Preparing for a New Birth
STUTTGART JUNE 21, 1923 GA 224
If we consider human existence on Earth,
the most significant element in life must appear to be
our capacity to think or make mental images — the capacity to
think for ourselves about the world, our own actions and so
forth. Any other view would be a self-deception. Certainly
there are temptations to consider other aspects of life as more
valuable. We can feel, just below the threshold of
consciousness, that our feelings about our own tasks,
about our relationships and about the world, are more valuable
than our thinking. And if we consider our moral existence, and
the voice of conscience, we can tell ourselves that this
conscience speaks to us from depths that thinking can never
reach.
We may feel all the more inclined to such a
view when we see that even the most highly trained thinking,
schooled in accordance with normal life, cannot arrive at the
moral impulses of a simple, unschooled conscience. Still, we
would be fooling ourselves if we imagined that thoughts are not
the essence of human life on Earth.
Certainly the voice of conscience, the
feeling of compassion, come from inexpressibly deeper sources
than our thoughts. Yet these impulses that well up from the
depths only find their right place in the human sphere when
they are permeated by thought. The voice of conscience, too,
only finds its true value by living within our thoughts, so
that we clothe in thoughts what the voice of conscience says.
Without overestimating thought, we still have to acknowledge,
if we want to proceed in describing human consciousness without
illusion, that it is thinking that makes us human. So Hegel is
right, in a sense, when he says that thinking distinguishes man
from beast.
Let us consider the total compass of the
thoughts that fill us from the moment we wake to the point of
going to sleep. If we are honest about it, we will have to say
that the majority of our thoughts in life are dependent on what
comes from outside, on sense impressions and experiences
that have to do with the material processes of earthly life.
Our thoughts pass by in intimate connection with the Earth, so
that whatever is most significant for us between birth and
death seems to be connected to the Earth. But if we consider
the totality of human life on Earth, we notice that a third of
it goes by without any thoughts at all. lf, with the means
available to ordinary consciousness, we look back over a period
of life, we naturally link one day's experience to the next and
leave out the experiences of sleep that remain in the
unconscious. But this leaves a third of life out of
consideration.
From my earlier lectures you know that our
activity during sleep, though unconscious, is not uneventful.
The I and the astral body go through experiences at night that
simply do not light up within our awareness. And if we look
more closely, we notice that the unconscious forces that
operate during sleep continue while we are awake — though
we might say they live a life of sleep, for they operate in our
whole activity of will, which is no clearer to us than the state
of sleep. And they operate in a large portion of our feeling
life, which is a kind of dreaming.
When we try to look at what comes from our
deepest essence, from our fundamental nature, we have to look
at something unconscious. Through spiritual scientific
observation, we find that what operates in us while we sleep
continues to operate while we are awake. It is present as the I
and the astral body, though they do not enter ordinary
awareness except in their effects — the expressions of
our will and our feeling life — which give a special
aspect to what does enter into clear, waking awareness: our
life of thought. This becomes more comprehensible when we take
into consideration the existence we participate in between
death and rebirth.
When we pass through the gates of death, we
undergo states I have described to you before, and that you
already know in some of their aspects. If we examine very
precisely what element of the human being is necessary for our
thinking, our conceptual life, we arrive at the insight that
for the formation of thoughts on Earth we need the physical
body. The physical body must be set in action for us, as
earthly human beings, to have thoughts. Beyond this, we also
need to set our life body in action. But these are the two
elements of human nature that seem to lie unconscious in bed
while we sleep. Only when our consciousness has developed
somewhat, through a certain training of our soul, and when we
can even see physical things from a spiritual viewpoint, do we
realize that actually we are thinking all the time, even when
we are asleep. If we consider the whole human being, we can say
that during earthly life we are never not thinking.
When we return in the morning to our
physical and life bodies, normal consciousness forces itself
very quickly back into them, and it is only then that normal
consciousness becomes aware of external things — of sense
perceptions that we then process conceptually, of objects that
we perceive around us. But when we begin to enter much more
consciously into our physical and life bodies, then as we
awaken we meet the thinking that has gone on while we were
asleep. We think; that is, the physical and life bodies are
caught up in continual thought activity while we are asleep,
only we are not present to it; we are outside this activity in
our I and astral body, so we are not aware that it is going on.
But this is a great self-deception. And just as we can better
recognize any aspect of ourselves when it is torn away from its
harmonious relationship to the whole of life — that is,
when it appears in an abnormal state — so too we can
realize based on external experiences of the world that while
we are asleep we not only continue to think, but we think far
more cleverly while asleep and absent than when awake and
present. We arrive at the depressing fact that our life body
thinks less well when we are within it, with the normal
consciousness of our I and astral body. We spoil the thoughts
that course through our life body by being present to them with
our normal consciousness.
Someone who can see into these things can
therefore confirm reports like the following. There were once
two university students. One was a philologist and knew nothing
of numbers. The other was a mathematics student. Now, we know
that at certain moments in the study of mathematics, you do
sweat through certain problems, whereas in philology it
tends to go more easily. And that's how it was with these two
students, who shared a room. One night, at the end of their
preparations for their exams, the philology student was very
pleased with himself, while the mathematics student was not,
since he couldn't solve a problem he needed to solve for a
written assignment. So he lay down to sleep very dissatisfied,
and a strange event followed. At a certain hour the philology
student woke up and saw the mathematics student get out of bed
and walk to the desk. There, he thought some more, wrote for a
long time and then went back to bed and slept. The next day,
when they both got up, the mathematics student said, “We didn't
drink anything last night, but this morning I have a terrible
headache.” The other replied, “No wonder, if you get
up at three and do calculations for hours, of course your head
will swim the next day.” And his roommate
said, “I was not up in the night!” He knew nothing
about having been up. Then he looked and saw that he had solved
the problem, though he had no memory of it.
These things are not fairy tales. I chose
this example, which belongs to the literature, because you can
check it. I could tell you many other such things. It is not a
question of the individual example, but of the reality of
all this. When consciousness is not present — and I
emphasize that the person in question had no memory of his
nocturnal activity — then the physical and life bodies are
worked on by outside influences, and the life body works in the
physical body to solve the assignment.
Now, I know that many will wish this kind
of thing could happen more often. But we today do not
have it so easy. In such a case as this the life body proves to
be much more clever when it is left alone to work on the
physical body than when the I and the astral body are present.
This was merely an illustration of how we go on thinking all
through the night. For our thoughts are stimulated directly by
the outer world through the mediation of the life body, and
then the physical body helps as well, to raise up thoughts for
the physical human being on Earth.
So our thought life is definitely bound up
with our physical and life bodies. Not so our feeling life and
our will life. It is merely a superstition of modern science to
imagine that our feeling and will are as bound up with our
physical and life bodies as our thoughts are. I will only
review a few points on this topic.
In contemporary earthly life, it is not
true to say we can survey what happens with our I and our
astral body when they separate from the physical and life
bodies, taking with them from normal life only the will and a
portion of the life of feeling. For this experience between
going to sleep and waking up takes place in a completely
different world. It takes place in a spiritual world, a world
in which the environment is not the kingdoms of nature, the
mineral kingdom and the plant kingdom, but the higher
hierarchies, spiritual beings, spiritual events. But as long as
we are beings of the Earth, we are not adequately developed to
survey what we are experiencing in our I and astral body
between falling asleep and waking up. The experience stays
unconscious, but it is not less lively than what becomes
conscious. We do go through it. And once we have done so, it is
something that belongs to our inner content. Each morning we
awaken changed; the night has changed us. We don't awaken in
the same state we arrived at before going to sleep. Instead, we
awaken in the state that our sleep life has put us into.
Now, when we pass through the gates of
death, we lay down our physical and life bodies. And so, in the
first days after death (since it takes about three days to let
go of the life body), we feel that our thought life is being
sucked up by the universe. First, we have a brief glance over
our previous earthly life. It is as if our past life were the
world around us; we see it in pictures before us. The whole of
the past life stands before us at one stroke once the soul is
free of the physical and life bodies, that is, once our passage
through the gate of death has been accomplished. But it still
takes days afterward for the life body to be completely
dissolved in the general life processes of the universe.
During this time, our impression is, first,
of a living and sharply contoured overview of the life. Then it
grows weaker and weaker, but at the same time more
“cosmic,” until after a few days it finally melts
away. But in these few days, the most valuable aspect of the
earthly life that is past departs from the person who has died.
Everything we thought about the things of the world, about our
whole earthly environment, what filled our normal consciousness —
all this melts away from us in just a few days. And to the exact
extent that the content of earthly
life melts away, there emerges the content of what we all
go through unconsciously every night during sleep. This content
now begins to become conscious for us. If we really experienced
nothing during our sleep life, then three or four days after
death our conscious life would be at an end. For everything we
thought of as most valuable during our life has melted away,
and out of this darkening, dimming awareness there emerges what
we lived through every time we slept, but which formerly
remained outside awareness.
Now, the peculiar characteristic of our
sleeping experiences is this: that in sleep the world takes
place in reverse. Whether our sleep is long or short, once we
fall asleep it is all the same, since other states of
consciousness also have completely different time-senses. So
the characteristic I am talking about holds true whether you
sleep all night or only for a few minutes. From the time we go
to sleep until the time we wake up again, we leave backwards
through everything we just experienced between our last waking
and the current moment of falling asleep. But we live
through it in a different form than we did at first.
When we are awake, we live through the day
from start to finish, every event and every circumstance, in
terms of physical, intellectual nuances. While asleep, however,
we experience it all backwards and in terms of its moral
nuances. Moral and religious impulses appear; we pass through
everything evaluating how it has made us more or less
valuable as moral human beings. We indulge in no illusions, nor
can we, but we evaluate everything we did the previous day in
terms of our fundamental humanity.
Natural science is wrong when it claims
that human life relies on causality, on necessary consequences,
though in waking life we may only see this linking of cause and
effect. Reality contains another current, though it
remains unconscious for us during the day, and every night as
we sleep we experience this moral ordering of the world. There,
we evaluate things morally, that is, in connection with our own
human value. We do this every night, or every time we sleep,
with regard to the last-experienced period of being awake. And
when we pass through the gates of death, then we go backwards
through the last night, the next-to-last night, the night
before that, and so on, up to the first night after we were
born when we became conscious for the first time — for
about a third of the time we were alive, since we slept through
about a third of our earthly life.
The physical, cause-and-effect course of
the world passes away from us, and what rises up before us is
the course of the world as the gods and spirits think about it,
feel about it and will it. Still, it appears to us bearing the
coloration that earthly life gave it, since we have to pass
through it in the form in which we lived it during our life on
Earth. We need about a third of our lifetime to live it over
again backwards in this way, just as I described it in my book
Theosophy. There, I described the land of the soul and the
world of the soul.
For before we enter a world that is
completely spiritual, we have to live through everything that
we experienced on Earth unconsciously in our sleeping
state. In this way, we are training our awareness for the
actual spiritual experiences between death and rebirth. At the
same time, this backward experience of earthly life frees us
from earthly life. Until we have done this, our consciousness
is not adequately free to move among the spirits of the higher
worlds. And once we have come to this point, we are only at the
beginning of our life in the higher worlds.
Our life in the higher worlds, until we
come to Earth again, can become a purely spiritual experience.
Just as here we live among physical beings and events, there we
live in a spiritual world among spiritual beings and spiritual
events. We live among the spiritual beings and deeds that never
descend to Earth, and among the spiritual beings who as
human beings came to Earth and passed through the gates of
death before us, or even after us. We meet again
with all the people we knew during earthly life. And this
community of ours is very widespread. For through our sleep
life we include in this community everything that we only
touched on briefly with human beings during our life on Earth.
In sleep, we already live within the spiritual world, but we
are still experiencing earthly events in reverse as earthly
human beings; just this distinguishes our nightly
experience from what we go through once we have passed
through the gates of death.
First, we have to acknowledge that in the
first few days, the content of our earthly consciousness
melts away from us. The unconscious experiences of sleep,
which we ignored during life, now emerge and we really do
experience them. For in those earthly states of sleep, we
experience backwards, and in pictures, only the events of
waking life. As we step through the gates of death, we submerge
ourselves in spiritual substance, just as here we submerge
ourselves in material substance. Just as we have the physical
and life bodies on Earth, after death we receive a higher kind
of external sheath, a spiritual sheath. Through this
process, we can actually go through, in a real way, what we
only pass through in pictures, in images, during our periods of
sleep on Earth. It is a real, true experience, just as real as
our experience of earthly life in a physical body. This real
experience, a repetition in reality of the pictorial
experience of our sleep states, is the basis of the further
experiences we go through in the later course of our life
between death and rebirth.
What follows between death and rebirth,
after we have put aside our whole earthly existence, is a
preparation for the next life on Earth. In conjunction with the
beings of the spiritual world, we form the spiritual seed of
our next earthly life, and above all our next physical body.
Then comes another period in which we grow oriented toward
life on Earth. After dwelling for a long time among spiritual
beings and spiritual facts, something happens that can be
compared to a feeling of tiredness, of wanting to go to sleep.
We feel how the awareness we have in the spirit becomes weaker, how
we can no longer work together with the beings of the spiritual
world in the way we have done, and our consciousness shifts
over to an interest in a new life on Earth.
Just as every day we sink into the
unconsciousness of sleep, our purely spiritual consciousness
that fills most of our time between death and rebirth sinks
down, not to unconsciousness but toward being filled with
interest for life on Earth — as seen from the
other side, from the point of view of the spiritual world. This
interest in earthly life emerges many years, even many
centuries, before we descend again to an actual life on Earth.
The interest we took for so long in the purely spiritual world
transforms itself into an interest in the succession of
generations, and at the end of this succession, we ourselves
are to be born. From out of the spiritual world, we take note
of our ancestors through many long years before our own
parents are born. So from out of the spiritual world we
grow together with our ancestry.
At some point all this will become common
knowledge, and only then will we see how limited today's
science really is, despite its partial correctness, with regard
to the concept of inheritance. Physical inheritance can only
become comprehensible to us when we understand the role of
those forces by which we participated in our ancestry from out
of the spiritual world. When we point out here, with our
limited scientific means, that we possess this or that
characteristic of our great-grandfathers, we shouldn't
forget that while this great grandfather was alive, we took an
interest in him from out of the spiritual world; we grew
together with what played itself out as the characteristics of
the succeeding generations. We grew into it from out of the
spiritual world.
When anthroposophy makes itself felt in the
general civilization of humanity, these things will gain
practical significance. We hardly realize how much in the way
of cowardice and lack of energy derives today unconsciously from
our notions of inheritance, for our science can only speak of
inherited characteristics in a completely inadequate way.
It has even permeated our arts, the whole of human
thought.
When we finally penetrate to a realization
of how we have been connected to the physical formation of our
own ancestors, and also to the development of our own soul,
which from out of the spiritual world has followed and
co-created the whole evolution of our ancestors, then
this awareness will become an inward reality for us. Then
energy and courage will come from the spirit into our souls,
where today we derive only cowardice and lack of energy from
our contemporary style of thought. For it is not of the
slightest value if we think this or that theoretically about
the spiritual world. For the most part, we even clothe whatever
we think about the spiritual world in physical thought forms.
It is not a question of our making theoretical thoughts for
ourselves about the spiritual world. ... What matters is not that we have
mere thoughts about the spiritual world — we have to have them
initially, so that the content of the spiritual world enters
our souls at all — but that these thoughts become living and
creative forces within us. Normal physical thoughts on Earth
are completely abstract. Most scientific thoughts are abstract;
they accomplish nothing within our human nature — no more
than mirror images. Such thoughts are only pictures. If you are
standing with another person, looking in a mirror, and the
other person smacks you on the ear, you won't ascribe the
blow to what happens in the mirror, but to the real
person standing next to you. Thoughts are like these mirror
images: they don't do anything, they don't act as impulses on
reality. It is moral intuitions that can act as impulses. So,
even if we have to start from thoughts, our thoughts about the
spiritual world have to be active, active as reality itself and
not like other thoughts.
We only enter into the real
Anthroposophic view when we sense and experience thoughts as
realities. A common objection arises at this point. It can be
stated superficially that the whole anthroposophical world view
is based on auto-hypnosis, a kind of self-suggestion.
People say for instance that some of us are so suggestive that
the very thought of drinking lemonade can fill us with the
feeling of drinking a real lemonade. It is true that there are
people so sensitive that they can taste lemonade in their
mouths when they think about lemonade. This seems to be a good
objection, but just let someone tell us about quenching thirst
by the mere thought of lemonade! Mere thoughts do not become
realities. As long as anthroposophy remains mere thought, it is
like an imaginary lemonade. But it need not remain so, for it
derives from spiritual reality. It does not simply operate like
a thought, but it operates the way outer reality operates on
material substances. It permeates, it resonates through our
human life of feeling and of will. It becomes a reality in us.
This is what matters.
So we don't have much if we have
anthroposophy as theory. It has to become life. It is life if
it fills our souls with energy, perseverance, courage. It
is life if, faced with the cares of physical life on Earth
— in our deepest sorrow, our deepest suffering — we
become filled with inner joy, inner consolation, inner energy
by looking up toward the spiritual world. Then anthroposophy
becomes like a living being; it becomes something that
seems to move amongst us as a living being. Only then has it
become amongst us what it should be, permeating all our
activity. And then it helps us to permeate this world in which
we have come for the sake of the spirit, not for the sake of
physical matter. Above all, anthroposophy arrives at real
knowledge of what we are as human beings.
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