Many people read with a truly religious feeling, reread and even know by heart large parts and texts of the Bible, but this does not mean that they understand them. Let us take for example the things said by Apostle Paul. Materialism in our time is an obstacle for the deep inner understanding of modern man. Particularly with respect to concepts such as “sin” and “debt”. These deeper understandings can be acquired, naturally by the people who are looking for them, through studying the Spiritual Science of Anthroposophy.
Immortality of the human soul means the continuation of consciousness, of the I-consciousness after death. If man feels himself alive after death and is aware that he has not died and that he has some kind of consciousness, although the conditions surrounding him are different, this is not enough. After dying, man carries the heritage of his thinking, such as it was on the Earth.
If man worldview was limited only to his material understandings and interests, when he finds himself in a different world, where nothing is as it was on the earth – then what exists in that other world as life, what makes man a human being, will not be present for such a person. I already wrote about loneliness of man after death – to find yourself in a world, where you are aware that you are alive and awake, but you don’t have the consciousness to grasp the beings dwelling in that world and to communicate with them – this is something really very sad. For the Spiritual World, where there is no death, this state of mind means death in that world.
Immortality stands for the continuation of consciousness – finding yourself in a new world with new conditions and beings, expanding in it, in addition to the consciousness that you are alive, you should be able to communicate with this world, which is full of life and Beings. One can speak about immortality only when the individual consciousness is maintained.
This individual consciousness after death, however, depends on “debt” and “sin”. Some people, even if they have advanced in their spiritual understanding, think that believing in the fair law of karma means that the errors committed by an individual in some incarnation are carried forward in later times and in the course of incarnations there comes redemption of debts. Spiritual Science reveals that this is not so simple. Naturally, the correctly developing man will make efforts to live righteously and will try to rectify his errors and the wrong things he realizes he has done earlier, at least in his latest life. From the cosmic aspect, while we are on the Earth, we don’t have such memory to remember when and in which incarnation we made mistakes and committed sins. Our current life with the diseases we carry, our suffering, the losses we sustain and the probations we go through are the result of those past “unremembered” mistakes. In this life, we also often act incorrectly and commit wrongs, but becoming aware of them, we can rectify them while we are still living. There is always a way to do this and this is the meaning of paying off our debts. Thus, with respect to our personal perfection it is appropriate that each man makes personal endeavours to rectify his mistakes and not to commit sins. The sin we commit is not only our concern, affecting only us, but this sin is an objective fact in the world, in respect of the cosmos. The fact that, let us say, we caused physical suffering to someone, committed a murder, theft, blackmail, fraud, or caused some psychic suffering, we could rectify this in our next life by doing something to compensate our deed, but this culpable deed we committed would continue to exist for the objective course of the world. We should learn to make difference between the consequences of a sin for ourselves and the consequences of a sin for the objective progress of the world, in the higher worlds, which we don’t see. The cosmic justice always remains in existence. We make our mistakes, we carry the responsibility for them and strive to rectify them in the course of our incarnations, but the objective debt for the world remains. It is this debt that Christ undertook upon Himself and only He is capable of redeeming our debts. I have something more to say about this later, while now I want to draw your attention to a human foolishness, caused by curiosity, but such curiosity will be better restrained, until man has not changed his understanding in the right direction.