The Rudolf Steiner Archive

2. Sensory Experiences and Experiences of the World of the Deceased

[ 1 ] When we reflect on the fact that here in the physical world we are becoming acquainted with this physical world, we will inevitably come to the conclusion that in this world we live primarily through our physical senses and through our intellect. Of course, we also live within this physical world through our soul life, through the thoughts that arise within us, that remain in our memory, that make up our store of memories; we live in this world through our feelings and impulses of will. It is quite understandable that for a person who has not yet delved more deeply into questions of spiritual science, it seems quite improbable that an experience could take place that is shaped entirely differently from that in the physical world; for it is clear that human beings initially know the world only through thinking, feeling, and willing. However, through what we call initiation, there exists in the world a completely different form of experience that transcends the physical world. Essentially, it is the same kind of experience as when a person passes through the gate of death and enters that time that lies between death and a new birth.

[ 2 ] Now, it must be said that in most cases, what overwhelms a person when they try to form a mental picture, here in the physical body, of the life between death and rebirth, is a certain fear of nothingness arising in the soul. Let us realize that this feeling of fear is entirely natural. For try, just for a moment, to put yourself in a purely physical situation: imagine you were walking quite quickly and came to a deep abyss. This would offer nothing more than a premonition, a feeling: you have no way of knowing what might happen in the next moment if you were to continue walking. — This feeling can only take hold of the soul when a person has been walking so fast that they can no longer stop themselves. They tell themselves: You must take the next step. — The indeterminacy of fear lives in the soul, and this feeling could only be compared to the feeling that is always present in the depths of the soul but is simply not perceived because attention is directed toward the physical world—this feeling that tells them: What will happen to you if you leave everything you have grown accustomed to? — One need only reflect that something like this can live within him subconsciously, and there also lives what can be expressed with the words: You cannot see or hear, for the instruments for these sensory activities have been taken from you; nor can you think. — One does not make these feelings clear to oneself, but they sit in the soul, and what a person feels is a kind of numbing oneself away from this feeling. As soon as it arises, something else is called into the soul, so that the feeling cannot come into consciousness. But with that, one cannot make the proper preparation either; one cannot lift the veil that lies behind death. Today we want to shed light on how our life here is connected to the life after death.

[ 3 ] In the physical world, we rightly speak of perceiving it through our senses. When people speak of the senses, they are actually referring only to those senses that are usable in the physical world. They are usable only in the physical world because they are bound to the instruments that are taken from us at death. Only the five senses are ever listed as such: sight, hearing, smell, taste, and touch. However, none of these are of any use in the disembodied state. If one wishes to find a transition, it is necessary to list all human senses completely. What people overlook in this list is that they forget to include themselves. Yet they belong to the physical world, and they could not perceive themselves here if they had no senses for it. There are initially few senses through which they perceive themselves: the sense of balance, the sense of movement, and the sense of life; yet these are just as important as the other senses, the external senses. What is the sense of life? You can form an idea of it by considering the difference between hunger and satiety. If a person did not perceive themselves internally, they would know nothing of their own physicality, of well-being or ill-being. Just as one speaks of the sense of sight, so must one speak of the sense of life.

[ 4 ] But we must also speak of another kind of sense. How impossible it would be for a person to feel anything if they did not perceive the activity of their muscles and tendons. This is a perception of inner mobility. For humans, this perception is somewhat clouded because we see ourselves in the physical world with our physical eyes. One gains a true sense of this inner perception when moving in the dark; there, for example, the perception of the breathing process becomes more readily clear.

[ 5 ] We have a vital need for what we call our sense of balance. This can be observed in children as they learn to walk and stand; they gradually develop a feel for it. We must accustom ourselves to the sensation of walking upright. This sense even has a specific organ: the three semicircular canals in the ear, which are perpendicular to one another. If they are damaged, a person falls over, and the lack of balance experienced by some people stems from damage to this inner sense of orientation.

[ 6 ] If we go further, we find other senses through which we can have a kind of self-perception within ourselves, but this is already more difficult. Here we must start from a certain perspective that points to a state of consciousness that is no longer entirely normal. It occurs in certain dreams. The following may occur in consciousness as a dream: A person is terribly upset; the tax collector has come. He dreams this in every detail, and it can be a long dream sequence. It transforms, and then the rattle of a carriage is heard; the fire engine drives by. A fire has broken out. Externally, nothing more has happened than the cry of “Fire.” This word sounds faintly like the word “Steuer,” and through its tone it evokes in the soul the transition from the cry of “Fire” heard directly, and this in turn gives rise to the sum of the dream’s distressing images. The dream unfolds terribly quickly. One imagines the individual events in a timeline, and that is why the dream seems so long. From this dream, one sees what great significance sound has in the soul-body, especially when it intermingles with images, when the word comes into play. If we proceed further in soul research, we see that something quite different is actually taking place. Only when a person is in deep sleep do they not notice these things. Something would have happened even if the cry of “Fire!” had not sounded at all, but now the cry covers something up and brings forth the word “Tax.” A fine veil is spun from the echo of the word. In daily life, the veil is terribly thick, but alongside our daily perceptions go the subtle soul perceptions. Only these are not perceived. In such a dream vision, we grasp world events, as they present themselves before our soul, by a single thread.

[ 7 ] We have deliberately chosen this example because hearing, as it is currently constituted in humanity, is the sense closest to the supersensible senses. We stand right on the threshold of the supersensible world, and if we could set aside these two words, we would be able to experience true spiritual realities.

[ 8 ] This example clearly illustrates how human beings stand before the spiritual world. But these two words hold them back. It is indeed true that the vast majority of our dreams are woven from echoes of the sense of hearing, because between hearing and thinking there exists an inner sense that has become completely atrophied in modern life. Once one has immersed oneself in the spiritual world, this sense becomes active. This sense lives between hearing and thinking; it becomes conscious when one can hear the inaudible, when one has awakened a sense for rhythmic, melodic harmony... (gap in the text.)

[ 9 ] If one does not proceed to a sense that is relevant only to the physical world, one is faced with a sense of the supersensible world. In the physical world, this sense has split into the sense of hearing and the sense of imagination. It resonates when one arrives at a kind of self-awareness. It resonates most strongly when one attempts to develop an appreciation of music and poetry. However, it is better to approach it from the other side. In external physical life, the sense has atrophied.

[ 10 ] From there, the journey continues on to what we call today: the human being arrives at the concept of the “I.” One must be sincere in relation to this concept of the “I.” People utter the word “I” and find a certain inner stability in doing so. They rightly believe that by uttering the word “I,” they are grasping the “I.” And rightly so. This is a kind of preparation for grasping the true higher “I.” Grasping this presents a great difficulty; otherwise, the entire philosophical endeavor would not be directed toward getting to the bottom of it. In my *Philosophy of Freedom*, I sought to clarify how one gets to the bottom of it. All of this belongs to self-perception. One must grasp inwardly that through which one addresses oneself as the “I.” We therefore have senses through which we perceive the external world, and those through which we perceive ourselves when we hear the soundless sound.

[ 11 ] Here in the physical world, the five familiar senses are particularly well-developed. These have no significance for the initiate in the spiritual world. The other senses, through which human beings come to self-awareness, have atrophied. They are of great importance to human beings when they pass through the gate of death.

[ 12 ] The first thing he needs in the afterlife is the sense that transitions from the external musical to the internal musical. The presence of the external hearing organ is no obstacle to this sense. Today, this sense has been stifled by the ear. In the physical world, one can perceive the power of this sense when musicians compose. The sense stands behind the musical creation. After death, it becomes a sense through which the human being is attuned to their entire surroundings. We then experience music inwardly. After death, the sense becomes an external sense, and for a time after death one perceives what passes through the world, for the world is permeated by rhythmic-musical harmony. A person who could not perceive this rhythmic-musical harmony would be like a person in the physical world who could not perceive the inorganic.

[ 13 ] In my book *Theosophy*, in the description of Devachan, you will find how mutual life consists in the unfolding of musical, rhythmic harmony. In fact, the upper and lower are joined by the forward and the backward, while through our sense of balance we know only that we are walking upright. We perceive the beings that are above and below, to the right and to the left. Thus the inner senses, which are now atrophied, expand and convey the spiritual world to us. Then the sense of balance transitions into the sense of harmony and rhythm, and the sense of movement follows. When we are freed from the entire muscular and tendinous system, the sense that is otherwise concentrated through physicality will expand, and we will gain the ability to be everywhere in the universe just as we are in our own body through the sense of movement. The external world is to the spiritual world what a muscular movement is to the physical world within us. When a hand is held out to a child, the child understands this and imitates the movement. In the inner experience of the imitated movement, the sense of movement awakens.

[ 14 ] Over time, one becomes thoroughly disillusioned with certain teachings that are fundamentally flawed because they claim: “We live within ourselves.” But in the supersensible world, there is no blood circulation.

[ 15 ] Our inner sense of movement will become a particularly important sense after we die; our sense of life will become important to us—provided it is not exploited in an unpleasant way—because we will no longer have headaches or feel hungry.

[ 16 ] The senses that are atrophied here are particularly stimulated when we pass through the gate of death. We cannot perceive our own physicality through our own physicality; the eye cannot see itself, and the brain cannot examine itself; thus, the organ that perceives something cannot be the same one that perceives itself. Therefore, what we have called the sense of life must be separated from physicality, and in this way it approaches the spiritual. In the case of the sense of balance, it is not that it mediates perception, but rather that it expresses itself only symbolically within it.

[ 17 ] These senses are, in fact, inherently selfish by their very nature, because it is through them that a person perceives their own self. And we must not deny to ourselves that what we carry with us out of this life is the more selfish part. So, initially we retain the more selfish part, and from this it becomes clear that immediately after death, a person passes into a rather selfish state. Just as a child brings its senses into physical existence and must first become accustomed to the physical, sensory world, so too must a person, in the disembodied state, accustom their senses to the supersensory world. This takes quite a long time after death, and while they are learning to accustom their senses, all that remains for them at first is what here in the physical world brought them into contact with the external world, as a memory—and specifically as the more unpleasant part of that memory. The first memory lasts only a few days; it appears as a tableau of memories, which is familiar to us. Then it begins to take on a form in which its innermost essence connects in an inner way, so that the human being becomes accustomed to processing internally everything they have experienced, for the ability to perceive ceases.

[ 18 ] A concrete example: In some relationship, we have lived together with another person. We pass away, and they remain behind on the physical plane. We become increasingly accustomed to retaining something other than mere memory from within. When we look at a deceased person, we see that they know what we experienced with them during their earthly life. With death, the thread is now severed, and we can have the shattering realization that we encounter the dead who tell us through the means of communication: “I lived with this or that person.” I know that he lives on, but I know of him only until my own death. — That is a great pain. Now the dead person misses him. That is why the dead mainly mourn for those they have loved and whom they cannot reach. It must be known that in this regard we can render important services to the dead if we reach out to them. The external senses have been taken from the dead; only what they experienced together with us lives on within them. Indeed, ordinary life offers nothing that could change this situation. It can only be altered if bonds are formed between the dead and the living. For the dead, it is usually as if we were looking up to them. (Gap in the text.) Now there is a common link between the dead and the living: it is what we think of as supersensible thoughts. Spiritual thinking is this link. I would like to emphasize that one can read aloud to the dead about what concerns the supersensible worlds. When we have time, we sit down and go through in our minds what the content of spiritual science is, vividly imagining that the departed are with us. In doing so, we relieve them of the torment of thinking that we are not there. We have achieved quite beautiful results within the anthroposophical movement by reading to the dead in our thoughts. In this way, they are with us, and that is what they need; that is what they long for. There are two aspects to living together with the dead. The first is what has just been described: the absence of the people with whom one lived on earth. We can remedy this by reading aloud. We are to be together with the dead and bridge the conditions of existence. What significance does it have for the dead, it is often asked, if we read anthroposophy to them, even though they wanted nothing to do with it during their lifetimes? — Yet this is a materialistic objection, for the circumstances do not remain the same. One can observe, for example, the case of two brothers. One is drawn to spiritual science, while the other becomes increasingly angry about it. He talks himself into a greater and greater rage. But he does this only because he wants to numb himself against his inner longing for spiritual science. In life, it is difficult to reach him, and it is not good to campaign for anthroposophy. In death, what a person has longed for is revealed most clearly, and it is precisely for such souls that one can do the very best by reading to them. The one who has already taken an interest in anthroposophy here will also become increasingly interested in it there. This is the first point.

[ 19 ] Another point to consider, especially in our time, is that when we enter the supersensible world every day in our sleep, we are in the same realm where the dead are. Only we remember nothing of it after waking up. How do most people enter sleep? It can be said that once they have crossed the threshold of sleep, they have taken little of the spiritual with them. Those who have attained the necessary drowsiness through the consumption of alcoholic beverages do not bring much of a spiritual nature into the spiritual world. But there are many nuances here. One often hears: “Well, what good is it to study spiritual science if one cannot see into the spiritual worlds?” — Yes, if one engages with it sufficiently, one does take something with them into sleep. Imagine a sleeping city, sleeping people—their souls are disembodied. What the sleeping souls represent for the spiritual world is something different from what they represent for the physical world. It is similar for the dead. What we give to the dead and what they take into their consciousness is what they need for their lives. And if we bring them spiritual thoughts, they have nourishment; if not, they are hungry, so that the following statement may be made: By cultivating spiritual thoughts here on Earth, we can provide nourishment for the dead. We can let them go hungry if we do not bring them spiritual thoughts. — When the fields lie fallow, they bear no fruit to feed the people, and the people may starve. The dead, of course, cannot starve; they can only suffer when spiritual life on Earth lies fallow.

[ 20 ] The fact is that here on Earth, science follows various laws governing relationships, and one ideal is that through science, life as such can be understood from a scientific perspective. Here on the physical plane, however, one does not come to know life. Although all laws pertain to the living, one cannot explore life with all this knowledge. As for the supersensible world, no amount of research can reveal death. For those who see through things, it is nonsensical to believe that there is death in the supersensible world. There are, admittedly, sleep-like states of consciousness and also a longing for death, just as we wish to comprehend life, but there is no death there. One must not believe that one could perish in the spiritual world; nor can one die there. Nor can one destroy one’s consciousness—that which corresponds to dying here. But one can become a loner in the spiritual world.

[ 21 ] This refers to an inability to perceive the physical, sensory world. One is aware only of oneself and nothing of other beings. This is what is called the suffering and pain of Kamaloka. What expands human consciousness is social life after death, and we also come into contact with the various beings of the supersensible world.

[ 22 ] An objection that may still be raised is to be addressed this evening in Erfurt. It goes like this: After all, the dead are in the supersensible world. Can they really experience anything when we read to them about the supersensible worlds? — They cannot come to know in the supersensible world what we do not give them from the earth. Thoughts must flow upward from the earth. Anthroposophy is not taught in heaven, but on earth. Human beings are not on earth merely to experience a vale of tears, but also to experience Anthroposophy. It is often believed that one could also come to know anthroposophy after death, but that is a great mistake. What a person has experienced on Earth, they must lay down in the spiritual world after they have passed through the gate of death.