LIFE BETWEEN
TWO INCARNATIONS
Breslau,
December 2, 1908
Yesterday
we were able to discuss a few things about the ways leading into the
higher worlds in front of a somewhat larger circle. Today it may be
permitted to say something about the higher worlds themselves, and we
want to pick out one of the most important chapters from the field of
the supersensible worlds and take a look at the processes which take
place with man between death and a new rebirth. This is one of the most
important chapters from the field of higher life because it concerns
the most fundamental facts and processes of human development, and
since the physical existence of man is connected and interwoven with
significant processes in those worlds, one must penetrate into these
mysteries if one wants to understand the human being at all.
I would
like to begin immediately by describing the life of man between death
and a new birth, but in order to be able to understand what is
happening in this interim, we must first consider the nature of man.
For those who have been engaged in anthroposophical matters and studies
for some time, what will be explained in the introduction should not be
anything new. But we have to consider these things very carefully from
the outset in order to prepare ourselves for a complete understanding
of the descriptions that follow.
For
anthroposophical spiritual science, the essence of the human being is
not merely that essence of a material kind which appears to the outer
senses, which we can feel with our hands and which is bound to the
physical world by physical lawfulness. Spiritual science shows that
this physical body of man is only a part of his whole beingness, and
indeed man has this physical body in common with the mineral world. We
can look around outside in the natural world and see that everything
which is apparently dead, mineral in nature, consists of the same
substances of which the human body is built. In the stone and in the
human body the same physical processes appear, but there is a great
difference between the processes of the ordinary, lifeless physical
bodies and the nature of man. An external physical body, such as a
stone, has a form, and it retains its form until an external process,
such as a smashing or other violence, destroys the form. The human
physical body, on the other hand, or that of another living being, is
destroyed at death by its own law of physico-chemical substances, and
the human body in this case is a corpse.
Spiritual
science now shows us that in the state between birth and death, that
is, during our physical lifetime, a second member of the human being is
still present as a continuous fighter against this decay of the
physical body. We call it the etheric body or life body. It is in all
of us. If this second member were not in man, the body would at every
moment follow only the physical forces; it would decay. The fighter
against this decay is the etheric body or life body. Only in case of
death this life body separates from the physical body. Man has this
life body in common with every other living creature; the animal has
it, and the plant also has such a perpetual fighter. In them, too,
there must be such a perpetual fighter against decay.
If the
physical body has been described as the first, the life body as the
second member of living beings, man has a third member beyond this
second member. Already with the intellect alone, with logic, we are
able to see this. Let us assume that a man stands before us. In this
room he occupies, in this hand he uses, is there nothing more than what
has been mentioned so far? Oh, there is something more in it than bones
and muscles, than all kinds of chemical components, which we can see
with our eyes, touch with our hands. And each of us knows it also quite
exactly that something more is in it. This something more, that is the
sum of his suffering and his pleasure; this something everyone knows,
because it is everything that runs in sensations and in feelings, from
morning to night, throughout the whole life. There is an invisible
carrier of these sensations, and we call it the astral body or
sensation body of man. This astral body, which is not perceptible to
the physical eye of man, is considerably larger than the physical body.
For the clairvoyant consciousness it is recognizable as a
light-emitting cloud in which the physical body is embedded. Man has
this third limb of his being in common with the animal, for the latter
also possesses an astral body.
But then
there is a fourth member in the human being, the crown of the earthly
kingdom, the crown of human nature. We can catch sight of this fourth
member when we trace an intimate movement of the human soul. There is
one thing in man that can never approach him from the outside. It is
this one name, the simple name "I". Only from the deepest depths of the
soul can this name, this designation "I" sound out. Never can another
person say "I" to a fellow human being. Only to himself can man speak
this; only out of him, out of his own deepest inner being can it come,
and here something quite different, something divine begins to sound
out through the name "I." All great religions also felt this, that in
the I there is something sacred. This is also clearly recognizable in
the Old Testament. There the name "I" is synonymous with the name of
God. Only the priest was allowed to pronounce the name of God on
particularly solemn occasions, at particularly solemn services, and
when he reverently sounded the name "Yahweh" in the temple, the name
"Yahweh" meant nothing other than "I" or "I am." That the God himself
expresses himself in the human being, it should mean. And only that
being can pronounce this word in the soul to its soul, in whose nature
the God-being reveals itself. The revelation of God in man is a fourth
member of the human being. But we should not think that we are God
himself. It is a spark from the sea of the Godhead that flashes in man.
Just as a drop from the sea is not the sea itself, but only a drop from
it, so the I of man is not a god, but a drop from the divine substance:
the god begins to speak in the human soul.
Only the
priest was allowed to pronounce Yahweh, the holy name, on particularly
solemn occasions. To make this God-being sound in the soul of man by
the fact that man can say: "I am", that is the crown of creation. This
I-bearer, the fourth member in the human nature, makes man the first
among the beings that are visible in the earthly creation. Therefore,
everywhere in the ancient Mysteries they spoke of the sacred
four-foldness, the first member of which is the visible physical body,
the second member of which is the etheric body or life body, the third
member of which is the astral body or sentient body, and the fourth
member of which is the ego. These are the four limbs we want to
consider first. And on the way they are connected with each other
depends the human life, the human consciousness.
Only in
daytime consciousness, in waking, do the four members of human nature
interpenetrate. There we have the physical body interpenetrated by the
etheric body, only finer and somewhat larger, projecting beyond the
physical body. Then we have the astral body, the carrier of our
sensations, penetrating the etheric body and surrounding the physical
body, which is connected with the etheric body, like a large shining
oval. And then we have the ego-body. But the four members of human
nature interpenetrate each other only when awake. When man sleeps, the
astral body comes out with the ego-body, while the physical body,
connected with the etheric body, remains in bed. In the morning, or
when man awakes, the former two of the four limbs descend again and
rejoin the other two.
What does
the astral body do in the ordinary human being during the night? It is
not inactive. It appears to the clairvoyant's eye like a spiral cloud,
and currents emanate from it which connect it with the physical body
lying there. When we fall asleep tired in the evening, what is the
cause of this fatigue? The fact that the astral body uses the physical
body during the waking hours of the day and thus wears it out, appears
as fatigue. But all night long, during sleep, the astral body works on
the elimination of fatigue. This is where the refreshment of a good
night's sleep comes from, and from this it can be seen how important a
really healthy sleep is for man. It restores in the right way what has
been worn out by the waking life. The astral body also repairs other
damages during sleep, for example, diseases of the physical body and
also of the etheric body. You will not only have observed it from your
own life experience in yourself and in other people, you will also have
experienced that every sensible doctor says that in certain cases sleep
is an indispensable remedy for recovery. This is the meaning of the
alternating state between sleeping and waking.
Now let us
proceed to consider an even more important alternate state, that
between life and death. If it was shown earlier that as soon as sleep
sets in, the astral body with the I-bearer leaves the physical body
connected with the etheric body, then in ordinary life a separation of
the etheric body from the physical body almost never occurs, at most in
certain exceptional cases, which will be mentioned later. Only in death
does a separation of the physical body from the etheric body normally
take place for the first time. Now, in death, not only does the astral
body leave the four-membered human being with the ego, as in sleep, but
the three members, etheric body, astral body and ego, leave the
physical body, and on the one hand we have the physical body, which
remains as a corpse, is immediately attacked by the physico-chemical
forces and falls prey to destruction; on the other hand we have a
connection of etheric body, astral body and ego-bearer.
Here the
question is obvious, how someone can know at all, how these relations
develop at death. Well, if you have followed yesterday's public
lecture, you will understand that those people who are able to see into
higher spheres are also able to report about the conditions after
death. And for every human being means are open and ways are offered to
acquire such abilities, that is why there is also the possibility to
know what the human being experiences when he passes the gate of death.
If about any facts is reported, which are not immediately controllable
by everyone, then about their correctness only he can decide who really
knows. If, however, on the part of the ignorant, the reproach would be
made to the knower that he could not know anything either, then the
reproach of arrogance would lie entirely on the side of those who know
nothing and thereby claim that one cannot know anything. So only the
knower can decide what one can know.
When man
has passed through death, he first has a feeling that he is growing
into a world in which he is getting bigger and bigger, and that he is
no longer outside of all entities as in this physical world, not facing
all other things, but as it were inside of them, as if he were crawling
into all things. At the moment immediately after death you do not feel
a here and there, but an everywhere; it is as if you yourself slipped
into all things. Then a total recollection of your whole past life
occurs, which stands before you with all its details like a great
tableau. This recollection cannot be compared with a recollection of
the past life, however good it may be, as you know the recollection in
earth life, but this tableau of recollection stands there all at once
in its full size. On what is this based? It is due to the fact that the
etheric body is in truth the carrier of memory. As long as the etheric
body was still in the physical body during its existence on earth, it
had to work through the physical body and was bound to the physical
laws. There it is not free; there it forgets, because there all memory
steps aside, which does not belong directly to the very nearest, which
the human being experiences just now. In death, however, as was
explained earlier, the etheric body, the bearer of memory, becomes
free. It no longer needs to work through the physical, and therefore
the memories suddenly appear in an unbound way.
In
exceptional cases this separation of physical and etheric body may
occur even during life. For example, in cases of danger to life,
drowning, falling, that is, in such cases where the consciousness
receives a great shock from the fright. People who have been subjected
to such a shock sometimes tell that for a few moments their whole life
stood before them like a tableau, so that the vanished experiences of
their earliest life suddenly reappeared from oblivion with full
clarity. Such narratives are not based on deception, but on truth; they
are facts. In that moment of flashing of the memory tableau something
very special happens to the person; only in such shock the
consciousness must not be lost. In that moment of crash or other shock,
which has given rise to the shock, something occurs, which the
clairvoyant can see. Not always, but sometimes, the part of the etheric
body which fills the region of the head emerges wholly or in part from
the head, and even if this happens only for a moment, the memory is
thereby released, because at such moments the etheric body is freed
from physical matter, the obstacle to uninhibited memory.
We can also
observe a partial exit of the etheric body on other occasions. When you
press or poke any limb of the body, a peculiar tingling sensation
sometimes occurs, and we are wont to denote this feeling by saying that
the limb has fallen asleep. Children who want to describe what kind of
feeling they have, have often been heard to say the expression: I feel
in my hand like seltzer water. What is that? The actual cause is that
the corresponding part of the life body is lifted out of this limb for
a while. The clairvoyant can then perceive the lifted-out part of the
etheric body like a copy of the physical human body near it. Thus, for
example, in the case of a fall, the corresponding part of the etheric
body is pushed out of the head by the falling movement.
In death
this memory tableau occurs immediately with full strength, because the
whole physical body is left. The duration of this memory tableau after
death is also known. It is three to four days. It is not easy to give
the reasons for this. This duration is different for each person and
corresponds approximately to the ability of the person in question, how
long he could have endured in life to stay awake without falling
asleep.
After that,
something else occurs. What happens then is that a kind of second
corpse comes out. Man now leaves behind the etheric body, but he
retains a certain extract, an essence, and man takes it with him and
keeps it for all eternity. Now, after leaving behind the etheric body,
the Kamaloka time, the Kamaloka state, begins for man. If you want to
make clear what kind of state this is, you must consider that man,
after he has left behind the physical and etheric body, has still kept
the astral body and the ego of his four members, and the question now
arises for us, what is the meaning of the astral body, with which the
ego now lives into the Kamaloka time. The astral body is the bearer of
pleasure and pain, of pleasures and desires, therefore these do not
cease when the physical body is discarded; only the possibility of
satisfying the desires ceases, since the instrument for the
satisfaction of the desires, the physical body, is no longer available.
Everything that man was as a sentient being in the physical body does
not cease to be. Man keeps all this in his astral body. Let us think of
an ordinary desire, and for the sake of simplicity let us choose one of
a quite banal kind, for example the desire for a delicious dish. This
desire has its seat not in the physical but in the astral body.
Therefore, this desire is not discarded with the physical body; it
remains. The physical body was only the instrument with which this
desire could be satisfied. If you have a knife to cut with, this is the
instrument, and you do not lose the ability to cut when you put the
knife away. Thus, at death, only the instrument for enjoyment is
discarded, and therefore man is initially in a state in which all his
various desires are represented, which must now first be discarded or
rather learned to be discarded. The time in which this happens is the
Kamaloka time. It is a time of testing, and it is very good and
important for the further development of man. Imagine that you are
thirsty and you are in a place where there is no water, no beer, no
wine, no drink of any kind. There you suffer burning thirst that cannot
be quenched. Similarly, man suffers a certain thirsty feeling when he
no longer possesses the instrument with which alone he was able to
satisfy his desires.
Kamaloka is
a period of abstinence for man, because he has to give up his desires
in order to live in the spiritual world. This period of Kamaloka lasts
longer or shorter time for a person, depending on how he manages to get
rid of his desires. It depends on how a person has already become
accustomed to regulating his desires in life, and how he has learned to
enjoy and renounce in life. But there are pleasures and desires of a
lower and higher kind. Such pleasures and desires, for the satisfaction
of which the physical body is not the actual instrument, we call higher
pleasures and desires, and such do not belong to those which man has to
get used to after death. Only as long as man still has something that
pulls him towards the physical existence - lower pleasures - so long he
remains in the astral life of the Kamaloka time. Then, when nothing
draws him down after that period of weaning, when he has become capable
of living in the spiritual world, a third corpse emerges from the human
being. The stay of the human being in this Kamaloka time lasts
approximately as long as one third of the lifetime.
Therefore,
it depends on how old man was when he died, that is, how long he lived
in the physical body. However, this Kamaloka time is by no means always
a gruesome or unpleasant one. In any case, man becomes more independent
of the physical desires, and the more he has already made himself
independent in life and has acquired interests in looking at spiritual
things, the easier this Kamaloka time will be for him. He becomes freer
through it, so that man becomes grateful for this Kamaloka time. The
feeling of deprivation in the physical life becomes bliss in the
Kamaloka time. Thus, the opposite feelings occur, for everything that
one has learned to gladly do without in life becomes enjoyment in the
Kamaloka time. When then, as has already been mentioned, the third
corpse emerges from the human being, then with this, the astral body,
everything that the human being cannot use in the spiritual world in
the future disappears. For the clairvoyant these astral corpses are
visible, and it takes twenty, thirty to forty years until they have
dissolved. Since such astral corpses are continually there, they
occasionally pass through the bodies of living people, through our own
bodies, especially during the night, when our astral bodies are
separated from the physical bodies in sleep, and from this come certain
harmful influences which man can receive. Just as for the actual human
being after the exit of the etheric corpse an extract, a certain
essence remains for all eternity, so also for him after the exit of the
astral corpse a certain essence remains for all eternity as fruit of
the last embodiment.
And now
begins for man the time of Devachan, the entrance into the spiritual
world, into the home of the gods and all spiritual entities. When man
enters this world, he experiences a feeling that can be compared to the
liberation of a plant that grew in a narrow crevice and suddenly grows
up to the light. For when man enters this heavenly world, he
experiences within himself perfect spiritual freedom, and he henceforth
enjoys absolute bliss. For, what is actually the time of Devachan? You
can get an idea of it if you consider that here man makes the
preparation for a new life, for a new incarnation. In the physical
world, in this lower world, man has experienced and lived through so
much, and he has taken these experiences with him. He has taken them
into himself like a fruit of life, which he can now freely process
within himself. He now forms an archetype for a new life in the
devachan time. This happens during a long, long time. This is a
creation of one's own being, and every creation, every production is
connected with bliss. That every producing, every creating is connected
with bliss, you can get an idea of that if you look at a chicken
hatching an egg. Why does it do that? Because it feels a pleasure in
doing so. So it is also a pleasure for the human being to weave in the
Devachan the fruit of the past life into the plan for a new life.
In the
chain of incarnations man has already gone through many lives, but at
the end of a life he is never again the same as he was at the beginning
of this life. In this life, forced into the physical body, he must
behave quite passively. Now, however, when he is liberated from the
physical body, from the etheric body and from the astral body, he
weaves an archetype into the eternal core of his being, and this
weaving is perceived as bliss, as a feeling that cannot be compared
with anything he can ever experience as bliss in the physical world.
His life is bliss in the spiritual world. But do not think that the
physical life has no meaning in this spiritual world. If in life bonds
of love and friendship have been established from soul to soul, then
only the physical falls away with death, but the spiritual bond remains
and creates lasting, indestructible bridges from soul to soul, which
condense into effects in the archetypes. These are then able to live
out in the physical in the following incarnations. It is the same in
the relationship that exists between mother and child. The love of a
mother for her child is the answer to the prenatal love of the child
for its mother, who felt attracted to this mother by her longing for
incarnation. What then takes place in life, in the jointly experienced
embodiment between mother and child, forms new, soul ties, which
remain. And everything that bound soul to soul is already woven into
the spiritual life that you find when you enter the spiritual world
after death. Thus, the life between death and a new birth is such that
what was done in the previous physical life continues to have an
effect. Yes, even the favorite occupations to which a person was
attached during his life continue to have an effect. But man becomes
freer and freer after death, because he becomes a preparer for the
future, for his own future.
Now, does
man do something else in this hereafter? Oh, he is very active in this
hereafter. Here someone could raise the question, why man is born again
and why he comes back to this earth at all, if he can also be active in
the hereafter. Well, this happens because the incarnations never occur
in such a way that man is unnecessarily reborn in their course. He can
always learn something new, the earthly conditions have always changed
in such a way that he comes into completely changed conditions in order
to make experiences for his further development. The face of the earth,
the regions, the animal kingdom, the plant cover, all this changes
continuously in relatively short time. Think once hundred years back.
What a difference compared with today! It was not so long ago that
every human being learned to read and write at the age of six. In
ancient times, there were highly learned people at the top of the state
who could neither read nor write. Where are the forests and animal
species that five hundred years ago filled the land that is now
crisscrossed by railroads? What were the localities like where our
great cities are today, what were they like a thousand years ago? For
then only man is reborn, then he enters into a new rebirth only when
the conditions have changed in such a way that man can learn something
new. Follow the centuries, how the face of the earth is changed, torn
down and built up by the mind forces of the people. But there are still
many things changing that the outer mind forces of man cannot work on.
The plant cover and the animal world, they change before our eyes; they
disappear and other species take their place. Such changes are brought
about from the other world. A person walking across a meadow may well
see a bridge being built across the stream, but he cannot see the plant
cover being built up. This is done by the dead. These are active in
reshaping and reworking the face of the earth, in order to create for
themselves the changed scene for a new incarnation.
After the
human being has been busy with the preparations for the new incarnation
for a long, long time, the time is approaching when it is to take
place. What happens now? What does man do then when he steps into his
new rebirth? At this time man is in his Devachan, and there he feels
that he must first attach a new astral body to himself. Then, so to
speak, the astral substance shoots up to him from all parts, and
according to his peculiarity it crystallizes around him, so to speak.
You must imagine it in the same way as the iron filings are subject to
the attraction of a magnet and arrange and group themselves around it,
so the astral substance arranges itself to the reincarnating I. Then,
however, it is still necessary to choose a suitable pair of parents,
and thus man is led to this or that pair of parents, but not merely in
obedience to his own force of attraction. For here highly exalted
beings intervene and are active, which today still, appropriate to the
present state of development of man, have taken over the work of
arranging these relationships karmically in correctness and justice.
So, if occasionally the parents do not seem to be right with the
children and to the children, then it is not necessary that there is
something wrong or unjust. This is perhaps sometimes the good thing,
that man gets into the most complicated conditions and has to put up
with the strangest circumstances in order to learn through them.
However,
the sequence of these repetitive reincarnations is not an endless one.
There is a beginning and also an end. Once, in the distant past, man
did not yet descend to embodiments. He did not know birth and death.
There he led a kind of angelic existence, not interrupted by such
drastic changes of his condition as they are present today as birth and
death. But just as surely there will come a time for man when he will
have accumulated a sufficient sum of experiences in the lower worlds to
have acquired a sufficiently matured, clarified state of consciousness
to be able to work in the sublime upper worlds without being forced to
submerge again in the lower worlds.
After
listening to the here presented relations about repeated earth lives,
some people believe to be afraid that the feeling of parental love
could be impaired by the fact that a mother hears that the child is not
absolutely flesh of her flesh, because there is something about this
child that is not of her, thus something foreign. But these bonds which
embrace parents and children are by no means subject to chance and
lawless. They are not new bonds. They were already present in previous
lives and once existed in kinship and friendship ties. These bonds of
love unite them permanently also in the higher worlds in eternal
reality, and all people will once be embraced in eternal love, even if
they will no longer descend into the cycle of incarnations.
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