VIII
During Sleep and
after Death
From what
has been said about the relation of sleeping to waking in man, and also
about the membering of his organism, it can be seen that in sleep he
experiences a profound cleavage in his earthly existence. We
know that a distinction has to be made between the part of man
which is materially perceptible to the senses, his physical body, and
the part that can be seen only through Imagination, his etheric or
formative forces body. This formative forces body embraces also the
living forces which enable a man to grow, underlie his
nutritive processes and generally build him up. As we have seen, the
formative forces body includes also the whole system of a man's
thoughts. Intermingled with his formative forces body and his
physical body are two higher members, which we may call the astral
body and the Ego-organisation.
In a man's
life during the day these four members of his being are in active inner
relationship with one another. But when he passes into the sleeping
state, his physical and etheric bodies separate from the Ego and
astral body. They remain — if one may put it thus — in
bed, while the astral and Ego organisations enter a purely spiritual
world. So that, from his falling asleep until he wakes, a man's being
is split in two — on the one hand there are his physical
organisation and the etheric that holds his world of thought; on the
other, the Ego and the astral organisation.
I believe
someone in the course of these days has voiced the misgiving: If in sleep
a man's whole thought-world remains in the etheric organisation,
then he must be unable to carry effectively into the sleeping state
the thoughts which he can grasp only while he is awake. This shows a
certain anxiety lest wishes for one's fellow-men, for example, or
thoughts relating to an absent one, should lose all power because
they cannot be taken over into the life of sleep. I should like to
reply with a picture.
You are not
very likely to have heard of anyone who, wanting to shoot at a target,
thought he had to throw his gun at it. While still holding the gun he
lets the charge do the work, and you cannot say that nothing reaches
the target because the gun remains in the man's hands. It is just the
same in the case we are considering. The effects of our thinking life
when we are awake do not cease during sleep because the thoughts
remain in the physical and etheric bodies. It is particularly
important with these subtle matters that we should be precise in our
thinking — precise to a degree unnecessary in the physical
world, where the things themselves provide immediate corrections.
From what has been said in these last few days, however, you will see
that a much more intimate relation exists between the physical body
and the etheric body than between the etheric body and the astral
organisation. For throughout the whole of an earthly life the
physical body and the etheric remain together, never separating even
when, in sleep, the etheric body and the astral body have to part
company.
There is a
close connection, on the other hand, between the Ego and the astral
organisation, for neither do they ever part from one another during
life on Earth. But the connection between the astral and the
etheric bodies is looser, and it is there that the split can occur.
This has a quite definite effect on a man's earthly life, and also on
his life beyond the Earth. In our waking state we give life to our
senses through our Ego, and through the astral body to our nervous
system; and what is brought about in this way we send down into the
etheric and physical bodies, as we must do if we are to live in the
physical world. Hence, because everything has to be imprinted into
the physical body, in order to become manifest in life from birth or
conception until death, a materialist supposes that the physical body
can make up the whole of a man's being.
This
work of incorporating the experiences of earthly existence into the
etheric body and the physical body does not proceed, however, without
meeting obstacles and hindrances. We are never able to send down
straight away into the organs of these bodies our experiences and the
thoughts embodied in our nervous system, for anything we absorb from
the external physical world is at first in a form moulded by
that world. If, for example, we perceive something angular, an
experience of this angular quality forms itself in our Ego and our
astral body. This cannot be taken up immediately into the etheric
body, for the etheric body struggles against absorbing anything
experienced in the external world of the senses. Imaginative
knowledge alone is able to throw light on this situation. No ordinary
sense-observation, no material experiment, no intellectual
reflection, will help us to a view of this necessary re-forming,
re-shaping, of what we perceive with the senses, so as to fit it for
living in the etheric body and physical body in such a way that we
can separate from it in sleep. It is only when we are able to observe
the actual relation between waking and sleeping in earthly man
that we come to realise the continuous conflict that goes on in life.
Thus — in the case of the crude example already mentioned
— if I have to take my experience of an angular object into my
etheric and physical bodies, I must first round off its angles and
give the object a form suited to those bodies. It has to be
completely transformed.
This
transforming of anything having as volatile a life as
that of the Ego and astral body themselves, and giving it a
plastic form capable of living in the etheric body and of
continuing its existence as plastic movement in the physical
body — this transformation creates an inner struggle not
perceived by ordinary consciousness to-day, but anyone who has
Imaginative knowledge can perceive it. Generally it lasts two
or three days. We have to sleep on an experience for two or
often three nights for it to unite with the other experiences
already imprinted in the etheric and physical bodies. The
dream-world is an actual expression, but only an outward expression,
of this struggle. While a man is dreaming, his Ego
and his astral body flow into his etheric and physical bodies and
come to a sudden stop — as already explained. This check is an
expression of the struggle I am now picturing; it goes on for two or
three days. Until the experience has been slept upon more than once,
it has not gone sufficiently far down into the etheric body, so that
where the connection is loose, as it is between astral body and
etheric body, a continuous interweaving is to be seen.
If we have
here the etheric body and the astral is there asleep, then on the verge
of waking or of going to sleep a continuous struggle takes place,
a movement full of life, expressed outwardly in the dream, but
signifying inwardly this weaving of experiences into the etheric and
physical bodies. It is only when a man has slept on some experience
two or three times — perhaps more often — that the
experience is united with the memories already bound up with his
etheric and physical bodies. The point is that the experience has to
be transformed into memory, which is left lying in bed during sleep,
for a memory is essentially the expression in thought of the
physical and etheric bodies.
For
Imaginative cognition, perceiving this is an extraordinarily interesting
experience. The very form of its expression is significant. We
give our ordinary earthly experiences definite outlines in conformity
with natural laws. These laws, however, no longer hold good when the
experiences merge with the etheric; everything firmly outlined
becomes soft and plastic. Whatever was at rest begins to move;
anything angular becomes rounded. Intellectual experience passes over
into the experience of the artist.
That is the
deeper reason why, in those ancient days when people still had instinctive
vision, art was rooted in life in a quite different way from anything
we have to-day. Even as late as the Renaissance, in the searching
back to earlier art there was still in Raphael and other painters at
least a tradition of that conversion of the intellectual into
the artistic. For the intellectual loses its form, and takes on the
nature of art, directly we rise to the super-sensible. The fact that
in art to-day people are so strongly inclined to naturalism, wanting
models for all their work, shows that they no longer realise its true
nature. Humanity must find its way again into the true realm of art.
Human life as
I have described it is thus made up in such a way that it is always possible
to say: I am experiencing something which will take three days to
flow into the etheric body. A day later, the experience of the
previous day will flow in. Hence it takes a man two, three, or even
four days to complete this uniting of an experience with the etheric
body.
Now when a
man passes through the gate of death, the etheric body detaches itself
from the physical body — something that never happens during
earthly life. And now, when the etheric body is free of the physical,
all that has been interwoven into the etheric body is gradually
dispersed, and this process lasts for about as long — two,
three or four days — as the interweaving did. Imagination,
which can judge rightly of these matters, shows how during life the
physical body holds together, through its resistance, the experiences
that have gradually penetrated into the etheric body. When the
physical body is laid aside at death, it can be seen how in the first
few days afterwards the memories woven into the etheric body pass out
into the universal cosmic ether, and dissolve. And so, for two, three
or four days after death, a person experiences this dissolving of his
accumulated store of memories. This may be called the laying aside of
the etheric body, but it involves an ever-increasing enhancement of
the memories; they lose the third dimension and become
two-dimensional, entirely picture-like. After the gate of death is
passed, the person is faced with the whole tableau of his life,
taking its course in vivid pictures for two, three or four days, the
time varying with each individual.
But just as
a student of botany recognises in a seed the plant that will develop from
it, so anyone with Imaginative cognition does not see only at death
this passing over of the etheric, of the whole memory system, to the
cosmos; he has seen it already in picture form, for as a picture it
is always present in human beings. Those who can grasp rightly the
interweaving that goes on in the course of three days or more see
already, in this incorporation of experiences in the etheric body, a
picture of the inward experience that is lived through for three or
four days after death. Whereas in earthly existence, before acquiring
Imaginative cognition, a man experiences more or less unconsciously
this blending of his experiences into the memories held together by
the physical body, immediately after death he experiences the reverse
process, the unwinding, as it were, of his memories and the passing
away of them into the Cosmos. Our treasured thoughts, left behind
whenever we fall asleep, unite directly after death with the whole
Cosmos. This is what in dying we have to yield up to cosmic
existence.
These things
must not be grasped only intellectually, but also with heart and soul.
For in face of them a man feels that his life is not to be taken
egoistically, but that he is placed in the world as a thinking being.
He will feel that his thoughts are not something he can preserve, for
after his death they will flow out into the Cosmos and will go on
working there as active forces. If we have had good thoughts,
we surrender them to the Cosmos, and if we have had bad thoughts, we
surrender them also. For a man does not exist on earth merely to
develop himself as a free being. This he certainly should do, and he
can do it precisely if he takes something else into consideration. He
is here also as a being on whom the Gods themselves may work, in
order to lead the Cosmos on from epoch to epoch. Moreover I would say
this: What the Gods are to weave into the Cosmos as thoughts has to
be prepared by them through all that can be thought and produced
during individual human lives. Here is the nurturing-place where the
Gods have to tend the thoughts they need for the continuing evolution
of the world — thoughts they then incorporate into the Cosmos
as active impulses.
During sleep,
a man lives with his Ego and astral organisation outside his physical
and etheric bodies. While in this state as a being of soul and
spirit, as Ego and astral organisation, he is interwoven with
the spiritual forces pervading the whole Cosmos. He is in the world
that is, figuratively speaking, outside his skin — the
world of which the only impressions he receives in waking life come
through his senses. During sleep, therefore, he enters right into the
things that in waking life show him only their outer side. But it is
only what is experienced by the astral organisation, when outside the
physical and etheric bodies, that can be brought back into the
thoughts of the etheric body, not what is experienced out there by
the Ego. Hence, during the whole of our existence on Earth, the
experiences of the Ego in sleep remain subconscious for
ordinary consciousness, and even for Imaginative consciousness. They
are revealed only to Inspired consciousness, as already described.
So this may
be said: In sleep a man gathers up sufficient strength to imprint on the
etheric body those experiences that can be put into thoughts. But
during his life on Earth he lacks the power to deal with the wishes
and desires which during sleep are experienced by the Ego in
connection with earthly affairs — for these also are gone over
during sleep. In our epoch, therefore, only the part of sleep-life
that can be transformed into thoughts, imprinted in thoughts, passes
over into the conscious waking life of earthly men; while the
sleep-experiences of the Ego lie hidden behind the veil of
existence.
Imaginative
and Inspired consciousness bring to light here things which can be
perfectly well understood by any impartial person with a healthy
mind, but in our present civilisation they encounter tremendous
prejudice. Even the fact that when the three-dimensional in the
physical world is imprinted in the etheric body, it changes from the
plastic to a picture form, from three to two dimensions — even
to grasp this calls for an unprejudiced approach. Directly we rise to
Imagination, we no longer have to do with three dimensions, any more
than with four, as a misguided science believes, but with two only.
The difficulty of picturing what is then experienced comes from our
being accustomed in earthly experience to reckon with three
dimensions and to form our concepts accordingly. And so, when we
should be finding our way over to two dimensions, we say: “Yes,
but two dimensions are included in the three; the two dimensions of a
plane can lie in such a way that there might still be a
third.”
That, however,
is not the point. As soon as we enter the Imaginative world, the third
dimension no longer concerns us at all, and the position of a plane
is immaterial. On our entering the etheric world of Imagination, the
third dimension ceases to have any meaning. Hence — and I add
this for mathematicians — all equations for the ether must be
transformed so as to correspond with the two-dimensional
world.
Now if we would
pass on to the world accessible to Inspiration, in which we are as
Ego between going to sleep and waking, we come to one dimension only;
we then have to do with a one-dimensional world. This transition to a
one-dimensional world, taken for granted by the faculty of
Inspiration — the faculty, that is, of actually perceiving the
spiritual in which we live between going to sleep and waking —
this understanding of a world with only one dimension has
always been part of Initiation-knowledge.
I have already
described how the hidden forces of the Sun — not the forces of
the external physical sunlight — are revealed to men of
the Jacob Boehme type. These hidden Sun-forces do not spread out
three-dimensionally, but are perceived in one dimension only. An
older, more instinctive Initiation-knowledge could, and did, come to
perceive this through Inspiration, but without a clearly
conscious knowledge of what it was. Much that is still handed down in
the ancient records of long past epochs of mankind is to be
understood only when one knows: This refers to the spiritual world
that is one-dimensional, the world we find through Inspiration; as
regards our earthly life it refers to the hidden forces of the Sun
and Stars. Between going to sleep and waking we do not live in
Sun-forces that are outwardly displayed, but in those that are
hidden.
These hidden
forces of the Sun can, for example, pass through certain kinds of stone
which are impenetrable to physically perceptible Sun-forces, and by passing
through them become one-dimensional. If anyone has acquired
Inspirational vision, then, although he may not perceive the physical
light, he can see the hidden Sun-forces penetrating the otherwise
opaque stone; thus the stone is permeable for the Sun's hidden
forces and also for the forces of Inspiration.
In very ancient
periods of human evolution on Earth, such expedients were not needed.
But when the old instinctive clairvoyance, which in those days was
the basis of Initiation-knowledge, was on the wane, these aids were
adopted as a short cut — we might say — to the perception
of things no longer perceptible through instinctive Inspiration.
People had recourse to such measures in the following way, for
example. Imagine a number of stones set up beside one another, with
other stones laid across the tops of them. If this is so arranged
that on certain occasions the penetrating rays of the Sun fall on the
covering stone, then the physical rays of the Sun will be held up by
the stone and the hidden rays will pass through.
When anyone
trained to it places himself so that he can look into this structure from
the side, he will see the spiritual, one-dimensional rays of the Sun
shining through and vanishing into the earth. If, when all this was
no longer perceived through instinctive clairvoyant powers, a short
cut of that kind were taken, it enabled anyone looking from the side
into the shadow-zone to perceive the world of spiritual Sun-rays
which we experience every night during sleep. Hence in such
contrivances, to be met with in this very district, we can see
by what means, during a long transitional period, certain wise
leaders of mankind tried to penetrate to the hidden forces of the
Sun, which a man such as Jacob Boehme could do instinctively
through simply beholding earthly things.
Although such
collections of stones can be seen to-day in appropriate places, their
real significance can be brought out only through what Spiritual
Science reveals. Otherwise people are left with a superficial
explanation which misses the real point.
Such stones
can of course be distributed in the circle so as to show how the spiritual
rays of the Sun differ according to particular constellations of the
stars.
I have been
trying to make clear to you the world in which our Ego lives during sleep.
This world is not held together by the inherent forces of the physical and
etheric bodies. These bodies, however, are alone responsible for the
clear consciousness of earthly man; they are the source of the
judgments we form, in accordance with our feelings and our will, on
our own actions, our inward experiences and thoughts. Hence, when we
are awake, we judge our external life according to the thoughts we
have been able to imprint in our physical and etheric bodies. But it
is not only a human being himself who has something to say about his
experiences; his experiences and actions are the concern of the whole
spiritual Cosmos. The Cosmos judges whether an action, a thought or
feeling is to be declared good or bad. Between waking and sleeping we
are left to form our own opinions about ourselves. As I have
sufficiently shown during these lectures, the spiritual content of
the Cosmos takes the moral as its natural law, and what the Cosmos
has to say about our true nature and our actions is experienced by
the Ego during sleep. Inspired cognition shows how the Ego, even
during the shortest sleep, experiences over again everything the
individual has gone through from his last moment of waking until his
present sleep — however long or short this period may be. So a
man, in the successive states of waking, sleeping, waking, sleeping,
experiences again in sleep whatever he went through during his last
waking time, especially where his own activities were
concerned.
As far as
this is the experience of the Ego, it remains outside ordinary
consciousness, but Inspiration can call it up. Then the particular
nature of the experience is disclosed, and we find it is gone through
in reverse order to our experience by day. Whereas by day you go
through your experiences — leaving short sleeps aside
— from morning to evening, during the night, in sleep,
you live through these experiences backwards — from
evening to morning. This is in order that we may experience whatever
the spiritual Cosmos has to say about the way we have lived through
the day.
During earthly
life, however, a man cannot normally call this experience up into
consciousness. Yet he must become conscious of it, or his human
existence would fall out of connection with cosmic existence.
Inspired cognition shows that as soon as a man after death has
watched his life-tableau, which, as I have said, lasts two, three, or
four days, and as soon as his memories have dissolved into the
Cosmos, spreading themselves out there — after this
experience, often referred to as the freeing of the etheric body
— a time comes when the man is able to look back on his earthly
life again, but in a different way.
If we look at
those few days after death, we come to a mighty panorama of our life, but
at first it embraces daytime experiences alone. In reality, however,
a man goes through not only his waking experiences but also those he
has had during sleep. When in earthly life you look back on your
ordinary memories, you always leave out your periods of sleep, as if
your only experiences had been those lived through by day. And so it
goes on right back to the time after birth when your memories
cease.
In fact it
is like this with the panorama that appears during those two or three
days after death. Then, later, comes a period when soul and spirit
have gained sufficient strength to experience in the spiritual world
all that could manifest only unconsciously, in picture form, while we
were asleep at night during our life on Earth. It now comes before us
as experience. A man then passes through a period — lasting
about one-third of his life on Earth, approximately the time normally
spent in sleep — when he experiences his nights again, but in a
backward direction. So he lives through his last night first, then
the night before, and so on right back to the time of his birth and
conception.
From other
points of view I have described this going back through a quite different
world after death in my book,
Theosophy,
when I was speaking of man, as a being of soul and spirit, passing
through the soul-world.
Now when after
death a man has gone thus through the soul-world, taking about seven years
for it if he has lived twenty-one years, or, if he has lived to
sixty, perhaps twenty years — always the length of time he has
slept in earthly life — he has then to experience the total
effect he has had upon Earth-existence — an existence created
by the Gods in order to carry the world, with the help of the human
race, a little further on its progress. Up to the end of this
backward survey of his nights after death, a man has been gaining
knowledge of what he has himself become, of his significance for the
Cosmos. He now has to experience how the Earth itself has been
affected by his life. This takes a long time — half the time,
indeed, between earthly death and a new earthly life. Tomorrow
we shall have to speak of this in greater detail.
After going
backwards through our nights, we come to our birth; and having arrived
there, after this backward journey through the soul-world, we have to
find the way back to our previous earthly life. This enables a man to
bring over with him that previous life for the shaping of his next
life on Earth.
Here we enter
the realm of the old Initiation-knowledge (which must be renewed to-day
in a way suited to men's present faculties.) The old
Initiation-knowledge led people over to religious experience. For
Initiation-knowledge is always true knowledge, but of a kind that
leads out from the world of the senses into the spiritual, so that
the human will is stirred to take a religious form. At the stage of
Initiation which leads to the Intuitive-knowledge already described,
it has always been recognised as of the utmost importance that when a
man goes back to his previous life on Earth, he should meet on the
way a being who can become his guide after death.
In a certain
region of the Earth a man would say to himself: In my earthly life I must
absorb the teaching of the last Bodhisattva to appear on earth. The
man may have lived three hundred years after the appearance of this
Bodhisattva. But when after death he went back to his previous life
on Earth, he arrived at the time when the last Bodhisattva was living
on Earth. In the old Initiation-knowledge, this meeting with the last
Bodhisattva to appear on the Earth was regarded as enabling the
man to make a real contact with his own previous earthly life —
which means finding the necessary strength for eternal life, for this
can be found only when real contact with the previous earthly life is
achieved.
Any possibility
of this meeting with the Bodhisattvas, who descend to Earth from certain
spiritual regions, ceased at a definite time in human evolution, in
world-evolution. And to-day a man would have been unable, when after
death he had gone back to his last birth and conception, to go
further and make contact with his previous earthly lives. The way to
this could be found by a man during the first millennia of earthly
evolution before the Mystery of Golgotha, when, in going back, he
came to the time of the last Bodhisattva. Today, however, he
will find the way only if he makes the journey under the leadership
of that Being who united Himself with the Earth through the
Mystery of Golgotha; if, in other words, he enters into such a
relation with the Mystery of Golgotha that Christ can become his
guide. For the Christ gathers into Himself all those powers of
leadership for life between death and rebirth which used to belong to
the Bodhisattvas who appeared on Earth.
Thus the event
of the Mystery of Golgotha, with its particular bearing on our
experience between death and rebirth, is one of the most important
facts in the whole evolution of the Earth. If anyone wishes to learn
about the spiritual evolution of the Earth and the place it takes in
the spiritual evolution of the Cosmos, and if moreover he wishes to
understand what a man goes through in connection with this spiritual
evolution of Earth and Cosmos during his life between death and a new
birth, then he must give the Mystery of Golgotha its right place in
the whole evolution of the world. For people to-day, therefore, a way
must be found that will lead attention over from the evolution of man
to the evolution of the world, so that the Mystery of Golgotha is
seen in all its fundamental significance for the course of events in
the evolution of the Earth and in the evolution of man within the
earthly.
With these
matters, as far as modern Initiation-knowledge can reveal them —
matters relating to the later experiences of human beings after death,
when they have gone back in memory through their night-experiences —
we will deal further to-morrow, in connection with the evolution of
the world.
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