Anthroposophical Guidelines

What is Revealed when One Looks Back at Repeated Earth Lives

When spiritual cognition can look back at a person’s previous earth lives, what is revealed is that a number of such earth lives existed in which the human being was already an individual. Outwardly he was similar to today, and he had an inner life which contained individual characteristics. Earth lives appear which indicate when the Comprehension or Sensitivity Soul existed but not yet the Consciousness Soul, and other lives when only the Sentient Soul had evolved, and so forth. In the earth’s historical ages this is the case, and it was the case for a long time previously as well.

But one also perceives ages when this was not yet the case. There one finds man still interlinked in his inner life and outer formation with the world of divine-spiritual Beings. Man existed as earthly humanity, but was not yet separated from divine-spiritual being, thinking and willing.

In still older times man completely disappears as a separate entity; only divine-spiritual Beings exist, who bear humanity in their fold.

Man has passed through these three stages of his evolution during his time on earth. The transition from the first to the second stage took place towards the end of Lemuria, from the second to the third during the age of Atlantis.

Just as man carries his experiences as remembrance within him in his current earthly life, he also carries within him as cosmic memory everything that he experienced as described above. What is earthly soul-life? The world of remembrances, which is prepared at every moment to perceive anew. Man lives out his inner earthly existence in this interaction of remembering and new experiences.

But this inner earthly existence could not unfold if cosmic remembrance did not still now exist in man when he looks back spiritually to the first stage of his becoming an earthly being, in which he had not yet been separated from divine-spiritual being.

From what happened at that time, only what develops within the human nervous- sensory organization still exists. In outer nature all the forces which were then active have died out and are only perceptible as dead forms.

Thus what exists in human thought as contemporary revelation is the necessary basis for earthly existence: what had already developed before he attained to an individual earthly existence.

In life between death and a new birth man experiences this stage ever anew. Only he also brings his individual existence, fully formed during his lives on earth, into the world of divine-spiritual Beings, which again takes him in, the same world which once included him in it. Between death and a new birth he is in the present, but at the same time he is in all the time which he has passed through in repeated earth lives and repeated lives between death and new births.

It is different in respect to his world of feeling. This world is related to the experiences which occurred directly after those which he had before he became completely human. These are the experiences he passed through as a human being, but when he had not yet separated from divine-spiritual being, thinking and willing. At present man could develop no world of feeling if it did not arise on the basis of his rhythmic organization - in which the cosmic memory of the above-mentioned second stage of human evolution exists. Thus in man’s world of feeling his spiritual present works together with his experiences from an older time.

In the life between death and a new birth man experiences the content of the time here described as the outer boundary of his cosmos. What the stars in heaven are for man in his physical earth life, spiritually is his Being in the life between death and a new birth - which lies between his complete solidarity with the divine-spiritual world and his separation from it. There at the” boundary of the world” the physical heavenly bodies do not appear to him; rather on every star the sum of the divine-spiritual Beings, who are, in reality, the star.

With the will alone, not associated with feeling and thinking, man lives in what his observed earth lives reveal to be personal and individual. What comes from the outer cosmos as his outer form is preserved as cosmic remembrance; it lives in the human form as forces. They are not directly the will’s forces, but what constitutes the foundation of the will’s forces in the human organization. In life between death and a new birth this area lies outside the “boundary of the world”. Man thinks of it there as something he will regain in his new earth life.

In his nervous-sensible-organization man is today still united with the cosmos as he was when he was still germinally developing within divine-spirituality.

In his rhythmical organization man still lives today in the cosmos as he did when, although already existing as human, he was not yet separated from divine-spirituality.

In his metabolism-limbs organization - the basis for the development of his will - everything he passed through since the beginning of his personal, individual earth lives and the lives between death and new births produce after-effects in this organization.

From the forces of the earth man only has what bestows self-consciousness. The physical-corporal foundation for this self-consciousness also derives from the earth’s activity. Everything else in the human being is of outer-earthly, cosmic origin. The feeling and thinking astral body and its etheric-physical foundation, all the active life elements in the etheric body, even the chemically reacting elements in his physical body have an outer-earthly origin. Strange as it may be sound, the active physical-chemical elements in the human being do not derive from the earth.

That man develops these outer-earthy cosmic elements within him is due to the activity of the planets and the other stars. The sun, through its forces, brings all these developments to the earth. The human-cosmic is transferred by the sun to the earthly domain. Through the sun man lives on the earth as a heavenly being. Only what transcends his own development, namely the capacity to reproduce, is a gift of the moon.

Of course these are not the only effects of the sun and moon. Other highly spiritual activities also originate in them.

When at Christmas time the sun acquires ever more forces for the earth, it constitutes the rhythmically manifesting yearly activity in the physical earth, which is an expression of the spirit in nature. Human evolution is a single element in a virtually gigantic cosmic year. This is evident from the preceding explanations. In this cosmic year, the Cosmic Christmas is where the sun not merely affects the earth through the spirit of nature, but where the sun’s soul, the Christ-Spirit, descends to the earth.

As in the individual, what is personally experienced is associated with cosmic remembrance, Christmas is correctly felt by the human soul every year if the heavenly- cosmic Christ event is thought of as continuous - and as not merely human, but as cosmic remembrance. Not only man, but also the cosmos celebrates the descent of Christ at Christmas.

Goetheanum, New Year, 1925

144. When one looks back at the repeated earth lives of a person, they arrange themselves in three different stages: the oldest, in which man was not yet an individual, but existed germinally in divine-spirituality. One does not find a human being when looking back, but divine-spiritual Beings (The Ur-Forces, Archai).
145. Then comes an intermediate stage in which man already exists as an individual being, but is not yet separated from the Thinking, Willing and Being of the divine-spiritual world. He did not yet have his present personality, was not yet completely his own being in his existence on earth, and was not yet separated from the divine-spiritual world.
146. The third stage emerges as the present. Man experiences himself in his human form as detached from the divine-spiritual world; and he experiences the world as the environment which he confronts personally and individually. This stage began during the age of Atlantis.