[20F-TDI: p. 133]
“Only when history is nothing, only when the naked individual, the individual who is stripped of all historical elements, of all destiny, determination, purpose, measure, and goal, only when the vain, abstract, meaningless, empty individual is something, and therefore only when nothing is something, … only then is there nothing after death, only if the nothing after death is not also something. Thus those peculiar beings and strange subjects who think that they live only after life do not reflect that they attain and make up nothing at all with their afterlife, that as they posit a future life, they negate the actual life.” [20F-TDI: p. 133]
[21F-TDI: p. 137]
“That which is true in the universal belief in immortality … consists only in the fact that it is a sensible representation of the nature of consciousness, that in this belief, the foundation, element, and condition of all history – that is, the unity of past, present and future as one essential reality – is fixed and raised to the level of an object … . Thus, your belief in immortality is a true belief only when it is a belief in the infinity of Spirit and in the everlasting youth of humanity, in the inexhaustible love and creative power of Spirit, in its eternally unfolding itself into new individuals out of the womb of its plenitude … .“ [21F-TDI: p. 137]
[22F-TDI: p. 145-146]
[P. 145] “If immortality lay in wait
For you behind this time, …
The flood of ages without end,
Without the boundary and obstacle of death,
Would wash away all your power,
Would erode all your quality.
Once in heaven, this earth
Would become for you the beautiful hereafter.
[P. 146] You would gladly give up immortality
For this time,
And, in the land of death, you
Would long to leave the tiresome angelic state
To become a loving human
Once again on this earth.
… only where there are conflict and suffering,
Where pain clouds the clarity of soul,
Only there is my true fatherland;
Pain is the pledge of Spirit.
Let cowardly clerics
Fall in love with the hereafter!
(…)
And if the whole world wished to be divine,
And to go to heaven –
… I would stay outside, …
