We are going to look at the matter in a slightly different way.

The living being consists of the being's kernel, an I, which is completely outside of time and space, and which exists under completely different laws than what we can sense and observe. This I has a superconsciousness. This superconsciousness is also beyond time and space. It is outside of reincarnation. It is outside of death, and in a way it is outside of life, since both these realities are something created.

That which is eternal is existence. The I has an eternal existence. But there would not be so much to this existence, if there were not at the same time something called life. Life is the experiences. It is being able to experience that one exists and equally it is being able to make it known that one exists. This is assisted by what we call mentality or consciousness.

The part of our physical organism that is completely physical is the mineral part, that is to say our nails and our hair. We can clip and cut these phenomena and we do not feel it at all. Why do we not feel it? Because here there is no awake day-consciousness.

It is only the nails and the other mineral parts of our physical organism that are completely physical. All the other parts are not exclusively physical. They are also spiritual. How can we be sure of this? We can be sure of it partly due to the fact that physical matter is mixed with a mental energy called instinct. In this way a state emerged in physical matter that caused it to appear as vegetable matter, that is to say physical matter directed by instinct. What is instinct? Instinct is a form of energy that can connect with physical matter and direct it in certain definite forms. And these forms appear as the beginnings of the creation of organisms. The organs that are now so perfect in our animal organism began to take form, or have their origin, in vegetable matter.

Vegetable matter became mixed with yet another energy. This energy was feeling. And so vegetable matter became animal matter, in other words what we know as flesh and blood. It is mainly this matter that the physical organism consists of.

Yet another energy plays a part in the physical organism, and that is intelligence. Physical matter is directed with the help of the animal organism. We can see how the living being can direct matter and can also build up its physical organism in logical forms so that it becomes a perfect tool.

There are two more energies that we know that also penetrate matter, that are also found in physical matter, or in the organism, and they are intuition and memory.

There therefore has to be an organ for instinct. Instinct is present in us. It stimulates all the functions that lie outside of the control of our will, all the functions that we do not have anything to do with, such as the beating of the heart and the pulse. The breathing is also something that we cannot stop. It is completely automatic. And the glandular functions and the digestion. All these functions take place automatically. And these automatic processes are taken care of exclusively by instinct.

Just like instinct, each of the other forms of energy also has a particular body through which it is directed, reaches a certain strength, and expresses a certain force or lack of force, all according to the current need that there is for it in the organism in question.

And as the other forms of energy, for example feeling, also have a certain form of expression in the being, there is also something that decides that each energy has precisely its form of expression. For this reason, there is also a body or organ for feeling, one for intelligence, one for intuition and one for memory.

When we look at each other or we see the details in our surroundings – colours, light and matter, human beings – it is an interplay of these various organs. What we can see is not only a physical phenomenon. The physical function ceases already in the background of the eye. Here on a membrane a physical image of whatever is in front of us is formed. But it would be of no significance if it was just the formation of a physical image. The same thing would apply to a camera. The camera cannot experience anything. But the human being or the animal, the living being, can perceive. There the image that is in the membrane in the eye is transformed to constitute a statement. That takes place with the help of feeling. That takes place with the help of intelligence. That takes place with the help of memory.

If we had no memory we would be unable to recognise anything at all. We would be unable to learn anything at all. Every time we experienced something, or every time we spoke to a person, this thing or this person would be a totally new experience to us. And once we had turned away from the person, we would not be able to remember that we had talked to him. But this is not now the case. Every experience leaves an impression or a mark in the consciousness so that with the help of memory we can remember what we have seen before. And when we see the same thing, we recognise it.

Without intelligence we would be totally unable to calculate anything at all. It would be impossible for us to work out that two and two is four. It would be completely impossible to carry out the most elementary forms of analysis.

If we had no feeling we would be unable to sense. We would be unable to sense the difference between pleasure and displeasure. We would be unable to notice the slightest thing. We would be able to flay and cut our organism without being able to feel the slightest sign of it. But feeling also shows itself on a higher plane, in such a way that we can sense wellbeing and displeasure also in our mentality, in our thoughts.

And if we did not have the energy of gravity – that is to say the energy of the sun or the energy of fire – if this was not present in us, we would have no normal body temperature. There is fire in us! Our normal temperature is a balance between the fire and the coldness of the universe. And that is of very great importance because it is due to this combination in us that we have the strength to lift our arm or to speak a word. With the help of the combination of these two energies, the energy of gravity and the energy of feeling, our heart and our breathing can function, and our entire intake of nourishment and digestion can take place. Our entire sensory perception, our entire exercising of will, is based on the presence of these two energies.

The physical organism is therefore not a physical organism pure and simple. It is a combination of the various mental energies that together temporarily appear in a form that we call physical, because the organism it built in such a way that we, with the help of certain physical senses, can observe it and lead the observations into the area in our subconsciousness where we can analyse them. We can perceive and feel and remember and so on. Everything we can sense is lead into that area.

Even though the physical organism is murdered, the human being does not die. It does not lose its consciousness. It does not cease to experience life. That is a great illusion! But the human being ceases to be able to sense or receive impressions from the material world. They cannot do that – not directly – like they can when they have the physical organism. But the organs that make up the other part of the organism are on the mental plane. Even though the being has lost its physical organism, it still has instinct, feeling, intuition, intelligence and memory. The organism exists as a concerted combination of these characteristics. So real death – real, absolute death – does not exist.

But that is not how it is! No human being can live or die with such a philosophy. Human beings can live with it only as long as things are going well in material existence, and they have a healthy body and are economically well off and everything is in order. But if this person falls on hard times they will certainly discover their helplessness. Human beings cannot live with the philosophy that they are mortal.

But the human being goes on living on the spiritual plane. Straight away one of the other organs bears the consciousness. In the case of terrestrial human beings, and also in the case of animals, the body of feeling bears the consciousness, just as soon as the physical body is destroyed or separated due to old age. The arrangement is so ingenious that when the physical body, which is a tool, has been injured and cannot be used, either as the result of a catastrophe or old age, it separates itself from the actual being, which continues to live on the mental plane.

The person who pronounced this sentence was Christ himself. But one has to understand that at that time people had not reached the point where they knew about the spiritual structure. Of course, Christ knew about the spiritual structure. But he was faced with people who it was totally impossible to explain this to. They had no vocabulary with which he could make them understand, and they had no desire for this knowledge. For this reason he had to make do with saying "the soul".

They said that a living being consisted only of soul and body. And if it consisted only of soul and body it is correct that "one cannot kill the soul". But in the true analysis of the living being the soul is not the actual living being. The "soul" is then the subconsciousness and the superconsciousness. But as well as these two realities there exists the immortal I. And the superconsciousness is also totally invulnerable, totally immortal.

The subconscious spiritual bodies that create the day- and night-consciousness are what, in the spiritual science of the future, will appear as the "soul". So we can say that the living being consists of an I, a superconsciousness, a soul and a physical body.

When we are now talking about spiritual suicide, it is something that should correspond to physical suicide. And there is absolutely no reason why not. One can perfectly well commit spiritual suicide.

You now know that physical suicide does not actually murder the whole. It is not a complete killing of the individual.

Neither is spiritual suicide a complete killing, a complete annihilation of the individual. It is merely a breaking down of the organs that I mentioned previously.

We have these spiritual bodies: feeling, intelligence, intuition, memory and instinct. Each of these kinds of energy forms its own body, which – when we are in the physical organism – flows through this organism. But if we are not in the physical organism, it does not function on the physical plane but on the spiritual plane. These mental bodies have been fashioned. They have been created. They have been improved. They have come from primitive conditions just like the physical body, and they are therefore subject to creation. But everything that is subject to creation can be destroyed. It can be broken down. It can degenerate and it can be built up. It can be made perfect etc. It is subject to all these time- and space-dimensional phenomena, but the basic principle itself cannot be annihilated.

One can destroy one's mental bodies to such an extent that one can perfectly well be born in a physical body but one's intelligence is destroyed, one's ability to feel is destroyed, one's memory is destroyed, one's faculty of intuition is destroyed. What do you think a being looks like who comes to the Earth with such destroyed sensory organs? There are a great many of them. A great many human beings are born to this world in this state. We are not used to calling them spiritual corpses but they are in fact beings who have committed spiritual suicide.

Beings who are born after they have committed a culminatory spiritual suicide we know as "mentally disabled" beings. Mental disability is the greatest defect a living being can meet with. This is the culmination of the least expression of life. I once saw a person who – as far as I remember – was twenty years old. This person was like a little child. He was fed, and he had no sensory faculties. He did not recognise the people who were looking after him. He just lay there. His life functions were at a low level and there were no signs that he could be otherwise in this life.

So physical suicide is something one does with one's will. Spiritual suicide on the other hand is something that takes place totally without the being himself being aware of it. He knows nothing about it. He does not know how a spiritual suicide arises. The fact is that as long as one does not believe that there exist several lives, as long as one does not understand that one has come from previous lives and that the present life is merely a result of these previous lives, just as there will be lives in the future that will be a result of the present life, as long as one does not have this understanding, this knowledge, it stands to reason that one cannot know anything at all about spiritual suicide.

Spiritual suicide is not something that arises either as a result of a shock or an accident. It is not something that arises because one wants it. It is something that arises as a result of a derailment from the true and natural road of life ahead.

The same law applies here as it does when we look at trees. They cannot go on growing so that they grow up into the sky. At a certain point they stop. We can also see that with all the other phenomena in physical existence these creative processes have a certain limit that they can go up to, after which a new cycle begins.

The same also applies to people who commit suicide. The physical suicide can bring one to the very point where one does not experience on the physical plane, but one experiences on the spiritual plane. The spiritual suicide brings one to the point where one can experience neither physically nor spiritually. One can however experience a little bit. There is a kernel of life left behind that is untouchable and that can only just hold the consciousness alive. But all the special functions that should make life a divine experience are weakened.

Particularly in evidence in spiritual suicide are derailments, which human beings cause in good faith, thinking that they are entirely in contact with life.

They are phenomena that have a direct effect on the spiritual bodies. Human beings can do things that can directly break down their intelligence. They can do things that can directly break down their memory. They can do things that can directly break down their feeling. They can do things that can directly break down their instinct.

They can do such a variety of things here on the material plane, things that have a real influence on the various spiritual organs. And human beings do such things! It is not something that they can be blamed for. They cannot know. They have to go through this process.

But not everybody. To the extent that they can bring themselves to know and understand the true road of life, not all of them need to take that road.

Examples are always having to be made. Life is continually making examples. It is always making tremendous experiences through which things can become concrete facts, so that it is not only ideas that are presented to human beings. There have to be really tangible experiences.

It would mean that you were more feeble than an idiot. You would have absolutely no specific ideas, you would be unable to calculate anything, you would be unable to decide anything. What would be the meaning of a free will if we had no idea of how it should be used and what it should be used for? If we could not know that there was something that was good and something that was bad, that there was something that was wrong and something that was right, what should we use our free will for?

That is why it is completely natural that there are possibilities of derailments. There are possibilities of spiritual suicide as much as physical suicide.

It is absolutely foolish to sprinkle poison in one's stomach, where there should be healthy and tasty food. It is foolish to fill oneself up with poisonous substances. Is that what one does? Of course, what is alcohol? What are narcotics? All these poisonous substances are to a great extent mental energies, which therefore have a direct effect on the mental organs.

We can see that by smoking tobacco a great many human beings have to a great extent grown accustomed to filling their lungs with poisonous fumes. They more or less accustom themselves to not being able to live without having this extremely poisonous state in their lungs.

Doctors are beginning to say that smoking can cause cancer. Yes, it is true, it can. But that is nothing compared to what it does to the mental organs. One should not believe that just because it finds an outlet as cancer, that that is the end of the matter. What does it mean when such a cancer patient dies? Is that the end of the matter for him? It definitely isn't! If it has reached the stage of being cancer, and it has become so serious that it murders, it kills, the human being's faculty for physical existence, it will then have brought about in the mental structure an undermining of the talent for breathing and an undermining of the talents for creating lungs. The talent that forms the basis of the breathing is undermined. It is undermined every single time that one lights and smokes a cigarette.

I have absolutely nothing against you smoking. I am not criticising you. I presume that you would like to know how things work. You would like to have the solution to such phenomena, and so I have to follow you. And when I follow you, I have to tell you about tobacco and spirits etc. So you have to understand that it is said in all friendship. I will not be angry or annoyed with you if I see you smoking a cigarette in the street or some other place, just as long as you do not smoke here in the lecture hall.

And it is the same with eating meat. Is that really so bad? It is bad in the sense that to make such a mistake in one life after the other contributes to breaking down the human being's inner core.

It has become a habit. It is a derailment. It is debauchery. It is quite harmless in one single life or at one single gathering. But if you have the opportunity of seeing the perspective unrolling in front of you so that you can see from one life to the other, you would see that it is a road that leads downwards. A human being that had come up to a very high plane, is now going downwards and will end up lower than the animals. That is spiritual suicide!

It is a tiny step here and a tiny step there. Perhaps it is only a little bit in one life, but when it is another bit in the next life, and in the next?

Why are children backward at school? Why are they not normally gifted? What is the reason for it? Because also here there is something that has broken down the talent kernels, so that they are not normally gifted, so that they are not so quick in their understanding, and cannot keep up. It is their intelligence that there is something wrong with, it is their memory that there is possibly something wrong with. Why are people dyslexic? Why are there so many mental phenomena that are faulty? They are all the effects of suicide. They are all expressions of the fact that something is being undermined.

Every single harmful thought that goes through our brain has an effect on one organ or another, on one part in the organism or another, so that it can either increase or undermine the force in these areas. This is not normal. What is normal, the normal strength, the normal supply of force to the various places, takes place through a truly well-balanced, normal thinking, a truly normal state of happiness, an everyday sense of wellbeing in being alive. This gives rise to the normal life force throughout the organism.

The various swings – from hot temper or anger, and then perhaps in the next moment up to powerful ecstasy, and then back to hot temper and anger, and so on – are powerful swings. When these are supplemented with poisonous fumes and poisonous drinks and also a permanently wrong kind of food, it is not so difficult to understand that it nevertheless must have a consequence. This consequence cannot be a perfect structure of the organism. It must be the opposite.

And this is what we can see. There is no shortage of proof. There is no shortage of facts. Is it not the case that we have a great many mentally disabled people, where suicide is at its culmination? And we have a great many other mental illnesses.

Just as when one smokes or when one drinks, it is because the normal sense of taste is not nearly enough. One wants it to be severely irritating.

In the case of pyromaniacs, it is to do with sexuality. Something that should be the most divine has become an excessive desire. More tension is needed! The normal tension that is a result of seeing the opposite sex or taking part in a sexual act in the natural way etc., has become something dormant. There is too little tension!

It is similar to an alcoholic. Would he appreciate some milk? A glass of milk is not something for him. Or a glass of water? "No let me have a beer!" That is how it is also with human beings' sexuality.

That is not the worst. It is much, much worse when a human being, in order to reach sexual satisfaction or their real sexual release, has to murder. He has to strangle. He has to see another human in fear of losing their life, because this tension is the one thing that he has to have in order to make his nerves react in such a way that he can find a release. He has to see the very opposite of what is the meaning of life. For it is the meaning of life that a sexual release should be an experience of the previous "paradise". The "heaven" that human beings have left behind by being "driven out of paradise" is what they will experience a glimpse of in the sexual connection. It should be a culmination of love, but here it has become a culmination of hell. Why is that? It has turned into illnesses that lead human beings down towards the destruction of their consciousness. Already here it is impossible for human beings to think normally. They have to seek satisfaction in this way.

Do we not often see dramas involving stranglings taking place here and there? Are not stranglings on the increase? What is it that is taking place in these violent acts?

Human beings are beating other human beings who are not doing anything to provoke it. Again it is the tension-factor. Again it is the initial derailments of the sexual state. It is not because these human beings are lowly evolved. They are certainly not. They are outstandingly evolved, but they are in the initial stages of a derailment. And that is the case in many areas.

What about when grown human beings want to have sexual relations with children? That is also outrageous. The power of attraction of sexuality should be directed towards the mature, fully grown, fully open flower. Not towards the tender, little bud.

We should not presume that these derailments make human beings happy. It can be that they shed tears and are unhappy afterwards because they are particularly evolved in other fields. They are unhappy about the power that they have become a slave of, and that they have allowed to grow by practising it and cultivating it all the time, so that it has turned into giant-sized talents in these areas. It creates an enormous depression, quite apart from the conflict that such beings come into with society if they are locked up and find themselves in institutions for psychopaths or in prisons. In former times they would have been put to death and tortured. All this contributes to destroying the human being's sensation of real life.

This is how these talent kernels, which have arisen as a result of derailment, are healed, just like one can acquire a good talent kernel. One can become skilled in music and have outstanding talent kernels for music. One can have talent kernels for singing. One can have talent kernels for painting and drawing.

That is how one develops talent kernels for being an arsonist who causes death, talent kernels for strangling, for finding the most sophisticated, sadistic methods of achieving one's satisfaction. One can have outstanding talent kernels and become a genius in being demonic, in having devil consciousness. It sounds drastic, but that is how it is.

But they do not know what they are doing in their thinking, or regarding their intake of food, or what they are doing when they smoke and drink. They do not know what they are doing. They do not know whether it is something good. To them it seems pleasant and they think it is good. A completely different faculty of observation is needed, a completely different knowledge is needed, in order for human beings to become truly what they should become: "human beings in God's image".

There are therefore plenty of dangers surrounding human beings. But it is not such a big problem as long as human beings advance just far enough that they begin to understand things, begin to understand the analyses, begin to sense "life's speech".

It is therefore not such a big problem because it is like on the physical plane when a human being begins to understand what is the right kind of food and what training a human being should acquire etc. It is then possible for the human being to turn his existence around.

He can also learn in just the same way on the spiritual plane once he has reached the stage of having the desire to gain knowledge, the desire to arrive at the truth. And there are nowadays a great many people who have such a desire. They are now ready for the great truth, which is why it has been revealed on Earth.

It is not the intention of life that we should go on having institutions for the mentally disabled. It is not the intention of life that we should go on having people that to such an extent blindly gamble with their own experience of life. It is intended that we should be extremely logically thinking, clear-headed individuals that can radiate only love, that can sense only how life should be lived. That is what is intended.

We can see gangsters who are very smartly dressed in fine clothes and who have an expensive car, which is the result of their plundering and robbing. But how do these human beings eventually end up? If you were to see them in the next life and the life after that, you would then see some poor miserable wretch that has succumbed more and more to drink and who has been through more and more intellectually abnormal states. You can see how earthly punishment does not have much meaning. It is merely an emergency measure, a wall that people have temporarily erected against human beings' animal characteristics.

That is the very reason that experiences and illnesses, including mental illnesses and mental disability are shouting and screaming out to human beings: "Look out! Beware! Take care! That is how you will also end up! That is how you will end up if you go on like this!" It is a question of not sticking your fingers in your ears so that you do not hear. It is a question of opening your ears and using all you senses to attract to yourself what there is to learn, and in so doing you will be able to get the better of yourself. You will then not need to sink down to this culmination of darkness, where you are in a state in which – so to speak – all the destroyed talent kernels have to be removed from the individual and you have to begin to grow forward.

It is this light, this source of light that is present by divine decree in all living beings. It will signify the change, that is to say the turning point, in as much as a disgust for the derailed existence has gradually come about. The light is shining brighter and brighter ahead. The being is longing to become perfected, and so it begins to build up its existence.

New talent kernels begin to emerge, but they cannot be built up in one life. Three or four lives are needed. But they grow life by life. We can see that clearly. There are human beings who are more or less mentally disabled. One can observe all the stages, once one has learnt to recognise the symptoms and you know how they function.

We can see that it is all present here. It is an immense open book. It is a colossal training that life is giving human beings, gradually as we learn to read and understand this book, which is the expression of life itself.

Precisely because you cannot live as you would like to, precisely because life demands a certain way of living, there is then a possibility for human beings to use their will power, their energy and power, their desire and longing, to build themselves up to be perfected beings in "God's image".

Next comes that "You should love your neighbour as you love yourself". You should be a joy and a blessing to all that you come into contact with. And that does not mean only your surroundings: human beings, animals and plants. It also means the microbeings within your own self that you should love, and you should therefore never ever eat food that is bad or drink water that is unfit to drink or think harmful thoughts, because then you would really not love the microbeings within yourself, and that would create a hell, or illness and wretchedness.

These sentences by the world redeemer are the actual great answer, the truly enormous guiding cloud, the radiant cloud that leads the way. It is, as he says, "the fulfilment of all the laws".

I think you have now been given a little insight into seeing how you can be a joy and a blessing to everything that you come into contact with both outside and within yourself.

I think you have been given the opportunity to have a little sensation of how in this you have the very "compass" that will enable you to become a "human being in God's image"