The Rudolf Steiner Archive

9. Life After Death

[ 1 ] When we come together to engage in Spiritual Science-related reflection, or indeed to collaborate on Spiritual Science-related work: what, then, are our actual goals?

[ 2 ] This is a question many a soul may well ask, because those engaged in work related to Spiritual Science devote, so to speak, a part of their inner life to contemplating things that, for other people today, do not actually exist. After all, we are truly contemplating worlds that do not exist at all for the vast majority of people. Now, committing oneself to such work, to such contemplations, is truly not merely the pursuit of an ideal, as there are other ideals in the present. Certainly, it is a beautiful, an extraordinarily beautiful thing when a number of people follow this or that high ideal. But it is something quite different to follow the ideal of Spiritual Science, that spiritual call which today perhaps still goes through the world quite faintly and is audible in the souls of only a few people, but which will become more and more audible in the world. Those who today tell themselves—either quite clearly or merely out of vague instincts—that Spiritual Science is a necessity: for what reasons within their souls do they do this? Certainly, some follow more or less an instinct that might be called spiritual, perhaps a certain impulse that they cannot fully bring to consciousness. But even such impulses correspond to a perfectly genuine will. When we examine the life of the soul, we can observe this.

[ 3 ] During this gathering, I do not wish to present general theories, but rather to focus on specific details as we seek to answer questions such as the one just raised. The seer, who can look into the spiritual worlds, gradually comes to understand the life that a human being experiences between death and a new birth. This life between death and a new birth takes place in spiritual realms that are constantly around us, to which we constantly belong with the best part of our soul life. Once a person has passed through the gate of death and shed their physical body, they live solely in the spiritual world—a world that otherwise remains closed to them as long as they rely on their physical senses and intellect. The seer can observe the life between death and a new birth.

[ 4 ] The fundamental questions that initially shape our ideals actually arise from contemplating this life between death and a new birth. For one might easily believe that this life has nothing to do with life here in the physical body; but in a deeper sense, it has very much to do with it. We become particularly aware of this when we consider the souls who have already passed through the gate of death and observe their relationship to those souls who are still here in the physical body. Let us immediately consider a specific case.

[ 5 ] A man had died, had passed through the gate of death, and had left behind his wife and children. Some time had passed since the man in question had passed through the gate of death, when a person capable of seeing into the spiritual worlds was able to find that soul. It was, so to speak, a truly agonizing existence that this soul was enduring. This soul lamented those left behind, his wife and children. This was expressed in words such as the following—though I must note that what the souls say must be clothed in earthly words; this is, however, merely a clothing, for the language is somewhat different; one cannot, of course, render the language of the dead with physical words; one must translate it—: There I lived with those left behind, and when I used to meet them in the evening, while I was still in the body, after I had attended to my business during the day, then what came to me from their souls was a kind of sunshine. Everything I had experienced at their side made my arduous physical life more beautiful at that time. I could not have formed a mental image back then of myself living this physical life without a wife and children. I can remember everything I experienced during my time with them; I still know that today. But when I awoke again after death in the spiritual world, I could not find my wife and children. They are not there for me; only the memory of those days remains; now they are no longer there for me. I know that they are down on Earth, but their true soul life—what they think, feel, and desire from morning till night—is as if it had been erased. I can no longer find those who are dear to me, no matter how hard I search!

[ 6 ] This is indeed a real experience; but it is also an experience shared not by a few, but by a great many souls who are currently passing through the gate of death. This was not always the case in the course of human development. In earlier times of human development, things were different; people did not pass through death in this way, nor were they on Earth in physical bodies as they are now.

[ 7 ] The difference between the present time and earlier times is that in earlier times, souls possessed an ancient spiritual heritage through which they were connected to the spiritual world. The further back we go in time, to when even the souls that are incarnated today were already incarnated, the more and more we find that souls were in the proper connection with the spiritual worlds. This ancient spiritual heritage was increasingly lost to humanity. And today, in this regard, we are indeed living in a time when much is changing in human development. Much, very much is changing at present.

[ 8 ] Before we consider the serious facts that have just been mentioned, let us first take stock of how things have changed in the course of human development. Today there are people who know little more—even if we speak only of what can be known today about the starry sky. Certainly, there are still people who occasionally go out on starry nights and enjoy the full splendor and glory of the starry sky, but these people are becoming increasingly rare, and the number of people who can no longer distinguish a planet from a fixed star is growing ever larger. But that is not the most important thing; even when a person goes out into the starry night today and looks up at the sky, they see nothing other than the external stars that appear to them physically. It was not so in earlier times; it was not so for the souls who are here now and who were incarnated in other bodies in ancient times. The same souls who today see only the physical stars used to look, when they gazed up at the starry sky, less at the physical light of the stars and more at what is spiritually connected with the stars. And spiritual beings are connected to all the stars. That which we can speak of today in Spiritual Science as the higher hierarchies was perceived clairvoyantly by the souls in the most ancient times of human development—all of you sitting here, and all those who are incarnated elsewhere. Human beings did not live merely in the perception of the physical world; they lived in the perception of the spiritual world. And to deny the spiritual world back then, in ancient times, would have been folly, just as it would be today if people were to deny that roses and lilies exist. They saw the spiritual worlds back then, so they could not deny them. In a certain sense, this is where progress lies: that people have lost their direct connection with the spiritual world, but in return have attained a higher degree of independence and freedom.

[ 9 ] At that time, the human soul lived in a spiritual outer world: that spiritual outer world has gradually been lost. But what has been lost from the spiritual outer world must gradually be replaced from within. Otherwise, the soul, which today relies solely on the sight of the external world, remains desolate and empty; and how many souls walk about in the world today who no longer know that all spaces are filled with spiritual beings, spiritual activity, and spiritual existence! Nor can one gain an understanding of the content of the spiritual world merely by looking at the external world. One can do so by turning inward into the soul. But many do not like this; such souls are precisely those like the family I alluded to. The father of the family lived in the spiritual world, in the realm where we live between death and new birth. He longed for a connection with the souls with whom he had been connected for so long; but how utterly absent these souls were to him. Why? Because these souls sought no spiritual content, because they were there only as long as they could make themselves known through physical embodiment. He thus longed to know something of these souls who had once been sunshine to him. And the seer, who had known him before he had passed through the gate of death, could not even offer him any particular comfort. This comfort would, in essence, have been a falsehood; for the comfort would have had to be: Those souls who have vanished for you will follow you if you wait patiently. Then you will have them again, just as you once had them on earth. — But that would not have been entirely true, for these souls were utterly devoid of any depth of spiritual life. When they pass through the gate of death, they too will yearn for connection with those souls with whom they were together in physical life; for there are manifold obstacles when there is no spiritual life within such souls.

[ 10 ] We are now in such a cycle of human development that souls here in the physical body must learn the language of spiritual life. Here we attain knowledge of the higher worlds—that which many souls of the present day despise, what we call, in the true sense of the word, theosophy. In truth, this is the language we must speak after death if we wish to be present in the spiritual world in the true sense of the word; how mute we will be when we enter the spiritual world if we do not learn to speak this language here. After death, we can no longer make up for what we should have learned here as the language of theosophy or Spiritual Science.

[ 11 ] If the father in question had studied Spiritual Science together with his family during his time on earth, he would have had entirely different feelings and a completely different consciousness after death; for he would have known: Souls are tangibly present; even though I am separated from them by a gulf, they will eventually come over to me and we will find one another, because we speak a common spiritual language. — Otherwise, however, he will not be able to reunite with them in the true sense of the word after death; he will only be able to be with them in the same way one might be with people on earth who are mute, who want to communicate something but cannot, who have no means whatsoever of making themselves understood.

[ 12 ] Certainly, one can admit that such truths are unpleasant to hear and unpalatable to many people today. But the point of the truth is that it is true, not that it sounds pleasant.

[ 13 ] In the early stages of human development, human souls were able to perceive so much because they were still in their infancy and absorbed religious traditions and mental images of the spiritual worlds in a childlike manner. This gave them a language for spiritual life and enabled them to be in communion with spiritual beings. Now, starting precisely with our age, human beings are to become ever freer in relation to spiritual life. That is why Spiritual Science does not enter the physical world arbitrarily, not as something that can be disseminated at will, just as associations might wish to disseminate this or that. Those who today feel called to bring spiritual thoughts into our spiritual life have had experiences such as those just described; they know of such souls who already live today in that realm beyond death, with their anguished cry for the souls they have left behind here and whom they cannot find because those souls are spiritually empty within themselves. The cries of the dead are the calls from which the ideal of Spiritual Science springs.

[ 14 ] Anyone who today enters this spiritual world and is able to perceive the torments, the longing, the deprivation, but also the hopelessness of the souls who have passed through the gate of death knows why we have come together here; who also knows that he has no choice but to champion this spiritual life. This is a serious, profound matter that will emerge from the deepest longings of humanity. Today there are souls who feel—even if only from the darkness of instinct: I want to experience something of the spiritual worlds! These are the pioneers of that human future that must come, those souls who will see an important task in the cultivation of spiritual life, which is drawn from the knowledge of the fundamental conditions of spiritual life itself. For otherwise, humanity on Earth would increasingly lose the ability to pass into the other world other than in spiritual silence, without the capacity to reveal itself spiritually; therefore, spiritual life in the sense of modern Spiritual Science must be cultivated here on Earth.

[ 15 ] Those who believe, for example, that they have time—until they have passed through the gate of death, until they are on the other side in the next world—to learn this or that about spiritual matters are also quite mistaken. In order to learn anything at all about these things, one must have the faculties to perceive them; one must have the ability to perceive these things, and one cannot possess this ability after passing through the gate of death if one has not acquired it here. For we do not live in the physical world in vain! Our souls do not descend into the physical world in vain; they descend because what can only be acquired in this world must indeed be acquired here: spiritual knowledge. We cannot simply view the earth as a vale of tears into which, so to speak, our soul is cast, but we must view the earth as something through which we can acquire the opportunity to attain spirituality, and this presents itself to us as a truth.

[ 16 ] When we ask the seer further what life is like after we have passed through the gate of death, he says: Quite different from what it is like here on Earth. Here we walk through the world; there we see the vault of heaven stretching out, the sun shining. We look out at the mountains, the seas, and the beings of the other kingdoms of nature. We ourselves walk through this world, carrying our thoughts, feelings, passions, and desires within us. We then pass through the gate of death, and there the situation is different: For those unaccustomed to Spiritual Science contemplation, the matter appears quite paradoxical, and it is true what Schopenhauer once said, that poor truth must tolerate being paradoxical. That which we regard here as thoughts, as mental images—which we believe we carry within us—appears after death as the external world. What are thoughts, mental images, and inner life here appears after death as a great, powerful tableau of the world. Those people who walk thoughtlessly through the world here pass through the world between death and a new birth in such a way that they find what should be experienced with thought and wisdom to be empty and desolate. Only those who have acquired the ability to see the thoughts spread out in the stars find the world between death and a new birth filled with content. One acquires this ability by developing a content of thought from the soul between birth and death. Just as if we had no ears and therefore could never hear a sound, just as if we had no eyes and therefore could never perceive a color, so do we walk the path from death to a new birth if we have not filled our soul here with what the physical organs can give it. And just as the sun now stands in the vault of heaven and illuminates everything, and all this disappears from our sight when it sets, so does the life that is here in many respects external appear after death as inner life.

[ 17 ] Let us turn once more to another specific experience of the seer. When we observe people who are living between death and a new birth, and translate what torments them into everyday language, they say something like this: “There is something living within me that causes me pain, pain that rises up from within myself.” — It is like a physical headache, only what is felt is inner pain. — I am the cause of it myself; I inflict the pain upon myself. — And after death, a person may have much to lament regarding inner pains and inner sufferings. If one now investigates, as a seer, where this inner pain comes from, this pain that afflicts a person after death can be traced back to the way they lived their life here: They hated a particular person whom they should not have hated; this becomes inner pain for them after death, and what they did to that person through their hatred now hurts them as their inner self.

[ 18 ] While our thoughts enable us to perceive an external world, what we experience here as our moral external world—what we experience as our emotional and psychological relationships with other people—becomes, in the end, our inner life. Indeed, it is grotesque enough when we say: Just as one’s lungs or stomach can hurt here, just as one’s head can hurt here, so moral wrongdoing can hurt one over there. What is inner here is outer there, and what is outer here is inner there. And in our time, the cycle of humanity has arrived that makes many things possible to experience only after death. The person who wants to know nothing here about the existence of karma or repeated earthly lives can, in essence, never come to realize that they are part of what they call their fate. How does a person go through the world? One person does this to them, another that; they like one thing, they dislike another: they do not know that they themselves are the cause of it, that something happens to them when someone inflicts something painful upon them; they do not think about it; otherwise they would feel: It is you yourself who inflicts it upon yourself! If one can follow these thoughts in life, one will at least have a sense after death of where it comes from that one experiences this or that pain.

[ 19 ] This is certainly some comfort: knowledge of karma here in this life, between death and rebirth; otherwise, however, the agonizing question of why one must suffer this or that remains for the life after death. These are things we must begin to understand today; without them, the development of humanity cannot, so to speak, move forward.

[ 20 ] Another situation that presents itself to the seer is that there are people between death and rebirth who have to perform tasks that are not very pleasant or appealing. We must not form a mental image of ourselves having nothing to do between death and rebirth. We have the most varied activities to perform, depending on our abilities. There the seer may find that there are souls between death and a new birth who must serve, for example, that spirit we call Ahriman. Ahriman immediately becomes clear to us as a special being when we enter the realm beyond the physical world. Everything depicted in the drama *The Guardian of the Threshold* as the realms of Ahriman and Lucifer are real worlds. Ahriman has his task. The seer finds souls who, over there, are attached to the realm of Ahriman: they must serve Ahriman. Why? As a seer, one investigates this; by what means are they condemned to serve Ahriman? One goes back to the life they led between birth and death, one investigates the most outstanding qualities of these souls, and one finds that they suffered from an evil and were subject to this evil, and this evil is—comfort. Comfort is one of the most widespread qualities of our present-day humanity. Let us ask: Why is it that most people fail to do this or that? It is comfort! Whether we turn to the most important things in human life or to the least important: comfort is what permeates the whole of human life. Attachment to the old and an inability to break free from the old is attachment to comfort. People are not as bad as is assumed; it was not out of wickedness that they burned Giordano Bruno and Savonarola, or treated Galileo as they did. Nor do they fail to honor great minds during their lifetimes out of wickedness, but out of convenience! It takes a long time for such people to learn to rethink and re-feel things, and this is solely because of convenience. Comfort is a common, quite widespread trait. This comfort makes us fit to be enlisted in Ahriman’s army after death; for Ahriman is, among his other roles, the spirit of obstacles. Wherever obstacles arise, Ahriman is the master; he slows down life and humanity. Those who are subject to comfort here become hindrances in the world with regard to everything that is channeled here from the supersensible worlds. Comfort thus chains human beings in the life between death and new birth to the spirits who, under Ahriman, must serve the resistances and obstacles.

[ 21 ] In many people, we find a trait developed here in life that we already count among the immoral traits: a lack of conscience. In the voice of conscience, we have something that wonderfully regulates our inner life. A lack of conscience—a limited ability to heed the warning voice of conscience—once again delivers us into the hands of other powers for the time between death and the new birth. There the seer finds certain souls who, after passing through the gate of death, have become servants of very evil spirits. Here in life, illnesses arise; they manifest themselves in one way or another. We know, for example, that in earlier times, epidemic plagues and cholera also swept through Europe. Materialistic science will be able to point to the external causes, but not the inner spiritual causes. And everything that happens has its spiritual reasons. If someone comes and tells you that science has the task of seeking the physical causes for what happens, one can always say: Spiritual Science does not exclude the truth of the external causes, if they are justified; but it adds the spiritual causes.

[ 22 ] Someone once asked, when these spiritual causes were being discussed: If Napoleon exhibits a passion for commanding battles, can we not explain this by the fact that his mother, while she was carrying him, enjoyed visiting battlefields and passed this on to him through physical heredity? There is some truth to that, but Napoleon was the one who instilled this in her: he implanted this quality, this inclination, in her. Spiritual Science never rules out the possibility that the external reality is also true.

[ 23 ] If someone says, “Here stands a human being; why is he alive?”, the materialist might reply, “Because he is breathing.” Another might say, “I know better than that; he still wouldn’t be alive if I hadn’t pulled him out of the water three months ago!” Yes, isn’t this latter connection true despite the former? For people always believe that scientific connections are nullified by connections of Spiritual Science. Even if someone can prove that he has inherited this or that trait from his father, grandfather, and so on, it remains true that he, too, has created the conditions.

[ 24 ] Thus, one can also study the causes of the diseases that have spread from a purely scientific perspective. One can also ask, from a purely external perspective: Why did this or that person die an early death? But all of this also has its reasons in the spiritual world. While diseases unfold here on Earth, certain spiritual beings must work to bring these diseases from the spiritual world into the physical world.

[ 25 ] When we look upon the dead who enter this realm while life has not yet fully run its natural course—those who may not only have died in the prime of life, in their youth, due to illness, but who were also plagued by misfortune and hardship throughout their lives— then the seer, when he observes these fates—which are indeed numerous—through clairvoyance, is confronted with a shattering reality: he sees before him a realm of sickness and death that is entirely dominated by certain evil spirits who bring sickness and death upon the earth. And when one attempts to trace the life course of these souls, who were unscrupulous people on earth, one finds that they have now had to become the servants of these evil spirits of illness, death, and adversity in order to bring about such premature deaths and heavy fates. That is the connection! Life only becomes understandable when one views it in its entirety, not just by isolating a brief period of time that lies between birth and death. For this period is in turn intimately dependent on what preceded it in the pre-birth state, in the purely spiritual world. With our entire being, we are dependent on what has preceded in the spiritual world. One understands this best when, with the eye of the seer, one is able to study such a phenomenon that many would like to believe is an objection to the facts of spiritual research. Some people say, for example: “Yes, you want to trace people’s abilities and destinies back to past lives on Earth, but just look at the Bernoulli family, which is represented by eight mathematicians! There you can clearly see that certain characteristics are inherited from generation to generation!” — But when one truly studies such a phenomenon with the eye of the seer, it turns out that everything that appears in the world in one art form or another—and which can already fill people with a sense of the supersensible world—and art has always done this—is the result of existence in the supersensible world. And whoever enters this world with artistic abilities brings these artistic abilities with them because, through previous earthly lives or through a special grace in the time before birth, before conception, they already lived in a very special way in the world of spherical harmony; and because they now demonstrate a certain inclination toward precisely such a physical human body that can give them the ability to express what they have perceived in the physical world as well.

[ 26 ] No human soul seeks to incarnate in such a body, in such a lineage, where musical traits are inherited, unless it has acquired in a previous life the ability to undergo, between death and a new birth, precisely what enables one to master this art, in order to then be born into a body with special musical aptitude. For only the very earliest predispositions are present in the hereditary line. A good musical ear is inherited; these organs are transformed during prenatal embryonic life or after birth according to the soul’s particular abilities. The first instrument a human plays is their own organism, and this is truly a very, very complicated instrument; for divine-spiritual beings have needed the entire duration of the Saturn, Sun, and Moon evolutions to prepare this instrument: And we come into the world with a wisdom that is truly greater than that which we can acquire later.

[ 27 ] People believe they are very wise when they begin to think; but the wisdom we achieve when we begin to think is actually small compared to a much greater wisdom that we have acquired, yet which we lose at a certain point in time. When we are born, our brains are still soft; then the connections leading from the brain to the individual organs are still undeveloped, and we possess this wisdom during our childhood to tune the organs, to tune the instrument. Later, at the moment we recall as the one when we become conscious of ourselves, we have already lost the ability to play our instrument; it is far better in early childhood than later. This is a great wisdom that is applied to bring us to the point where we become this complex instrument. This is something that can fill us with great respect for what we are, as long as we are still in the bosom of divine-spiritual wisdom. And then we become aware of how we actually enter life with a much greater wisdom than we could have known until now; then we can also form a mental image of how great this wisdom is beforehand in the life that lies before embryonic life. This is now extraordinarily significant, for the seer’s gaze recognizes: the further back we go, the greater is the wisdom and capacity of the human being.

[ 28 ] And now, with the eye of the seer, let us contemplate the soul of a person who has become a servant of the evil spirits of illness and death. In such a soul we can see how the wisdom of which the human being is capable has been extinguished by his having debased himself. Such a soul presents a terrible sight: once destined to have unfolded the highest wisdom, and now so deeply debased that it becomes a servant of the Ahrimanic powers! Once the human being has entered physical incarnation, once they have taken on the physical body, they can—by participating in spiritual life, by taking the spiritual world into themselves—enliven their soul and enable it to have a spiritual world around them as they pass through life between death and new birth—or they can make themselves dull. Such a soul has made itself dull if, here between birth and death, it has not wished to take in anything that enables it to see a spiritual world around itself.

[ 29 ] There we see ourselves as individual souls in connection with the entire spiritual life of the world; there we see ourselves set apart from the whole life of the world; there we feel the need not to let our innate spiritual powers wither away, but to nurture them, so that we do not gradually fade away from the world. Now, someone might say: Yes, I want to erase myself from the surrounding world, for I care nothing for life. — But this erasure is not the same as annihilation; this erasure is only an erasure for the environment. One is then no longer there for the environment, but one is still there for oneself. Eradication is isolation in the spiritual world; it means living as if on an island, lonely, cut off, without the possibility of communication. — This is achieved when one excludes oneself from the spiritual world.

[ 30 ] The following image can be helpful here. Commit this image to memory; consider it a good foundation for meditation: As humanity advances further and further in the evolution of the world, it becomes freer and freer. They always live in such a way that they are as if on an island; our calls, our understanding, must travel from one island to another. The person who will participate in the spiritual life of humanity in the future will be able to communicate from one island to another with all those who live freely on the islands. The person, on the other hand, who flees from spiritual life will be on his own island, and when he wants to communicate with those he has known before, he will not be able to do so. The voice within him will die away; he will sense: There, over there on those islands, are the ones I know, the ones who belong to me. — But nothing reaches him; he will listen and hear nothing. Spiritual science gives us the language through which we will gain the ability in the future to transcend loneliness and arrive at understanding. Those sayings that resonate to us from occult writings are sometimes much deeper than one thinks. When the Mystery of Golgotha took place, that was the first proclamation of what humanity needs in order to find understanding from one of the designated islands to another.

[ 31 ] Now comes the second proclamation: anthroposophical Spiritual Science, which is intended to make the mystery of Christ clearer and clearer to the human soul. What Christ spoke is hinted at in certain words. Among the deepest is this: “Where two are gathered in my name, there am I in their midst.” But one will only learn to understand this name once one has learned the spiritual language. In the early days of the Christian proclamation, one could still discover this in a naive way; in the future, only those people will recognize Christ who recognize him through Spiritual Science. It may seem foolish to many people today that Spiritual Science is called the spiritual language that people need so that they do not isolate themselves, do not separate in death or in dying, so that they may find the possibility of moving from one island to another.

[ 32 ] What I have tried to say to you today will give you a full sense of why we have come together to promote Spiritual Science. Those who consciously work for Spiritual Science today follow those calls, those voices; and to a greater or lesser extent, those who feel a longing to hear something about the spiritual world also follow them. These voices, these calls, come from the spiritual world itself, as does the need one feels emanating from the spiritual world when the human souls living between death and new birth speak; when the other spiritual beings of the various hierarchies also speak. When all these voices resound to us, they will be able to awaken in our souls that which will lead humanity more and more to the cultivation of that spiritual life which we cherish in our branches and which may also be faithfully cultivated here in this branch in the future. This is the wish I would like to place in your souls today at the end of these reflections, and I earnestly hope that it may burn ever more strongly in your own souls for the flourishing of Spiritual Science work, sustained by true Spiritual Science warmth.