The Rudolf Steiner Archive

6. Life Between Death and a New Birth II

[ 1 ] The reflection we were able to engage in the day before yesterday on life between death and a new birth shows us just how closely the entire human being is connected to what might be called the universal life of the cosmos. For if you reflect on some of what has been said here, you will be able to conclude that the human being is, in a sense, confined to a single place only during his earthly life, that he occupies only a small space during his earthly life, whereas in the entire period between death and a new birth he is incorporated into the planetary system and even, at a later time after death, into the world beyond it. If, when speaking of the development between birth and death, we often say—to express an occult fact—that the human being appears as a kind of microcosmic image of the macrocosm, then we must now say: Between death and a new birth, the human being is actually macrocosmic; he is poured out into the macrocosm; there he truly proves himself to be a macrocosmic being, for in this interim he must draw from the macrocosm the forces he needs for his next incarnation. Indeed, we can understand this macrocosmic life between death and a new birth in such a way that, in the first period after death, the human being still, so to speak—if one may put it that way—carries the eggshells of earthly life upon themselves, connected to what earthly life could give them, what earthly life could make of them. This is, after all, the time that initially lies particularly close to the needs and interests of the human heart. When the occult gaze is turned toward someone who has left the earthly plane relatively recently, they are, as we know, in the kamaloka sphere. This is the sphere that, in macrocosmic terms, extends to the orbit of the Moon. The human being thus lives his way into it, expanding his soul-spiritual being so that he inhabits the entire lunar sphere. During this time—as we already know—the human being is still completely connected to the earthly world. The desires, the cravings, the interests, the sympathies, the antipathies that he has developed form forces—as we have often described—that, as it were, draw him back toward the earthly world. During the Kamaloka period, the human being is, in a certain sense, enclosed as if in an atmosphere of his own astral nature, as he acquired it on Earth. He still desires what he desired on Earth; he is interested in what he was interested in on Earth. And this period of the Kamaloka is precisely intended to allow the human being to work through these desires, but so that these desires and cravings—insofar as they depend on the physical organs, and all sensual pleasures, for example, depend on them—cannot be satisfied, and he thus weans himself from them through the impossibility of satisfaction. All of this, which we have often described in relation to the human being immediately after death, refers, however, as we can easily see, to the individuality of the human being—in the strictest sense of the word—to that which the human being must, as it were, tear away from his astral nature, that which he must wean himself from, that which he must remove from himself.

[ 2 ] In another respect, the human being carries earthly connections with them into the Kamaloka period, specifically in the following way: What the human being is connected to—whether facts or beings of the Kamaloka period—depends on their inner life, on how the relevant matter is preformed and predisposed in their soul. For example: a person passes through the gate of death. Some time earlier, someone close to them has already passed through the gate of death, so that we can say: both of the deceased are in the Kamaloka sphere; they can find one another there. Occult investigation clearly shows that the human being is not merely concerned with his own development, with the weaning away from his desires, cravings, interests, and so on, but that soon after death, following a brief—one might say embryonic—period of sleep, he finds the people to whom he was close on Earth. On the other hand, during this initial period there is generally no real prospect that a person can actually find every being who is in the Kamaloka sphere at the same time. The spatial and temporal conditions there are quite different, particularly the spatial ones. It is not a matter of not being able to get close to beings with whom one was not close in life; one may come as close as possible to them, but one does not perceive them. Perception requires that one has been close to the being in question during life. Thus, those to whom one was close in life—and initially, hardly any beings other than humans come into consideration—are also found in the vicinity of a deceased person soon after death in the Kamaloka period. The relationships we have with such beings after death are still entirely determined by the earthly relationships we have formed with them. And this is in a way that I already described the day before yesterday: in such a way that we relate to a person in Kamaloka exactly as we did in earthly life, in full accordance with the truth, but we cannot do what we could still do during our earthly life—that is, change the relationship. It remains as it was on Earth. On Earth, we can later develop hatred toward a person we once loved and love toward a person we once hated; we can strive to change our relationship with them. It is not like that in the Kamaloka period. We meet a person who died before us, and at first we find ourselves placed in a relationship with them that corresponds to the last relationship we had with them on Earth. That is how we stand in relation to them. Then, as you know, we live backward in time. If we had a different relationship with them before, we cannot artificially bring that about, but we must calmly live backward and, at the appropriate point in time, experience a relationship that we had with them earlier—one that we cannot change again, one that expresses itself exactly as it did on Earth.

[ 3 ] One might easily believe that this is an extraordinarily painful state. In a certain sense, it is; one even feels it exactly as one might feel when one wants to leave but is chained to the ground. One feels spiritually bound to a relationship that was established on earth; one feels trapped. That is certainly true. And if this predicament is a severe one, the relationship is naturally agonizing. Now, in order to properly understand such a state and appreciate it emotionally, one must not merely think of it as a painful state—it is indeed painful in many respects — but the deceased not only has the awareness that a painful state exists, but also the very definite awareness that this state is necessary, that it must be so, that one would be rolling stones right into one’s path to hinder one’s development if one did not go through such pain.

[ 4 ] What happens when we go through all of this? Let’s suppose we experience our relationship with another person after death—that is, we look upon and experience a certain relationship that we established with them in life. Through this observation, through this experience, through this gazing, as it were, the forces develop within our soul—initially in their spiritual archetypes—which we need so that our karma may guide us correctly in the future, so that we may come together with the other person in reincarnation in such a way that karmic balance can be achieved. In this way, the forces necessary for karmic balance are, so to speak, technically constructed.

[ 5 ] The deceased can hardly change anything about what first meets them in their surroundings; yet the deceased sometimes feels a strong urge to change this or that. One might say: Unfulfilled desires take on great significance for the dead, but specifically those unfulfilled desires that did not always fully rise to consciousness during life. And here something comes into play that is extremely important to note. In ordinary life here on the physical plane, we certainly feel this or that inclination, this or that sympathy in our consciousness, and form this or that mental image; but beneath this consciousness lies the astral, the subconscious. This does not rise with great force into the higher consciousness, into the actual sense of self. As a result, something incomplete, one might say, enters into the human being’s life of consciousness. As a conscious being, the human being hardly ever fully lives out their life. The way a person lives their life is, one might say, by no means always entirely true; the human soul life is, after all, something extraordinarily complicated. It can happen that someone, in their ordinary consciousness, in their ego-consciousness, out of prejudice, out of convenience, or for this or that reason, does not like something at all, perhaps even hates it, while in their subconscious there is an intense desire for what they actually hate in their conscious mind. And it happens that the human soul often works intensely to deceive itself about precisely such things.

[ 6 ] For example, it may happen that two people live together. One of these two, who are in some kind of relationship, comes into contact with Spiritual Science or anthroposophy and feels inspired by it; the other, who lives with him, does not feel inspired, but becomes more and more terrible in his attitude the more the other immerses himself in Spiritual Science, railing more and more against this Spiritual Science and slandering it. Now the following is possible—for the human soul life is complicated—that this other person, who slanders Spiritual Science, might well have become an anthroposophist himself at some suitable opportunity, had it not been for the fact that his partner or someone else living with him had become one. It is precisely the person living with him who prevents him from becoming one himself. This can certainly happen; and it can happen that such a person, who slanders Spiritual Science, who brings up all sorts of arguments against it in his ego-consciousness, harbors the most intense desire for it in his subconscious or astral consciousness—indeed, that the more he slanders Spiritual Science, the stronger and stronger the desire for it becomes within him. For in life here on earth, it is entirely possible to speak ill of things in one’s conscious mind that are coming to the fore more and more strongly in the subconscious; but death turns untruths into truths. And so one can observe that people pass through the gate of death who, whether out of convenience or for reasons such as those we have described, have reviled Spiritual Science; it can therefore happen—and this can apply to all manner of things—that after death, because truth asserts itself in the human soul, they feel the desire they had not noticed in the most intense way. And it can be demonstrated that people pass through the gate of death who apparently had no desire at all for a certain thing, and yet after death a desire emerges with the utmost intensity. So what matters in the examination of our Kamaloka period is not whether our desires, cravings, passions, and so on are in the higher consciousness, in the ego-consciousness, but whether they are also in the astral, in the subconscious. Both exert an equally intense influence after death, and the desires and cravings that we have concealed here in life actually exert an even more intense influence after death.

[ 7 ] Now, in a matter such as this, we must take into account that anything which is in itself related to the human soul will, under all circumstances, make an impression on that human soul. What I am telling you now has been well researched; it can truly be seen as an important fact concerning the human soul, and it is good that we consider the matter specifically through the example of Spiritual Science. Let us suppose that two people lived together here; one is an enthusiastic anthroposophist and the other wants nothing to do with it. Now, however, because Spiritual Science is being practiced in his environment, this other person is not left unaffected by it in his astral body. Truly, immensely significant things happen to our souls of which we know nothing, things that simply work upon us in a spiritual way, and there are things that, simply by their nature, shape and transform the human soul. And so one can say: One can hardly find anyone who has been in the company of an anthroposophist, no matter how obstinately opposed they were, who has not developed a tendency toward Spiritual Science in their subconscious. One finds, particularly among those who were opposed to Spiritual Science, that after death they have a desire sphere of which one can say with the utmost certainty: it expresses itself, makes itself felt, in that they then passionately yearn for Spiritual Science. That is why it has proven so beneficial for such deceased individuals—as is often done in our circles—that those who, during their lives, were unwilling to take in much of Spiritual Science are, after death, so to speak, read to. This proves to be extraordinarily beneficial for those concerned. This is done in such a way that, in order to have a vivid mental image, one tries to picture the face of the deceased in question as they were in their final days on earth; then one takes a book and, in complete silence, with the thought of the deceased as if they were sitting across from one, reads to them, going through the text sentence by sentence. The deceased absorbs this with great eagerness and benefits infinitely from it. Yes, you see, here we stand at a point where spiritual wisdom truly becomes quite practical in life, at one of those points where materialism and spirituality do not merely stand opposed to one another as theories, but as life forces, so that one can say: By approaching spirituality, communication and connection are created between human individuals, whether they are in life or in death. We can be of service to the dead if we are established in spiritual life, in the manner described and in many other ways, which will be discussed on another occasion. But if we do not stand within the spiritual life, this signifies not only a lack of knowledge and insight, but also that it truly confines us to a very limited sphere of existence: namely, only the physical sphere; so that, if we are materialistically minded and live only in the material world, we immediately lose contact with any individuality once it has passed through the gate of death. Here we have, in what has been said, an example of how immensely significant the interaction of one world with the other is. The deceased himself must—if, for example, he has the intense desire to learn this or that about spiritual wisdom after death—forgo this; he must remain burdened with the desire. At most, there might be the possibility—though this is hardly possible for him during the Kamaloka period—that he might find someone there who has also died, someone who had stood in such a relationship to him on Earth that, through their mere presence, through the relationship they share with him, they could grant a kind of satisfaction—though that would not be very great either. But this pales in comparison to the immense benefits and good deeds that the living, those still on the physical plane, can bestow upon the dead.

[ 8 ] Consider the plight of the dead! He has the most intense desire for this or that. This cannot be satisfied in the time after death, because the things we carry in our souls remain immutably rigid; but a stream can rise up from the earth that penetrates this otherwise rigid desire. And that is actually the only way in which the things that play out in our souls can be changed. And one may say: In the immediate time after death, much—an immense amount—of how the deceased can live and feel depends on the spiritual understanding developed for him by those who were close to him and have remained behind on the physical plane.

[ 9 ] When we act in accordance with what we can learn through spiritual science, we become the architects of entirely different life conditions—conditions that influence one world from within the other. In this regard, it must be said that the development of Spiritual Science into life forces has not yet progressed very far. There is so much to be done to truly cultivate the real forces that Spiritual Science can establish, and it would be good if people familiarized themselves with the truths of Spiritual Science and then organized their entire lives accordingly. If one were to understand Spiritual Science in this profound sense, if one were to make it the very lifeblood of one’s being, then there would be little discussion or contention on Earth regarding spiritual theories. This is what we must bear in mind. Through Spiritual Science, not only is earthly life transformed, but the entire life of humanity. And once Spiritual Science becomes a matter of the heart—much, much more so—through the understanding of ideas, people will—if one may use the trivial word—act and behave in accordance with Spiritual Science; then the interrelationship of the individual worlds with one another will also become increasingly evident.

[ 10 ] Here, however, we must touch upon something that—I would say—is not easily believed, although it can be understood if one thinks it through. For human knowledge, insofar as it is knowledge on the physical plane, is something extraordinarily deceptive, truly something extraordinarily deceptive; for on the physical plane, human beings really know nothing other than the facts and the relationships they observe. While this is the be-all and end-all of what the ordinary scientist or the materialistically minded person calls reality, it is the least of it when one considers the life of the soul in its entirety.

[ 11 ] I’d like to give you an example that seems paradoxical; but we can recall Schopenhauer’s words that the truth must blush because it is paradoxical. A person knows facts and combines them. He knows, well: it is half past seven. He left his house and crossed this or that street. At eight o’clock he arrived here or there. He knows such things through sensory perception; he knows such things through, let’s say, intellectual combination; but in most cases he does not know why he did not leave two or three minutes earlier or later. Very few people will give it a second thought if they leave three or four minutes earlier or later; but that can make a difference. I’ll choose a grotesque example—though small-scale examples of this kind always occur in life—the example that a person was three minutes late. If he had left punctually at eight o’clock, he would, let’s say, have actually encountered something that would have run him over and killed him. He was not killed because he was three minutes late. In this grotesque way, it will happen less frequently, but such things, in a more or less real sense, occur time and again in life; it’s just that people are unaware of it. His karma protected him from death by causing him to leave three minutes later. Now this might seem insignificant, indifferent, but it is not indifferent; for just imagine that a person is indifferent to such a thing only because he does not know it: the moment he knew it, he would not be indifferent at all. If you knew: I left three minutes later than I intended; had I left at the right time, I would be dead—then it would not be indifferent to you, then it would make a powerful impression on your soul, then this knowledge would have a profound effect on your soul. Just remember, when something like this actually happens, what significance it has for the life of the soul. But does that mean anything other than: that human beings actually go through life with their eyes firmly bound? For that is precisely what they do. They know what is happening externally, but they do not know what would have happened to them if things had been just a little different. That is to say, this knowledge of possibilities eludes the powers of the soul. The soul drifts along indifferently, while it could be shaken and uplifted by knowledge—by knowledge of possibilities. Thus, because human beings know so little of the connections that exist, knowing only what circumstances happen to reveal, the life of the human soul is impoverished; consequently, what would otherwise be expressed does not find expression in this soul life. Perhaps one would not easily arrive at a seemingly paradoxical statement such as the one just made, were it not for the fact that investigations into life after death, so to speak, point one’s intellectual nose toward it; for among the manifold things that arise in the soul is that which has just been characterized as not coming to consciousness. Much comes strongly before the human soul after death of which one had no inkling during life; much comes strongly before the soul: There you were in mortal danger, there you forfeited your good fortune, there you were complacent, and if you had not been complacent, you would have achieved this or that, could have brought about this or that good. A whole world of the unlived comes to meet one after death. What appears ridiculous to the materialist in physical life becomes reality after death; it becomes reality, true reality. So that one must say: one does indeed come to know, after death, a whole world of what is around one and does not find expression in life.

[ 12 ] So are the things we’re talking about here not there at all? Let’s take this example: All right, we left our house three minutes later than we intended, and as a result, we escaped death. We don’t know that at all. The fact that we, as human beings, don’t know it matters only to the materialist. The intelligent person knows that it doesn’t matter whether they know about it or not. The generally intelligent person knows that things don’t care about their knowledge, but that they exist even without their knowledge. The interplay of forces, the interaction of forces, was there. Perhaps the train was there that could have run us over; we were there too, all the conditions were in place for our death. The forces interacted with one another; they merely passed each other by; but they converged. Such things are common in our surroundings, all around us in life. There it is. We do not perceive it, but it is all around us. Now, if people, in accordance with the destiny of our cycle of time, in accordance with the evolution of humanity moving into the future, gradually gain an understanding of the spiritual world, then that which, admittedly, cannot be there for sensory perception and the intellect, but which is nevertheless in our surroundings, will in a certain way have an effect on us. And here we come to an extraordinarily interesting fact. Let us suppose that the situation was really as described, that we had escaped death by being three minutes late: the materialist feels nothing of it; but for the person who, little by little—spiritual science is still in its infancy today—gains an understanding in his heart of such connections, his soul is truly transformed. He then, once he has gained an understanding of this spiritual science, once he has lived within it for a while and has not merely gained an external understanding, but once it has become the content of his soul, once he lives with its concepts and feelings and so on, perhaps also leaves three minutes later, escapes death—but at the very moment when death could have come, had the circumstances been different, then he senses something, he feels something within himself. Learning to feel according to one’s possibilities—this will come about when anthroposophy becomes the lifeblood of the soul.

[ 13 ] And what, for example, will we gradually be able to sense through such things once human nature has brought itself to embrace an understanding of the Spiritual Science? Well, through such a moment—when something could have happened that is connected to us—we will become a kind of temporary medium—according to the definitions I have given in my public lectures—and enter a brief mediumistic state in which we are able to allow the spiritual world to shine into our consciousness. Such moments can be the most fruitful for human beings when the dead now influence them, when they are to know something consciously about the dead. Moments of unhappened events that are connected to us in the manner described, such moments that are connected to us, become in a certain way catalysts for impressions from the spiritual world. The very peculiar nature of a life imbued with a sense of the unseen will develop precisely in this way in the souls of those whom Spiritual Science touches in life; this is because humanity is truly in a state of evolution, and only a very narrow-minded person can believe that the human race has been endowed with the same soul forces throughout all ages. The soul forces are changing, and just as true as it is that human beings today are primarily predisposed to perceive the external world and to process what they perceive through thought, so true is it that through circumstances such as those just described, they will develop into an age in which psychic-spiritual forces are cultivated. Thus there is also the prospect that Spiritual Science will become a life force that will intervene powerfully and creatively in life. Earlier we saw how an effect can be exerted from the physical plane upward into life after death; now we see where gates or windows can be created so that what the dead experience can be perceived here in physical life. — I also wanted to give you an idea of how, so to speak, the opportunities for communication between the two worlds arise.

[ 14 ] In this regard, there is indeed a great deal of sin involved in the dissemination of all sorts of curious teachings and, in particular, sometimes curious practices. Whereas those familiar with such matters know that if one wishes to communicate with a deceased person, an opportunity must first be created—I am not referring here to such opportunities that arise through mediumistic means— an opportunity for the window to the deceased to open, as it were—there are, after all, many reckless people who are told that so-and-so wants to know something from a deceased person, and very soon, after just a few hours, they say: I spoke with him; he is well. — I have witnessed this happen on more than a few occasions. This is also something that touches on the chapter about the delusion of authority and all the nonsense that is perpetrated in connection with it.

[ 15 ] But there is something else you can see from this: You can see—since the Kamaloka sphere is essentially located in the astral realm—how the world of possibilities is connected to the astral world; not the world of what actually happens here in the physical world, but of what could happen. And I ask you to make this the very subject of a kind of meditation: that what is possible in the physical world but does not actually come to pass creates a kind of atmosphere, a kind of communicative atmosphere for the astral realm.

[ 16 ] Of all the many things that could be said about life between death and a new birth—and of which we will certainly learn more in the coming days—let us mention just one today: In the course of life between birth and death, we find that three kinds of forces, so to speak, are expressed in the soul: the powers of thought, the powers of feeling, and the powers of will and desire. The powers of thought, the intellectual powers, such that we are more or less intelligent; the powers of feeling, such that we are more or less compassionate or hard-hearted, more or less religious or irreligious in disposition; the powers of desire and will, such that our actions are more or less selfish or unselfish. Thus, these three kinds of soul forces come into play between birth and death. For the life between death and a new birth, these various soul forces have a very different significance. Let us first consider the intellectual forces. What, we might ask, do they help us with after death? The intellectual powers help us after death to make our consciousness—the conscious experience of the time between death and a new birth—particularly clear, so that the more we strive in physical life, first, to think clearly, and second, to think correctly and truthfully, the more we strive to familiarize ourselves with spiritual facts in a proper manner, the more our consciousness brightens between death and a new birth, so that—and I will describe the concrete case right away—a person who is untruthful regarding their intellectual qualities, who has no particular interest in becoming acquainted with spiritual conditions out of truthfulness, which one can only be reached through knowledge—will indeed develop a consciousness after death, but a consciousness that will gradually fade away. And now the peculiar thing is that the fading of consciousness after death causes us to pass through a certain period of time more quickly; that is, we move more quickly through the spiritual world when we are more asleep than properly awake. So if someone is dull to all intellectual powers, they remain conscious for a time after death, but then they can no longer sustain that consciousness; their dullness brings about a twilight state, and then the remainder of their life passes quickly, and they return to earthly life relatively soon.

[ 17 ] The situation is different for the forces that pertain to the will and desire. These forces help us draw strong or weak forces from the macrocosmic conditions during the time between death and a new birth, as we need them to build our next life. If one enters such conditions—as we have described—through an immoral state of mind, one cannot draw out the necessary forces to properly build up the astral or etheric body; these will then be stunted. One will be feeble and the like. Morality is thus what enables us to draw from the higher world the forces we need for the following incarnation. Thus, intellectuality and morality are closely connected with what becomes of the human being, so to speak, through their sojourn in the supersensible sphere between death and a new birth. The powers of feeling, so to speak the innermost powers of the human soul, objectively confront us during the corresponding time between death and a new birth; they are outside of us. This is very significant. A person capable of love and compassion experiences the life between death and a new birth in such a way that the life-affirming, bliss-inducing, strengthening images corresponding to compassion appear before the soul as their environment, as that in which they find themselves. For the hater, the images of hatred appear before the soul. As we are in our innermost being, we see it at a certain time between death and a new birth as a world-picture outside of us. There is no painter as good as the forces between death and a new birth. For the innermost soul forces of our mind, our firmament is that which we behold between death and a new birth, just as we see the firmament of the heavens here on earth. It is our firmament between death and a new birth. It is always with us. It is connected to the fact that, when we have taken in the Mystery of Golgotha into the innermost depths of our soul, as was mentioned the day before yesterday, when we have gained an understanding of the Pauline word: “Not I, but Christ in me”—when we experience Christ within us, then during the time of the Sun we have the opportunity to behold what has been mentioned as the Akashic world of images around us, Christ in his most beautiful, most magnificent form, as it were, in his glory of revelation, as the element in which we live and move. This thought need not have merely an egoistic meaning, but it can have a very objective meaning. For what we find spread out there as a painting, we take back into our soul as we move on and carry it into the next incarnation, thereby making ourselves not only better human beings but a better force in the development of the Earth.

[ 18 ] Thus, what we work on in our soul is intimately connected with our abilities in the next life, and we have, as it were, come to know the process by which our soul forces form around us—like a vast cosmic tapestry, like the firmament of the world—between death and a new birth, only to be within us again in a corresponding way, with greater power than in the previous life: for everything is strengthened by the fact that, in the interval between death and a new birth, one looks around at what one has experienced inwardly in a life, thereby fortifying oneself with that experience and further developing all the powers that arise from this living observation.

[ 19 ] So we have once again discussed some of the things that are so infinitely important—the relationship between death and a new birth—which are important for the simple reason that, in our life on Earth, we are nothing other than what life between death and a new birth has made of us, and because we will be less and less able to attain a true understanding of our own being—and therefore also to engage in genuine action, conduct, and thought in the future of humanity—if we fail to take into account what takes place in the spiritual world between death and a new birth. These reflections are part of a broader discussion of what can be said about life between death and a new birth. I wanted to begin, first of all, with what, in one way or another, is to become more and more the subject matter of Spiritual Science in the near future.