Birth and Death: Revelations of Love and Freedom

Rudolf Steiner, lecture of December 11, 1920:

"What enables us to gradually transform ourselves from a soul-spiritual being into a physical-corporeal one, so that we become the latter and unite with it? We can grasp this if we learn what the moral quality of love is. A man enters the physical world through love by pouring himself into a physical body, and this is an important truth. And through what does he leave again? He takes himself back out of his physical-corporeal metamorphosis, he changes himself back — and freedom is the only force that enables him to do this; so that we say that our further development and passage through death occurs through freedom. We are born through cosmic love and we go through the portal of death and into the spiritual-soul world through the freedom force that we have in us. When we develop love in the world it is basically the echo of the soul-spiritual being which we had before conception. And when we develop freedom or spiritual activity between birth and death we are prophetically developing what will be our most important force when we have left our body through death. What does it really mean from a cosmic viewpoint to be a free being? To be a free being and to be able to change oneself from the physical-corporeal into the soul-spiritual basically means to be able to die, whereas love means being able to transform oneself from the soul-spiritual into the physical-corporeal. From a cosmic viewpoint the ability to love is the ability to live. Although natural scientists look upon birth and death as natural processes or phenomena, you see here how these processes can be looked upon as revelations of love and freedom."