IX
Experiences between
Death and
Rebirth
I began my
lecture yesterday with a brief outline of a man's experiences in sleep,
and of how in a certain sense they presage his experiences after death.
These sleep-experiences lie beyond the so-called threshold which, in
course of our days here, has often been mentioned. The experiences I
am now going to describe are gone through by all human beings when asleep,
though they do not rise up into ordinary consciousness in life on Earth,
but are accessible only to Imagination, Inspiration and Intuition.
Because they do not enter consciousness, we should not believe they do
not exist; they do exist, and we go through them. If I am allowed a
simile — it is as though a man were led through a room
blindfold. He does not see anything, but he has to exert himself to
walk, and he can have some experience of many things in the room,
although he cannot see them. What I am going to describe concerning
the time between going to sleep and waking is plunged, as it were, in
darkness, since the consciousness is blind to it, but it is
positively lived through by human beings, and the effects of all we
experience in sleep enter our waking life. Thus we understand rightly
what anyone goes through, from the time of waking until going to
sleep, only when we look upon it as combining the after-effect of his
last sleep with whatever he does through his physical and etheric
bodies during the day.
Now when a man
goes to sleep, at first an indefinite feeling of anxiety comes over him.
In ordinary life on Earth this anxiety does not rise into consciousness,
does not actually manifest; but it is there as a process in the man's
astral body and Ego, and he carries over its results into his waking
state during the next day. If this anxiety were not carried over,
were not to work in waking life as a force in physical body and
etheric body, the man would be unable to hold together his physical
constitution so that, for example, it may secrete salts and similar
substances in the right way. This secretion, necessary for the
organism, is throughout an effect of subconscious anxiety during the
life of sleep. First of all in sleep, therefore, we enter what I
might call a sphere of anxiety.
Then a
condition arises in the soul like a continuous swinging to and fro,
from a state of inner tranquillity to one of uneasiness — such
a movement to and fro that, if the man were conscious of it, he might
believe he was alternately beginning to faint and then recovering.
Thus the anxiety sets going a constant alternation between
self-control and the losing of it.
Thirdly comes
a feeling of standing on the brink of an abyss with the ground giving
way under one’s feet and that at any moment one might fall into
the depths.
You see that
at this moment when a man is falling asleep, conditions in the Cosmos
are already beginning to rise from the physical to the moral. For the
second state we enter on going to sleep can be properly judged only
when we recognise that moral laws in the Cosmos have the validity of
natural laws on Earth — only, that is, when we feel their
reality with the same certainty we have in speaking of a stone
falling to the ground, or of an engine driven by its steam.
Nevertheless, in earthly life, because a man's strength is still
limited, he is for the present protected by the kindly guidance of
the world from experiencing consciously all that he goes through
unconsciously every night.
The ordering
of the Cosmos is such that even the things which shine out in the greatest
beauty, the most lofty splendour, must have their roots in
sorrow, suffering and renunciation. In the background of every
beautiful appearance are pain and self-denial. In the universe this
is just as inevitable as that the angles of a triangle should add up
to 18o degrees. It is mere foolishness to ask why the Gods have not
so organised the Cosmos that it would give men pleasure only.
They bring about necessities. This was indeed divined in the
Egyptian Mysteries, for example. They called the conscious
perception of what occurs in sleep — the anxiety, the
swinging to and fro between keeping hold of oneself and become
powerless, and the standing on the brink of an abyss — the
world of the three iron necessities.
These
experiences during sleep produce in the man, again unconsciously,
a profound yearning towards the divine which he then feels to be filling,
penetrating, permeating, the whole Cosmos. For him, then, the Cosmos
resolves itself into a kind of hovering, weaving, ever-moving
cloud-formation, in which one is living, able at every moment to feel
oneself alive, but at the same time realising that at any moment one
could be submerged in all this weaving and living. A man feels
himself interwoven with the weaving, surging movement of the divine
throughout the world. And in the pantheistic feeling for God which
comes to every healthy human being during waking life, there is the
aftermath, the consequence, of the pantheistic feeling for God which
is experienced unconsciously during sleep. A man then feels his soul
to be filled with an inner unconscious conviction, born, one
might say, out of anxiety and powerlessness; and filled also with
something like an inner force of gravity in place of the ordinary
gravity of the physical world.
The Rosicrucian
mystery-teachings gave expression to what comes over a man when he
sinks into the realm of the three iron necessities. The experience
that would come to the pupils immediately after going to sleep was
explained. They were told: Your daytime experiences sink into moving,
floating cloud-formations, but these reveal themselves as having the
nature of beings. You yourself are interwoven with these clouds, and
you hover in anxiety and powerlessness on the edge of an abyss. But
you have already discovered what then should be brought to your
consciousness in three words — words which should pervade your
whole soul: Ex Deo nascimur. This Ex Deo nascimur, so
vague for ordinary consciousness, but raised into consciousness
for students of the new Mysteries, is what a man first experiences on
entering the state of sleep.
Later in
these lectures we shall see how this Ex Deo nascimur plays an
historic part also in the world-evolution of mankind. What I am now
describing is the part it plays during earthly existence in the life
of each single man, personally, individually.
If the man
continues to sleep, the next stage is that the ordinary view of the Cosmos,
as seen from the Earth, ceases. Whereas at night the Earth the
glittering, shining stars are there for him, together with the Moon,
and by day the Sun playing upon his senses, at a certain moment
during sleep he sees how this whole starry world vanishes. The stars
cease as physical entities, but in the places where they appeared
physically to the senses there come forth from their rays —
which have vanished — the genii, the spirits, the gods, of the
stars. For conscious Inspiration the Cosmos changes into a speaking
universe, declaring itself through the music of the spheres and the
cosmic word. The Cosmos is then made up of living spiritual beings,
in place of the Cosmos visible to the senses from the
Earth.
This is
experienced in such a way that, if a man became conscious of it, he would
feel as if the whole spiritual Cosmos, from every side, was pronouncing
judgment on what he has made of himself as a human being through all his
deeds, both good and evil. He would feel that in his human worth he
was bound up with the Cosmos.
What comes
to him first of all, however — and if he could experience it
consciously, as Inspiration does, he would notice this — is
bewildering, and he has need of a guide. In the present period of
human evolution this guide appears if, during life on Earth, a man
has woven in his soul and heart a thread uniting him with the Mystery
of Golgotha; if, that is, he has created a bond with the Christ, who,
as Jesus, went through the Mystery of Golgotha. The feeling that
immediately lays hold of a man at the present time — we will
speak tomorrow of other epochs — is that, in the sphere
he now enters, his bewildered soul would surely disintegrate if the
Being who has come to be the very life of his conceptions and
feelings, and of the impulses of his heart — if the
Christ were not to be his Guide.
The approach
of the Christ as Guide — who in this sphere must be conceived of as
connected with the life of the Sun, just as the man is connected with
earthly life — is felt again in the same way that it was when a
medieval Mystery School brought it before the souls of the pupils
with the words: In Christo morimur. For the feeling is that
the soul must perish should it not die in Christ, thereby dying into
cosmic life.
In this way
a man lives through the experiences of sleep. After perceiving the stars
of the Cosmos in their essential being, and because he cannot attain to
conscious wakefulness in this sphere, a longing comes over him to
return to the sphere where he is conscious. That is why we wake; it
is the force by which we are awakened. We develop an unconscious
feeling that, because of what we have absorbed from the real being of
the stars, from the star Gods, we shall not be spiritually empty when
we wake; for we bring down with us, into the daily life of the body,
the spirit dwelling in our soul.
The pupils
in the medieval Mystery Centres were made aware of this feeling, the third
in the series of nightly, personal experiences of human beings on
Earth, by a third saying: Per spiritum sanctum reviviscimus.
This threefold experience of the spiritual world lying beyond the
Guardian of the Threshold — who is ignored only by men of the
present epoch — is thus perceptible in three stages, and at the
same time they imprint on the human soul what can truly be called the
Trinity — the Trinity which permeates spiritual life, weaving
and living throughout it.
What I have
been describing here is experienced by a man every night in a picture,
and into this picture are woven his daytime experiences, going backwards
in time. Just as we find our earthly experiences interwoven with
those of natural processes during waking life, so during the night we
experience this backward repetition interwoven with memories of
the starry world. But all this is at first a picture.
This can be
realised only when a man has gone through the gate of death. Here on Earth
it is a picture experienced backwards. It becomes real only when,
after three or four days, we have completed the panoramic survey of
our memories described yesterday, and we enter the spiritual world no
longer in terms of pictures, as we do every night, but in
reality.
If anyone
wishes to bring before his soul with a right understanding the experiences
that are gone through consciously after the gate of death is passed,
the following must be borne in mind. The Gods, the spiritual Beings
we meet from the metamorphosed stars, take a different cosmic
direction in their lives from that followed by human beings in
earthly existence. Here we touch on a very important truth about the
spiritual worlds, though it is not generally recognised when the
spiritual worlds are spoken of theoretically and with little
perception. When we are conscious as earthly men in earthly
existence, we have a physical body and an etheric body so organised
that a later experience always follows an earlier one and we find
ourselves carried along in a particular stream of time. It is
characteristic of our physical and etheric bodies to take this
direction in the Cosmos. In so far as we are human beings, we
experience everything in this sequence.
Those beings
whom we met on rising to life between death and rebirth — when we
discover the reality behind the pictures of our sleep-experience
— move and come towards us always from the opposite direction.
So that, in accordance with what in earthly life is called time, we
must say: The Gods have spiritual bodies — one could equally
well say, bodies of light — with which they move from the most
distant future towards the past.
During the
time between death and rebirth our bodies are of this same nature; we
acquire them just as here on Earth we acquire the physical substance
of our physical body. Divine bodies clothe us, and with them we draw
round us what in my book
Theosophy
I have called Spirit-Man
and Life-Spirit. By so doing we find our direction reversed, and so
we live through our life backwards until we reach our birth and
conception. In life on Earth we start from birth or conception,
and — if we think of a circle — during existence on Earth
we complete the top half. When that existence is over, we return
through the lower half of the circle to our birth and
conception. Just as on leaving our home we might walk in a
certain direction and return, completing a circle in space, so
— since in the world we enter after death there is no space
— we have now to complete a circle in time. In time, it
is a going out and coming back. Between birth and death we go out and
then, having had this experience, we go backwards through the
experiences of our nights as spiritual realities, until we return to
the point of time at which we started.
In this
materialistically thinking age little is said about such circles of
life, and we have to go back in human evolution on Earth if we are to
find words to express what really happens. If we turn to the old
Oriental wisdom, with its less conscious insight into things than we
have to-day, and its dreamlike clairvoyance, we find there a
wonderful expression, evidently derived from an insight we can
recover if we cross the threshold with real understanding, and
pass the Guardian consciously when entering the spiritual
world.
When the
spiritual world is described in theories built up at any rate
half-intellectually, it is not far removed from a materialistic
picture of the Cosmos. It shows a human being as beginning his life
at birth, then becoming a child and later a youth or young girl,
growing older and approaching death — and then on and on in a
straight line which naturally is never brought to an end. Anyone with
knowledge of Initiation knows how nonsensical it is to talk of an
end. This road has no ending: it turns back on itself. And the
wonderful expression used by the old Oriental Initiates to
describe this fact is “the wheel of births”.
There is much
talk of this “wheel of births”, but little of it nowadays
points to the truth. In fact we have accomplished the first revolution
of this wheel at the end of our journey around the stars, which takes
about one-third of our whole earthly life — the time, that is,
we spend in sleep on Earth. We have then completed the first
revolution, and in the life between death and rebirth we can await
further revolutions of the wheel.
That is how
it is when, with knowledge awakened through Imagination, Inspiration and
Intuition, we make our way into the worlds lying behind the veil of
the sense-world. These are worlds that once, in a remote period of
evolution, were open to man as a heritage from a past age, when he
associated with divine-spiritual Beings in the way described. It is
only when some insight into the spiritual worlds takes us back to
ancient times, when people knew about these worlds, that it becomes
possible to understand all that has come down to us from the old
wisdom. And then we are filled with wonder at this primeval wisdom of
mankind. So that anyone who has received Initiation at the present
time can do no other than look up to those ancient days of man's
earthly existence with admiration, with reverence.
Something else
can be seen from this — that only through the Spiritual Science of
to-day can we arrive again at the true form in which things were
perceived of old. People who want to shut out modern Spiritual
Science have no means of understanding the language spoken by those
who possessed the primeval wisdom of mankind; hence they are
fundamentally unable to picture things historically. Those who
know nothing of the spiritual world are often quite naive in the way
they expound and interpret the old records of primeval peoples. So,
in documents which perhaps contain primeval wisdom now obscured, we
find ringing out such wonderful words as “the wheel of
births”. These words must be understood by rediscovering
the reality to which they allude. People who want to give a picture
of the true history of mankind on Earth must therefore not shrink
from first learning to know the meaning of the language used in those
far-off days.
I might very
well have begun by picturing the historical evolution of mankind in the
terms used in the ancient records; but then you would not have heard words
used merely as words, as they so often are in the world to-day.
Hence, if one is to give a true picture of that part of the world of
reality lived through by a man during his historical period, one has
to start by describing his relation to the spiritual worlds. For only
in this way are we enabled to find our way about in the language
used, and in all that was done in those ancient times to maintain a
connection with the spiritual worlds.
Yesterday
I described how the Druid priests set up stones and
screened them in such a way that, by gazing into the shadow thrown
within this structure and looking through the stones, they could gain
information concerning the will of the spiritual worlds which
impressed itself into the physical. But something else also was
connected with this. In the spiritual world there is not only a going
away, but also always a coming back. Just as there are forces of time
which carry us forward through physical existence on Earth, and after
death draw us backwards again, so, in the structures set up by the
Druids, there are forces descending from above and also forces
ascending from below. Hence in these structures the Druid priests
watched both a downward and an upward stream. When their structures
were set up on appropriate sites, the priests could perceive not only
the will of divine Spirits coming down from the Cosmos but —
because in the upward stream the one-dimensional prevailed —
they could perceive the good or bad elements which belonged to
members of their community and flowed out from them into the Cosmos.
Thus these stones served as an observatory for the Druid priests,
enabling them to see how the souls of their people stood in relation
to the Cosmos. [See the volume of four lectures
given by Dr. Steiner in September, 1923, shortly after his return to
the Continent from Penmaenmawr. The volume is entitled:
Man in the Past, the Present and the Future.
These three lectures are followed by a fourth,
The Sun-Initiation of the Druid Priest and his Moon-science.
(Rudolf Steiner Press, London.)]
All these
secrets, all these mysteries, are connected with things that have remained
from ancient times, and exist now in so decadent a form. They can be
understood only when through the power of individual Imagination,
Inspiration and Intuition, the world of the Spirit is raised once
more out of its hidden existence and brought into
consciousness.
These circular
movements — which are of course meant metaphorically, since one
is moving in the one-dimensional realm — are gone through
repeatedly during a man's life between death and a new birth. And as
with this revolution — going out from birth to death and
returning from death to birth — so do others take their course
in the whole of a man's life between death and rebirth, but in such a
way that there is always a change of level between the
experience of the going out and the experience of returning. In
the first round of the wheel of birth, the distinction lies in our
experiencing the out-going half up to death, and the return half
— which lasts, when measured by earthly time, for a third of
our life on Earth — immediately after physical death. Then the
first round has been completed. Others follow, and we go on making
such rounds until we come to a very definite place from which we can
journey back in the way I shall be picturing to-morrow. We continue
to complete these rounds of the wheel until we reach the point, in
our life as a whole, which indicates the death we experienced in our
last incarnation.
Thus in
circles — though our first experience after death is a looking
backwards, a living backwards — we live through what we
underwent between our last death and last birth into Earth-existence.
Each of these circular journeys corresponds in its outgoing to a
cosmic life of sleep. If one were to describe further these circles,
one would say that the outgoing always corresponds with a life after
death, in that a man with his whole being goes out more into the
cosmic world and is conscious of living within it — of
becoming one with it.
When a man
comes back into himself from the cosmic world, this return corresponds
with his working on what he has experienced there, and now realises to
be united with himself. As here on Earth we must have alternate sleeping
and waking for a healthy life, between death and a new birth we have
always to experience a flowing out into the Cosmos, when we feel
ourselves to be as great and all-embracing as the Cosmos itself, and
perceive the creations and deeds of the Cosmos as our own. We
identify ourselves with the whole Universe so entirely that we
say: That which you beheld with your physical eyes as an
Earth-dweller; that which looked down on you in its physical
reflection as the Cosmos of stars — in this you are now living.
It is not, however, as physical stars but as divine-spiritual Beings
that they are now uniting their existence with yours. You have, as it
were, dissolved into the life of the Cosmos, and the divine-spiritual
Beings of the Cosmos are living within you. You have identified
yourself with them. That is one part of the experience we pass
through between death and a new birth — whether you call it
cosmic night or cosmic day. The terms used on Earth are naturally a
matter of indifference to the Gods living in the spiritual world. In
order to bring home to ourselves what we experience out there, we
have to use earthly forms of speech, but they must be such as will
correspond with the reality.
The times in
which we grow together with the Cosmos, identify ourselves with the whole
Cosmos, are followed by other times when we draw back, as it were,
into a single point within ourselves — when everything we first
experienced as being poured out into the whole Cosmos is now felt as
a cosmic memory, inwardly united with ourselves. We feel the
wheel of births as though perpetually turning, carrying us out into
the Cosmos and back into ourselves, there to experience in miniature
what we have lived through out there. Then we go out again, and
return again, following a spiral path. The wheel of births can indeed
be described as a spiral movement, perpetually turning in on
itself. In this way, between death and a new birth, we progress
through an alternation of self-experience and self-surrender.
To say this, however, takes us only as far as if we were to describe
events on Earth in the course of the twenty-four hours by saying:
Human beings sleep and wake. We have merely gone that far with such a
description of a man's experience between death and a new birth in
the spiritual world. For the outgoing surrender and the drawing back
again of the self in the spiritual world are similar to waking and
sleeping in earthly life. And as in earthly life only those events a
man has lived through find a place, so in the completion of these
wheels of births and deaths the spiritual events involved are those a
man has actually experienced between death and rebirth. In
order to grasp these events we must form a sound conception of how
matters really stand for a man in earthly life.
Strictly
speaking, a man is awake only in his conceptual world and in a closely
connected part of his world of feeling. When he intends to do anything,
if only to pick up a pencil, his intention lives in a concept and shoots
down into the will, which then makes a demand on the muscles, until the
further concept of having grasped the pencil comes to him. All this
activity, expressing his will and desire, remains shrouded in
darkness for his earthly consciousness; it resembles his life of
sleep. Only in our concepts and in part of our feeling-life are we
normally awake. In the other part of our feeling, the part that
approves or disapproves the actions of the will, and in the will
itself, we are asleep.
Now we do not
take our thoughts with us after death. We take them into that life after
death as little as we take them with us at night. In the world between
death and a new birth we have to form our own thoughts in keeping
with that world. We do, however, take with us that which lies in our
subconscious — our will and the part of our feeling
connected with it. It is precisely with everything of which we are
unconscious in earthly life, with all that lives in our
impulses and desires, and in our will influenced by the senses, and
with all that lives spiritually in our will — it is with all
this that we go through the time between death and rebirth, making
conscious our cosmic thoughts about our unconscious experiences on
Earth.
If we wish
to understand the times lived through immediately beyond the gate
of death, we must be clear that the experiences which come to the
soul from the physical body take on another aspect directly we no
longer possess a physical body. It is not your physical body,
with its chemical substances, that experiences hunger and
thirst; these are experiences of the soul. But it is through
the physical body that all such cravings are satisfied here on Earth.
Hunger lives in the soul, and in earthly life hunger is satisfied
through the body; through the body thirst is quenched, although
thirst, too, lives in the soul. When you have passed the gate of
death you no longer have a physical body, but you still have thirst
and hunger. You carry them through the gate of death, and for a third
of the length of your life on Earth, while you are going backwards
through your nights, you have time to disaccustom yourself from
thirst, hunger, and all other desires experienced only through
the body. Herein consists the inner experience after death of
this third of your life on Earth: everything that can be gratified
only through the body — or at any rate only in earthly life
— is purged from the soul, and the soul is freed from these
desires. We shall see later what lies further on.
I have now
given you a description of part of a man's experience after he passes
through the gate of death — a description based on what
we have gone into to-day. To-morrow we will look further into the
life between death and rebirth, in its connection with the whole
earthly evolution of mankind. We must, however, be clear about the
scope of the events which enter into earthly life. A great deal that
can now be investigated only through Imagination, Inspiration
and Intuition was at one time open to people through a kind of
instinctive vision. The night was not such a closed book for them.
Their waking life took a more dreamlike course, and in its
dream-pictures revealed more of the spiritual world.
I should like
now to draw attention to something you will see more clearly during the
next few days. We are living in an age when human beings are exposed in
the highest degree to the danger of losing all connection with the
spiritual world. And perhaps, as we are so close here to centres
reminiscent of the old European Druids, it will be appropriate to
mention certain symptoms, which, though not harmful in themselves,
show not only what is taking place on Earth but also what is
happening spiritually behind the scenes of existence.
Now consider
medieval man, including his shadow-side; consider the so-called Dark Ages;
compare all this with mankind to-day. I will take only two
symptoms which can show us how, from the spiritual standpoint, we
should look upon the world. Turn to a medieval book. Every single
letter is as though painted in. We seem actually to see how the eye
rested on those characters. The writer's whole mood of soul, when it
rested upon the written letters in those days, was attuned to enter
deeply into whatever could come to him as revelations of the
spiritual worlds.
And now consider
a great deal of handwriting to-day — it is hardly legible! The
letters cannot give one anything like the pleasure one has from a
painting; they are thrown on the paper as though with a mechanical
movement of the hand — or so it appears very often. Moreover
the time is already beginning when there will no longer be any
writing by hand — nothing but typewriting — and we shall
no longer experience any connection with the words on the paper.
This, and the motorcar, are the two symptoms which show what is going
on behind the scenes of existence, and how human beings are driven
away more and more from the spiritual world.
Do not think
I want to come before you as a typical reactionary who would like to put
a stop to cars and typewriters, or even to this terrible handwriting.
Anyone who realises how the world is going knows very well that such
things have to be; they are justified. Hence there is no question of
abolishing them; I am saying only that in dealing with them we should
be on our guard. These things have to come and must be accepted in
the same way that we accept night and day, although enthusiasm for
them may be found chiefly among people who are strongly inclined to
materialism. All these developments, however, the illegible
handwriting, the distressing noise of typewriters, and the
quite horrible rushing of motorcars — all this has to be faced
in order that men should rightly develop a vigorous approach to
spiritual knowledge, spiritual feeling, and spiritual will. There is
no question of fighting against the material, but of getting to know
its reality and necessity; and also of seeing how essential it is
that strength of spirit should be brought to bear against the
crushing weight of physical existence. Then, through a swing of
the pendulum between cars and typewriters and Imaginations and
insight into the spiritual world — the fruits of
spiritual scientific work — the healthy development of
mankind can be furthered, which otherwise can only be
prejudiced.
This has to
be said particularly in Penmaenmawr, for here, on the one hand, we perceive
how the Imaginations from the old days of the Druids remain, as I
have already described; while on the other hand we discover how
forcibly these Imaginations are destroyed by the rushing of motorcars
through the atmosphere.
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