The Temple Legend: Freemasonry and Related Occult Movements

In this book, Steiner writes: "One cannot attain to what is usually known as immortality unless one is to some extent familiar with the occult sciences. The fruits of occult science do, of course, find their way out into the world along many different channels. A great deal of occult knowledge exists in the various religions, and all those who participate deeply and sincerely in the life of a religious community have some share in this knowledge and are preparing themselves for the attainment of immortality in the real sense. But to subsist on the knowledge of this immortality and the feeling of belonging in the spiritual world in concrete experience and with full awareness is still something different. "All of you have lived many times but not all of you are conscious that you have lived through these many lives. However, you will gradually attain this consciousness, and without it man's life is lived with incomplete consciousness. It has never been the aim of occult science to inculcate into man a dim feeling of survival, but to impart a clear, fully conscious knowledge of onflowing life in the spiritual world. And there is a certain great law which governs the progressive development of consciousness in all future stages of life. Namely, it is what man works at to help others attain such consciousness which contributes the most to its development. It is an apparently paradoxical proposition: everything a being works at without aiming at developing its own consciousness helps to maintain that being's consciousness. "It is a fact that all occult science consists of knowing how a man can act selflessly in order to attain the greatest enhancement of his own consciousness...For selfless deeds are the real foundation of immortality. "