708. As we have pointed out, death is thus nothing other than a liberation of energy or matter that takes place in accordance with the laws of life, without this energy thereby becoming detached from its connection to the remaining matter of the universe. Everything that comes under the concept of separation of substances, everything that exists as dissolution – regardless of whether this takes place as a slow disintegration of an old house or whether it is rocks that are split by a bolt of lightning – constitutes exactly the same principle as what we call "death". Death is therefore a rather ordinary phenomenon. We work with it every second of our life. We cannot undertake any action whatsoever other than on the strength of the principle of death. Indeed, even our most intimate need to relieve ourselves can exist only as an expression of the liberation of energies and is therefore in itself a death process. The same of course applies to our thoughts. How could we arrive at a recognition of the truth? How could we refine our mind or consciousness if we were unable to dissolve the unrefined states of mind or thoughts? All evolution comes about solely by virtue of a dissolving of the less perfect in favour of the more perfect and is in itself also a death process, even though it quite naturally cannot avoid being a construction process as well. All construction processes are thus at the same time death processes, and death processes are construction processes and constitute purely and simply nothing other than the dissolving and joining together of energies or substances, and have nothing whatsoever to do with the annihilation or cessation of "something truly living".
      But the terrestrial human being has no such awareness of the process of joining together and dissolving, or of creation as a whole, when it concerns its own physical organism. Due to the mental conditions of perspective in which it sees life at present, it has the idea that the process of death cannot possibly be anything other than the cessation or annihilation of "something living". And today this idea is, either consciously or unconsciously, at the root of the strong, mental phenomenon in mankind that we today call the "fear of death".