The Rudolf Steiner Archive

13. Man Between Death and Rebirth

[ 1 ] Yesterday we visualized how the moment of death unfolds, how the etheric body, together with the astral body and the “I-bearer,” emerges from the physical body, and how the tableau of memories appears before the soul. A peculiarity becomes apparent in this tableau. Namely, the events appear before the soul as if simultaneously, allowing for an overview like a kind of panorama. The essential point, however, is that one truly perceives it as a picture. In real physical life, events are associated with joy and pain; these emotional contents are gone within a few days after death. This picture of memory is an objective painting. Let us try to clarify this with an example. We find ourselves in a truly dire, painful situation; we experience its unfolding, so to speak, but the pain itself is absent. It is like a picture we are looking at that depicts, say, a martyr: we do not actually feel the pain, but merely observe it objectively. So it is with the image of memory after death. It occurs at the moment when the etheric body largely withdraws, detaches itself from the physical body, and then dissolves into the universal world ether. What remains of it is the essence that contains the fruit of the past life. — Now a truly different phase begins for the soul: the time of weaning itself from attachment to the physical world. We can best imagine this by telling ourselves: For the occultist, the sum of instincts and desires is something real. Now, what is present in the astral body does not cease after death with the shedding of the physical body; rather, all these instincts and desires remain. Anyone who has been a gourmet in this life does not lose their desire for delicious food upon death, for that desire clings to the astral body; they simply no longer have the physical instruments—the palate, the tongue, and so on—with which to satisfy that craving. We can compare their situation—because the situation is the same for another reason—to a person who is terribly thirsty and has no way to quench that thirst. They suffer from these desires; they suffer from the inevitable deprivation of fulfilling them. The purpose of this suffering is to feel what it means to have desires that can only be satisfied with physical tools. Kamaloka: Weaning; this state is called the “place of desires.” It lasts—perhaps we can go into this in more detail—one-third of the time a person spends between birth and death. So if someone dies at the age of sixty, one could say that he spends twenty years—one-third of his past life—in Kamaloka. As a rule, Kamaloka lasts until the person has weaned himself from all the desires that still bind him to the physical plane. That is one aspect of the Kamaloka period. But let us also consider Kamaloka from another perspective.

[ 2 ] What a person experiences in the physical body is valuable to them because, through those experiences, they develop higher and higher through what they accomplish on Earth. That is the essential point. On the other hand, between birth and death, there are numerous opportunities for a person to create obstacles to their own development. This includes everything we do that harms our fellow human beings. Every time we seek some form of self-serving gratification at the expense of others, or undertake any selfish act that is connected to and somehow interferes with the world, we create an obstacle to our own development. We slap someone: the physical and moral pain of that act is an obstacle to our development. This obstacle to development would remain with us for all future times and lives if we did not remove it from the world. During the Kamaloka period, a person receives an impetus to clear these obstacles to development out of the way. Now, the Kamaloka period unfolds in such a way that a person relives his entire life, and he will relive it in reverse three times as fast. This is, in fact, the remarkable feature of the astral world, the Kamaloka: that all things appear as mirror images. And this is also what confuses the student upon entering the astral world. For example, he must read the number 346 as 643. He must reverse everything when looking at the astral world. This is true of all things related to the astral world. But it is also true of all his passions. Suppose someone becomes clairvoyant through training or pathological conditions; they will first see their own drives and passions streaming out from them, appearing to them in the form of all manner of figures and forms, and approaching them in radii from all sides. Anyone who becomes a seer in the astral realm—whether regularly or irregularly—first sees these figures, which invade their field of vision as grotesque or demonic forms. This is a very dangerous thing, especially for those who are becoming seers and have never heard of this peculiar phenomenon. This will become less and less rare, because we are currently in a stage of development where the eyes of a number of people are opening to the spiritual world. So this, too, must be said, so that those to whom it happens will not be afraid. For spiritual science is meant to serve as a guide for human beings into the spiritual world. For many who become clairvoyant, this is associated with a great deal of emotional distress because they are unaware of all these facts and conditions. So they see all these things as mirror images in the astral world; they also see other things in the spiritual world. In the physical world, when a hen lays an egg, you first see the hen and then the egg; in the astral world, you witness the process of how the egg returns to the hen. Thus, everything is relived. Imagine this: you die at the age of sixty and then arrive in Kamaloka at the point where, at the age of forty, you slapped someone else—now, in Kamaloka, you experience everything that the other person experienced through you; you are literally immersed in the nature of the other person. In this way, one relives one’s life all the way back to birth. But one experiences not only pain but also joy—the joy and happiness one has brought to others. Bit by bit, the soul thus sheds whatever stands in the way of its development. And it must be grateful for the wise guidance that gives it the opportunity for redemption. For with the will to make amends, it absorbs each time something like a mark—a impulse of will—to rectify what are obstacles to its development. And in the coming life, it finds itself in a position to do so. We see, then, that the objective tableau is something entirely different from the reliving of experiences in Kamaloka. In Kamaloka, one experiences very precisely what the other person felt as a result of our behavior; one experiences the other side of one’s own actions. But it is not merely a matter of experiencing that burden there; rather, what one experienced here as pain becomes pleasure and joy there. One thus experiences pleasure and suffering as the opposite of what they were in the physical world. This is precisely why Kamaloka exists—to give the soul what the tableau of memories does not: the reliving of pain and joy.

[ 3 ] Once the Kamaloka has been lived through, a kind of third body is shed. First came the physical body, then the etheric body, which generally dissolves into the world ether, and now it is the astral body. This comprises everything in the human astral body that the person has not yet purified and ordered from the perspective of the “I.” That which the human being once acquired as the vehicle for his drives and passions—and which he has not transformed or spiritualized through the “I”—is shed after the Kamaloka state. On his further path, the human being takes with him an essence of the astral body: first, the sum of all the impulses of good will; and second, everything he has transformed through the “I.” Everything he has refined from his instincts—the beautiful, the good, the moral—forms the essence of his astral body. At the end of the Kamaloka period, the human being now consists of the “I,” and arranged around it, as it were, is the essence of the astral body and the etheric body: the good impulses of will.

[ 4 ] Now a new state begins for humankind: that of a suffering-free, spiritual life—the Devachan. It is very uplifting for the occultist to experience such things as facts and then find them confirmed in sacred texts and religious scriptures. The passage in the New Testament is one that reads: “Unless you become like little children, you cannot enter the kingdom of heaven.” This alludes to the process of reliving one’s life back to birth: these are the kinds of profound insights one can gain from religious texts. You must understand me correctly: the occultist does not swear by any text or authority; for him, only the facts of the spiritual world are decisive, but the texts themselves regain their objective value for him. Theosophy is not based on any religious scripture, but directly on the investigation of spiritual facts. The foundation of all spiritual science is objective research; if the scriptures then contain similar ideas, the occultist will be all the more able to evaluate them accordingly.

[ 5 ] Now life begins in the Devachan, in the spiritual realm. This spiritual world can always be observed; it is always there. The deceased has only just entered it, but it is always there. We will learn later about the methods by which it can be perceived. This spiritual world is very difficult to describe, since our words are tailored to the physical world. Therefore, we can only provide a comparative conception of it. Here in our earthly world, we find solid earth, upon which we walk; liquids, such as water; a layer of air; and the whole permeated by warmth. You can imagine the spiritual realm in a similar way. There is a mainland there, formed in a very peculiar way—the continental region of the Devachan: all things mineral are contained within its forms. You know that where the mineral is solid, the clairvoyant sees nothing in that space; the space is hollowed out, and all around it, the spiritual forces appear to the clairvoyant eye as ethereal figures of light. Imagine a crystal: what is filled with physical matter is not the essential aspect for consciousness when it ascends into the spiritual world, but rather the spirit of the crystal—the forces that are visible around it. The crystal cube appears to the clairvoyant like a negative. What exists as physical forms in our world constitutes solid ground in Devachan. There is much else within Devachan as well. All life on Earth—plant, animal, and human life—and the way it is distributed among the various beings there appears to the seer as the liquid element of the spiritual world, like seas and rivers. However, we cannot accurately compare the arrangement of the liquid life flowing there to our rivers and seas; rather, it resembles the blood flowing through the human body. This is the oceanic and riverine realm of Devachan. This solid and liquid realm does not appear to be descending or ascending, nor is it tiered; rather, it exists in a relationship similar to that of land and sea here.

[ 6 ] The third realm is comparable to our air sphere. In Devachan, it is formed from the same substance of which our sensations and those of animals are composed. It is the sum total of everything that lives in the astral realm. Flowing pain and flowing pleasure constitute the substance that forms in Devachan what air is here. Imagine that a clairvoyant were to observe a battle from Devachan. When you look at it physically, you see combatants, cannons, and so on; but the clairvoyant sees more than just the physical human forms and the physical instruments—he sees how the passions of the combatants clash. You would see there what lives within the souls: how passion collides with passion. Just like a terrible thunderstorm raging in the high mountains—that is roughly how such a battle appears to the clairvoyant from Devachan. Yet the person there also perceives loving feelings: like a wonderfully lovely sound, these permeate the Devachanic atmosphere. - Thus, we have named the three realms of Devachan—the solid, the liquid, and the ethereal—by drawing comparisons to those of our Earth.

[ 7 ] Just as warmth permeates the three lower realms here on Earth, so too does a unifying element permeate the three realms of Devachan mentioned above. And what permeates everything there is the substance of our thoughts, which live there as forms and beings. What human beings experience here as thoughts is only a shadow of their true thoughts. Imagine a stretched canvas with living beings and figures behind it; on the canvas, however, you would be able to see only their images. This is exactly how the thoughts that human beings know in the physical world relate to what thoughts are in the spiritual realm. There, they are beings with whom one can interact, permeating the entire space of Devachan like states of warmth. This is the world into which human beings enter. Human beings perceive this very clearly in this life after death when they enter Devachan.

[ 8 ] We must also mention that, to the same extent that a person weans himself from physical attachments in Kamaloka, his consciousness also brightens again. Following the sharp, clear vision of one’s life, a darkening of consciousness sets in during the afterlife, the stronger the desire for the physical becomes. But the more a person detaches from the physical, the more their clouded consciousness brightens. And in Devachan, a person consciously—not in a dreamlike state—experiences the events and all the experiences of Devachan. We will discuss later how the organs necessary for this develop.

[ 9 ] A person knows exactly when he enters the spiritual world. The first impression of Devachan is that he sees the physical body of his previous life in its form outside of his “I.” This body is, in fact, incorporated into the continental region of the spiritual world; it belongs to the mainland of Devachan. In physical life, you say, “I am doing this.”—You acknowledge that you live in your physical body and therefore refer to it as “I”; this is not the case in Devachan. There you are outside the physical body, but you become consciously aware of it in its form the moment you enter Devachan, and then you say to it: “That is you!” - You no longer refer to your physical body as “I.” This is a profound, highly significant event for the soul, during which it becomes clear to the soul: I am no longer in the physical world, but in the spiritual world—that is where I am now. That is why you no longer address your physical body as “I,” but say: “That is you!” - In truth, the saying from Vedanta philosophy also stems from this experience: Tat twam asi—“That is you.” - Everything that is said in this way in Eastern philosophy consists of facts of the spiritual world. So when Vedanta teaches the student to meditate on “That is you,” it means nothing other than that he should already in this life evoke within himself those ideas that will then dawn on him upon entering Devachan. True meditation formulas are nothing other than photographs of facts of the spiritual world. And “Tat twam asi” is the boundary stone, the marker that signals one’s entry into the spiritual world. Furthermore, one gradually learns there to view objectively everything connected with one’s own physical life—without sympathy or antipathy—just as one would view pictures.

[ 10 ] Another aspect, however, is the soul’s experience of the flowing life of Devachan. In the physical world, life is distributed among many individual beings. In Devachan, however, life appears as a whole. That one, all-encompassing life confronts one there, and the sensation one has of it is immensely powerful, for in this one life, the experiences are not merely abstract concepts. Just consider how everything that the great founders of religions have imbued into life, and how that is in turn lived out by the human being in his astral body and his etheric body: all of this is relived as something uplifting in Devachan. What has flowed out through the great founders and flowed in during the individual incarnations—and it is precisely the most valuable experiences that are embedded in the etheric body—you encounter as an experience in the spiritual realm. Everything that has flowed into physical life appears before you in vast, magnificent images. You experience what unites human beings. What harmonizes them, you experience in Devachan; what separates us here, what is alien to us, we bring into harmony there. And what we are so deeply involved with inwardly here—pleasure and suffering—appears to us there like wind and weather. We experience it around us in images—what we once experienced within ourselves: it is now the atmosphere surrounding us. It is important that what we personally feel in physical life, we experience there in connection with the whole. We feel joy only in connection with all pleasure, and pain only in connection with all suffering. Thus our pleasure and our suffering reveal themselves in the full extent of their effect on the whole. We gain this experience of pleasure and suffering in the life after death. There, we live with our thoughts just as we do with things.

[ 11 ] And now let us ask: What effect does this have on the human being’s essence when he lives in this way, immersed in all of this within the Devachan? Let us clarify this through a comparison. How does a human being see in the physical world? By light penetrating him and his organ forming to receive it. Goethe says, not without reason: “The eye is formed by light for light.”—The truth of this fact can be seen from the fact that when animals migrate into dark caves, their eyes atrophy, while other organs—such as the tactile organs, which are necessary there—develop more finely. The organ of perception is formed by the external element. If there were no sun, there would be no eye; light has given birth to the eye. Our organism is a result of the elements surrounding it; everything we possess physically is formed from the environment around us. And in the same way, in Devachan, the spiritual organs are formed for the human being out of the spiritual environment. And in Devachan, the human being continually absorbs something of the life of their surroundings and builds for themselves a kind of spiritual organism from the elements of their environment. There, they continually feel themselves to be a being in the process of becoming, as their spiritual organism emerges limb by limb. And now consider that every perception of creativity is experienced as a feeling of bliss and is also associated with such a feeling in physical life! Think of the artist, the inventor. This growth and development, piece by piece—this is what a person experiences as a feeling of bliss while passing through Devachan. And so, there, the spiritual archetype of a human being takes shape within them. He has formed such an archetype many times before, each time the human being dwelt in Devachan after death, but each time what the human being has brought into Devachan as the fruit of his last life—as an essence within his etheric body—is worked into it as something new.

[ 12 ] When a human being first entered Devachan, he had already mentally constructed an archetype of the human being, and this then solidified into the physical human being. Now that he has passed through many incarnations, he takes with him the essence of his past life each time, and based on that, he then forms the archetype of a new human being. This process takes a long time; we will only mention it in general terms today. It is therefore not without purpose that human beings appear on Earth in successive incarnations and repeatedly pass through the Devachan. Each time, the Earth takes on a different face for him, and new experiences present themselves to him in the outer culture and in relation to all kinds of circumstances. The soul does not appear on the physical plane until it can learn something new here. I will later give you the time span between reincarnations in numerical terms; that is how long a person needs to build up their new archetype. Once it is built up, this archetype—which is, in fact, the person themselves—has the impulse to appear on Earth again each time. It is not easy to describe this impulse. Take an example. Someone has a thought, and now he also feels the urge to express it: driven by this impulse, the thought has taken on physical form. Today, the power to shape the archetype created in Devachan does not yet lie within the human being’s own will. In this life cycle, human beings cannot yet direct their own reincarnations; they need higher spiritual beings to guide them to the parents who are capable of providing the suitable physical body for the archetype. These beings guide them to the people and the race that best suit them for this archetype. When the time for reincarnation has come, the human being first surrounds himself with astral substance in accordance with the archetype he has developed in Devachan; this forms as if of its own accord: it springs up, so to speak. Now the guidance by higher beings toward the parental couple begins. And since the physical body provided by the parents can only be found to be approximately suitable for the astral body and the I, these beings incorporate the etheric body into the human being in between, through which the greatest possible adaptation between the earthly and that which is given from the spiritual world then takes place. We will then speak tomorrow about this incorporation of the etheric body and about physical birth. But we can already see this today: At birth, upon reappearing on Earth, the human being takes the reverse path of that taken after death. First, the astral body is incorporated; then the etheric body; and finally the physical body. At death, the human being first sheds the physical body, then the etheric body, and finally the astral body.

[ 13 ] And when a person receives the etheric body, something similar happens to them as when they pass through the gate of death. Just as they had a retrospective view of their past life, they now have a prophetic preview of the life they are about to enter. This is very significant for them. It occurs at the very moment the etheric body integrates itself. The moment then vanishes from their memory. It is not details that they see, but rather a picture of life’s possibilities. This preview can only become fateful for them to the extent that it causes them to experience what is called a “shock”—that is, they resist entering physical life. During a normal entry, the etheric body and the physical body align; in cases such as a shock, they do not. In such cases, the etheric body does not fully enter the physical body—it remains protruding, especially at the head—and therefore cannot properly develop the organs of the intellect. Some cases of idiocy stem from this, but by no means all; this should be emphasized separately.

[ 14 ] In this way, physical life becomes comprehensible to us through the spiritual life that underlies it. And this insight will help us put our knowledge to use in the service of a life of service.