Death is not, as many millions of people believe, losing one's physical body. Quite the opposite. One could say that that has not the least little bit to do with real death. Real death can exist only as a loss of knowledge and the resultant loss of intellectual capability. But because a being loses its physical body it does not lose its knowledge or intellectual capability, even though it is temporarily brought to a standstill in its physical capability. Real death can therefore be only a situation in which the being's cosmic spiritual faculties degenerate and in which the resultant lack of faculty to understand rules the individual. Only the culmination of this loss of spiritual faculty or intellectuality can express absolute death. All the other forms of loss of senses or spiritual faculties that occur are nothing more than purely temporary lesions, scratches or wounds caused by the struggle for existence, the healing of which, over the course of several lives, is absolutely inevitable and therefore only a question of time.
      We have therefore in everyday existence two forms of loss of consciousness, namely the temporary or acute loss that is brought about through the struggle for existence, and the chronic loss of consciousness appearing in the form of faculty degeneration, which in this case means a loss of spiritual faculties that is not caused in an unnatural way through mutilation or neglect of the organs or through some other infringement of the laws of life. One can actually describe the first form of loss of consciousness or the faculties, as the wear and tear on the organs, nerves and thereby the senses that the everyday drive for self-preservation or struggle for existence demands. Injuries to the eyes, ears, arms and legs as well as to the internal organs: the stomach, intestines, lungs, heart and brain etc., in fact, damage that leads right up to so-called death or the total injuring of the whole physical organism so that it can no longer be maintained by the I, thus constitute merely temporary natural defects that a life in the zone of the killing principle or the home of warfare inevitably entails for the tools that the I has to use in this struggle for existence. And because the living being's physical organism is nothing more than just such a tool, the I cannot possibly avoid this tool being affected by the materials, forces and forms of energy that it, using the aforementioned tools, seeks to juggle with. But because, in the form of reincarnation, it has the ability to build new bodies as the old ones wear out, no injury, wear and tear or total destruction of the being's physical organism can be anything other than a certain temporary, superficial phenomenon, which it can relatively quickly make up for by constructing and improving a completely new body or a new organism, and so on. That this has nothing to do with death, but on the contrary reveals to the very highest degree the imperishability of life, hereby becomes a fact for the advanced researcher.