Immortality is the negation of death. We do not usually speak

In the luminous and mysterious words of Rudolf Steiner, philosopher and seer of the spirit, we encounter a thought both humbling and exalting: “Immortality is the negation of death. We do not usually speak about ‘innatality’—about having not yet been born—yet this is something we would have to regard as the other aspect of the human soul. We are just as unborn as we are immortal.” In this profound utterance, Steiner draws back the veil of existence and invites us to see the human soul not as a brief flicker between birth and death, but as an eternal flame—one that shines before birth and after death alike. His words challenge our ordinary view of life as a single line from beginning to end; instead, he reveals it as a circle, a rhythm, a divine breathing of the cosmos itself.

Rudolf Steiner, born in 1861, was no ordinary thinker. He was a man who sought to unite science, art, and spirit into a single vision of truth. Through his work in philosophy and the spiritual movement he called Anthroposophy, he taught that human beings are more than flesh—they are travelers of eternity. When he speaks of immortality, he does not mean simply endless continuation after death; he means the wholeness of existence—the realization that we belong to realms beyond time, that we come from eternity and return to it. But what makes this quote remarkable is his pairing of immortality with innatality, the state of not yet being born. He reminds us that just as our souls will live beyond death, so too they lived before birth. We are not created from nothing; we are awakened into the physical world for a time, as a wave rises from the ocean and then returns to it.

To say that we are “just as unborn as we are immortal” is to understand that the human soul exists outside the boundaries of what the senses can perceive. Birth and death, those two great gates of mystery, are not opposites but mirrors of each other—thresholds through which the eternal self passes, clothed first in the body, then freed from it. In death, we lose form but gain boundlessness; in birth, we gain form but lose remembrance. The ancients knew this well. The Greek philosopher Plato, in his dialogue Phaedo, taught that learning is but remembering—that our souls knew truth before they entered the body and that wisdom is the art of recalling what we once knew. Steiner revives this ancient intuition for the modern mind: that before we came into time, we belonged to the eternal.

Consider, for example, the artist Michelangelo, who said that his sculptures already existed within the marble and that his task was merely to free them. So too, Steiner would say, the soul is not created by birth—it is revealed by it. Each of us, before our entry into this world, carries within us the seeds of purpose, the echo of a divine design that unfolds through our lives. To think of ourselves as “unborn” is to remember that life is not an accident but a calling, that existence does not begin with our first breath but with a mystery far older than time. When we forget this, we live as though confined in a narrow room, blind to the vast horizon of being that surrounds us.

Yet Steiner’s vision is not meant to distance us from life, but to sanctify it. To know that we are immortal and unborn is to live more consciously in the present, to treat each moment as sacred, for it is the meeting place of eternity and time. The child we once were, the soul we shall become, and the being we are now—all coexist in the divine unity of existence. The wise among the ancients—the Hindus, the Egyptians, the mystics of the West—understood this rhythm and sought to live in harmony with it. They did not fear death, for they saw it as a continuation of the same divine journey that begins before birth. In this light, life itself becomes a pilgrimage of remembrance—a chance to rediscover who we are in the vastness of spirit.

Think, too, of the Holocaust survivor Viktor Frankl, who emerged from the abyss of suffering with the insight that “life is never made unbearable by circumstances, but only by lack of meaning.” Though Frankl did not speak in Steiner’s spiritual language, he too sensed the eternal within the human heart. In the camps, he saw men and women who, stripped of everything earthly, still found purpose in love, memory, and faith. That power to transcend death, to find meaning beyond despair, is the mark of the immortal soul—the same soul Steiner describes, born from eternity, untouched by the passing of time.

And so, my children of the eternal dawn, take this teaching to heart: you are more than the span between cradle and grave. You are both ancient and new, both seed and flame, both unborn and undying. Live, then, as one who has come from eternity into time, and who will return again to eternity when your work is done. Seek not escape from life, but its deeper purpose. Every joy, every sorrow, every encounter is a thread in the tapestry your soul began weaving long before you were born. Honor that mystery. Remember that you came into the world not to begin existence, but to awaken to it.

Thus, as Rudolf Steiner teaches, to know oneself is to remember both the light before birth and the light beyond death. For the spirit is never truly born, nor can it truly die. It passes through forms and ages as the sun passes through dawn and dusk—always shining, always alive. When you understand this, fear vanishes, and life itself becomes a sacred act of remembrance. Live, therefore, as one who knows you have never ceased to be—and never shall.