It must be a fact for everyone who thinks about it that they will die some day. Most people do not think about it except when friends or relatives die, and it is at closer quarters than they are accustomed to, and then the thought strikes them with terror. Death is a riddle for most people. "No one has come back and told us how it is on the other side, and maybe there is not even any 'other side'", people usually say. It is therefore natural that in my lectures I also deal with the mystery of death, which will gradually cease being a mystery and will also cease being something that people feel anxious or terrified about.

It cannot be denied that these physical bodies no longer exist. Here you may argue that an older person's present body is the same as the body he or she had as a child and as a youth, only now it is worn out. But such a view is based on an illusion. An organism is a "living thing", an organisation of living micro-individuals that we call organs, cells, molecules and atoms. With the exception of the organs, the cycles of these micro-individuals have such a rapid pace that their physical existence is of far shorter duration than that of the macro-being. These beings are therefore continuously replaced in the organism of the macro-being. Every minute there are cells and atoms that are born and die in our organism, so our organism actually undergoes a continuous process of transformation, and in the course of only a few months is almost totally renewed. So, it is not an insignificant number of bodies an older person has already left behind. Every renewal must be perceived as a new body. But you do not notice these reincarnations or rebirths very much since, behind these transformations, you carry on a continuous, uninterrupted experience of life. The replacement takes place gradually and in such a gentle and harmonious way that it does not normally disturb or interrupt the experience of life. But if one imagines that the replacement of all these micro-beings were to occur at the same time, the organism would have to die and an entirely new organism would have to replace it. A kind of death process would then have to take place between these replacements. The body we have as a child would then be unchangeable until that moment when we were mature enough to take possession of the body we have in youth, and the concept of "growing", in the sense in which we now know it, would be unknown to us. The replacement that could not take place gradually must then take place suddenly. We would have to fall into a kind of sleep or dormant state, and during this sleep the new body, which should bear our youth-consciousness, must grow quickly and the child-body must just as quickly shrivel up and be discarded in favour of the new. We would then wake up in a new body and use it for a period until a new replacement could occur.

I have touched on all of this only because in reality it lifts a first little corner of the veil covering the process that people call "death", a process that very often terrifies them. But the human being has no reasons to be afraid of death other than those created by itself. And through spiritual science the modern seeker has the possibility of becoming familiar with what happens during the process of death, so that anxiety and uncertainty can be overcome and replaced by confidence and peace of mind. It is quite true that after the process of death with which people are familiar only the discarded physical body or corpse remains. One is not able to see the being appear in a new form. But is this an irrefutable proof that the consciousness is wiped out when the organism decomposes? No – we can physically experience another person's consciousness only when this other person has a physical body through which to manifest himself, just as we can experience radio waves only when there is a radio through which they are transformed into sound waves.

When the transformation of the organism, the principle of rebirth or reincarnation, is thus subject to evolution, there must be a goal for this evolution, and this is to make the replacement more and more imperceptible. Terrestrial human beings and the categories of beings related to them have thus reached this goal to perfection within the individual terrestrial life. Indeed, they have reached such a degree of perfection that the human being does not notice the replacement of his organism at all and denies reincarnation. Only the process of replacement that is still imperfect and called "death" is noticed at the moment. A partial replacement of the organism has not yet been able to be created here, and human beings are subject to the total replacement of the organism, believing because they are used only to a "partial death", that the total replacement of the organism is tantamount to "total death". But it is only for a short time that people will have such a belief based on lack of knowledge of the eternal laws of life. Many seekers have already begun to succeed in finding a solution to the riddle of death.

Until this epoch of evolution has been reached, however, the terrestrial human being must still experience its existence as being demarcated into separate physical and spiritual lives, where the transitions can occur only as total replacements of the organisms, which in turn usually cause the being to be conscious in only one of the two spheres in which it finds itself at the moment. Often during its stay in the physical world, at any rate, it is apt to deny the existence of the other sphere. In principle it is in a way the same as if a caterpillar were to deny the existence of a butterfly. Through modern spiritual science, however, the seeking "human caterpillars" of our time have the possibility to become familiar with something other than their own little local "caterpillar world". They can acquire an overview of the evolution of life, of the process of creation in the midst of which they are situated, and they can acquire knowledge about what promotes the development of that state in which pain, suffering and death are totally overcome.