The Rudolf Steiner Archive

What is Revealed When One Looks Back into the Repeated Earth Lives

[ 1 ] If spiritual cognition can look back into a person's previous earthly lives, it becomes apparent that there are a number of such earthly lives in which the person was already a person. His outward appearance resembled the present one, and he had an inner life that bore an individual character. There are earth lives that reveal how the intellectual or emotional soul was there, not yet the consciousness soul, and those in which the sentient soul was first formed, and so on.

[ 2 ] This is the case in the geological ages; it was also the case long before that.

[ 3 ] But when we look back, we return to ages in which it was not yet so. There we find man still interwoven with the world of divine-spiritual beings according to his inner life and outer formation. Man is there as an earthly human being, but not detached from the divine-spiritual being, thinking and willing.

[ 4 ] In even older times, the detached human being disappears completely; there are only divine-spiritual beings who carry the human being in their womb.

[ 5 ] Man has gone through these three stages of his development during his time on earth. The transition from the first to the second lies in the latest Lemurian period, that from the second to the third in the Atlantean period.

[ 6 ] Just as man carries his experiences in the present life on earth as a memory, so he carries everything he has gone through in the manner described as a cosmic memory. What is the earthly life of the soul? The world of memories, which is ready to make new perceptions at every moment. In this interaction of memory and new experience, man lives his inner earthly existence.

[ 7 ] But this inner earthly existence could not come to fruition if there were not still present in man as a cosmic memory what one sees when one looks back spiritually to the first stage of his becoming man on earth, in which he was not yet detached from the divine-spiritual being.

[ 8 ] Of what happened in the world at that time, only that which is developed within the human nervous-sensory organization is still alive on earth today. In external nature, all the forces that were active at that time have died and can only be observed in dead forms.

[ 9 ] So there lives in the human world of thought as present revelation that which, in order to have earthly existence, must have as its basis that which was already developed in man before he attained individual earthly existence.

[ 10 ] In the life between death and new birth, man experiences this stage anew each time. Only he carries into the world of divine-spiritual beings, which receives him again as it once had him within itself, his full individual existence formed in earthly life. He is between death and new birth at the same time in the present, but also in all the time he has gone through repeated earth lives and repeated lives between death and new birth.

[ 11 ] The situation is different with what lives in the emotional world of the human being. It is related to the experiences that came immediately after those that do not yet reveal the human being as such. To the experiences that the human being already undergoes as a human being, but not yet detached from divine-spiritual being, thinking and willing. Man could not develop an emotional world at present if it did not arise on the basis of his rhythmic organization. The cosmic memory of the second stage of human development described above is present in this organization.

[ 12 ] So the human spiritual present and that which continues to work in it from an ancient time work together in the emotional world.

[ 13 ] In the life between death and a new birth, man experiences the content of time, of which we are speaking here, as the boundary of his cosmos. What the starry sky is to man in his physical life on earth, that is his spiritual existence in the life between death and a new birth, which lies between his complete connection with the divine-spiritual world and his detachment. It is not the physical celestial bodies that appear at the "world boundary", but the sum of the divine-spiritual beings at each star location, which are in reality the star.

[ 14 ] With the will alone, not connected with feeling and thinking, there lives in man that which the earthly lives exhibit, which already reveal themselves as personally individual when observed. What gives man his outer form out of the cosmos is preserved in this outer form as cosmic memory. This lives in the human form as forces. These are not directly the forces of will, but that which is the basis of the forces of will in the human organization.

[ 15 ] In the life between death and new birth, this area of the human being lies outside the "world boundary". Man presents it there as that which will be his own again in the new life on earth.

[ 16 ] In his nervous-sensory organization, man today is still connected with the cosmos as he was when he was still only germinating within the divine-spiritual.

[ 17 ] In his rhythmic organization, man still lives in the cosmos today as he lived when he was already present as a human being, but not yet detached from the divine-spiritual.

[ 18 ] In his metabolic-limb organization, as the basis of the unfolding of the will, man lives in such a way that everything he has gone through since the time of his personal-individual earthly lives in these and in the lives between death and new birth continues to have an effect in this organization.

[ 19 ] From the forces of the earth man has only that which gives him self-consciousness. The physical body basis of this self-consciousness also comes from what the earth brings about. Everything else in the human being is of extraterrestrial-cosmic origin. The sentient and thought-bearing astral body and its etheric-physical basis, all vitality in the etheric body, even what works physically and chemically in the physical body, is of extraterrestrial origin. As disconcerting as this may be, the physical-chemical that is active within the human being does not originate from the earth.

[ 20 ] The fact that man develops this extraterrestrial cosmic within himself is the effect of the planets and other stars. What he develops in this way is carried to earth by the sun with its forces. The human-cosmic is brought into the realm of the earthly by the sun. Through it man lives on earth as a heavenly being. Only that by which he goes beyond his human formation, the ability to bring forth his own kind, is a gift of the moon.

[ 21 ] Of course, these are not the only effects of the sun and moon. They also have highly spiritual effects.

[ 22 ] If the sun gains more and more power for the earth around Christmas time, this is the annual effect that reveals itself rhythmically in the physical-earthly, which is an expression of the spirit in nature. The development of mankind is a single link in a gigantic world year, so to speak. This can be seen from the foregoing. In this world year, world consecration night is where the sun not only works out of the spirit of nature to the earth, but where the soul of the sun, the spirit of Christ, descends to the earth.

[ 23 ] Just as in the individual human being the individually experienced is connected with the cosmic memory, so the annual Christmas is correctly perceived by the human soul when the heavenly-cosmic Christ-event is conceived as continuing and understood as a not merely human but cosmic memory. It is not only man who commemorates the descent of Christ at Christmas, but also the cosmos.

Goetheanum, on New Year's Day 1925.
Guiding Principles No. 144 to 146
(January 11, 1925)

Further guiding principles issued by the Anthroposophical Society at the Goetheanum (with reference to the preceding consideration: What is revealed when one looks back on repeated earthly lives)

[ 24 ] 144. If one looks back into the repeated earth lives of a human being, these are divided into three different stages: the oldest, in which the human being is not yet present as an individual being, but as a germ in divine-spiritual essence. Looking back, we do not yet find a human being, but divine-spiritual beings (the elemental forces, Archai).

[ 25 ] 145. This is followed by a middle stage in which the human being is already present as an individual being, but not yet detached from the thinking and willing and beings of the divine-spiritual world. He does not yet have his present personality, which is related to the fact that he is a completely separate being in his earthly appearance, detached from the divine-spiritual world.

[ 26 ] 146. The third stage is the present one. Man experiences himself in his human form, detached from the divine-spiritual world; and he experiences the world as an environment that he faces individually and personally. This stage begins in the Atlantean period.