoughts with your soul that also strives in the spiritual. Dear friend, you have united yourself with us, we will remain united with you, even if we can only reach in our hearts what you yourself, after you have left us physically, carry in your soul as your aspiration. We have grown fond of you. There are many among us who feel this at this very moment. They have grown fond of you, fond of you in a spiritual-soul bond that cannot be broken. You are among us. At this moment, we think of your distant relatives in the far north who cannot be here, who are thinking of you at this moment. We direct our feelings so that our thoughts can say to your loved ones in the far north: You do not leave the physical world here without being surrounded by loving hearts, by loving hearts that are aware that they must replace for you even in this moment the loving togetherness with those in your homeland whom you left to go to a spiritual place of striving.

And so you, the relatives of our dear friend Lille in his distant homeland, may feel how we stand here in faithful love as his soul leaves his physical body, and you, who love him, who gave him to us, be aware that he has found loving souls here, that he does not rush out of this physical world without love.

The superhuman rule of fate
Taught you the art of measuring, shaping
And the power of technology.

This remained only the shell of your being.
Deep inside, a mighty yearning
Pointed to the path to spiritual solar warmth.

And this longing pointed you from the north
to our Goetheanum,
where the power of technology unites with the workings of the spirit.

And there you found the warmth of soul
that you wanted to give to your heart
as the content of being you were striving for.

Now, into the heights of the spirit
Take what you have found
Through the power of the soul: divine powers.

We have found You in life. You have united Your powers with ours in earthly life. Here we stand to empathize with Your soul, to prepare ourselves to unite our thoughts with Your thoughts, which You carry into the work of the eternities. We deeply feel what is to shine before our soul once more, for the last time, as the beginning and end of Your image:

The superhuman rule of fate
Educated you in the art of measuring, forming
And in the power of technology.

Now, in the heights of the spirit
Take what you have found
Through the power of the soul: God's powers.

In life, we were united with you. In spirit, we want to remain united with you forever in the sense of what you have won as your realization-conviction. From the Divine, the human soul is born. In the Christ, the human soul must die if it truly wants to live. In the Holy Spirit it must be resurrected and will always be resurrected. That was your conviction, that you carried through death. This will shine for you as the light of the spirit, since you are now to enter the other paths.

Yours, dear friend, forever!

Dear mourners!

Now that the priestly word has guided this dear soul up into the spiritual realms, where she already felt at home during her earthly existence, allow me to add a few words from the heart of those with whom our dear friend, Mrs. Wilhelm, was united in shared spiritual striving, shared work. This is in keeping with the heartfelt desire of those who shared the common striving with the dear departed, that here, where her soul separates from us, but we remain united with her in the eternal realms of the spirit, that here spoke the priest who stands within our spiritual community, and that also from me, as the representative of this spiritual community, the thoughts are conveyed, which arise from the hearts and souls of those who were united with our friend. In the last days, when this soul had parted from the earthly body, the image of the dear one stood before my soul, and what spoke to me from this image was spoken to the departing soul:

From the circle of life's duties
The great question of fate spoke

How can human knowledge fathom
Where the soul's true home
Is in the vastness of the universe?

To your heart's desire,
Spiritual knowledge appeared as the way,
Illuminated by the light.

And you followed this urge.
It has given you certainty of soul
brought you soul-assurance and courage to face life.

And it has become a comfort and strength
in the difficult days of pain,
in the hour of the turning point of fate.

Then what you saw strongly
in the soul's inner vision
as the light of the human spirit,

Through suffering it has shone.
So also find it in the mind,
Whose gate now before you

The new form of existence
Opens, and your soul
Further way light-full indicates.

My dear mourners!

The close relatives of the dear departed may feel in this hour that the friends who have gathered here to send the last farewell thoughts to the soul parting from us, that all these friends have followed this soul here in warm love. And in warm love, the words that are yet to be spoken will be spoken:

Our dear, dear friend had sensed a ray of that spiritual light that shines in the soul when that human soul reflects on its true, genuine origin, when it reflects on the eternal source of humanity from which every single person is drawn to work in the spiritual and physical world. But, my dear mourners, the great question of fate often arises more intensely for one person than for another: How does the soul find its way in this existence? - in this existence, which surrounds us first as the earthly-physical world, into which shines for the soul's eye that which can spiritually permeate this earthly-physical world. That which this life can offer in the way of joy and uplifting is strong in life. It is easy for a person to get stuck within this physical life. Then the fateful questions do not arise with all their intensity from the pleasures, joys and exaltations of life! The great fateful questions, the great riddles of the world, approach man when pain and suffering afflict him. My dear friends, anyone who has acquired something like knowledge of the world will never speak from his deepest experiences, from his deepest experiences: From my joys, from my pleasures in life, I have gained knowledge. — He will speak of the fact that it is precisely suffering and pain that spring up as the light of knowledge in the soul. And the suffering and pain that penetrate into life are what point more strongly towards the eternal than the joys. And if our friend was already – as her search for spiritual light showed – one of those deeper souls who wanted to unite their own light with the divine light of the world, she has been absorbed in life by severe suffering, by pain.

And those who loved our dear friend, Mrs. Wilhelm, will, inspired by that love, send their thoughts to her again and again in eternal realms. And that which earthly death has separated will be united by life in the eternal realms of the spirit, in the bright heights of the spirit, for the bond that was formed here between our dear friend and those friends who have found union in our community was so strong that this bond certainly cannot be broken. Even those who were distant from her will unite their thoughts with the striving that our dear friend will have in the future as spirit and soul. For anyone who has become aware of the connection in eternity, there is in reality no separation.

Consider, my beloved, the strong confidence that lived in this friend, Mrs. Wilhelm, out of the spiritual consciousness of her soul, which she sought through union with our spiritual striving. We know how dear it was to her to come again and again to Dornach, how dear the place became to her, how dear to her was every single thing she heard there. But we also know how what she heard and experienced there brought her together with the divine light she sought. I myself remember how moving it was to hear her, on her sickbed, speak of the sun shining through her window as the outer expression of the divine permeating the world. Thus she sought the divine in everything physical.

She believed that she could only find the spirit with which she wanted to unite if she could revive the genuine, strong power of Christ in her soul. And so she went out to us, to let this soul grow strong inwardly through her experiences outside, through what happened out there, so that she could feel the Pauline words: “It is no longer I who live, but Christ lives in me.” And she felt this Christ power moving into her soul. She felt that of which man can be conscious, as of his origin; she felt the divine of this human origin, permeated by the power of Christ. She knew that, as truly as man is born out of the depths of the spirit through the power of the divine Father, so must man be borne through life and death by the power of Christ. In the most difficult hours of suffering, she was illuminated by the image she had received of the suffering of Christ on Golgotha, who is victorious over all death. Thus, under the most severe suffering and agony, she defeated death within herself. She felt the Christ-light within her. That was what sustained her under the heavy pressure of the suffering through which she was tested. For that was what the Christ-light told her again and again: No matter how many deaths a person may go through, no matter how much suffering and darkness may enter this life, there is a resurrection in the spirit from all deaths, from all darkness, from all suffering. And out of all suffering come trials for the soul, and out of all trials for the soul comes that great light which awaits the human being and strives towards him.

So, my dear mourners, that is how we knew our friend. We do not want to talk about what she could find outside. Because that she could find what her soul was looking for, her life itself was the living testimony. But we still want to talk about the fact that when she came out, her own appearance was the living testimony of something that spoke from within her, without her being aware of it, but which touched every person who got to know our dear friend: she is a good woman. She is a woman you could love to the depths of her soul. Those who saw her outside, when she was still seeking this spiritual light, could say that to themselves. Right up until the last days when she was still able to make her way out. She was looking for it. And from the way she received it, from the way she looked up from her eyes to unite the inner light with the outer, she spoke from within: a good, loving woman. And she will continue to be loved by those who have come to know her, and from the warmth of that love will spring that light that will shine when we send our thoughts up to her in the certainty of being united with her, even if the soul is separated from this physical existence.

So let me once more repeat to you, dear friend, the image that has been speaking to me these days, reminding me of what you were to us, what you were to all those who got to know you, what you were to the world of the spirit, which you have faithfully and lovingly striven towards with strong courage:

From the circle of life's duties
The great question of fate spoke to your spiritual source with seriousness:

How does human knowledge fathom
where the soul's true home is in the vastness of the universe?

To your heart's desire, Spirit-knowledge as the way,
Which is illuminated by the light.

And you followed this urge.
Soul certainty has brought
You and courage to live.

And it is you comfort and strength
In the difficult days of pain,
In the fateful turning point of the hour

Then become. What you saw strong
In the soul's memory
As the human spirit's light,

Through suffering it has shone.
So also find it in the spirit,
Whose gate now before you

The new form of existence
and shows your soul
the way forward, full of light.

In the here and now, your friends have found you. They have united the love for you with the love that your dear relatives have shown you on your journey through life. They saw the love that you showed your dear relatives and friends. May the path of life that has united us give rise to the strength by which our thoughts will always find your thoughts, when you live and strive in eternal realms. For that which is found in true love at the turn of time remains united for eternity from the depths of human nature.

Dear Mourners!

Now that our dear friend has been escorted by the clergy into the realms of light, words of farewell are spoken from the hearts of those who were most closely connected to our dear friend: to his dear wife, daughter and to you, dear friends, who were so closely connected to Hermann Linde. These words, which may resonate in the soul of our dear friend, are spoken:

Your soul's gentle beating of wings
Carried you, dear friend, in spiritual orbits,
Your destiny's solemn guiding hand
Brought the spiritual word to your ancestors.

Many a doubt stepped into your path,
But the strength of the heart found
through the light of life and the shadows of existence
to the goal of thought in the spiritual realm.

And so look, faithful friend soul,
in the full spiritual reality,
what you sensibly and meaningfully envisioned
as the future after your time on earth.

And in the evening of your life, you still had to Your daughter's faithful memory
Shall preserve your noble striving.

And we, united with you in spirit in our earthly existence,
We who accompany you to the new life,
Want to dwell with you in spiritual union
In the times of the future and in the vastness of the world.

Dear mourners! Our dear friend was one of the first of our spiritual community to join us in heartfelt intimacy. And we got to know his kind, good heart, whether it was in such a effectively accomplished, sacred work duty for all of us, or whether it was in walking side by side in the confession of our spiritual knowledge, we got to know this good, dear heart, we learned to appreciate it, and we should know to remain connected to it, even after our physical eye can no longer look into his physical eye. And so let our soul's eye look into his in the future, remembering him with all our heart and love, into his dear spiritual eye.

Dear friends! On his earnest path to spiritual research, Hermann Linde has found many doubts and many other soul obstacles on the way. But he has possessed a spiritually inclined, soul-warm inner heart power. With strong inner power, it led him to what he then found as his spiritual word, his spiritual insight, in which we were united with him in intimate friendship.

One could say that Hermann Linde walked in loyalty with the three epochs of anthroposophical life. First he found this spiritual life. Then came the times when he worked in Munich as one of the most effective, devoted and sacrificial collaborators on our festival mystery plays, which, together with others, were also his work. My dear friends, there are many things we have to say: at the time when we had to work on them, they would not have come about without Hermann Linde.

And then, when the call came to build the Goetheanum, which was so dear to all of us and also died on the Dornach hill, he was again one of the first to offer advice and help, giving everything he had: his art, his being, to the work. We have seen how Hermann Linde, outgrowing his artistic life, ultimately sacrificed everything he was able to give in art to the work with which he had completely identified.

And anyone who is able to appreciate and love human loyalty and human devotion could not help but appreciate and admire the quiet, gentle, and yet so energetic soul of Hermann Linde, and feel him as the dearest friend soul who walked with us on our spiritual path.

Many are the hours that come to mind's eye, when I met Hermann Linde working, working at the side of his dear wife, our friend, up in the dome of the Goetheanum, and when he sacrificed his best for the work, whose downfall he and we had to experience with such deep pain.

And when you saw Hermann Linde quietly working in his studio, completely absorbed in the Goethean idea, everything he could feel as an artist, mysteriously enmeshed in this Goethean idea, then you knew: he was one of the best who work among us.

Dear mourning friends, Hermann Linde stands before us. But we also had to accompany him in such a way that we always saw in him how a strong soul, a soul with many desires, nevertheless lived in a weak body. And this weak body took Hermann Linde from us early, much too early, for all of us: this weak body, which those who were more intimately connected with Hermann Linde knew, that everything that stood in Hermann Linde's life, that even doubts arose in him, that sometimes did not allow the intentions of the work to come into full effect, came from him. Those who were very close to Hermann Linde knew that his soul was great and that he himself often felt an inner tragedy due to his weak body,

But that is precisely why he belonged to a spiritual community that is able to look beyond everything that physical-earthly sensuality alone gives, that is able to look up to that which, as a supermundane ability, the spiritually willing soul longs for and hopes for as its great goal. And in my intimate friendship with Hermann Linde, I often had the thought: You may tell yourself that not everything you want in your earthly existence will be granted to you, but you may take comfort in the fact that in spiritual regions your will to transcend the earthly will be strengthened and that you are able to give to the earth all that you would like to give to it. But we had to remind ourselves that we cannot make the same demands on ourselves that Hermann Linde made on himself. And we were truly always in complete agreement with this gentle and quiet soul. We appreciated what he did for us as one of the best.

And, my dear mourners, Hermann Linde can be a role model for many. He wrestled in his quiet mind, wrestled with earnest strength, wrestled with solemn dignity beyond all doubt, beyond all inhibitions, to that knowledge that brings man the certainty: That which you live on earth comes from divine heights of existence. But Hermann Linde appreciated the sacredness of the divine heights of existence, Hermann Linde knew how to see through what secrets these divine heights of existence hold, and he therefore knew how little of that which we carry into this existence from heavenly heights through earthly birth enters into human consciousness of earthly existence.

It is true that we are all born of God into earthly life. But during this earthly life, the human consciousness is too thin to be permeated with divine power. And only in this death, experienced with earthly consciousness, can the divine power rediscover the strong soul power that feels connected to the impulse of Christ, give birth again, resurrect the God in the human breast, the connection with Christ.

And so did Hermann Linde feel. Just as he knew that he had been led from divine existence into earthly existence, so he knew that in earthly death the awakening Christ lives, with whom the human soul, the human heart, can connect. And so today, in this solemn hour, we look up with you, beloved soul, into spiritual regions, knowing that he who retains in earthly existence the awareness of divine origin, who conquers for earthly existence the permeation with the power of Christ, will be reawakened, will resurrect in bright, luminous spiritual heights. Dear friend soul, our friendly glances from the depths of our hearts longingly accompany you. We want to let our best thoughts, which were connected to you, follow you there. We know you in the heights of spirit in the future. It will be for us to seek again and again from the depths of our hearts the thoughts that go to you, that may unite with your thoughts of purpose in the light of spirit, that want to remain with you for all time, that you will have to go through for all the worlds, that you will have to permeate. Yes, our thoughts may be with Your thoughts, out of the earthly labor, which we could feel, with which You were spiritually connected to us through Your own choice in this earthly life.

May Your thoughts, my dear mourners, always follow the spiritually connected one in his future earthly joyful existence, preparing himself for a new earthly existence full of light. So may it be. And so may our thoughts follow you, may they stay with you, our dear Hermann Linde, and may we understand to stay with you, even when our soul must seek you in the bright heights of the spirit.

The gentle beating of your soul's wings
Carried you, dear friend, in spiritual paths,
Your destiny's solemn guiding hand
Brought the spiritual word to your ancestors.

Many doubts arose in your path,
But the strength of your heart found
Its way through the light and shadow of life
To the goal of thought in the spiritual realm.

And so look, faithful friend soul,
In the full spiritual reality,
What made sense to you, shiningly envisioned
As the future after the time on earth.

And in the evening of your life, you still had to
Deep in the soul, our great pain
from the flame;
For earthly existence, it broke your heart.

Your wife's sincere heart love,
She will follow your spiritual life;
Your daughter's faithful memory
Shall preserve your noble striving.

And we, united with you in spirit in this world,
We, who accompany you to the new life,
Want to dwell with you in spiritual union
In the times of the future and in the widths of the world.

This morning we had to see off our dear friend Hermann Linde at the gate through which he will now enter the spiritual world. At such moments, my dear friends, it is up to us to make real, in a deeper, moral-religious sense and in a deeper sense of feeling and perception, what anthroposophy can trigger in our souls, what anthroposophy can inspire in our souls. It is, after all, our whole endeavour to get to know the spiritual world, to learn to live in the soul with the spiritual world.

In the moment when a dear soul departs from physical existence and enters into that life, in order to gain knowledge of which we strive, we must also feel the strength and the power to sustain in the full sense of the word all that which should have become ingrained in us during that time while we were here on earth in a spiritual bond with a soul that has now passed away from us. And we should learn to understand in the right sense that we should maintain the community in which we have found each other, beyond the bonds that are woven through earthly life. We should be able to hold that love warmly, which connects us with such souls, even when that warmth of feeling cannot be kindled by external impulses as it can when the soul in question is still walking among us in a physical body. Only then do the powers of perception that can be triggered in us through anthroposophy have the right strength, if we are able to do so. We should also be able to keep the memories of a dear dead person alive in a different way than someone who has not taken in spiritual knowledge into the depths of his soul as we have set ourselves the goal.

And Hermann Linde is indeed bound to our souls by many beautiful memories. A large number of those sitting here know this without a doubt, some perhaps in a looser way. But Hermann Linde was a personality of whom it may be said that even those who knew him only briefly grew to love him. Those who have been part of our society for longer know Hermann Linde as one of the first to join the society in order to follow a shared spiritual path with the other friends united in it. And those who knew Hermann Linde more intimately know that he was not one of those who joined this spiritual path in a mere effervescence of feeling, in an inner-soul sensation, but that he strove, out of innermost self-knowledge, to find the possibility of uniting his path with the path of this spiritual current.

Hermann Linde was a mild nature, but a nature that also had a strong, justified critical spirit within the mildness of his soul, a nature that examined what came its way, and a nature that had to examine because other impressions that were already there had stuck in the soul in a strong way. And so Hermann Linde had to fight his soul's battles with what lived in his soul, what warmed his soul, what often filled his soul with bitter doubts on the one hand, and with what, because it differs so much from everything else that one encounters in the present, on the other hand, with anthroposophy, he had to fight his soul's battles with these two currents. And today, when his life on earth is complete, we can look back on it and say to ourselves: When a soul so noble, mild and inwardly earnest has found its way into this spiritual movement, not from overflowing sentiment but from inwardly true self-knowledge, then this spiritual movement can regard it as a kind of testimony that confirms its inner strength. A movement that is in a position to point out that good people have found the opportunity to unite with it can consider itself fortunate in the most beautiful sense.

And it was indeed the case that our anthroposophical movement in its first period could, by the nature of things, be nothing other than a place where souls found themselves and their connection with the spiritual world. In view of the tasks that the anthroposophical movement has had to take on in later times, many older members may well say to themselves: Oh, if only it had always remained so, if the Anthroposophical Movement had remained in that first epoch, when it was basically a gathering of people who interacted as people, who formed an inwardly cohesive association that initially looked to the spiritual current flowing through it.

Hermann Linde knew how to unite with his own soul that which flows through the Anthroposophical Society as a spiritual current; but he was also one of those who, with an open heart and an unlimited willingness to make sacrifices, devoted themselves to every new task that arose from this spiritual movement. And for many who enter this spiritual movement, it should be so that they look to the example of such a personality.

Hermann Linde entered the anthroposophical movement as an artist. He first placed his entire artistic being at the service of this movement and then, in the third phase of this movement, sacrificed it at the altar of the same. We look back because what happened through the personalities working within our movement must be of value to us. We look back to the time when the Anthroposophical movement in Munich, steeped in true inwardness, had to be led into artistic channels. At first we needed people who could infuse it with artistic life. And now I would like to call upon those of you who remember the Mystery performances in Munich to recall in your inmost soul how marvelously unified were the stage sets that Hermann Linde contributed to the individual scenes of these Mystery Dramas out of his, I might say, natural willingness to make sacrifices. For some of those who were present at those performances, these images will be unforgettable, for they arose out of a real experience of what was to arise at that time before the soul-vision of our anthroposophists. And the words I spoke this morning from a deeply moved heart, I would like to repeat them here: We know very well that much of what was to be done back then could not have been done without a subsidy like the one that came from Hermann Linde.

And when the idea arose in some people's minds to erect a building for the anthroposophical movement, it was again a matter of course to call upon Hermann Linde in the circle of those who wanted to devote themselves above all to the construction and management of this building, because they knew that they would find a willingness to make sacrifices, a willingness to work, above all, what is most needed: a reconciling, loving spirit that balances differences.

And so Hermann Linde joined the small community of those who, as a kind of committee, led everything that was initially connected with the intention in Munich and then with the reality here in Dornach: to build up the anthroposophical cause. And he was also one of the foremost in the ranks of those who took on the work of this construction. He was imbued with such inner love for the cause that he now linked his entire existence in these last years with this construction.

And again I would like to repeat a word that I said this morning: When I think back to the hours when I met Hermann Linde, working up in our now-defunct dome room, working in harmony with our dear friend, his wife, when I discussed the most diverse matters with him up there that were related to the management of the building and to the role he held within this leadership, then in all of this lay, firstly, the revelation of his unlimited willingness to make sacrifices, the unlimited application of his artistic skill to what was to be built there, and on the other side there was also that reconciling spirit that balanced out the contradictions, which was always there with advice, rather than criticism.

Many a person has thought that either they themselves or others – as is always the case in life – could have done better what Hermann Linde has done. But these things are vain illusions. What matters when something real is brought into the world lies much more in what Hermann Linde had in such an outstanding degree than in what some believed he did not have. It would not have been possible to work with the things that were often criticized. Hermann Linde's approach to our work, which was so self-sacrificing and lovingly conciliatory, allowed us to work on every detail and as a whole. And if we are to talk about the workers in our cause, then Hermann Linde must be mentioned in the first row.

But then it must not be concealed how great our sorrow must be that he left us so early, for a difficult time that undoubtedly lies ahead of us. But he was so intimately connected with everything that concerns us here in our earthly existence that we may hope for the help that the souls from the spiritual realm can provide for those who have remained here from him to the greatest extent possible, if only we prove worthy of this help.

Many people are unaware of the extent of the individual concerns that weighed on the leading personalities during the last few years of the Dornach building work. Today it is self-evident to point out that Hermann Linde was one of those who bore these worries in the most beautiful way, but that Hermann Linde was also one of those who followed everything that happened here with a broad-minded interest and who would have liked to see many things develop into greater fruitfulness, precisely by reconciling the differences, than has been possible so far.

Many of us will remember how Hermann Linde was always among those who had the sincere desire to bring about a union of artists here among us. He was certainly not a person who would have excluded or restricted any individual activity. Out of the infinite kindness of his heart, he wanted to create a collaboration. And much of what has been achieved in this direction can be traced back to his initiative. And the fact that many of the seeds he has planted in this regard have not come to full fruition is truly not due to a lack of his own zeal. Let us remember with what heartfelt love and devotion he reported on the progress of the artistic work at our Goetheanum during the meetings of the Goetheanum Association here in this hall. Let us remember such things as what is most intimately connected with the history of our movement. We must not forget, especially at this moment, that it was Hermann Linde, for example, who gave the impetus for the small further training school established here at the Goetheanum, and that he devoted his special care and attention to this further training school.

But this is just one of the many gaps that arise in our ranks as a result of Hermann Linde's passing away from the physical plane. And those who will have the task of filling these gaps in some way will feel what Hermann Linde meant to us. Because what we take for granted in certain areas of life – that wherever a gap is created by a person, another will step in – is not the case at all.

And finally, Hermann Linde had to go through with us the pain that affected our and his work. He had to be among those who, in a short time, saw what had been built out of love and devotion dwindle to ruin. And it is truly true in the deepest sense, as I had to speak this morning, that for his earthly existence this broke his heart. This impression, which he experienced on New Year's Eve and which was a death for much of what our cause is, was deeply burning in Hermann Linde's soul. And the short span of time that he was still granted to spend on earth after the Goetheanum fire was entirely under this impression.

The last time he spent here on earth was a time of suffering. He also felt deeply in his innermost heart all that is being done against the anthroposophical movement by various opponents. That is why the last time he was allowed to dwell on earth was a time of suffering. And if pain is what deepens life in the spiritual world that follows on from the time on earth, Hermann Linde has taken much of noble pain into the form of existence that he has now entered. All this, my dear friends, should fill our soul today. And it should be the starting point for thoughts of devotion for this soul to remain in our souls. Then we will worthily find again the dear soul that has been taken from our physical sight, but that should remain with us in the most intense way in our spiritual sight.

If we can do this, if we can love Hermann Linde with the same intensity with which we loved him here, and with an ever-increasing strength, then in this case we fulfill the anthroposophical view of life that we should be able to fulfill.

The starting point for a spiritual community with this soul should be the days when he is snatched from our physical sight. He left behind his dear wife, our dear friend, and his dear daughter. We must understand the pain they feel over his death, in true inner warmth. We must understand that we make our thoughts about him, which are devoted to him, quite precious by remaining connected in the most intimate love, as long as we are granted this on earth, with these, his friends who have survived him. We must make it our will and his spiritual joy to be for those who remain behind what can serve him, when he looks down on what is happening on the site where he worked for so long, to give him inner spiritual and soul satisfaction. This is truly practical anthroposophy for the soul. If we know in the right sense that death is not the destroyer of life but the beginning of another form of life, then we must understand in the right sense that the love that has been assigned to one who is now dead to earthly life also enters into another form of existence with this death. And if we do not understand this metamorphosis of love, then we do not understand in the right sense the metamorphosis of life, which we think we understand when we join a spiritual movement like anthroposophy.

And so let us reflect today on how beautifully Hermann Linde has realized in his own heart the conviction that what a person is and does here on earth comes from the divine: Ex deo nascimur. It should be borne in mind that he found in his heart the strength to recognize, for earthly consciousness, that in this consciousness the power of Christ must come to life, so that what begins to die in man at birth may, through the experience of the power of Christ, gain the right to a new life: In Christo morimur. And in thinking of Hermann Linde today, we share the conviction that when the consciousness of our divine spiritual descent unites with the consciousness of union with the Christ impulse, we may live in the conviction that human existence is God-conscious and imbued with Christ: Per spiritum sanctum reviviscimus.

These thoughts affirm that in us which enables us, for all time, to look up in loyal thoughts to the soul of Hermann Linde, which will continue to work in the spiritual existence as a continuation of its earthly existence. As a sign of this, my dear friends, we rise from our seats.

My dear friends, perhaps it is appropriate on this day, in the short span of time that remains to us, to reflect on an event like this. We must be clear in the innermost part of our soul about how what we live through in our physical existence on earth, and also live through in our soul, is bound to the outer senses and to what the mind makes of the impressions of the outer senses. But the outer senses, with everything that the mind makes of them, do not follow us into the after-earthly existence. We hand over the external senses to the earthly existence with physical death. What the mind makes of the impressions of the outer senses, we hand over to the etheric world a few days after physical death. It melts away from us, and in all that follows, we are dependent on continuing to live out that which is immersed in the darkness of the unconscious while we live our earthly life.

To some extent, a person lives their life in the state between waking and sleeping. They are filled with what is experienced through the senses and through the mind, and what they find extinguished with death in the form in which they experience it here on earth. Every day, people experience the other side of existence between falling asleep and waking up. But even if the experiences within are immersed in the darkness of the unconscious for earthly consciousness, what appears to some to be of little importance for earthly existence: for what comes to life in the human soul when it has passed through the gate of death, it is precisely these experiences, which then transform into full consciousness, that are the most essential part of earthly life. What we go through here on earth in unconsciousness, we carry through the long time between death and a new life on earth.

The greatest difference between what we perceive, see and think here on earth and what we see on the other side after we have passed through the gate of death is in relation to the outer nature. Anyone who believes that they can exhaust what is hidden and revealed in nature with their physical senses and earthly mind while they are awake is mistaken. They only know the smallest part of nature. Nature has another essential side, the side that we live through between falling asleep and waking up, which is deeply hidden from the conscious mind, which in the truest sense of the word represents another side of our existence. The one side of existence that nature assigns to our earthly senses and our earthly mind is extremely different from the other side, which is assigned to our soul, our spiritual nature, which belongs to eternity.

He who can form a correct idea of this radical difference, he who realizes to what a high degree it is the case that, while nature reveals to our senses a completely unspiritual, un-animated entity, seen from the other side it is through and through an infinite abundance of spiritual entities in themselves, he can also comprehend what an enormous difference there is between the human being when it is clothed here in the physical body, and the human being when it has discarded the physical and etheric bodies and lives on in its soul-spiritual part beyond the gate of death. Not only in itself, but in the whole relationship to ourselves, there is a radical difference. We face a human being in earthly life, we experience together with him what happens in earthly life. What he experiences is imprinted on our earthly thoughts. Through our earthly thoughts it becomes our memory. During our time on earth, we carry this other person within us in our memory. But every time we see him again, it is not just the earthly memory that works in us, but what flows out of his soul as a living being and is poured into this earthly memory. Consider how the memory of a person that we carry within us is enlivened when we are face to face with him in earthly life, how infinitely more alive for earthly thinking is that which streams from him into our memory than is this memory itself.

And now he leaves us, out of the physical existence on earth. We are left with the memory, to which he himself adds nothing metamorphosing, nothing transforming, nothing enlivening after his death. We are left with the memory, just as we are left with thoughts of the outer nature when we see it with our physical senses, grasp them with our physical minds, where the things of nature add nothing to our knowledge, to our thoughts, where we must keep our thoughts all the more objective, the more we want to faithfully depict that which is, and where we must not be led astray by that which could modify these thoughts from life. But just as the other side of nature is different from what it assigns to us for the senses and for the earthly mind, so is that which a human being is when it has become merely an earthly memory for us, different from what it was when it lived these earthly memories day after day, from time to time. For from this point on, this human being now appears to us, to our experience, entirely on the other side of existence.

Just as we live in our sleep, so we live with the natural beings, who are inwardly spiritually alive, in contrast to what is dead and assigns its dead countenance to us for the earthly senses. So that part of the human being that which for our earthly life has now become only a memory, lives on this other side of existence, in that realm which we experience when we are pushed into unconsciousness, into the darkness of unconsciousness, in that realm which we pass through in our sleep.

Yes, my dear friends, just as our thoughts are invigorating and our impressions are vivid when the physical human being steps before us and we consciously experience him in his earthly consciousness, so we experience — unconsciously, but no less real for that — the approach, the coexistence with us in sleep of the one who has passed from earthly existence. To the same extent that the deceased disappears from our waking consciousness, he enters our sphere of life for our sleeping consciousness. And if we human souls, based on anthroposophical knowledge, know how we have to learn to adopt a completely different attitude to life for sleep than we do for waking, then we will feel what has been said.

If we could only live in such a way that the later always follows the earlier in physical time, we would never be able to experience the true spiritual. We only learn to experience the true spiritual when we can change the direction of life in the opposite direction. As paradoxical as it may seem to the physical thinker, all life in the spiritual takes place in the opposite direction. The wheel of life comes full circle. The end comes together with the beginning at last.

This seems so incredible to people on earth only because they have distanced themselves so far from any spiritual view. But every time we fall asleep, even if it is only for a moment, we experience time running backwards. For the path leading back to the spirit from which the world originates is a path leading forward.

And even what older cultural movements recognized as correct, namely that those born later return to the forefathers in death, is more correct than the idea we have in our seemingly so enlightened time.

But then, when we set out on our journey to the spiritual realm every night, in the opposite direction to the physical, those who have gone before us in physical death are the ones who precede us. And as we enter a spiritual world every night, we find, so to speak, figuratively speaking, the entities of the higher hierarchies at the front, who never incarnate on earth, and then, below them, the procession of those souls with whom we were fatefully connected and who passed through the gate of death earlier than we did. And that part of the journey, which, if not consciously, then at least in our unconscious thoughts we are allowed to follow in every state of sleep, that is the part in reality we follow them.

And if we can keep the memory of our dear dead alive and vivid, if we also have these thoughts in a vivid imagery again and again in our waking state, then what we lovingly carry within us as memories during waking hours makes it possible for the dead to have an effect in this world, to pour their will into it, and that the will of the living continues to live in the will of the dead. But also what we fully awaken again and again in our memories during waking hours for the dead, goes with us into the state of sleep as forces with a lasting effect. It is different for the dead when we fall asleep from a life in which we have forgotten our dead, or from a life in which we have lovingly called the images of our dead to our soul again and again. For what we carry into the world of the spirit every time we fall asleep becomes a sensation for the dead. There their soul perceives the images that we carry through the portal of sleep into the spiritual world every day. And so we can bring it about that the perceptive faculty of the dead unites with the images that we faithfully preserve for them during sleep. In this way we can bring it about that the will of the dead unites with our will through our thoughts, if we cherish and care for them in loyal remembrance when we are awake. And so we can learn in a real way to live with the dead.

Then the dead will find us worthy of living with them. And only then will the true human community arise, which is instinctive only within the physical world, but which also becomes spiritual for this physical world when the extinguishing of physical life on earth does not loosen or even break any spiritually formed bonds, when everything that is bound in the soul can remain, even though the outer earthly bonds are loosened or broken. This means that through the human soul the reality of the spirit is preserved when we admit the truth to the spirit in life by not depriving it of its reality, by not surrendering to the physical and sensual alone, but by finding the possibility to live freely in the spiritual and soul, as if compelled to do so in the physical and sensual.

This is what every death, and in particular the death of a dear friend, can remind us of, what it can call us to, not just as a dead memory, but as a lasting, living sensation, memory.