X
Man's Life after
Death in the
Spiritual Cosmos
If we wish
to bring before our souls the nature of our experiences between death
and rebirth, we must above all grasp the great difference between them
and those of earthly life. Here on Earth we carry out whatever we do
in such a way that once done, it separates from us — it no
longer belongs to us. For example, we manufacture various things and
they become detached from us. Most people get free of them by selling
them. Hence we find that anything a man makes on Earth, as the
outcome of his will, goes out into the world in such a way that he
feels relatively — I say expressly, relatively —
little connection with it. And the thoughts out of which he creates
something on Earth slip back within him, into his inner being, where
they either remain merely passive or become memories, habits,
aptitudes.
It is different
between death and a new birth. There, everything a man achieves flows
back to him, in a certain sense.
Now we must
remember that here on Earth we carry out the impulses of our will on things
belonging to the kingdoms of nature — on the minerals, plants
and animals. We more or less mould them, move them around, and even
set other people into motion.
In the
spiritual world, between death and rebirth, we are among purely spiritual
Beings, partly with those whose whole existence has been in the
spiritual world, who have never been incorporated in earthly
substance. Among such Beings belong the higher Hierarchies —
the Angels, the Exusiai, the Seraphim and Cherubim. Other names may
be preferred; but here, too, there is no need to quarrel over
terminology. These particular names are old and venerable; they
may well be used now for what we are rediscovering in spiritual
realms.
Between his
death and rebirth, accordingly, a man dwells partly among such Beings,
and partly with the souls of men who have cast off their earthly bodies
and taken on spiritual ones; or with those souls who are awaiting
their coming re-descent to Earth. This co-existence, it is true,
depends somewhat on whether we are connected with such souls, whether
we have formed a bond with them in earthly life. For those persons
with whom we have not been in close contact on Earth have
little to do with us in the spiritual world. I shall have more to say
about this.
Then, too,
a man stands in relation to other beings who have never been so directly
incorporated in earthly life as he was himself, for they are at a
lower stage and not ready to take on human form. These are the
elemental beings who live in the kingdoms of nature, in the plant
kingdom, in the kingdom of the rocks, of the minerals, as well as in
that of the animals. Thus, between death and rebirth, a man grows
together with the whole spirit-populated world.
I must add
that these beings are perceptible to Inspired, Intuitive and Imaginative
consciousness, for with these forms of consciousness one can see into
the world where we live between death and a new
birth.
Because a man
lives then in a quite different way, his whole mood and condition are
changed. When here on Earth, for example — I am coming
back to this same important theme — we make a machine, our
action, the handling and fitting together of the parts, flow from our
will and our thoughts. But all this becomes detached from us. When
between death and a new birth we are in the spiritual world —
where as souls we are continually active, always doing something
— there shines out from our actions something we recognise as
thoughts living in light. Here on Earth a thought stays with
us; there, it shines out in everything we do, gleaming as a being of
light. So that in the spiritual world we can never do anything
without a thought springing from it. This thought is not like
the thought of an earthly human being which he can often
conceal, however harmful it may be, for it is a personal,
individual thought. But in the life between death and rebirth
the thought which springs out of things is a cosmic thought,
expressing the response of the whole spiritual cosmic world to what
we are doing.
Now picture
this to yourselves vividly. In the life between death and a new birth a
man is active. Through his activity, every action by the soul, every
grasping, one might say every touch, immediately changes into a
cosmic thought, so that in doing anything we imprint it on the
spiritual world. Then on all sides an answer rings back from the
Cosmos; out of what we do there flashes up what the Cosmos says of
it, and this cosmic verdict is final. But that is not all. In this
flashing up of the cosmic world of thought, something else glimmers
— other thoughts which we cannot say originate in the Cosmos.
Thus we find the brilliantly flashing thoughts permeated by all sorts
of dark thoughts, glimmering out of our surroundings.
While the
brightly gleaming thoughts from the Cosmos fill us with a profound feeling
of pleasure, the glimmering ones — very often, though not always
— carry something extraordinarily disquieting; for they are
thoughts still working on from our life on Earth. If we have
cultivated good thoughts during earthly life, they glimmer out, after
death, from the radiant cosmic environment. If we have cherished bad
thoughts, evil thoughts, they may be said to glimmer out
towards us from the shining thoughts of the cosmic
verdict.
In this way
we behold both what the Cosmos is saying to us and what we ourselves
have brought with us to the Cosmos. This is not a world that
detaches itself from a person; it remains intimately bound up with
him. After death he bears within him his cosmic existence, and, as a
memory, his last existence on Earth. His next task is to lay aside
this earthly life and to accustom himself to a different way of
living, so that he may become a cosmic being in the true sense. As
long as we are in that region of spiritual experience which in my book,
Theosophy,
I called the soul-world, we are pre-occupied
with this aftermath of glimmering earthly thoughts, earthly ways of
life, earthly aptitudes. Because of this we make what we feel could
be beautiful cosmic forms into grotesque ones, and so, under the
guidance of these distorted cosmic forms during our passage through
the soul-world, we wander on through the Cosmos until we are freed
from everything binding us to the Earth. Then we can find our way
into the realm called spirit-land in my book,
Theosophy.
We have then left behind the state of soul habitual to us in physical
life on Earth, and we are able to act in perfect accordance with the
admonitions of those spiritual Beings whose realm we have to enter as
the only one where it is possible for us to be.
You will see
that a man does not take with him into the world after death anything that
lives in his physical and etheric bodies. That is thrown off and
sinks away into the Cosmos. He takes with him only what as Ego and
astral body he has experienced within his physical and etheric
bodies.
Something of
outstanding significance and importance follows from this.
While a man is going about on Earth, he regards his physical body and
his etheric body — of which he knows little, but at least he
feels it in his powers of growth, and so on — as his own body,
but he has no right to do so. Only his Ego and his astral body are
his. Everything present in his physical body and etheric body
— even while he is on Earth — is the property of the
divine-spiritual Beings who live and weave within them, and continue
their work while the man is absent in sleep. It would go badly with
anyone if he had to care for his own etheric and physical bodies in
continual wakefulness between birth and death. Time and time
again he is obliged to hand over his physical and etheric bodies to
the Gods — especially during childhood, for then sleep is the
most important thing of all. Later in life sleep works only as a
corrective; the really fructifying sleep is the sleep that comes to a
child in the first years of its life. Thus the human being has
continually to be yielding up both physical and etheric bodies to the
care of the Gods.
In past ages
of human evolution this was so clearly perceived that the body was
called the temple of the Gods, for so was its wonderful structure
experienced. And in all architectural work — this can best be
seen in oriental buildings, but also in those of Egypt and of Greece
— the laws of the physical body and the etheric body were
followed. In the very way the Cherubim are set on the temples of the
East, in the attitude of a sphinx, or in the placing of pillars
— in all this the work of divine-spiritual Beings in the human
physical and etheric bodies has been made to live again. In the
course of evolution, consciousness of this has been lost; and to-day
we refer to the physical body as our own — with no notion of
how unjustified this is — whereas as an earthly creation it
belongs in reality to the Gods. Hence, when anyone to-day talks of
“my body”, when he speaks of the healthy functioning of
his body as due to himself, it is just an instance of the
prodigious arrogance of modern man — a subconscious
pride, certainly, expressed with no awareness of it, but none
the less deplorable. It shows how in speaking of their bodies as
their own, people are really laying claim to the property of the
Gods, and this pride is embodied in their very speech.
To all these
things attention must be drawn anew by Spiritual Science; it must show how
a moral element is already mixed into our ordinary naturalistic life
— and truly, as we have seen in the case just referred to, it
can take a by no means healthy form. These matters show how, through
genuine spiritual knowledge, our whole feeling life can be so
transformed that, if Spiritual Science has been really
understood, even ways of speaking can become different from the way
in which people like to talk under the influence of purely
materialistic thinking.
In order to
understand the further experience we have between death and rebirth, we
must be able to recall what was said yesterday — that, on growing
accustomed to the spiritual world, a man loses the physical aspect of
the stars and in its stead there arises the spiritual counterpart of
the brilliance of their rays which meet the eye physically. Just as
the Earth is the dwelling-place of men who, with their Ego and astral
body, live upon it as spiritual beings, so certain spiritual Beings
dwell in every single star. And during his physical life a man is
connected also with elemental beings dwelling in the kingdoms of the
minerals, plants and animals. He is also connected through his
ordinary bodily life with other human souls. Then, between death and
a new birth, he is in connection with the dwellers on other stars,
and his life is actually spent in experiencing the world of the stars
through its spiritual counterpart, through life in common with the
other divine-spiritual Beings dwelling there.
We have already
seen how, immediately after earthly life, we pass through existence in the
soul-world, and how it is essentially a living backwards through all
that we have slept through in unconscious imagery during our nights
on Earth. One-third of the duration of a man's earthly life is thus
spent in weaning himself from that which his glimmering thoughts
carry into the thoughts of the Cosmos. Anyone who has lived to the
age of sixty, say, on Earth, will therefore go through the soul-world
in twenty years, while he is working his way out of everything
connecting him with physical existence. Inwardly, during this time
after death, he experiences his coming into relation with the
world of the stars, and especially with the Moon. Yesterday I spoke
of a man describing a circle, as it were, completing the first half
between birth and death, and the return half in a third of that time.
I would now add that he feels this circling to take place round the
Moon-existence and the spirits belonging to it. As I pointed out
yesterday, he is not conscious of returning to his birth, and so his
movement is not actually a circle but a spiral, a progressive
spiral.
The reason why
we do not simply circle round the Moon, but move on to approach another
state of existence, is partly the onward driving force of the Mercury
beings. These beings are rather stronger than those of Venus.
Existence is urged forward by the Mercury beings, whereas through the
Venus beings it is brought to a stop, as though completed. Hence the
essential course of a man's passage through the soul-world is such
that he feels himself taken up into the activity of Moon, Mercury,
Venus.
We must make
a quite clear picture of this form of existence. Here on Earth we say:
“As a man I have a head”, activated chiefly by what might
be called the middle brain — the pineal gland and so on.
“In the middle of my body is my heart, and in my whole kidney
system the organism for metabolism and movement.” In the
soul-world all this would have no meaning; we have laid it all aside.
After death we say: “As a man I consist of what comes from the
Moon-spirits on the Moon.” This corresponds with saying on
Earth: “I have a head.” And whereas on Earth we say:
“I have a heart in my breast” — which covers the
whole breathing and circulatory system — in the soul-world we
say: “I bear within me the forces of Venus.” Again
whereas on Earth we say: “I have a metabolic-limb system with
all its organs,” of which the chief is the kidney system, after
death we have to say: “The forces coming from the Mercury
beings live in me.” Therefore on Earth we must say: “As
man I am head, breast, lower body and limbs”; and after death:
“As a man I am Moon, Venus, Mercury.”
This corresponds
entirely with our true inner existence during life. For our whole
physical existence here on Earth depends upon how head, heart, and
digestive system work together — everything turns on that. The
slightest movement of the hand involves the action of head, heart and
digestive system, for continuous changes in the relevant substances
come into play. Our whole earthly existence takes its course in head,
heart, limbs — to put it in a very summary way. So in the
soul-world the activity of the Moon, Mercury and Venus forces within
us fills our whole existence. And through this we are in fact carried
back to a time when human beings were experiencing natural existence
in long past epochs of human evolution — epochs to which I have
often alluded during these lectures.
In those days
people had a kind of instinctive vision, and I have already spoken here
of certain types of this which can still be found. Even on Earth a man
then had a presentiment of his connection, in life beyond the Earth,
with Moon, Mercury and Venus. Why has this consciousness
disappeared today? When anyone speaks of these deeply
significant things which lie behind the veil of the physical world
and can be spoken of only from the realm beyond the threshold, one
naturally stirs up ill-feeling, or, to put it more elegantly, one
arouses contemporary criticism. For to-day it is particularly
difficult to put into words the truths of Initiation. It must either
be done in such abstract concepts that people to-day will not realise
what is meant, or terms that really belong to such truths must be
used — and this makes many people downright angry. One
can understand this anger, for they are being told about a world they
want to be rid of, a world they fear and hate. But this cannot
prevent a start being made in speaking honestly of these
matters in civilised circles. Were one to show great consideration
— though it would not help us much — towards the people
who hate Initiation-knowledge — not of course any of those
sitting here but those in the world outside — one would have to
say: As a man grows accustomed to life in the soul-world, he finds
himself in conditions resembling an earlier condition on Earth, when
he had instinctive spiritual knowledge of the truth, and in this
knowledge, lived the forces of the Moon. In that way one might
perhaps have gone halfway, quite respectably, towards the
materialistic concepts of to-day; but it would have been put far too
abstractly. If one is not afraid of the criticisms that will of
course come from materialistic thinkers, one has to speak differently
and say: When people were going through a far-off prehistoric epoch
in earthly evolution — of which more is to be said later
— even on Earth they were in the company of spiritual beings
who were in direct connection with the Cosmos rather than with the
Earth itself. We can say that divine Teachers, not earthly ones,
directed the Mysteries and instructed human beings then on
Earth.
In such remote
ages these Teachers did not take on physical bodies of flesh, but
worked in their etheric bodies upon men. So that the highest Teachers
in the Mysteries, to whom physically incorporated men stood merely as
servants, were etheric and divine; but they dwelt among men on Earth.
Hence we are expressing something very real when we say: Once, in a
long past period of human evolution, divine-spiritual Beings dwelt on
Earth together with men. They did not always make their presence
known if someone, let us say, was simply going for a walk, but they
did reveal themselves if a person was led to them in the right way
through the servants of the Mystery-temples. This happened only in
the Mysteries, and through the Mysteries these Beings became
companions of earthly men. Since then they have withdrawn from the
Earth to the Moon, where they now dwell as if in a cosmic citadel,
not perceptible from earthly existence, within the Moon's inner
being. Thus, when considering this inner existence of the Moon, we
have to look upon it as a gathering of those Beings who once, in
etheric bodies, were the great Teachers of men upon Earth. And really
we should never look at the Moon without saying: Our one-time
Teachers on Earth are now assembled there.
Nothing that
comes to earthly men from the Moon is inherent in it, but only what is
reflected by the Moon from the rest of the Cosmos. For the Moon
reflects all cosmic activity in the same way that it reflects the
light. Hence when we look at the Moon and see its light most clearly,
this is really the least part of it. We are seeing a mirror of cosmic
activities, not the inner life of the Moon.
Within the
Moon dwell those Beings who once lived on Earth, and it is only during
man's life in the soul-world, after death, that he again comes under
their influence. It is these Beings who, in accordance with the judgment
of the far-distant past, work correctively on what a man has done on
Earth. After death, therefore, in our epoch, a man actually comes
once more into relation with these Beings who formerly, as
divine-spiritual Beings, educated and instructed him and all mankind
on Earth.
When the human
being has passed through this realm of the Moon, it is then his appointed
task in the Cosmos to enter the Sun-existence. Whereas the first
circle, the first completed spiral, has existence on the Moon
for its central point, this spiral movement now takes a man a further
step forward, and on leaving the realm of the Moon, he enters the
realm of the Sun.
Any spatial
diagram illustrating this process can be no more than illusory, for it
all takes its course in the one-dimensional, the super-sensible. However,
as we must use earthly words, we can say: When a man has completed
the first revolution in the realm of the Moon, he comes to the
Sun realm, and the Sun, the spiritual Sun, then stands in the same
relation to him as the Moon did previously. The man has now to become
a being who — on entering what in my book,
Theosophy,
I called spirit-land, the spiritual realm of the Sun — must
transform his previous Moon-, Venus-, Mercury-, existence. He
must in actual fact become a different being. In earthly life he
says: I am a being of head, heart, breast; a being of metabolism and
limbs. Immediately after death he says: I am a being of Moon,
Mercury, Venus. But then he can no longer say this, for it would mean
his having come to a standstill in the spiritual world, between the
soul-world and the real world of the spirit. He has now to go through
a special metamorphosis even of his soul-spirit being and
become what I may describe as follows: The Sun must be his
skin. Everything around must be Sun. As here on Earth our physical
body is wrapped in our skin, so now, on entering the life of the
spirit, we have to be clothed in a skin consisting entirely of
the Sun's spiritual forces.
Now it is not
easy to picture this, for on the Earth you think: There is the Sun, shining
down upon us; the Sun is in the centre and sheds its rays all around.
On entering the realm of the spiritual Sun we find the Sun to be no
longer in a definite place — it is everywhere. A man is
then within the Sun; it shines in upon him from the periphery, and
is, in truth, the spiritual skin of the entity he has become.
Moreover, within the realm of the spiritual Sun, we have what must be
described as organs. In the same way that in earthly life we have
head, heart, limbs, and, immediately after death, Moon, Mercury,
Venus, so, after that, we have organs which we must attribute to
Mars, Jupiter, Saturn.
These are then
our inner organs, just as heart, pineal gland, kidneys, are on Earth. All
this has gone through a metamorphosis into the spiritual and
these new organs, not fully formed when first we leave the soul-world
and enter the world of spirit, now have to be gradually developed.
For this purpose we do not describe one circle only in the
Sun-existence, as in our Moon-existence, but three. In the
first circle the spiritual Mars organ is developed; in the second,
the Jupiter organ, and the Saturn organ in the last circle. If
we compare them with earthly periods of time, we find that
these three circles are traversed much more slowly, about twelve
times more slowly than the relatively fast Moon circle. And during
this whole journey, while a man is living in the world of spiritual
spheres and participating in its forces, he is continually
active. Just as we are active here with the forces of nature, so
there we are active with the forces, the Beings, of the higher
Hierarchies, whose physical manifestation in the surrounding starry
heavens is only an outer reflection, as with the Sun and
Moon.
In order to
find his way from the realm of the Moon to that of the Sun, however, a
man must have the guidance to which I have already referred. We have seen
how, in the most ancient epochs of mankind, Beings lived on Earth who
have since withdrawn, entrenching themselves, as it were, in the
cosmic stronghold of the Moon. They are the Beings with whom a man,
after death, first enters into a relationship. But these Beings have
had successors who, in the epochs after the ancient Hyperborean
period, appeared on Earth from time to time. In the East they have
been called Bodhisattvas. Although they have always made their
appearance embodied as men, yet they are the successors of the Beings
now entrenched on the Moon, and their life is passed in community
with these Beings. There lie the springs of their strength, the
sources of their thoughts. And they were the Beings who once acted as
the guides of mankind. Through the teaching they gave on Earth, men
were enabled to have the strength, on coming to the end of their
journey through the Moon-sphere, to pass over into the realm of the
Sun.
In future
lectures we shall see how, in the course of man's earthly evolution, this
has become impossible, and how the Christ Being had to descend from the
Sun to carry out the Mystery of Golgotha so that mankind, through the
teachings of that Mystery, should be given sufficient force to make
the crossing from the soul-world to spirit-land, from Moon-sphere to
Sun-sphere.
In the ancient
days of Earth evolution, the Moon-influence was closely connected with the
Earth, and cared for its spiritual element, with the participation,
direct or indirect, of the Bodhisattvas. Then, when the time was
ripe, after the first third of the fourth post-Atlantean epoch had
expired, the effects of the Mystery of Golgotha, the working of the
Christ, came in. This work of the Christ was surrounded by the
twelve-fold activity of the Bodhisattvas, indicated — though
indeed it was a reality — in the twelve Apostles. Thus
the Christ, incorporated in the body of Jesus, is the power who,
coming from spiritual existence in the Sun, has now united Himself
with the Earth.
If we look up
to the Moon with the desire to understand it, rather than merely to gaze
at it with our soul and spirit clouded by materialism, and if we realise
it to be a gathering of beings pointing to the past evolution of the
Earth, then we must look up in the same way to the Sun. The Sun is a
gathering of those Beings who point to the future of Earth-evolution
and now also to the present, and whose great representative is
the Christ, who passed through the Mystery of Golgotha. Through as
much as human beings absorb on Earth in their relation to that
Mystery, so will their entrance into the spiritual land of the Sun be
facilitated, so that they are enabled to take up inwardly the Mars
organ in the sphere of Mars, the Jupiter organ in the Jupiter-sphere,
and in the sphere of Saturn the corresponding Saturn organ. This is
accomplished in threefold circles which take their course far more
slowly than that of the Moon; yet this also underlies
world-evolution. The complete fulfilment of what I have just been
describing — the development into Mars man, Jupiter man, Saturn
man — will come about only in the future. During our present
epoch we can make only the circle of the Mars region after death,
through the activity of world-forces; after that we are unable to do
more than touch on the Jupiter region. We have to go through many
earthly lives before being able — between death and rebirth
— to enter fully the Jupiter region and, later still, that of
Saturn.
In order that
man, though not yet able to enter the Jupiter region, may receive, between
death and a new birth, something of the forces of Jupiter and also of
Saturn, many planetoids are interspersed between Mars and Jupiter; in
their outer aspect they are constantly being discovered by the
astronomers. They make up the region which in its spiritual aspect is
experienced by a man after death because he cannot yet reach Jupiter.
They have the remarkable characteristic of being spiritual colonies,
as it were, of beings from Jupiter and Saturn who have withdrawn
there. And before a man is ripe for existence on Earth, he can find
in this region of the planetoids, which are there for that purpose, a
kind of preparatory substitute, before he is able to enter the region
of Jupiter and Saturn. At present, therefore, by the time a man has
gone through death and rebirth, he has achieved his
Mars-organisation, and has absorbed those Jupiter and Saturn forces
to be found in the colonised regions of the planetoids. With the
after-effects of this — we still have to learn about them
— the human being embarks on another earthly life.
How this life
between death and a new birth, which I have now described in relation to the
world of the stars, can be further characterised, we shall hear
to-morrow.
|