The Rudolf Steiner Archive

Fifth Lecture

[ 1 ] It will now be my task to speak once more about the events that occur between death and a new birth, but this time drawing on the mental images we have gained in the last four lectures. Naturally, since the subject must be treated with a certain brevity, much of this comprehensive topic can only be touched upon; some points that may not follow directly from the pictorial representation will need to be elaborated upon. But what our anthroposophical friends will not yet find fully developed today will then become apparent in the course of further insight into Spiritual Science.

[ 2 ] When a person has passed through the gate of death, they have shed their physical body; the physical body is returned to the elements of the earth. In other words, one could also say of him: The physical body has separated itself from the forces and laws that permeate the actual human being between birth and death—forces and laws that are different from the merely chemical and physical laws to which the physical body then succumbs after death. From the perspective of the physical world, a person naturally holds the view: What belongs to the physical plane has remained behind on the physical plane from the human being. This aspect belonging to the physical plane is now also surrendered to the physical plane. For the human being himself, however, and for all understanding of the spiritual world, the perspective must be considered that the deceased—the human being who has passed through the gate of death—must have taken. For them, leaving the physical body signifies an inner process, a soul process; for those left behind, what happens to the physical body after death is an external process. The inner being of the human being, the human-soul aspect of the deceased, is no longer expressed within what remains as mortal remains. For the person themselves, however, who has passed through the gate of death, there is nevertheless something connected with leaving the body. It signifies an inner soul experience: You have stepped out of your physical body and are leaving this physical body behind.

[ 3 ] It is extremely difficult—I would say—to describe accurately, from the standpoint of the physical plane, what is taking place within the human soul. For it is an inner process that is, in essence, something immensely all-encompassing, something immensely significant. It is an inner process that, in essence, lasts only a short time, yet is of universal significance for the entirety of human life. Now, if one were to describe the content of the mental image of what is happening within the soul—this content of the mental image, which, of course, cannot yet be touched upon in a public lecture today, for it would shock the public too much—though perhaps the time will come for that as well—if one were to describe the external, that is, now spiritually external, process of imagination with which, so to speak, the life journey begins, the one that runs between death and a new birth, then one could say that the one who has passed through the gate of death initially has the feeling: You are now in a completely different relationship to the world than you were before, and the entire previous relationship you had with the world is, in essence, reversed, radically reversed. One would actually have to describe it in the following way if one wanted to describe what is experienced in the realm of imagination. One would have to say: The human being has lived on Earth until his death; during this time he has been accustomed to standing on the solid, material Earth, to seeing on this material Earth the beings of the mineral, plant, and animal kingdoms, mountains, rivers, clouds, stars, the sun, and the moon, and has become accustomed, through his own perspective and through the faculties present in his physical body, to create a mental image of all of this as one does, even though we know today through Copernicanism that it is essentially an illusion: Up there is the blue vault of heaven like a celestial shell, with the stars upon it; above that pass the sun and moon and so on; one is oneself as if in this shell, in this hollow sphere, inside there, in the center, on the earth, with what the earth reveals to one’s perception.

[ 4 ] What matters to us now is not that this is an illusion, that we ourselves create this blue circle solely because of the limitations of our abilities, but rather that we simply cannot help but see it. We simply see what is so only because of the limitations of our abilities; we simply see a blue sphere formed as the firmament above us. When a person has passed through the gate of “death,” the first thing they must do is form the mental image in their soul: You are now outside this blue sphere in which you were. You look at it from the outside, but as if it had shrunk into a star. At first one has no awareness of the world of stars into which one is actually expanding, but one has at first only an awareness of what one has left behind: that one has left behind the sphere of consciousness one had in the physical body, that one has left behind that which the human faculties developed in the physical body allowed one to perceive. Spiritually, something similar has indeed taken place to what would happen if, through conscious experience, a little cake inside an eggshell were to break it open and then view the broken eggshell—which had previously enclosed it, its former world—from the outside rather than the inside. Of course, this mental image is again maya passing through the human soul, but a necessary maya. As I said, what previously gave us the content of our consciousness has shrunk together as if into a star, only that, emanating from this star, there spreads what one might call: radiant cosmic wisdom.

[ 5 ] This radiant cosmic wisdom is the very same thing I discussed yesterday in my last lecture, and about which I said that we possess it in abundance. It glows and sparkles toward us as if from a fiery star. Now it is not blue like the firmament, but now it is fiery, glowing red, and radiating into space the abundance of wisdom that first shows us—it is entirely fluid in itself—what one might call a tableau of memories from our last earthly life. All the events we have traversed with our inner soul experience between birth and death, where we were consciously present, step before our soul, but in such a way that we know: You see all this because the star shining before you is the background, which, through its inner activity, enables you to see all that unfolds as a tableau of memories. This is spoken of more from the standpoint of imagination. Spoken of from the standpoint of inner life, the experience is roughly this: that the one who has passed through the gate of death is now entirely filled with the thought: Yes, you have left your body. Now, in the spiritual world, this body is pure will. A star of will, a star whose substance is will—that is your body. And this will glows with warmth and radiates back to you, across the vastness of the worlds into which you have now poured yourself, your own life between birth and death like a great tableau. And you owe it to the fact that you were able to dwell within this star that you were able to draw and absorb from the world all that you had just drawn and absorbed from the world on the physical plane. For this star, this star of will, which now forms the background, is the spiritual aspect of your physical body; this star of will is the spirit that permeates and energizes your physical body. That which shines upon you as wisdom is the activity, the mobility of your etheric body.

[ 6 ] Time passes—as was already described in the public lecture—and it actually lasts only a few days, during which one has the impression that life unfolds like a tableau of memories. Our thoughts, which have become our memories during our life on Earth, unfold, as it were, in this tableau of memories; they appear once more before our soul. And we can sustain this for as long as we have the strength to remain awake in our physical bodies under normal conditions. It does not matter how long we once stayed awake in our lives under abnormal conditions; what matters is what powers we possess within us to keep ourselves awake. In one person, these forces are such that they can barely stay awake through the night without being overcome by fatigue; in another, they can endure it longer without growing tired. The length of time a person needs to process this tableau of memories depends on the extent of these forces. But one also has the very clear inner awareness that, because the star of the will is in the background, this tableau of memories contains what we have attained in our last earthly life; that it contains that through which we have become more mature, what we have, so to speak, carried out through death as something more compared to what we had as something lesser upon entering our birth. This, which we might describe as a fruit of the last life, we feel as if it were not to remain as it was during the tableau of memories, but as if it were receding, as if it were departing, as if it were entering the future of time and vanishing into the future of time.

[ 7 ] Today I will focus primarily on what life is like between death and rebirth for those who have lived a normal lifespan and died under normal circumstances. I will discuss exceptional cases in more detail tomorrow.

[ 8 ] So our fruit of life moves away once we have attained it, and we know in our soul: this fruit is somehow present, but we have been left behind. We have the awareness that we have remained at an earlier point; the fruit of life moves on quickly, so that it arrives earlier at a later point, and we must follow it, this fruit of life. What I have just said—this inner experience that the fruit of life dwells in the universe, that it is present—we must truly create a mental image of this, for this is what forms the basis of our consciousness, of the beginning of our consciousness after death. Our consciousness must, so to speak, always be stimulated by something. When we wake up in the morning, our consciousness is rekindled—while we are unconscious during sleep—by our immersion into the physical body and by the fact that external things confront us, by the fact that something acts upon us from the outside. In the circumstances immediately following death, this consciousness is kindled by the inner sensing and experiencing of what is the fruit of our last life, of what we have attained and conquered. This is present, but present outside of us. Through this feeling and experiencing of our innermost earthly being outside of us, we have the first spark of our consciousness after death; this is what animates this consciousness.

[ 9 ] Then begins the time when it is necessary for us to develop soul powers that must actually remain undeveloped during life on the physical plane, because they are all used to organize the physical body and everything associated with it—the entire physical life—soul powers that must be transformed into something else during physical life. These powers must gradually awaken after death. Already during the days in which we experience the tableau of memories, we can observe such an awakening of soul faculties. When the tableau of memories gradually fades and dims, this actually occurs because during these days we are already developing those powers that underlie the capacity for memory but do not become conscious during physical life—and this is precisely because during this physical life we must transform them in order to form memories. The last great memory we have after death in the form of the tableau must first ebb away; it must gradually fade, and then, out of this fading, develops that which we were not permitted to possess consciously before death. For had we possessed it consciously before death, the powers of memory could never have formed within us. The forces that are now developing in the soul as the memory of the tableau of life fades have been transformed into this ability to remember. These forces were transformed into the power of remembrance before death, and now they emerge as the ability to recall earthly thoughts in the usual way is overcome. This power of memory, transformed, as it were, into the spiritual, awakens within us as a first spiritual-soul power that emerges from the human soul after death just as the soul powers emerge in the growing child during the first weeks of life. As this soul force develops, it becomes clear to us that behind the thoughts—which, while we were on the physical plane, were merely shadows—there lies something living, that there is life and activity in the world of thought. We become aware that what we have within the physical body as our tableau of thoughts is merely a shadow image, that in truth it is a sum, an outspreading of elemental beings. We see, as it were, our memories fade away and, in their place, a whole host of elemental beings awakening from the general cosmos of wisdom.

[ 10 ] You might ask, my dear friends: Yes, but won’t we lose that after death—won’t we overcome our power of memory and have something else instead? We do not lose it, for we have ample compensation for it after death. Instead of remembering our thoughts as we do in life, we realize after death that these thoughts, which we had as memories in life, appear to us only as recollections. Oh, this treasure of memories during life—it is something quite different from a mere treasure of memories! Once we have left the physical body, we see this entire treasure of memory as a living presence; then it is there. Every thought lives as an elemental being. We now know: You thought during your physical life; your thoughts appeared to you. But while you were in that delusion—while you were forming thoughts—you created nothing but elemental beings. That is the new thing you have added to the entire cosmos. Now there is something there that has been born from you into the spirit; now what your thoughts actually were appears before you. One first learns to recognize through direct perception what elemental beings are, because one first learns to recognize those elemental beings that one has created oneself. This is the significant impression of the first period after death: that one has this tableau of memories. But this tableau begins to live, to truly live, and as it begins to live, it transforms into nothing but elemental beings. Now it reveals, so to speak, its true face, and its disappearance consists in the fact that it becomes something entirely different. If, for example, we have died at the age of sixty or eighty, we no longer need the power of memory for any thought we may have had in our twentieth year of life, for it is there as a living elemental being; it has been waiting, and we do not need to remember it. For if, for example, we had died in our fortieth year, the thought would be only twenty years old—and we can clearly see that in it. These elemental beings tell us themselves how long it has been since they were formed. Time becomes space. It stands before us as the living beings reveal their own signatures of time. Time becomes the immediate present for these conditions.

[ 11 ] Through these elemental beings of our own, who have already surrounded us in life and whom we behold in death, we come to know the nature of the elemental world in general and thereby prepare ourselves to understand, through gradual observation, those elemental beings of the external world as well—beings whom we have not created, but who exist in the spiritual cosmos independently of us. Through our own elemental creation, we come to know the others. Just imagine how infinitely different this life between death and a new birth actually is from earthly life. The first thing that happens after birth is that the human being does not yet recognize themselves. What they experience as a very small child, others experience with them. They have been born, and the others—their parents—look upon this newborn. After death, however, one does not initially look at oneself, but one looks upon one’s own creation as an external world. What is outside, what one has brought into being at the moment of death—that is what one looks upon oneself. Just as, when a human being enters existence through physical birth, they face an external world incomprehensible to them and are, in fact, a being who merely wriggles, cries, and laughs for the sake of others, so after ‘death,’ after birth into the spiritual world—which is death for the physical world—one is initially such that one begins to be within the environment one has brought into being oneself, which one erects around oneself because one has brought it into being. One has given birth to the world, whereas when one is born into the physical world, one is born of the world. So it is with our thoughts and with what becomes of the thoughts through memory, the treasure trove of memories.

[ 12 ] The situation is different when it comes to what belongs to our emotional and volitional spheres. In the first of the lectures here, I explained that what belongs to our emotional and volitional spheres has not yet been fully born within us; that will and feeling, in a certain sense, represent something that has not yet come to full fruition. This becomes particularly evident after death, for will and feeling, as they permeate the physical body, remain present after death. So that after some time, once the star of the will has departed with the fruits of its last earthly life, the human being lives in an elemental world that is its environment, and to which it itself, so to speak, gives the keynote through its transformed memories. The human being lives in this inner world—which is actually the human being in the sense just explained—knowing: Yes, but your feeling and your will still live within you; they now have a kind of memory, a kind of connection to the last earthly life. This lasts for decades. When we stand in earthly life between birth and death, then we enjoy and we suffer, then we live in passions, developing impulses of will through the fact that we carry the feeling and willing soul within our body. But it is never the case that all the forces lying in feeling and will can truly emerge through the body. Even if one has reached the highest age, one still dies in such a way that one could have enjoyed even more, suffered even more, and developed even more impulses of will. But what still remains in the soul in terms of possibilities of feeling and willing must first be overcome. As long as this is not completely overcome, we remain bound by a web of desires to our last earthly life. We look back, as it were, on this last earthly life. It is, as I have often described it with a trivial word, a kind of weaning away from the connection with physical earthly life. Anyone who becomes even a little bit of a true spiritual researcher very soon penetrates the nature of this force that must be overcome—a process that actually takes decades—for it reveals itself relatively easily to spiritual research.

[ 13 ] When we fall asleep each day after the events of the day, spending time between falling asleep and waking up, we are, in our soul-spiritual being, outside our body. We return because we have an impulse in our soul-spiritual being to return, because we truly long for our body. We do indeed long for our body, and anyone who can consciously experience waking up knows: You want to wake up, and you must want to wake up. There is simply a pull in the soul-spiritual realm toward the body. This must gradually subside; it must be completely overcome. This takes decades. It is the time during which we gradually overcome our connection to our last earthly life. This is why, with regard to the experiences after death—in the time that, as I have just described, is spent in the afterlife—we must actually experience everything indirectly through our earthly life.

[ 14 ] Now that the previous lectures have been delivered, I am in a position to describe certain circumstances to you in greater detail than usual, when it was necessary to provide a more general overview, since the concepts must always be established first in order to provide an accurate description.

[ 15 ] Let us suppose that we have left a loved one behind on Earth and have ourselves passed through the gate of death. We now find ourselves in a time when we have acquired the ability to look into the elemental beings and to sense ourselves, so that we know: Our earthly fruits have departed. But we are still connected to our last earthly life. Let us suppose that when we passed through the gate of death, we left behind a person whom we loved very dearly. Yes, now, after death, we gradually come to see the elemental beings of others by acclimating ourselves through our own elemental creations; now we can learn to perceive the thoughts of others as elemental beings. We gradually learn this through our own elemental beings, and also with regard to the other people we have left behind—to see what they think, what thoughts live in their souls; we see it. For it expresses itself in the elemental beings that appear before our soul in powerful imaginings. So in this respect we can already have much more connection with the inner life of the person in question than we had with them in the physical world. For while we ourselves were in the physical body, we could not look into the thoughts of others; now we can. But we need, so to speak, the emotional memory—please pay close attention to the word—the emotional memory, the emotional connection to our own last earthly life. We must, as it were, feel as we felt in the body, and this feeling must resonate within us; then the relationship—which we would otherwise have only as with an image, as the thoughts of the other appear to us—comes to life. We thus gain a living connection indirectly through our feelings. And so it is, in essence, with everything.

[ 16 ] You see, it is a process of emerging from a state that can be characterized by saying: It is a time when we must still draw our strength from our last earthly life in order to establish living connections with our spiritual environment; we must still be connected to that earthly life. We love the souls we have left behind, whose soul content appears to us as thoughts, as elemental beings, but we love them because we ourselves still live from the love we developed for them during our earthly life. It is, I might almost say, unpleasant to use such expressions, but some of you will understand me when I say: Earthly life—that is, not the life of thought—earthly life as the content of the soul, experienced and permeated by impulses of will, with which we are still connected, acts as a kind of electrical switch between our own individuality and what surrounds us spiritually. Like a kind of electrical switch: we perceive everything indirectly through our last earthly life. But only through what was feeling and willing in our last earthly life do we perceive what in the spiritual world belongs to us. It is truly the case now that we feel ourselves continuing to live on in time, like a kind of comet of time. Our earthly life is still there like a core, but this core develops into the near future a sort of tail that we live through. We are still connected to our earthly life, insofar as it is filled with feeling and will. Within our soul, something must emerge from this experience—as I have described it to you—that is not immediately feeling or will. For the soul forces we develop here in the physical world—including the power of feeling, as we possess it in the physical world as an emotional force, and the power of will, as we possess it in the physical world as a volitional force—we possess in this form precisely because we live in the physical body. When the soul no longer lives in the physical body, it must develop other abilities that lie dormant during physical life; while the aftereffects of feeling and will continue to work within it for years, it must mature from this connection what it now needs for the spiritual world in this regard as well—forces that I have described by saying, it is something like a feeling desire or a desiring feeling. We know that our feelings and our will reside within our soul. But of such feeling and desire as reside within our soul, we have, strictly speaking, nothing after death; they must gradually fade and dull; and this is precisely what they do over the years. But during this fading and dulling, something must develop from feeling and will that will be of use to us after death.

[ 17 ] Our thoughts live out there as elemental beings. Without the feelings and will that once lived within us, we would have nothing for this world—which is ourselves and which exists out there. We must gradually develop a will—and we do develop it—that flows out from us, that pours forth from us and surges and swells toward where our living thoughts are. It permeates them, because on the waves of the will floats the feeling that in physical life exists only within us. On the waves of the will, feeling floats; out there, the sea of our will surges and swells, and upon it, feeling floats. Namely, it floats when the will encounters a thought elemental; then, through this collision of the will with the thought elementals, a spark of feeling arises, and we perceive this repulsion of our will as a real reality of the spiritual world.

[ 18 ] Let me put it this way: Suppose there is an elemental being in the spiritual world outside us. Once we have worked our way out of the state we must first pass through, our will, now flowing out from us, surges toward the elemental being. Where it strikes the elemental being, it is thrown back: now it does not return as will, but as a feeling that ebbs back to us in this sea of will. As a feeling that returns to us in the currents of will, our own being lives outpoured into the cosmos. Through this, the elemental beings become real to us; through this, we gradually perceive more and more of what truly exists out there in the spiritual world beyond us.

[ 19 ] But there is another power of the soul that must emerge from within us, one that slumbers in much deeper layers of the soul than feeling-will or will-feeling: the creative power of the soul, which is like an inner light of the soul, which must shine out into the spiritual world, so that we do not merely gaze, floating upon the waves of feeling that return to us in the sea of our will, at the living, weaving, objective beings of thought, but so that we may also have illuminated this spiritual world with spiritual light. Creative spiritual light must radiate from our soul out into the spiritual world. It is gradually awakening.

[ 20 ] You see, my dear friends, while we live in the physical body, we have—at least, I would say—the twin aspects of feeling and willing within us. We have these two, while they form a unity once we have passed through the gate of death. This creative soul force, which we radiate like a soul light out into the spiritual space—if I may use the term “space” here, for it is not actually space, but one must in a certain way make these relationships understandable by expressing them figuratively— this soul light slumbers deep within us, because it is connected to that of which we may not and cannot know anything in life. Deep within us, during our life on the physical plane, slumbers that which is then, as it were, redeemed as light and goes on to illuminate and brighten the spiritual world. What radiates from us there must be transformed and utilized during our physical life so that our body may truly live and harbor consciousness within itself. But far below the threshold of consciousness, this spiritual luminous power acts within our physical body as the force that organizes life and consciousness. We must not bring it into earthly consciousness, otherwise we would rob our body of the power that must organize it through and through. Now that we have no body to sustain, it becomes spiritual luminous power and radiates through, illuminates, brightens, and sparkles through everything—the words signify real realities.

[ 21 ] In this way, we are gradually working our way toward becoming just as at home in the spiritual world, experiencing it as a reality, just as we experience the physical world here as a reality. We are gradually working our way toward truly having the souls of the dead—insofar as they live in reality in the spiritual world—as our companions in the spiritual world. We live among souls just as we live among bodies here in the physical body. And as one penetrates ever more deeply into the very inner spirit of Spiritual Science, the claim that someone might make—that after death we would not be reunited with all the people with whom we have lived—this claim becomes, for those who delve deeper into the matter, just as foolish as it would be on the physical plane to claim that when we enter this earth through birth, we find no human beings here. People are right around us. It is exactly the same for the connoisseur of spiritual life as if someone were to say: The child enters the world, but sees no people. That is obvious nonsense. Likewise, it is nonsense to say: When we enter into the spiritual world, we do not find all the souls with whom we have been connected, nor do we find beings of the higher hierarchies whom we gradually come to know, just as here on Earth we know the minerals, plants, and animals. But the difference is that here in the physical world we know: When we see and hear things, the ability to see and hear them comes through the senses from the external world. In the spiritual world, we know that this ability comes from within us, as what we might call the light of the soul or the radiance of the soul emanates from our soul and illuminates, enlightens, and penetrates things.

[ 22 ] Thus we live through the period that might be called the first half of life, between death and a new birth. As we live through this period, we experience the two states I also spoke of in my public lecture—a period lasting several years in which, as described, we are connected to the spiritual world through the radiance of our soul’s luminous power, and thus perceive the spirits and souls around us. This then begins to fade; we feel: You can now develop your soul’s luminous power less and less; you must allow it to grow dimmer and ever darker in a spiritual sense. As a result, you see the spiritual beings less and less. This becomes more and more the case, so that one alternates with a time when one says to oneself: “There, the beings are around you,” but you become ever lonelier; you have only the contents of your own soul, and these contents become richer to the extent that one ceases to be able to illuminate the beings out there. There are times of spiritual fellowship and times of spiritual solitude, in which there is a reliving of what one experienced during the times of spiritual fellowship, but all of it then within the soul: this ebbs and flows. This is how we immerse ourselves in the spiritual world: spiritual fellowship—spiritual solitude. In times of spiritual solitude, we know: What you have otherwise experienced in the spiritual world all around you—it was all there, you know all of that—but now only the echoes of it remain within you. One might say: these are memories during times of spiritual solitude. Yet when one uses such words, one does not quite capture the essence of the matter. I shall therefore attempt to describe it to you from yet another perspective.

[ 23 ] It is not as if, in the spiritual darkness where one has no companionship, one were to recall what one once experienced in the spiritual world, but rather as if one had to bring it forth anew at every moment: it is a continuous inner creation. But you know: while the outer world exists out there, you must be with yourself and create and create. What you create is the world that surrounds you out there, beyond the shores of your own being.

[ 24 ] But as one continues to live in this way during the first half of life, between death and a new birth, and approaches the midpoint of the time between death and a new birth, one feels that solitary life becoming ever richer and the views of the spiritual surroundings, as it were, growing shorter and dimmer, until the time arrives at the midpoint between death and a new birth, which I have attempted to portray in my latest mystery play “The Awakening of the Soul” as the midnight of the worlds, where the human being possesses the strongest life within, but no longer the creative soul power to illuminate their spiritual surroundings, where, so to speak, infinite worlds from within us can fill us spiritually, yet we can know nothing of any being other than our own. This is the midpoint in the experiences between death and a new birth: the midnight of the worlds.

[ 25 ] Now begins the time when longing within the human being becomes a positive creative force. For although we possess the infinite as an inner life, the longing to have an outer world once again awakens within us. The conditions of the spiritual world are so different from those of the physical world that, while longing is the most passive force in the physical world—if we have something we long for, it is that very thing that determines us—the opposite is true in the spiritual world. There, longing becomes a creative force; it transforms into what can now, as a new kind of soul light, give us an outer world—an outer world that is, however, an inner world, in that it opens our gaze to our past earthly incarnations. These now lie spread out before us, illuminated by the light born of our longing. There is a force in the spiritual cosmos that, arising from longing, can illuminate this retrospective for us and allow us to experience it. However, for this to happen, one thing is necessary in our present cycle of time.

[ 26 ] I have told you that throughout this entire period of the first half of life, between death and a new birth, we alternate between inner life and outer life, between solitude and spiritual fellowship. The conditions of the spiritual world are such that every time we return to our solitude in this spiritual world, we always bring before our soul, through our inner activity, what we have experienced in the outer world. Through this, a consciousness exists that spreads like the wings of infinity over the entire spiritual world. The wings then draw back together in solitude.

[ 27 ] But there is one thing we must preserve, something that must remain intact, regardless of whether we expand into the great spiritual world or withdraw from it. Before the Mystery of Golgotha took place, it was possible, through the forces by which human beings were connected to primeval times, to maintain a firm sense of the I, not to lose this sense of the I—that is, to retain a clear and complete memory of one’s past earthly life: one was an I on Earth in this life. This must extend through the times of solitude and of social life. Before the Mystery of Golgotha, this was ensured by inherited powers. Now it can only be ensured by the fact that what we have detached from ourselves as our earthly possessions—what we have felt moving away from us the very moment we leave the physical body—remains connected to a soul-fulfillment, the soul-fulfillment we can attain through the fact that Christ has flowed out into the Earth’s aura. This permeation with the substantial Christ—that is what gives us, in the present, during the transition from physical life to death, the possibility of preserving the memory of our I right up to the midnight of the world, despite all expansion into the spiritual world, despite all contraction into solitude. The impulse emanating from the Christ-force extends that far, so that we do not lose ourselves. But then, out of longing, a new spiritual force must kindle our yearning into a new light. This force exists only in the spirit, in spiritual life.

[ 28 ] My dear friends, in the physical world there is nature, and the Divine that permeates this nature, from which we are born into the physical world. There is the Christ impulse, which is present in the Earth’s aura—that is, in the aura of physical nature. But the power that approaches us in the midnight of the world to make our longing shine across our entire past—that exists only in the spiritual world; it exists only where no bodies can live. And once the Christ impulse has brought us into the midnight of the world, and the midnight of the world has been experienced by the soul in spiritual solitude—because the light of the soul can no longer shine forth from within us—world darkness has set in; the Christ has led us this far, then now, out of the midnight of the world, out of our longing, a spiritual essence emerges, creating a new light of the world, spreading a radiance over our own being, through which we take hold of our existence in the world anew, through which we awaken anew to our existence in the world. The Spirit of the spiritual world that awakens us—we come to know it as a new light shines forth from the midnight of the world, radiating over our past humanity. In Christ we have died—through the Spirit, through the incorporeal Spirit, which in technical terms is called the Holy Spirit, that is, the One who lives without a body, for that is what is meant by the word “holy,” without the weaknesses of a spirit living in the body; through this Spirit we are reawakened in our being out of the midnight of the world.

[ 29 ] Through the Holy Spirit, we are thus awakened in the midnight of the world.

[ 30 ] Per spiritum sanctum reviviscimus.