The Rudolf Steiner Archive

2. What Does Spiritual Science Have to Say About Life, Death, and the Immortality of the Human Soul?

[ 1 ] If it is, in a certain sense, difficult to address the fundamentals of the Spiritual Science, as understood here, as was done in the lecture the day before yesterday, it may well be said that the presentations regarding the research findings that are to form the subject of today’s lecture are, in a certain sense, actually a risk in the face of the modes of perception and habits of thought of the opposition. For while one will undoubtedly find many paradoxes in what the lecture from the day before yesterday expressed, when viewed from these modes of perception and habits of thought, it will certainly and understandably not be easy, from such a standpoint, to see serious research in what is to be said today. In wide circles of the present day, people will be far more inclined to see in it merely the ramblings of a strange dreamer. One must be fully aware of this when speaking of these things; aware that everything which later enters the general consciousness—even much of what later becomes self-evident—is, at the time of its first appearance, something paradoxical, something fantastical.

[ 2 ] I would like to preface this by noting just how fully aware the spiritual researcher is of the understandable reactions that may arise when he takes the liberty of sharing his research findings, which still seem quite paradoxical to today’s audience.

[ 3 ] Before I discuss these research findings, I would like to say a few introductory words to describe the fundamental attitude of the spiritual researcher. This attitude is, of course, quite different from the one one might have toward other fields of research. Whereas in one’s understanding of external life and also of conventional science today, one rightly feels that one possesses the powers of cognition within oneself, and that one need only, so to speak, put them into effect, then one can judge everything that nature itself and the researcher presents from nature—whereas in this research one devotes all one’s efforts precisely to researching, to observing things, and to recognizing their laws through the intellect—the spiritual researcher’s attitude toward truth, toward all striving for knowledge, is quite different. As one works one’s way into this spiritual research, one feels an ever-increasing need to devote all the work of the soul, all inner striving, first and foremost to preparation; and one increasingly feels: If one wishes to approach any truth from this or that field, one would actually still like to wait, to prepare oneself further and further, because one is aware that: The more effort and work one devotes to that path of the soul that must be traversed before one begins to research, the more one ripens oneself to receive the truth. For the reception of truth—that is what the actual, true Spiritual Science is all about. And this feeling, this mood, comes over the soul so strongly that one feels a sacred reverence about allowing things to approach oneself, and that, time and again, when faced with important, essential insights of spiritual research, one would rather wait than let things enter one’s consciousness too soon. This requires a very special mood in the spiritual researcher himself, that mood which gradually permeates all the work spoken of the day before yesterday as inner soul work in exercises, and which brings about in the spiritual researcher a certain attitude toward the truth—precisely the attitude of sacred reverence toward the truth.

[ 4 ] Having said this by way of introduction, I would now like—I would say—to address, with an open mind, what needs to be said about the important, significant “topic of this evening,” which is so close to every soul’s heart. Certainly, it is not the least intelligent minds among us who still cling to the opinion that the truths of faith are special and the truths of knowledge are also special, and who believe that everything the human being can conceive of as extending beyond birth and death is merely a matter of faith, not of strictly provable science. It is precisely this strict separation between faith and knowledge that is abolished by Spiritual Science. And yet one feels in harmony with what has long sought to enter into modern spiritual striving when one develops, in this sense, the truths that lie beyond death, as is to be done here; one feels in harmony with it when one repeatedly and again and again keeps in mind that the great Lessing did indeed grapple with one of the main truths of the Spiritual Science, grapple with it even in that work which he composed shortly before his death as his spiritual testament, as the mature fruit of his thinking and reflection: in his Education of the Human Race. Lessing does not shy away from saying that the belief in repeated earthly lives need not be an error simply because it arose, as it were, as one of the first things the human race encountered, before the prejudices of the school and the philosophers had yet cast something like a murky veil over what humanity knew about the afterlife at the dawn of its cultural development. — Thus one feels in harmony—many other minds could be cited—with the finest personalities who have contributed their efforts to the cultural development of humanity, precisely when one stands on the ground of the Spiritual Science.

[ 5 ] It was said the day before yesterday that the matters of spiritual life, the processes of that life, can only be explored when a person, through what was described the day before yesterday, comes to strengthen and invigorate the powers slumbering within their soul to such an extent that this soul finds the possibility—it was said by way of comparison: Just as the chemist extracts hydrogen from water—that the soul of the spiritual researcher finds the possibility, through soul exercises, to withdraw from the physical-bodily realm and to experience itself as separate from the physical-bodily realm, so that it can then attach meaning to the words: I experience myself as a soul-spiritual being outside my body, and my body, with everything in the sensory world that belongs to it, stands before me just as an external object stands before us when we look at it with our eyes or touch it with our hands. — And already when I was permitted to give a few public lectures here last time, I was able to draw attention to the significant moment that occurs in the life of the spiritual researcher when this spiritual researcher has truly matured through the exercises mentioned the day before yesterday. — Anyone who wishes to know more about these exercises will find it in my book How Does One Attain Knowledge of the Higher Worlds? and in my Outline of Esoteric Science. Here, too, I shall only refer in principle to what the spiritual researcher experiences. Once he has brought his soul to the point where it can step out of its body, this experience will come one day—or one might also say one night—for both are possible: in the midst of the ordinary events of the day, or in the middle of the night; and if properly prepared, neither will be disturbed by it. It can occur in a hundred different ways; I wish only to describe its typical character. It may occur in one way or another, but what I am about to describe will always occur in a typical manner: It happens that the person awakens, as it were, from sleep; they know: something is happening that is not a dream. They are detached from all external perception, all cares, all passions, everything that connects them to the day. Or the event occurs in the middle of the day, when one must pause in one’s mental image, when something entirely different enters into one’s mental image, into one’s consciousness. What then enters—it may be like this; it will always be similar to how I describe it; I would like to describe as concretely as possible how this shattering event can truly occur for the spiritual researcher—one may have the feeling: You are now as if in a house struck by lightning. Your surroundings crumble like a house struck by lightning. The lightning passes right through you. You feel as though everything to which you are materially connected is being separated from you by the elements; you feel detached from yourself, sustaining yourself as a spiritual being. It is the deepest, most shattering impression imaginable. From this moment on, or from a similar one, you know what it means to experience yourself in the soul itself, outside of your body. And the spiritual researchers of all ages have used an expression for this experience that seems entirely apt to those who know it. For there has always been a form of spiritual research, shaped precisely by the conditions of the various cultures. Today’s research differs from that of earlier times; it is commensurate with the advances of modern natural science. But what is achieved through it was also achieved through the methods made possible by the various cultures. Thus, spiritual researchers of various eras have described the experience just mentioned with the words: one has arrived, as a human being, at the gate of death. — And indeed, the mental image of an experience through death does occur. It does not occur immediately as a reality; for the spiritual researcher does return to his body, and everything is as before; he perceives the outer world once more. But everything he experiences is a reflection of what actually takes place when a human being passes through the gate of death, when external, physical life ceases and life after death begins.

[ 6 ] If one wishes to understand how the spiritual researcher arrives at the things being discussed here, one must bear in mind that through the careful preparation of his soul, as has been described, he comes to perceive things in a manner entirely different from that of the external senses; that he is truly able to look into those spheres of existence of which we are about to speak.

[ 7 ] The first thing the spiritual researcher experiences once he has overcome such a moment—one in which one stands at the threshold of death—could, in a certain sense, be described as follows: one reaches beyond human memory. Human memory, the human power of recollection, is, after all, something that lives in our soul, so to speak, as the beginning, one might say, of something spiritual. Even external philosophical researchers who know nothing of Spiritual Science recognize this. The French researcher Bergson, who has achieved such brilliant successes, already sees in human memory something purely spiritual that has nothing to do with biological or physiological processes. And once the prejudices of natural science, which still cling to almost everyone today, have passed, then people will realize how, within the treasure of our memory, there is already something present for the human soul that is, as it were, the beginning of a transition from what is bound to the senses and the brain to something purely spiritual-soulful. By, as it were, pushing our mental images back into memory, we do not preserve them through any physical processes, but purely in the soul. I can only hint at this. The scientific justification of what has just been said would take a great deal of time and require special lectures. Now, just as in ordinary life we perceive images of memory that rise up from the treasure of our soul—images which, as they appear, have nothing in them that might lead us to regard them as an illusion or a hallucination—so do but now not from the treasure of the soul, but from spiritual worlds, the spiritual processes and spiritual facts appear before the soul of the spiritual researcher; and one then realizes that behind what we call the treasure of memory, the human soul can experience something else. The spiritual researcher then sees, as it were, the following: Now you have drawn yourself out of your body with your soul; now you can truly take stock, because what you have acquired through the sensory world—the treasure of memory—has become like an external object. But this treasure of memory is like a veil that covers something that always lives in the soul, only unconsciously, something that is always there; but what is covered by recollection and memory is veiled. Yes, in these depths of the human soul there is something beneath that always lives within them; but as the human being spreads out his memories in his soul, he covers this subconscious spiritual-soul aspect. As the spiritual researcher ascends into the spiritual-soul realm, he does indeed have, one might say, his memories attached like the tail of a comet to his spiritual-soul being; but through these memories he can see through to something that could be called: forces of a higher order than the forces that preserve our memories. If the expression were not so frowned upon—but it is difficult to find appropriate terms for these realms that have nothing to do with the sensory world—one could use the expression: one ascends from memory to a super-memory. One gradually enters into what was called an imaginative mental image the day before yesterday. Whereas with memory one always has the feeling: The images of memory rise up, they present themselves to the soul as you passively surrender to them—one now dives into what lies behind memory and knows that one must actively help bring forth what then strives upward as imagination, as the content of a super-memory. But one also knows, through the soul prepared for these things, that what reveals itself there as lying beyond memory has always been there, that it was merely covered by memory, and one knows, by recognizing it in its essence, that what sinks down into the depths lying beneath the treasure of memory is itself something that now works upon our physical organism, that is active within it. One makes yet another, entirely different discovery. One makes the following discovery—and this discovery is extraordinarily significant for the relationship between spiritual research and natural science. Natural science confronts us today by saying: Everything that a human being feels, thinks, and wills is bound up with processes in the nervous system. It is right in this; but with its methods it cannot determine the way in which the life of the soul is bound up with the nervous system, just as, for example, thinking is bound up with the brain. One must go to much deeper foundations of the life of the soul. When one approaches this through spiritual research, one realizes: Yes, it is certainly correct for the ordinary mental image of everyday life, and also for scientific work, that all the thoughts we form—and all our sensations, for example—are bound to the brain; but how are they bound to the brain? It is the deeper soul, of which ordinary consciousness knows nothing, which is only discovered through spiritual research, that first works upon, so to speak, a certain part of the brain, that first sends its forces into the senses and the brain; and because this “subconscious” soul works upon the nervous system, the latter becomes a mirror to reflect what occurs in ordinary life. What occurs in ordinary life is the reflection of the soul-spiritual. Just as if a mirror were placed here and, when you approached it, you would not see yourself but merely your reflection—just so do you behave as you develop your everyday thinking, feeling, and willing. The deeper soul works specifically on the nervous system and the brain, and what it works out there is what enables something to be perceived. Thus it is the soul-spiritual that works on the eye and brings about certain processes within it. When these processes are brought about, the eye reflects back into the spiritual-soul what we call color. Thus it is the deeper soul-spiritual that works within the body. And spiritual science will lead humanity to this: to recognize that it is we ourselves who live within our mental images, and who, through our deeper being, first prepare the body so that it becomes a mirroring apparatus for what the soul then experiences. This is how it is in ordinary, external, spatial life. But the moment our mental images become memories, something else must take place; we must apply our attention if we do not want the images to flit past us like dreams, so that they may become memories. We must concentrate longer on everything that is to become a memory, everything that is to remain in our soul, than is necessary, let us say, for the mere mental image. A color impression would not remain in our memory if we looked at it only for as long as is necessary to evoke the color. If we look at it longer, we appeal to that power which preserves all this in our soul as memory. We push, as it were, our soul activity back into a deeper being, and this turns out not to be the physical body, but something finer, more ethereal than the physical body; and what in spiritual research can be described with the admittedly frowned-upon, and today quite unpopular, term “ethereal”—though the word does not have the meaning usually associated with it— it presents itself as an etheric body that is already of a spiritual nature.

[ 8 ] But our soul does not merely create these images of memory; rather, it acts upon itself through its interaction with the external world during the life between birth and death. And here the spiritual researcher discovers the remarkable fact that our memories remain mere mental images only because they are held back by the etheric body and are not allowed to enter the physical body. If these mental images were to flow into the physical body, if they were to become active there, they would merge into the formative forces, into the life forces of the physical body, and would permeate it throughout. By allowing our mental images to remain mere mental images—by not needing to let them merge into organic forces—they retain the character of memory, and we preserve them in our power of imagination. They can remain memories.

[ 9 ] But the soul also develops powers in life that are far stronger than those that give rise to memories, and these stronger powers are likewise initially preserved within the soul. Yet they lie like a super-memory behind the ordinary store of memories; they are within us. This is what the spiritual researcher now experiences when he looks through memory onto this super-memory-like treasure, knowing: There lives in your soul something that cannot work into your physical body, that lies beneath the surface of memory, but also does not become active in your physical body, now as it is between birth and death. There is something that does not remain a mere mental image, yet does not become an organically active force. The spiritual researcher experiences this by being outside his body. But at the same time he experiences the other aspect, which he can express when he becomes clear about the fact, by saying: Yes, I experience something in my soul that is within it, which, so to speak, finds no application because it cannot enter the body that has been formed since birth or, let us say, since conception, because it finds no place within it. And as the spiritual researcher now delves into what I have indicated here, he experiences it in such a way that he can recognize it, just as one recognizes the seed that is within a plant. The plant develops from the root to the fruit, in which the seed is found. But the seed is already predisposed within the entire plant. What is a seed has no purpose for this plant; it cannot pour its forces into this plant; yet it is within it—it is the predisposition for a subsequent plant, let us say, of the coming year. As the spiritual researcher delves downward, he immerses himself in something that is within him a soul core, a soul germ, of which he knows it is formed in this life between birth and death, but it does not develop its powers in this life; he dives down into the deeper layers of the soul and lies ready for a subsequent life, just as the seed in the plant’s fruit lies ready for the next plant, which could not develop without the preceding one.

[ 10 ] This is how one comes to understand the harmony between a person’s successive earthly lives and all of external nature, if one knows how to immerse oneself in the spiritual realm. The only important thing is that the spiritual researcher never loses sight of the following: What you must experience there can only be of a nature in which you become aware of your own activity again and again; for if you are not, if you do not grasp how it came about, then it becomes an illusion, a hallucination, or mere fantasy. It is a complete fallacy to object: “But how can the spiritual researcher know that what he discovers in this way is not a hallucination, not an illusion, not a fantasy? It could, after all, be a self-induced hallucination.” If the spiritual researcher were to approach what he experiences in the manner described—just as the diseased mind approaches a hallucination—then this objection would be entirely justified. For it presents itself in the mind like an external perception; one does not see through it. But the spiritual researcher learns to recognize this precisely through the proper preparations—as you can read in my treatise “How Does One Attain Knowledge of the Higher Worlds?” —that he can distinguish what is merely a reminiscence of the external world from what is fantasy and hallucination, toward which he remains passive; that he must distinguish this from what presents itself in such a way that he recognizes it just as one knows a letter or a word: what is written there on the paper does not signify itself, but something else. For the spiritual researcher does not use what is perceived in the same way one uses hallucinations, but rather in a way that can be compared to a spiritual reading of a text composed of imaginations that present themselves before him. Only when one learns to use in one’s mind, in a free manner, what one places there through one’s own activity, so that one lives within it as one lives within the written characters through which one sees what they signify; only by rising in such an inwardly empowered way to what enters into the soul’s vision can one arrive at truly perceiving what the processes and beings of the spiritual world are. But then, because one thereby gradually attunes oneself to that element of our soul which is not identical with the body, one enters into the being of which one can say that the quality of immortality belongs to it.

[ 11 ] Spiritual Science is not a speculative philosophy in which one ponders what reasons might exist for the immortality of the soul: Spiritual Science shows how one arrives at the soul itself, and from this true soul, it reveals what it truly is. It lays the soul bare, as it were; and then it turns out that what is laid bare as the soul is not a result of external physicality, but rather that this physicality is the result of what one discovers there. For when, on the one hand, one discovers within oneself the soul-core—which one senses and from which one experiences that it is the seed of a future earthly life— then one also experiences in this content of consciousness lying above the treasure of memory that which has been drawn into the human being as the human physical-bodily aspect before he began his existence as a physical being with birth or, let us say, conception. Just as it is the soul itself that, spatially speaking, prepares its brain—as we perceive—so that it may reflect its content, so one experiences that the spiritual-soul aspect, which has entered into one, existed in a spiritual world before birth, before conception, and acquired within it the powers to connect with what is given in physical substance by father and mother, to permeate itself with this substance, and to organize itself through it. One experiences that the human being, as he or she enters the world, is not merely the result of father and mother, but that the spiritual unites with the material, with what is given by father and mother; the spiritual that descends from spiritual worlds, where it lived between the last death and this conception. And the spiritual researcher, by coming to know that which lies beyond memory in the soul, can thereby also learn to recognize how the soul behaves when the physical no longer, so to speak, restrains the activity of this spiritual-soul aspect, when death has come upon the human being. When death has come upon a person, the soul initially lives—this is the fact that presents itself to spiritual research—in that which did not become physical during life; it lives in its treasure trove of memories. In the first period after death, a vast panorama of memories unfolds before the soul, encompassing everything the person experienced between birth and death. Even those events that were forgotten during life come to the surface. This experience of one’s entire memory lasts only a few days. The spiritual researcher can penetrate what appears as the first experience after death, because he comes to know the nature of memory. When the soul has left the body, then something truly becomes the content of consciousness for the spiritual researcher, just as it does for the dead person once they have passed through the gate of death. As soon as the soul is out of the body, the spiritual researcher also encounters what constitutes the entirety of its thought content, but now as a world; just as one is otherwise surrounded by mountains and clouds and stars and the sun and moon and rivers and cities, so, outside the body, one first has before one a tableau of what one has experienced; only one can see through this tableau; one can perceive its power of action. By—to use a trivial expression—becoming accustomed to truly seeing through these things out of the body, one also gradually comes to be able to consciously cast one’s gaze upon what the soul experiences after death, what it has experienced since the last death, and what lies ahead after the death that is yet to come. At first, it is this image of memory that spreads out, the thoughts that have accumulated. But behind it, another soul force emerges. Now that death has passed, this soul force is no longer hindered by the body; now it works in such a way that this image of memory disappears from the person’s surroundings after a few days.

[ 12 ] As I mentioned at the outset, one inevitably touches on sensitive topics when discussing the subject of today’s lecture, but one cannot avoid addressing these issues if one does not wish to resort to mere platitudes. I have attempted to describe what spiritual research has revealed regarding the duration of this first experience after death. It has been found that this review of the mental images of the experiences of the last life lasts for different lengths of time for different people—longer for one person, shorter for another; but generally speaking, about as long as the strength lasts during life that enables a person to stay awake when prevented from falling asleep. One person can barely stay awake for a single night without sleep overcoming them, another for many nights. This inner strength to fight sleep is the measure of the number of days that this recollection after death lasts. Then it disappears, and something else takes its place.

[ 13 ] What is now unfolding can only be fully grasped if one is already familiar with it through out-of-body experiences; but it is very difficult to find words for these experiences of the soul, which are of a completely different nature than those one experiences in everyday life. Our language is, after all, shaped for the sensory world. What lies outside the sensory world is experienced by the soul quite differently than here in the sensory world. Therefore, I ask you to excuse me if some expressions seem awkward or paradoxical to you; but you can be assured: When someone sets out to describe, using the very ordinary words of language, that which is difficult to put into words, they will not be able to describe directly from the soul’s experiences what is experienced in retrospect. — What the soul now experiences, what the spiritual researcher experiences outside the body, is precisely what I wish to describe with this expression—for it is neither feeling nor willing; it is something between feeling and willing—which I would like to call “willing feeling,” “feeling willing.” One does not possess this soul power, which one develops inwardly, in ordinary life at all. One knows it as a spiritual researcher. It is as if the will were moving with us through the world; and as if this will, I might say, as it moves along, were carrying on its wings or its waves that which now confronts us as a feeling, so that it is as if outside of us, as if playing upon the waves of the will. While we are otherwise accustomed to perceiving this feeling as something that is inwardly fused with us, it now becomes as if undulating and weaving upon the waves of the will; and yet we know, as we expand into the world through this experience, that what is out there—as willing feeling, as feeling will—what is out there like the perceptions of color and sound in the sensory world—is permeated by our being. There is a feeling out there that we perceive like light; but we know ourselves to be connected to it at the same time.

[ 14 ] But in the initial period following the review, the human being experiences this in such a way that the only world he initially perceives is, in essence, the one from which he has, so to speak, emerged through death. Once the tableau of memories has faded, this feeling-willing, willing-feeling unfolds and gains strength in the soul; but it expresses only things still connected to the last earthly life; so that we can characterize these things we experience there in roughly the following way: Earthly life never gives a person, in their experience, everything it could give them. A great many things remain such that we can say: We have not enjoyed everything that could have been enjoyed, everything that could have made an impression between birth and death. There is always, so to speak, something left behind between the lines of life—desires, wishes, love for other people, and so on. Unfinished business—to use the trivial expression—in the last life: that is what we look back upon longingly in spirit, and indeed have been looking back upon longingly in spirit for years now. In these years, it is the case that we have our world, so to speak, mainly in what we have been. We look into our last earthly existence, seeing in it what has remained unresolved. And precisely because we live for years in a sphere where nothing of this can be satisfied as it is on earth—since we have, after all, laid aside the physical organs for this purpose—we work our way out of such connections with our last earthly life in the soul.

[ 15 ] Here, too, Spiritual Science must take stock of the duration of these experiences, and the following can be said: The period of time that a person lives through, from very early childhood up to the point when they begin to recall their past, has no influence on the duration of the experiences that have just been described. Likewise, the time we continue to live through after the ages of twenty-five, twenty-six, and twenty-seven has no further influence. The years from about the age of four into one’s twenties indicate the length of time one must spend—in connection with one’s last earthly life—gathering experiences in the spiritual world and withdrawing from earthly life. It becomes clear to spiritual observation: As long as one needed, after the previous spiritual life, after having gone through conception and birth, to build up one’s body, as it were, with the upward-striving forces, up into the mid-twenties, that is, as long as one has needed to permeate life with the physical, organically fertile forces, to permeate it with the forces that desire and enjoy life—the time one must again find one’s way out of the last earthly life lasts about as long. So that when one reaches, say, the age of twelve, one may need only five years to emerge from the last earthly life, or seven years; but when one has reached, say, the age of fifty, the years after the mid-twenties contribute nothing special to the extension of the period just mentioned.

[ 16 ] It must be said of this period that, in a certain sense, what might be called the following begins to occur: human beings perceive spiritual processes and spiritual beings in their surroundings. I already hinted at this the day before yesterday: when the spiritual researcher experiences himself in his spiritual-soul life, he is within a real spiritual world. The deceased does indeed enter this spiritual world; but at first he is so preoccupied with his connections to his previous world—in the way we discussed earlier—that he can only establish a connection with what is in his spiritual surroundings by taking a detour through his former life. To give an example: Let us suppose that someone has passed through the gate of death. The looking back is over. He is living in this time of breaking free from the connections to his previous earthly life. Someone he loved is still in the physical body. The person who is still in this stage of experience we are just speaking of cannot look directly at the soul that is still on Earth; but a kind of shift takes place, as it were: in the last earthly life we loved the person who has remained behind; we look to the feeling of love when we are in the stage we are now discussing. Feelings are our outer world. By looking toward them, we find the path to the soul that is still on Earth. In the same way, we must also find the path through feeling to a soul that has already passed through the gate of death. Thus one can say: The human being lives with human souls as a soul after death, but initially by way of a detour through their own life.

[ 17 ] But more and more, a power is developing within human beings—a spiritual power—which, in turn, is known only to the spiritual researcher when he experiences himself spiritually and psychically outside of his body. There is now absolutely no expression left for this. For the other power, one can at least still say: “willing feeling” or “feeling will,” because it bears some resemblance to willing and feeling. Even though willing and feeling are objectified, they still have something in common: the things that surge about out there in willing and feeling have something in common with the impulses of feeling and will that we otherwise experience in life. But what the soul now experiences, what awakens as a force within it the more it distances itself in the manner described from its last earthly life—I can only describe this with an expression that may sound awkward in relation to ordinary language, but which is nevertheless apt; I can only call it: creative soul force, the soul’s creative power. It is something the soul now experiences directly. The soul fully experiences the transition into an activity; but at the same time, that this creative power truly develops, truly radiates from the soul into the surroundings—and, again, it is clumsy, but this expression must be used in order to make oneself understood—this power is something that radiates into the surroundings like a spiritual light, illuminating the spiritual processes and beings all around, so that we can see them; just as when the sun rises, we see external objects through the sun, so we see the spiritual processes and beings through our own inner luminous power, which pours forth. Now the time comes when the soul is in the spiritual environment to the extent that this creative power awakens within it to illuminate this world. And here the religions have not used insignificant language when they speak of life after death: this feeling of being in the creative power, this immersion in a spiritual environment that becomes visible through the sending forth of one’s own creative power, this experiencing of oneself in the pouring forth of light is a feeling of bliss. Even pain is thus experienced as bliss in this world. There the soul now experiences its further life.

[ 18 ] The point is that the soul can only undergo the experience just described in alternating states. — I am, however, entering into realms that seem entirely fantastical to the average person; but following the preparatory explanations that have now been given, I may also discuss these matters; for it must be clear that the spiritual researcher will never claim anything other than that such things can only become apparent to him when he experiences them out-of-body. — The soul thus experiences alternating states. It is not always in a state where it radiates its spiritual luminosity psychically into its surroundings, so that human souls and other beings are now around it and spiritual processes are experienced by it. It is not always the case that the soul lives in the outer spiritual world; rather, this state must alternate with a state in which the soul feels, as it were, that this outradiation of spiritual luminosity is dimming within itself. The soul becomes inwardly dull; it can no longer radiate its light onto its surroundings; it must gather its entire being within itself. And now comes the moment when, in the interval between death and a new birth, the soul lives a completely solitary life. This lasts a long time. If one wishes to compare it to ordinary life, one can say: Just as in ordinary life a person must alternate between sleep and wakefulness, so after death they must alternate between a life that pours out into the outer world and a life of inner solitude. Here, everything that was previously experienced in a state of expansion is drawn inward, yet the soul knows: You are now completely alone with yourself. Just as one becomes unconscious in sleep, so here one withdraws into oneself, yet does not become unconscious. The soul experiences a heightened consciousness precisely in these times of solitude, but it experiences this in such a way that it knows: Out there is the spiritual world, but you are alone with yourself; everything you experience, you experience within yourself. — What one experiences within oneself are the echoes of what one has experienced outside oneself. Only through this can the inner radiance regain its strength and emerge from the soul once more. And then one awakens spiritually again and experiences the other state once more.

[ 19 ] It is one of the most remarkable experiences to truly come to understand the meaning of the words that, during the time between death and a new birth, the soul lives in spiritual fellowship and solitude; that this alternation of states—between social experience and solitude in the spiritual world— albeit over much longer periods than day and night, that for this post-death experience it signifies something similar to sleeping and waking for physical experience. I have hinted at these conditions in my penultimate book: “The Threshold of the Spiritual World.” But as the soul lives on between death and a new birth, it gradually experiences a dimming, a fading of its luminous power. One might say: The experiences of inner solitude grow ever stronger and stronger. They gradually become such that the human being experiences an entire world within, one might say an entire cosmos. Truly, it becomes such that it is justified to say: a feeling akin to fear of oneself overtakes the human being when he discovers all that lies down there in the depths of the soul, and what now emerges roughly in the middle of life, between death and a new birth.

[ 20 ] And then comes the time I sought to depict in my fourth Mystery Play: “The Awakening of the Soul”—I sought to portray this time when human beings are capable only of inner experiences; when the nights of solitude grow longer and longer; when human beings can no longer awaken spiritually to a consciousness in which they radiate their luminous power all around them. I have tried to express what the human being then experiences with a symbolic expression, with the phrase: The midnight of spiritual existence between death and a new birth. It is the time when a person experiences everything that lies in the depths of their soul as their world, where they know only this: Beyond the shores of your soul lie the spiritual worlds, in which everything that exists of spiritual beings is found, in which all human souls are present—whether disembodied or embodied—and in which all other beings are found; but one knows this only because one carries the echoes of it within oneself. And now something arises in the soul that, once again, cannot be described with an ordinary word. Is it not true that ordinary language has the word “longing” for the most passive state in the soul? When we are longing in our physical experience, we are at our most passive. We long for something, we desire something we do not have—and longing certainly cannot bring about what we long for. We can only remain passive. But the soul’s powers take on a completely different character when the soul is outside the body. Out of the depths of solitude, out of what the soul experiences in the manner described in the spiritual midnight of the world, there arises a longing to live once more into the world from which one has been torn away in one’s solitude. And this longing now becomes active, and out of it arises something that is spiritually real, an organizing force. It truly becomes a new power of perception. This spiritual longing gives birth to a new power of the soul, once again a power that can now perceive an outer world, but a world that is at once both outer and inner: outer because it truly exists outside our being; inner because we regard it as the world we lived through in our previous life, the world of our former earthly incarnation. This now becomes our outer world out of our longing. We look upon all that remained unresolved in the previous life, and within us the longing builds up the strength to make amends for what the soul did that was bad, foolish, evil, or ugly in the previous earthly life, to make amends for it in a new life.

[ 21 ] This is the time when every human being can look back on their past earthly lives, the time when, between death and a new birth, all the deeds of their past lives truly stand before them—before their inner eye— and within them the impulse awakens to create such balances in a new earthly life that the new earthly experiences can live out and make amends for what was experienced in past lives. I have met people who said they had had enough of one life; even one person who was close to finding some sense in these repeated earthly lives—but then he wrote me a card from the next train station saying that he didn’t want to know anything about a next earthly life after all. But what matters is not that we can form a mental image of these repeated earthly lives, but that every soul in the situation just described looks back on its previous earthly lives and at the same time takes up within itself the tendency to experience a new earthly life that serves as a balance for the previous ones. And one further experiences that there are people to whom one has become indebted in many ways, or who have become indebted to one: this presents itself to the soul as a complement to one’s own earthly life. And the tendency arises to live together again with the people to whom one has become indebted, in order to make amends for what one has become indebted for. And the same tendency arises in other people. As a result, forces arise in various people who once lived at the same time; spiritual forces are stirred up that tend toward the earth. This is why, in the new earthly life, people who were once together come together again. What these souls owe one another must be balanced out. As I said, the tendencies converge there. And then one experiences this spiritual life between death and new birth further and further: the tendencies spoken of become increasingly imprinted and ingrained. They become living tendencies. And from what one has thus experienced regarding past earthly lives, the human being creates the archetype, the spiritual archetype of the new earthly life.

[ 22 ] He now creates this himself as time passes; he now creates what unites with the material substance provided by the father and mother in order to enter a new earthly life. And depending on how the inherited characteristics of the father and mother may be present in the material substance and related to the spiritual archetype, the spiritual archetype is drawn to the material before conception. So that one can say: The affinity between the inherited qualities and the archetype, which determines to which parental couple the soul feels magnetically drawn, into which life one finds oneself. Through this, the human being returns to Earth once more, unites once more with an earthly body. And spiritual research can now see what, in the child, one might say, develops in such a mysterious way—anyone who knows how to observe a child’s life will see that this is so—as the expressive facial expressions gradually emerge from within, as the skillful movements develop from the clumsy ones, as that which so visibly works from within shapes and sculpts the body; in all this the spiritual researcher sees that which has undergone the experiences between death and a new birth, of which we have just spoken, as it becomes more and more connected with the body—that is what the spiritual researcher sees. Now he understands why, at first, there can be no memories of these pre-birth experiences: The forces that could become powers of memory are used up in organizing the body. The child would remember everything from the past, for it possesses these forces; but the forces are transformed; just as the forces of pressure I generate when I run my finger across the table are transformed into heat, so these powers of memory are transformed into organizing forces. What organizes the child internally, what makes the brain plastic so that the child can later think and develop powers of memory within the physical body: this is transformed, retrospective power; it disappears in this form, in which it can develop retrospection, and organizes the body. And the spiritual that organizes the body through and through is the transformed soul, which has flowed into the body. And so we comprehend the life in which we now stand by understanding what took place outside of life, beyond death. What is at work in the human being in earthly life has appropriated its forces between death and a new birth. The forces that emerge there in a purely spiritual way are the powers of memory that have been transformed, that flow into the body and organize it through and through.

[ 23 ] Natural scientists will one day come to understand how the forces that lie purely in heredity also experience exhaustion in humans at the time when the capacity for heredity arises. Certain lower animals die at the very moment they become ready to give birth to another being; the forces that a human being must develop in order to have physical offspring and to bequeath something to them must be completed by the time of sexual maturity; I can only hint at this. Natural science and Spiritual Science will together be able to provide important insights into this. But in all that which acts as physical forces within the human being, the spiritual is at work. It is the spiritual forces that act within the physical body in such a way that they permeate this physical body. The physical body is, as it were, the reflection of the spiritual. And fundamentally, it is actually processes of destruction that bring about the reflection mentioned earlier. There are always processes of destruction at work when we see colors, when we hear sounds; even when we form mental images of memories, we are carrying out processes of destruction within ourselves. This is the basis for the necessity of sleep, so that human beings do not allow these processes of destruction to operate unchecked.

[ 24 ] Thus we live by permeating and energizing our bodies with the forces we acquire outside the body, and life can only be understood when we take into account the spiritual-soul aspect that is active within it. Spiritual Science is at a disadvantage compared to other sciences in that it cannot speak of death in plants and animals in the same way as it does in humans. What I have just said applies only to human beings. In this way, spiritual research broadens our perspective beyond what lies between birth and death. Indeed, even details become explicable to spiritual research. I can well imagine that those among the esteemed audience who have some interest in these findings of spiritual research would like to hear about the details; but I can only cite a few examples.

[ 25 ] First, let us consider an example that, paradoxical as it may sound, can seem like a true mystery of life, particularly to the spiritual researcher himself. This is the existence of criminal natures. Is it not true that spiritual research by no means takes the position that criminals deserve only pity and should not be punished? It is not the spiritual researcher’s place to interfere in the external affairs of the world; but the spiritual researcher wants to understand what confronts us in human life, and he wants to do so from the depths of the spiritual world. So we ask ourselves: What is the nature of a life that manifests itself as criminal? Well, it is easy to speak of these things, but the spiritual researcher must first wrest the answers to such questions from within himself, and he must, in essence, also force himself to speak of these things, because they appear so paradoxical to the present-day imagination. When the criminal is viewed from a spiritual perspective, it turns out that criminal natures are a kind of spiritual premature birth. For every soul, there is a possibility of descending from the spiritual worlds to connect with physical materiality, which is, in a sense, the normal state; but the tendencies leading toward this normality intersect with other tendencies, so that most people—but criminals especially so—descend into earthly life much earlier than should normally be the case. This turns out to be a curious phenomenon. Now, this has another consequence. One can only truly become fully imbued with the physical body—so that one stands in the physicality of the Earth as a fully developed human being—if one reincarnates at least approximately at the normal time. But if there are reasons, stemming from previous earthly lives, to descend to Earth earlier, one brings with one something that lives in the subconscious, of which one has no awareness at all. For there lives in the depths of the soul something that is like a taking of earthly life lightly, because one did not descend at the time when one could have connected most fully with the physical. Thus one connects only superficially. But one knows nothing of this. This becomes an inner mood of the soul: not taking life fully. And so it may be that in one’s ordinary conscious mind one even has an abnormally developed instinct for self-preservation, so that one faces the social world with hostility, displays the strongest egoism, so that one becomes a criminal—and yet in one’s inner nature, which one does not know, one has a certain superficiality, a taking life lightly, a refusal to place any value on this life. This is caused by a spiritual premature birth. If that is the case, then this life also comes into being in such a way that the person can fuel the overwhelming instinct for self-preservation through what they do not know—which is a light-hearted attitude toward life—and one sees this sprouting in criminal souls. Only when I knew that this was so did something else become clear to me. There is a dictionary of criminal slang. One understands inwardly the peculiar nature of criminal language—this taking life lightly in the words that, after all, spring from the soul’s subconscious—one understands this only when one knows what has just been indicated above. But it must be pointed out again and again that, in the totality of human earthly lives, what one earthly life commits is in turn balanced out, so that the criminal, precisely through what he must experience as a consequence of his criminal acts, ascends to other earthly lives in which a balance is achieved.

[ 26 ] But other things also become clear when we examine the mysteries of life through spiritual research. There we see people who are taken from us by misfortune. Strangely enough, it turns out that in the case of people who are snatched away by an accident at a time when they would not otherwise have had to leave the earth—that is, at a time beyond the reach of earthly physical forces— for example, when someone is struck by a locomotive at the age of thirty-five without seeking death, the forces that could still have been active remain within their body. As one departs from the physical world, these forces do not vanish into nothingness; rather, one sees how the soul-spiritual, the powers of intelligence, and the powers of precise thinking can actually be strengthened by such an accident, so that such a person can be reborn with stronger powers of intelligence than another who dies a natural death. One must come to terms with the fact that spiritual research, by surveying life from a broad perspective, must speak of many things differently than one does in ordinary life. Someone who dies early in their earthly life, let us say from an illness, and who endures much through this illness, prepares their soul through this illness in such a way that their powers of will can be strengthened. Dying prematurely from illness strengthens the will.

[ 27 ] Yes, some of this may seem like pure fantasy; but I am also aware—and I feel I should mention this—that I bear a certain responsibility when I discuss these matters, and that I would not discuss them if I did not know the methods of spiritual research by which these things can be known with just as much certainty as the things of the external world can be known. I would consider it the height of frivolity if these things were spoken of without there being within the soul a knowledge imbued with the very mood that has just been described.

[ 28 ] Thus, human life becomes comprehensible precisely through that which lies beyond physical life; and just as life unfolds between birth and death, it is the result of the life that lies beyond birth and death. To some, this may seem like a devaluation of life. So that it does not appear that way to my esteemed listeners, I would like to briefly repeat something. Someone might say: We are being made aware that what we experience in an earthly life, we have prepared for ourselves. It is true. But when we experience misfortune—we experience it because we have previously implanted in our soul the tendency to enter into this misfortune. Just as the Alpine plant does not thrive on the plain but seeks out the heights, so the human soul seeks out the situation where misfortune can befall it; it grows into what it experiences as fate. Just as it is natural for that plant to live in the Alps, so it is natural for the human soul to plunge into misfortune when it takes up within itself the tendency through the insight: only if you overcome this misfortune can you become more perfect in a relationship where you would have to remain imperfect if the misfortune had not befallen you. When someone says: thus we are made the smiths of our own misfortune; and when it is said that we should not only bear and endure our misfortune, but have in a certain sense even supernaturally deserved it: That can be no comfort to us! — in response to this, we must say what I have already made clear through a comparison: If someone has lived until the age of eighteen in abundance off his father’s pocket and without having learned anything, and his father then goes bankrupt, then, viewed from the outside, it may be a great misfortune if life now treats him harshly. And he is right to find life unhappy now. But suppose he has reached the age of fifty and views his life from a different perspective; then he says to himself: Had that misfortune not befallen me, I would not have become what I am now. For my father it was a misfortune; for me, it was a catalyst for my life’s development. — Nor are we always able to find the right perspective on a misfortune at the very moment we experience it. Before birth, we stand from a completely different perspective than afterward: namely, that what must be experienced in a new life creates a balance for what happened earlier. Thus we bring upon ourselves the misfortune that we later rightly endure with suffering, and about which we rightly lament, because we then view it solely from the perspective of physical-earthly experience.

[ 29 ] I would like to say a few more words about the time that elapses between death and a new birth. I have already mentioned the brief period of reflection following death, which lasts only a few days; the time that follows lasts longer—it spans decades. The spiritual researcher arrives at an understanding of how long this period lasts in roughly the following way. He must first ask himself—so that he can develop within himself the powers to perceive such a thing at all: What is it in your soul that, when you experience yourself outside the body, appears to you as something that can be carried from the soul through death? And there, strangely enough, one experiences that one takes something out of the body, while otherwise leaving everything behind. As a spiritual researcher, one leaves behind the passions, memories, and so on when one departs from the body; but one takes with one’s spiritual victories, one takes with one what one can only acquire in an earthly life, let us say, after the age of twenty. People today won’t like to hear this, because today people are already considered mature enough for the highest things before they turn twenty. You can see this in the newspapers; today, people who haven’t even reached the age of twenty often write articles. But the truth is this: what one truly experiences through oneself—in such a way that it becomes genuinely stored-up wisdom—happens because one has already experienced something and, looking back on the earlier experience from a later one, reflects upon it. This inner working upward through one’s own triumphs, this inner experience of the soul, is what turns out to be a seed—as it turns out—of what the soul then experiences between death and a new birth. And so the soul must live in such continuous overcoming, in the transformation of forces. Normally, the soul remains in the spiritual world between death and a new birth for as long as it has something to transform. Viewed from the other side, the following may be noted: We live our way into a certain time; we take in this or that, experience this or that, by belonging to this or that ethnic group. By having passed through death, we have formed our life experiences out of it. But the Earth is changing. It is not only the physical conditions that are changing. Let the esteemed listeners just think back, for example, to how the regions here, where Vienna now lies, were shaped around the founding of Christianity. But in even shorter periods of time, the cultural face of the Earth changes—the spiritual content of our surroundings, from which we draw our memories, our store of recollections. Now, the soul does not normally return to a new earthly life until it can enter a completely new spiritual environment. It turns out that the soul is not reborn without purpose, but so that it can experience something new. To do this, it must transform everything it experienced in its previous earthly life, for example, the ability to express itself in a particular language. It must transform this; it must acquire different linguistic abilities. This, then, is the time it takes—measured in centuries. It normally spans something like one to one and a half millennia. But as mentioned, certain circumstances can lead to spiritual “premature births.”

[ 30 ] Time is running out; I cannot dwell any longer on the details of these particular circumstances. I would just like to add that any member of this esteemed audience who might go home feeling: ‘Yes, none of this is really to be believed; how could anyone possibly know anything about it!’—should be reminded of what I mentioned at the outset: that what later became self-evident truths—insights that have penetrated every soul—were initially communicated as paradoxes of earthly culture. And anyone who wishes to pursue Spiritual Science today must familiarize themselves with how understandable it is that what will so surely take root in people’s minds—just as the Copernican worldview became established after initially being regarded by many as mere fantasy, even as something harmful—can be accepted as fantasy. But once more I may draw attention to the image that presents itself to the spiritual researcher and to those who are able to understand Spiritual Science in the sense mentioned the day before yesterday, in order to give them a strong awareness of the truth that will gradually prevail. Even if it must force its way through the narrowest crevices, so that the heaviest masses of prejudice press down upon it, it will still force its way through. This awareness is strengthened when one looks to Giordano Bruno; there one has the image before one: He stood before humanity in such a way that he shattered centuries-old prejudices by saying: People believed that when they looked up into the vast space above, the blue vault of heaven spread out; the sun and planets circled there, and the blue vault of heaven is a wall, a blue wall! — At that time, Giordano Bruno could say: This wall appears to you only because your powers of perception extend only that far. You construct this boundary yourselves; it does not exist at all. Infinities of space stretch out. And infinities of space are filled with infinite worlds.

[ 31 ] Today, the spiritual researcher must reflect on this expansion of the human gaze into the infinities of space; he must remember, as Giordano Bruno first pointed out, that the boundaries of space in the celestial vault are created solely by the limitations of human perception itself; he must point out that such a firmament also exists for the duration of human experience. When one surveys human life with the physical organs of perception and the intellect, one sees these boundaries—the boundaries of birth and death—just as one once saw the boundary of space in the blue vault of heaven, which in reality does not exist. So too is the boundary for the time of human experience between birth—or, let us say, conception—and death merely imposed by the limitations of human perception. And beyond birth or conception and death lies temporal infinity, and embedded within this temporal infinity are the repetitions of human earthly life—extending backward and forward—and those lives that flow between death and a new birth. I cannot, however, explain that all these repetitions once had a beginning, that humanity was born from the spiritual realm and found its home here—at that time, the Earth itself arose from the spiritual world— and that after humanity has passed through the repetitions on Earth, when the Earth itself falls away from the human souls, humanity then passes into another, re-spiritualized life. This can only be hinted at; more precise details can be found in my Occult Science.

[ 32 ] Even if, as suggested, the insights of Spiritual Science seem to contradict the thinking of our time, one must nevertheless say: In the intuitions of those who were the leaders of humanity—I concluded my reflection in the same vein the day before yesterday—one nevertheless finds what is now reviving in Spiritual Science. People did not have Spiritual Science as it is meant here; for it is a child of our time and will arise from the culture of our time; but those who felt themselves connected in their souls with the spirit of the universe, which surges and weaves within all human beings, imprinted upon their words that which Spiritual Science can fully affirm. Spiritual Science shows us how to understand life between birth and death by seeing, as we act and weave within this physical body and throughout physical life, that which is immortal, that which can also live in a spiritual world. Spiritual Science shows us that we have life in the body through life outside the body, so that no one can understand life between birth and death who does not understand life outside the body, in the spiritual firmament. Goethe expresses this—foreseeing the later insights of Spiritual Science—with words that not only clearly set forth Goethe’s commitment to an immortal life, but also express how he knew that the true value in understanding present life, in the experience of earthly existence, depends on one’s knowing that this earthly existence is permeated, illuminated, and suffused by that which is extraterrestrial, superterrestrial, and immortal. Therefore, this very insight of Spiritual Science—that a true inner essence of the mortal is recognized through the immortal—is summed up, as in a feeling, in the words with which Goethe once expressed his conviction: To those who do not wish to form a conception of another life from the peculiar essence of the present life, to them I would like to say with Goethe: ‘I would by no means wish to be deprived of the happiness of believing in a future continuation; indeed, I would say with Lorenzo de Medici that all those who hope for no other life are dead even in this one.’