The Rudolf Steiner Archive

13. Man Between Death and Rebirth

[ 1 ] Yesterday we considered how the moment of death unfolds, how the etheric body with the astral body and the ego carrier emerges from the physical body and the memory tableau stands before the soul. This tableau reveals a peculiarity. It is as if the events stand before the soul simultaneously and allow an overview like a kind of panorama. The essential thing, however, is that one really experiences it as an image. In real physical life, events are associated with joy and pain; these feelings disappear in the few days after death. This memory image is an objective painting. Let us try to clarify this with an example. We find ourselves in a rather fatal, painful situation; we experience its course, so to speak, but the pain remains absent. It is like a picture we look at that depicts a tortured person: we do not really feel the pain, but only look at it objectively. This is how it is with the memory image after death. It occurs at the moment when the etheric body largely emerges, detaches itself from the physical body, and then dissolves into the general world ether. What remains of it is the extract that contains the fruit of the past life. Now a truly different time begins for the soul, the time of weaning itself from its attachment to the physical world. We can best imagine this by saying to ourselves: For the occultist, the sum of drives and desires is something real. Now, what is present in the astral body does not cease after death with the shedding of the physical body, but all these drives and desires are still there. Those who have been gourmets in this life do not lose their appetite for delicious food in death, for the appetite clings to the astral body, and it is only the physical instruments, the palate, the tongue, and so on, that are no longer available to satisfy the craving. We can compare his situation—because the matter is also so for another reason—with a person who is terribly thirsty and has no way of quenching his thirst. He suffers from these desires; he suffers from the necessary deprivation of the fulfillment of these desires. The meaning of this suffering is to feel what it means to have desires that can only be satisfied with physical tools. Kamaloka: Weaning, “place of desires” is what this state is called. It lasts, perhaps we can go into this in more detail later, one third of the time that a person spends between birth and death. So if someone dies at the age of sixty, one can say that they spend twenty years, a third of their past life, in Kamaloka. As a rule, Kamaloka lasts until they have renounced all the desires that still bind them to the physical plane. That is one aspect of the Kamaloka period. But let us also look at Kamaloka from another angle.

[ 2 ] What a person experiences in the physical body is valuable to them because, through these experiences, they develop higher and higher through what they accomplish on earth. That is the essential thing. On the other hand, between birth and death, there are numerous opportunities for people to create obstacles to their development. This includes everything we do that harms our fellow human beings. Every time we obtain some selfish satisfaction at the expense of our fellow human beings, or undertake something selfish that is connected with and somehow interferes with the world, we create an obstacle to our development. We slap someone in the face: the physical and moral pain of this is an obstacle to our development. This obstacle to development would remain with us for all future times and lives if we did not remove it from the world. During the time of Kamaloka, human beings receive an impetus to remove these obstacles to development. The Kamaloka period unfolds in such a way that human beings relive their entire life, and they do so three times as fast in reverse. This is the strange thing about the astral world, the Kamaloka, that everything appears like a mirror image. And this is also what confuses the student when he enters the astral world. For example, he must read the number 346 as 643. He must reverse everything when looking at the astral world. This is the case with everything that relates to the astral world. But it is also the case with all your passions. Let us assume that someone becomes clairvoyant through training or pathological conditions. He first sees his own instincts and passions emanating from him, appearing to him in the form of all kinds of figures and shapes, coming toward him in rays from all sides. Those who become clairvoyant in the astral space, either regularly or irregularly, first see these figures, which appear to them as grotesque or demonic figures. This is a very unfortunate thing, especially for those who become clairvoyant and have never heard of this peculiarity. It will become less and less rare, because we are currently in a state of development where the eyes of a number of people are opening to the spiritual world. This should also be said so that those to whom it happens will not be afraid. For spiritual science is there to be a guide for human beings into the spiritual world. For many who become clairvoyant, this is connected with a great deal of mental unhappiness because they are ignorant of all these facts and conditions. So you see all these things in the mirror image in the astral world, and you also see other things in the spiritual world. In the physical world, when a chicken lays an egg, you first see the chicken and then the egg, but in the astral world you see the process of the egg returning to the chicken. So everything is relived. Imagine you die at the age of sixty and then arrive in Kamaloka at the point where you slapped someone in the face when you were forty: now, in Kamaloka, you experience everything that the other person experienced through you; you are literally inside the other person's nature. In this way, you relive your life back to the moment of birth. But you experience not only pain, but also joy, the joy and happiness you brought to others. Piece by piece, the soul thus discards those things that hinder its development. And it must be grateful to the wise guidance that gives it the opportunity to make amends. For with the will to make amends, it takes up something of this each time, like a mark, an impulse of the will to make amends for what are obstacles to its development. And in the next life it comes into a position to do so. We see, then, that the objective tableau is something quite different from reliving the past in Kamaloka. In Kamaloka, one experiences very precisely what the other person felt as a result of our behavior; one experiences the other side of one's own actions. But it is not just a matter of experiencing this cross there; what one experienced here as pain is pleasure and joy there. One experiences pleasure and suffering as the opposite of what they were in the physical world. This is precisely what Kamaloka is for: to give the soul what the memory tableau does not provide: the reliving of pain and joy.

[ 3 ] Once the Kamaloka has been lived through, a kind of third corpse is discarded. First there was the physical corpse, then the etheric corpse, which dissolves into the general world ether, and now there is the astral corpse. This encompasses everything in the human astral body that has not yet been purified and ordered by the ego. That which he once received as the bearer of his instincts and passions, and which he has not transformed and spiritualized from his ego, dissolves after the Kamaloka state. On his further path, the human being takes with him an extract from the astral body: first, the sum of all the good impulses of will, and second, everything that he has transformed from his ego. Everything they have refined from their instincts: the beautiful, the good, the moral, forms the extract of their astral body. At the end of the kamaloka period, human beings now consist of the ego, and around this, as it were, they have the extract of the astral body and the etheric body, the impulses of good will.

[ 4 ] Now a new state begins for the human being, that of a suffering-free, spiritual life, the Devachan. It is very uplifting for the occultist when he experiences such things as facts and then finds them again in the sacred documents and religious writings. The passage in the New Testament is one such passage, which reads: “Unless you become like little children, you cannot enter the kingdom of heaven.” This refers to living back to the time of birth: these are the great moments that one can experience in relation to religious documents. You must understand me correctly: the occultist swears by no document or authority; for him, only the facts of the spiritual world are authoritative, but the documents become objectively valuable to him again. Theosophy is not based on any religious document, but directly on the investigation of spiritual facts. The foundation of all spiritual science is objective research; if the documents contain similar things, then the occultist will be able to evaluate them accordingly.

[ 5 ] Now life begins in Devachan, in the spiritual realm. This spiritual world can always be observed; it is always there. The dead only enter it, but it is always there. We will learn later about the methods by which it can be perceived. This spiritual world is very difficult to describe, since our words are shaped by the physical world. Therefore, only a comparative idea of it can be given. Here in our earthly world, we find solid earth, we walk around on it, liquids, water, a circle of air, and the whole thing permeated by warmth. You can imagine the spiritual realm in a similar way. There is a mainland there, formed in a very strange way, the continental area of Devachan: everything mineral is contained there in its forms. You know that where the mineral is solid, the clairvoyant sees nothing in space; the space is hollowed out, and around it are the spiritual forces visible to the clairvoyant gaze, like ethereal figures of light. Imagine a crystal: what is filled with physical matter is not the essence for consciousness when it rises into the spiritual world, but rather the spirit of the crystal, the forces that are visible around it. The crystal cube appears to the clairvoyant like a negative. What exists in physical form in our world is solid ground in Devachan. Much else still remains in Devachan. Everything that exists in life on earth—plant, animal, and human life, and how it is distributed among the various beings—appears to the seer as the liquid element of the spiritual world, like the sea and rivers. However, we cannot easily compare the liquid life that flows there with our rivers and seas; it is much more like the blood that flows through the human body. This is the oceanic and river region of Devachan. This solid and liquid region does not appear to rise or fall, nor is it stepped, but rather in a similar relationship to land and sea here.

[ 6 ] The third region is comparable to our air circle. It is formed in Devachan from that which constitutes our and the animals' sensations. It is the sum of everything that lives in the astral. Flowing pain, flowing pleasure, is the substance that forms in Devachan what is air here. Imagine that the clairvoyant sees a battle from Devachan. When you look at it physically, you see fighters, cannons, and so on, but the clairvoyant sees more than the physical human forms and physical instruments; he sees how the passions of the combatants confront each other. You would see what lives in the souls: how passion collides with passion. Like a terrible thunderstorm raging in the high mountains, this is how such a battle appears to the clairvoyant from Devachan. But the human being also perceives loving feelings there: these permeate the Devachan air like a wonderful sound. So we have compared the three realms of Devachan to those of our earth: solid, liquid, and air.

[ 7 ] Just as warmth pervades the three lower realms here, so a communal element pervades the three realms of Devachan. And what pervades everything there is the substance of our thoughts, which live there as forms and beings. What humans experience here as thoughts are only shadows of the real thoughts. Imagine a canvas stretched out with living beings and figures behind it, but on the canvas you can only see their images. This is exactly how the thoughts that humans know in the physical world relate to what thoughts are in the spiritual realm. There they are beings with whom one can interact, who permeate the entire space of Devachan like states of heat. This is the world into which human beings enter. Human beings perceive this very clearly in this life after death when they enter the Devachan.

[ 8 ] We should also mention that as human beings in Kamaloka become detached from physical connections, their consciousness also becomes clearer. After the sharp, clear picture of the overview of his life, a darkening of his consciousness sets in during the afterlife, the stronger the desire for the physical becomes. But the more the human being weans himself of his attachment to the physical, the more the darkened consciousness brightens. And in Devachan, the person consciously experiences, not in a dreamlike state, the events and all the experiences of Devachan. We will talk more about how the organs for this are formed.

[ 9 ] The person knows exactly when they enter the spiritual world. The first impression of Devachan is that they see the physical body of their previous life in its form outside of their ego. This body is incorporated into the continental area of the spiritual world; it belongs to the mainland of Devachan. In physical life, you say, “I will do that.” You state that you live in your physical body and therefore say “I” to it; this is not the case in Devachan. There you are outside the physical body, but you become conscious of it in its form the moment you enter Devachan, and then you say to it: That is you! You no longer say “I” to your physical body. This is a striking, very significant event for the soul, in which it becomes clear to it: I am no longer in the physical world, but in the spiritual world. That is why you no longer address your physical body with “I,” but say, “That is you!” The saying from Vedanta philosophy, “Tat twam asi — that is you,” also goes back to this experience. Everything that is said in Eastern philosophy is a fact of the spiritual world. So when Vedanta teaches the student to meditate on “That is you,” it means nothing other than that he should already awaken within himself in this life those ideas that will then dawn on him when he enters Devachan. True meditation formulas are nothing more than photographs of facts of the spiritual world. And “Tat twam asi” is the boundary stone, the mark that indicates that one is entering the spiritual world. Furthermore, one gradually learns to view objectively that which is connected with one's own physical life, without sympathy or antipathy, like pictures that one looks at.

[ 10 ] The experiences of the soul in relation to the flowing life of Devachan are something else again. In the physical world, life is distributed among many individual beings. In Devachan, however, life appears as a whole. One encounters the one, all-encompassing life, and the sensation one has of it is immensely powerful, because in this one life the experiences are not contained as something abstract. Just think how everything that the great founders of religion have put into life is lived by human beings in their astral and etheric bodies: all of this is experienced again as something uplifting in Devachan. What flowed out through the great founders and flowed in during the individual incarnations—and it is precisely the most valuable experiences that are placed in the etheric body—you encounter in the spiritual realm as an experience. Everything that has flowed into physical life is before you in great, powerful images. You experience what unites human beings. What harmonizes you, you experience in Devachan; what separates us here, what is foreign to us, we bring into harmony there. And what we are so strongly involved in here, pleasure and suffering, appear to us there like wind and weather. We experience around us in images what we used to experience within ourselves: it is now the circle of air around us. It is important that we experience there, in connection with the whole, what we personally feel in physical life. We do not feel joy other than in connection with all pleasure, nor pain other than in connection with all suffering. In this way, our pleasure and suffering reveal themselves in their full significance for the whole. We gain this experience of pleasure and suffering in the life after death. With our thoughts we live there as with things.

[ 11 ] And now we ask: What effect does this have on the essence of the human being when he lives thus in everything in Devachan? Let us clarify this by means of a comparison. How does the human being see in the physical world? Through light entering him and forming the organ for it. Goethe says, not without reason, that the eye is formed by light for light. The truth of this fact can be seen from the fact that when animals migrate to dark caves, their eyes atrophy and other organs, such as the organs of touch, which are necessary there, develop more finely. The organ of perception is formed by the external element. If there were no sun, there would be no eye; light gave birth to the eye. Our organism is a result of the elements surrounding it; everything we have physically is formed from the environment around us. And in the same way, in Devachan, the spiritual organs are formed in humans from the spiritual environment. And in Devachan, humans continually absorb something of the life of their surroundings and build up a kind of spiritual organism from the elements of their environment. There they feel themselves continually becoming, their spiritual organism developing limb by limb. And now consider that all perception of productivity is experienced as a feeling of bliss and is also connected with such a feeling in physical life! Think of the artist, the inventor. This growth and becoming, piece by piece, is what human beings experience as a feeling of bliss as they wander through Devachan. And so they form the spiritual archetype of a human being there. He has already formed such an archetype many times, each time he has lingered in Devachan after death, but each time something new is incorporated into it, something that the human being has taken with him into Devachan as the fruit of his last life, as an extract in his etheric body.

[ 12 ] When man first entered Devachan, he had already built up a spiritual archetype of man, and this then condensed into the physical human being. Now, having passed through many incarnations, he takes with him each time the extract of his past life, and from this he then forms the archetype of a new human being. This work takes a long time; we will only mention it in general terms today. It is therefore not pointless for human beings to appear on Earth in successive incarnations and to pass through Devachan again and again. Each time, the Earth presents a different face to them, and new things are offered to them in the outer culture and in relation to all kinds of circumstances. The soul does not appear on the physical plane until it can learn something new here. I will give you the time that lies between reincarnations in numbers; this is how long it takes for the human being to build up his new archetype. Once it is built up, this archetype always has the impulse to reappear on earth, this archetype, which is actually the human being himself. It is not easy to describe this impulse. Take an example. Someone has a thought, and now they also have the urge to express it: the thought has taken physical form from the impulse. Today, the power to shape the archetype created in Devachan does not yet lie in the will of the human being. In this life cycle, humans cannot yet guide their own reincarnations; they need higher spiritual beings to guide them to the parents who are capable of providing the appropriate physical body for the archetype. They guide them to the people and race that best suit them for this archetype. When the time of reincarnation has come, the human being first surrounds himself with astral substance according to what he has developed as his archetype in Devachan, and this forms as if by itself: it shoots up, so to speak. Now the guidance by higher beings to the parents begins. And since the physical body provided by the parents can only be found to correspond approximately to the astral body and the ego, these beings incorporate the etheric body between them and the human being, through which the greatest possible adaptation between the earthly and the spiritual world takes place. Tomorrow we will talk about this incorporation of the etheric body and physical birth. But we can already see this today: at birth, when reappearing on earth, the human being retraces the reverse path taken after death. First, the astral body attaches itself, then the etheric body, and finally the physical body. At death, the physical body is shed first, then the etheric body, and finally the astral body.

[ 13 ] And when the human being receives the etheric body, something similar happens to him as when he passes through the gate of death. There he had a review of his past life, now he has a preview, a prophetic one, of the life he is about to enter. This is very significant for him. It happens at the moment when the etheric body is incorporated. The moment then disappears from their memory. It is not details that they see, but rather a picture of life's possibilities. This preview can only be disastrous for them insofar as it causes them to experience a so-called shock, meaning that they resist entering physical life. During normal entry, the etheric body and the physical body coincide; in cases such as shock, they do not. The etheric body does not then enter the physical body completely, but remains protruding, especially at the head, and is therefore unable to develop the organs of the intellect properly. Some cases of idiocy originate from this, but by no means all; this should be emphasized.

[ 14 ] Thus, physical life becomes understandable to us through the spiritual life that lies behind it. And this insight will help us to put our knowledge at the service of a helpful life.