The Rudolf Steiner Archive

8. Man's Connection to the Spiritual World

[ 1 ] As you could see from yesterday’s public lecture, the spiritual world in which we find ourselves between death and a new birth is intertwined with the physical world—just as, in essence, the spiritual and physical worlds are also intertwined in our so-called physical life between birth and death. We determine, so to speak, the manner in which we are born with certain characteristics by remaining connected—between death and a new birth—to what happens here in the physical world, including the hereditary currents that ultimately lead to our birth.

[ 2 ] We can now examine the entire process of development—which we considered more from an external perspective yesterday—from a somewhat more internal perspective as well, by attempting to bring to mind the connection between human beings and the spiritual world from a certain point of view. Between birth and death, we live here in the physical world. We know this physical world through our sensory perceptions. It is, of course, a truism—one hardly needs to say it—that if we did not have our sense organs, we would know nothing of our connection to the physical world. But everything that conveys our connection to the physical world through our sense organs naturally separates from us when we pass through the gate of death, so that we can say quite literally: becoming acquainted with the physical world is our task between birth and death. We are incorporated into this physical body in order to become acquainted with the physical world through it.

[ 3 ] But we are not only members of the physical world; we are just as much members of spiritual worlds. The next spiritual world, which in a sense adjoins our physical world, is the one we have come to call—whether the term is appropriate or not is of little consequence—the etheric world, also known as the elemental world. This elemental world is, at first, an unknown world to human beings as they live in the physical world. It is the first supersensible world. But just because it is the first supersensible world does not make it any less significant for human beings than the physical world, than the sensory world. As soon as human beings develop an understanding of this elemental world—which happens when they are able to perceive imaginatively—it becomes clear to them that this elemental world is just as richly populated by beings as the physical world. Human beings themselves, insofar as they have an etheric body, belong to this elemental world. As etheric beings, they are citizens of this elemental world. However, the conditions in this elemental world are somewhat different from those in the physical world.

[ 4 ] First, I would like to make a remark about the fact that perception in the elemental world can only begin once a person is able to free themselves completely from what makes them an earthly human being. This process of freeing oneself from what makes a person an earthly human being is generally not difficult. It is, however, more difficult for people today than it was for people in ancient times. We are all familiar with the atavistic clairvoyance of ancient times. This consisted largely in the fact that human beings were able to free themselves from what makes them earthly human beings. As earthly human beings, we are composed of solid matter only to a very small extent. For the most part, we consist of fluid. The moment we can emancipate ourselves from what is solid within us—when we feel only our liquid nature—the emergence of the imaginative can already begin. It is only our existence in the solid that actually prevents us from knowing what surrounds us as the elemental world through imaginative perception. This imaginative perception will return just as it was lost to humanity. However, the lost imaginative clairvoyance was a kind of unconscious, dreamlike state. What will gradually take shape in our fifth post-Atlantean epoch will be a fully conscious imaginative vision. But this will become integrated into human beings through a completely natural process of development.

[ 5 ] Returning to what I said earlier—that our relationship to the elemental world is different from our relationship to the ordinary physical world—I would first like to give an example that will illustrate this point: In the physical world, we form—at least seemingly at first—our relationships with this or that being out of our own free will; we form our friendships and other relationships with the beings around us. In the elemental world, where we exist through our etheric body, this is not immediately the case in the same way; rather, throughout our entire life we are, to a greater or lesser extent, in a closer relationship with certain other elemental beings. Thus we can truly compare our relationship as an independent elemental being—which is what we are through our etheric body—to a number of other elemental beings who actually accompany us throughout our entire life, with the relationship of the Sun to the orbiting planets. Our own etheric body is a kind of solar elemental being, and it is accompanied by a number of elemental beings that belong to it just as the planets belong to the Sun, so that these elemental beings, together with it, constitute, as it were, a kind of septet, just as the planets, according to older conceptions, constitute a kind of septet with the Sun.

[ 6 ] Throughout our entire physical life, from birth to death, there is a constant interplay between these elemental companions of ours and ourselves. Not only does our well-being depend on the way our elemental or etheric body relates to its satellites, but our relationship to the outside world—to certain external beings, namely other people—is also governed by the interrelationships between these satellites and our own etheric body. In the future, there will be a form of medicine that will take into account, in a very special way, what I have just described. There will be a medical-physiological approach that will determine, as it were, how one or the other of the satellites relates to the etheric body, and on that basis, it will be possible to assess whether a person is sick or healthy. For what is actually called illness today is, in truth, only the outer physical manifestation of what is really present. In reality, there is some irregularity in what I have compared to a planetary system, and the illness is merely a reflection of this irregularity.

[ 7 ] One might now say: Let those who know such things draw up a theory of disease today: Hic Rhodus, hic salta! — one might say —, and let occultism demonstrate its art here. Certainly, it will do so the moment its legs are set free, for one cannot dance with one’s legs bound; and this binding of the legs consists precisely in the existence of present-day materialism, which has taken hold of the entire field of medical science. This cannot be improved by one person or another doing this or that, so to speak, but only by the collective will of a larger number of people truly compelling a medical practice that makes the integration of spiritual principles into medicine possible.

[ 8 ] In this regard, it is particularly important to realize that Paul did not utter an immensely significant statement in vain—a statement that is, however, never truly understood, because people always believe they are Christians, when in reality they are not at all. Paul explained that sin entered the world through the law—that is, sin exists because of the law. In a broader sense: That which disrupts order exists because of the law. Even today, one can only hint at these things, for in general, whenever something is amiss, our materialistic age cries out for a law, without realizing that precisely what is amiss stems from the laws that are enacted. But, as I said, this can only be hinted at; for understanding these things will require much, very much more. I said: People only believe that they are Christians. For although a passage like this one from Paul is read by countless people, it is understood by few.

[ 9 ] So, because we are ethereal beings, we exist in an elemental world, and a specific system is closely related to us. This system—that is, those elemental beings, those etheric beings who accompany us—are also the ones who, through their powers and because they are arranged in a certain way, first draw our etheric body out of our physical body when we pass through the gate of death and then transport it—and thus the human being himself—into the elemental world. This elemental world, as I have already indicated, can indeed be perceived through imaginative cognition. In this elemental world there are a number of beings that can be called nature spirits. But at first, all human beings who have physically passed through the gate of death are also there—though only for a short time, as we know, just a few days. Then what we call the etheric body is handed over to the elemental world. It is cast off like a second corpse. But one must not believe that this second body, which has been cast off, is now rapidly destroyed in the elemental world. That is not the case; rather, it does indeed dissolve, so to speak, in the elemental world, but this dissolution—this process of becoming thinner and thinner—does not mean that it is imperceptible to beings who are capable of imaginative perception. Above all, this elemental body—this etheric body—is always perceptible to those who have themselves passed through the gate of death. The human being has shed this elemental body and now lives on between death and a new birth, yet remains in constant connection with this shed etheric body. It is not as with the physical body, to which a person loses their connection once they have shed it; with the elemental body, the opposite is true: the person retains their connection, and this connection that a person has to their elemental, to their etheric body, can also extend all the way down into the physical world.

[ 10 ] If a person here in the physical world has made their soul receptive by developing the ability to perceive through the elemental and imaginative realms, then they can also consciously maintain a connection with the dead through their mental images—which, of course, appear much more subtle than ordinary mental images. This is a conscious connection with the dead. But what becomes conscious in this way is actually always present unconsciously if, during life, there was a relationship between the one who has remained here in the physical world and the one who has ascended into the spiritual world. Let us suppose we have lost a loved one through death. Whether we are aware of it or not—and those who have developed their capacity for imaginative perception can know this—the deceased acts as if, I might say, they were sending their will into the etheric body they have shed, as into a mirror, and the mirror in turn sends the rays back to us; the deceased acts back upon the living indirectly, through the elemental body and the etheric body. This is the influence that is, in a sense, indirect.

[ 11 ] If we wish to characterize the ways in which this indirect influence manifests itself, I can say: within the ideas we carry with us through the world. For the most part, people—especially in our materialistic age—are aware only of the ideas that external physical reality presents to them. But among the ideas we carry with us through the world, there are constantly those that are, so to speak, subtle, so that they cannot be perceived directly. People simply do not pay attention to them. If one were accustomed to observing one’s inner life more intimately, and if one did not constantly—I would say—allow the coarser impressions flowing in from the physical environment to drown out the finer inner life, one would already see how these finer impressions are always present. And these originate from those who have been connected to us, who have passed through the gate of death before us, and who—especially in the early period after they have passed through the gate of death—can convey their deeds, actions, and thoughts to us in the manner described.

[ 12 ] Thus, for a time, we ourselves carry within our perceptions—by virtue of belonging, as ethereal beings, to the elemental world—the essence of the dead. When one speaks of monism and wishes to stand on the ground of reality, one must speak primarily of this monism that I have just alluded to—the monon formed by the interaction of the living and the dead. In truth, those who have passed through the gate of death are not gone from us at all. They are much closer to us than one might think.

[ 13 ] As a human being passes through the time between death and a new birth, they develop more and more, so that they can also exert a direct influence on the world here from within themselves. And from a certain point onward, one perceives—as the influence of the departed dead—that their rays of power, so to speak, penetrate into our soul life. But these rays, this direct influence, cannot take root directly in our imagination or in our thoughts; rather, they take root more in our habits, in the way we are, in the way we go about our lives here; into which flows that which works down from the spiritual worlds and which comes to us from those who have gone before us through the gate of death. We must only be clear that such interaction between the dead and the living is bound to all manner of conditions. The deceased finds themselves in an environment inhabited by beings of their own kind—that is, soul beings as well—including all entities belonging to the higher hierarchies down to the human being. Through their shed etheric body acting as a mediator, they can also perceive human beings who are, so to speak, veiled from them here by the physical body; but he penetrates this veil with the help of his etheric body. The one who has passed through the gate of death is subject to the conditions under which one lives in the soul world and the spiritual world; he must submit to them. Now I need only point out one main thing, and it will become clear to you what is actually meant by this. We know, after all, that Luciferic and Ahrimanic forces are at work in the most manifold ways throughout the world in which we live. If these Luciferic and Ahrimanic forces did not exert their pull upon us, then what is expressed in human beings as wrongful or evil actions would simply not exist in the world. The Luciferic and Ahrimanic forces must act upon human beings; they must give human beings the opportunity to follow them.

[ 14 ] If we really take this to heart, we will realize that human beings are something other than the beings we often make them out to be in our criticism. If we had the ability, even in the physical world, to always see how the Luciferic and Ahrimanic forces are at work within human beings, we would judge people quite differently. Not that we would necessarily be less critical, for when we shift our judgment away from human beings, we must—though not against human beings themselves—fight against Lucifer and Ahriman. But toward human beings as human beings, we would be infinitely more tolerant. This tolerance is practiced by those who live in the soul life during the interval between death and a new birth—both toward the beings who are with them in the spiritual world and toward those beings who are still incarnated here as human beings in physical life. And it is simply part of the nature of one who has passed through the gate of death to acquire this tolerance, to always see through the fact that Lucifer or Ahriman has this or that share in a human being. He does not say, “This is a bad person who follows evil desires”—but rather he sees through it: Lucifer has such-and-such a share in him. He does not say, “This is an envious person”—but rather, he says, “Ahriman has such-and-such a share in him.” — This is how one who lives up there between death and birth judges, for this is part of his nature, just as it is part of our nature, when we are naturally healthy, to have healthy eyes. Since this is part of the dead person’s nature, it causes the dead person immense pain when he maintains the connection he established in physical life and encounters a different attitude from us here. Suppose we harbor a particular hatred toward a person who was also connected to the deceased, stemming from our personal antipathies; then this hatred causes immense pain to the deceased, who is able to remain in contact with us, and at any moment this hatred—like a sword, like a barbed sword, like a spear drawn against him—must first be overcome by the deceased whenever he wishes to approach us, as he must, since he is, after all, connected to us.

[ 15 ] Thus, the way in which the deceased seeks to influence us and how they themselves experience this influence depends very, very much on the mood of our soul. This influence is always taking place; but the nature of that influence depends very, very much on the mood of our soul. These direct influences from the dead, which I have described, play a role in our ordinary conceptions—borrowed from the external world—in our sensations, in the direction of our feelings, in our temperament, and in our habits. Yet there is a constant interplay between what is taking place in the realm of those who have passed through the gate of death and our own souls.

[ 16 ] When you take all of this into account, you will say to yourself: There are complex processes at work within what we carry within us as the soul, and it takes a great deal to grasp all the mysterious forces that actually pulsate within a human soul—forces that pulsate in such a way that the human soul itself, in its own consciousness, is largely unaware of what is pulsating there. But the soul’s overall disposition—what one is or is not capable of—depends on this. For all of this, in turn, is largely determined by our karma; the fact that we are brought together here with precisely these or those people, who then in turn influence us in the way I have described, is naturally connected to our karma in the broader sense.

[ 17 ] Keeping this in mind, we need only be clear that our time has genuine, real longings for what spiritual science is meant to bring to humanity, but that these real longings are still, in many cases, being satisfied through the most erroneous paths. There are a number of people today who have thoroughly moved beyond the prejudice that many people in the middle—and even in the last third—of the 19th century held, namely, that everything psychological could be explained solely through physical and physiological effects. But often, half-truths or quarter-truths are far more harmful than complete errors. And such a half-truth or quarter-truth underlies what is so often referred to today as analytical psychology or psychoanalysis.

[ 18 ] People are searching, but they are groping in the dark. They sense that all manner of things lie hidden in the depths of the soul, but they cannot bring themselves to truly take the steps into the spiritual world to find what is hidden there. What do psychoanalysts say today? They say: When a person presents themselves to us in this way in life, their overall state of being depends in many ways not only on what is in their consciousness, but on a whole series of factors that lie in the unconscious, below the threshold of consciousness. A person comes along, feeling, as it were, that their mood is depressed. An irregularity arises in their entire nervous system. According to the psychoanalyst, one must then investigate what the person may have experienced many years ago—experiences they have not fully processed but have repressed into the unconscious. But just because it is forgotten does not mean it is not there. The psychoanalyst senses quite well that what has been pushed out of consciousness has not, for that reason, been pushed out of reality; it is simply down there in the subconscious. Now he proceeds on this assumption: if one brings it up into consciousness through a kind of questioning, then one discovers what is gnawing and consuming one down there. Building on this—I cannot, of course, discuss psychoanalysis in all its ramifications here, but I want to illustrate some aspects of it—the psychoanalyst now searches for many things in the depths of the soul. Years ago, a person had this or that ideal in life, this or that hope, this or that plan. They did not carry them out; they could not carry them out. Certainly, these are out of his consciousness, for the simple reason that he lives in the present; but they are not out of the reality of his soul. There they gnaw, there they devour, and his overall state of being depends on what lies down there in his consciousness. He has experienced some kind of—and this is what psychoanalysts most often find, because they focus on it—unhappy love. This is an isolated province of his soul’s consciousness; although he has fought against it, and it is no longer in his consciousness, it continues to have an effect. In particular, psychoanalysts believe it continues to exert its influence when only the feelings of love were present and the beloved was not, when he remained unsatisfied. Then, deep within the depths of the soul, the psychoanalyst seeks—besides the shattered springtime hopes of life— besides what I have just alluded to, the “animalistic sludge” of life—that which continually surges upward as the “animalistic sludge” of life—the connection with everything that a human being possesses as an animalistic, bestial being and which plays a role in his psychological life. And such analytical psychologists who go further say: If one now penetrates further and further down, one finally finds that which arises in the soul from racial connections, national connections, and so on—what influences the soul in a more or less unconscious way—but finally, at the very bottom, the demonic, the most indeterminate element, which lies beneath the “animalistic primal sludge.” Such people—who today are particularly devoted to psychoanalysis—often subtly suggest that in these demonic depths lie the impulses that lead to Gnosticism, theosophy, anthroposophy, and the like. Even if this is sometimes—I would say—hinted at in a somewhat veiled manner, it is indeed hinted at. If you read one of the latest issues of “Wissen und Leben,” you will sometimes find such hints, even if they are hidden between the lines.

[ 19 ] Well, I said: half-truths and quarter-truths are often worse than complete errors. In analytical psychology, there are half-truths and quarter-truths—namely, the search for the subconscious causes of the soul. But if we compare this to what we have pointed out today—that all the realities living at the bottom of the soul have their origin in the realm of the dead—then we are driven toward a completely different approach; then we will not search for the “animalistic sludge” of the soul or the devious eroticism behind a particular mood of the soul; rather, we will often have to seek the cause of a mood of the soul in this or that departed soul, whom we are causing difficulties for through our own behavior—and these difficulties express themselves in the form of this or that dissatisfaction forcing its way into consciousness. In short, we would do well to bring to our consciousness, in a reverent and sacred manner, the connection that exists not merely between our world and an abstract, pantheistically vague spiritual world, but with the real spiritual world, in which those who have passed through the gate of death are real beings who are with us, just as they were in life, except that what they accomplish together with us touches our soul much more deeply than what they accomplished in life, when we were always separated by our bodies and theirs, which stood like a barrier between us.

[ 20 ] Then comes a later time when the human being has become completely free from the astral body, having shed the astral, and some time afterward, the human being can then exert an influence from the spiritual world down into the physical world in an even more intense way, because it is more inner. In the past, outer life was often shaped by such instinctively known truths, even though what arose in outer life was frequently attributed to ordinary external causes. But underlying this outer reality—though people often knew this only through instinct—is an inner reality. I have said that after the dead have passed through the gate of death, they stand in such a direct connection with the people they have left behind here—and to whom they are bound especially through love—that they influence their habits. That is why, in times when such things were still felt quite instinctively, care was taken to ensure that a son strayed as little as possible from the circle of his parental ties. Access was easier then. Learning the same trade, working in the same profession—indeed, the entire, genuinely conservative adherence to the same current—was an instinctive expression of a way to facilitate the influence of those who had passed through the gate of death upon those they had left behind here. If people found themselves in situations similar to those of the deceased, it was also easier for the deceased to find their way to them. And one day, such subtle impulses and reasons will surely be traced in the historical development of humanity.

[ 21 ] When a person has been dead for a long time, they have completely shed their astral body. This does not happen until decades have passed, because the pace of life in the spiritual world is much slower than that in the physical world; thirty years in the spiritual world correspond roughly to one year in the physical world. Here in the physical world, people rush about; in the spiritual world, they must always, so to speak, complete a cycle in a much larger circle than here in the physical world. In short, one year in the physical world corresponds to thirty years in the spiritual world; in thirty years in the spiritual world, one experiences roughly the same segment of the world as in one year in the physical world; as a result, one experiences that segment of the world more deeply and intensely.

[ 22 ] In general, what a human being experiences here is connected in many ways to the greater world, to the macrocosm, so that what is experienced here in the microcosm—in the human being—can always be expressed in terms of the proportional relationships to the macrocosm. I would like to draw attention to one thing, for example: If we calculate the number of days in a human life, we arrive at the same number as the number of years it takes the Sun to pass through the entire Platonic year, the world year. Thus, a human being lives a lifetime consisting of as many days as the Sun needs years to advance through the entire celestial sphere, from one sign of the zodiac to the next. Once it has passed through all the signs of the zodiac, it will have taken approximately 25,900 and a few more years to do so. That is roughly how many days a human lives—though, of course, this varies from person to person—in their individual life between birth and death.

[ 23 ] And here is another interesting connection: that a person, in turn, takes as many breaths in a single day—in terms of number—as the number of days he lives, and as the sun takes to complete its annual cycle through the entire zodiac. You see, the world is truly ordered according to measure and number in the deepest sense. And one would think that this subtle integration of human beings into the world—this correspondence of harmonies—should lead the crude materialists of our day beyond their worldview, which sees nothing in the universe but a mechanism. Admittedly, it is a strange mechanism that structures its individual beings within itself in such a way that they stand in marvelous, numerically harmonious relationships to the whole.

[ 24 ] And so it is also very remarkable that, when we look at the world spiritually, we can truly say: As human beings go through the process of development between death and a new birth, they move forward more slowly in order to do everything more thoroughly. In fact, the human being progresses in the spiritual world at a rate that is as much times slower as Saturn’s orbit around the Sun is slower than that of the Earth. Saturn orbits the Sun so many times more slowly than the Earth does as human beings move more slowly in the spiritual world than they do here on the physical Earth. For this reason—not because they knew less than today’s astronomers—the ancients considered Saturn to be the outermost planet still belonging to the solar system. This is also astronomically correct; for the other planets that are included today—Uranus and Neptune—arrived later and joined the system, and they orbit in a completely different order, even with a different rotation than the planets that belong to the actual solar system.

[ 25 ] Well, at least one such spiritual year—that is, thirty Earth years—must have passed before the soul, having reached a normal lifespan of seventy to eighty years, can enter not merely into the habits but, for those who have remained behind here or who voluntarily join them, into the entire way of viewing things, into the entire spiritual life. But in this way, too, the dead exert a very extensive influence on our lives. It is certainly true that, with regard to the entire spiritual nature in which we are immersed, we carry within us the impulses of people who have long since passed away and who are working within us. This is what brings about the connection between the future and the past in the first place—that such a harmony between the dead and the living takes place. Just as the indirect revelation of the dead through the etheric body they have shed affects imaginative knowledge, so does that which enters into our habits in the manner described affect inspirational knowledge; and what I have just described—which can only take effect after a person has undergone a spiritual year—that works its way into intuitive knowledge when it is to become conscious. But it works continuously. One can only—I would say most accurately grasp the meaning of evolution—if one consciously takes such things into account.

[ 26 ] Please forgive me if, at this point—you know I don’t like to do this and therefore do so very rarely—I include something quite personal. Anyone who takes a look at what I began writing decades ago will see that, at that time, I completely set aside what I had to say as my own opinion. I did not write my opinion about Goethe, but rather I tried to express the thoughts that could have come from Goethe; I wrote a “theory of knowledge based on Goethe’s worldview,” not my own theory of knowledge. — In this way, one can quite consciously align oneself with those who have long since passed away and can work from their spirit. This is also what, in a sense, grants one the credentials to influence the living. For it is a poor credential—one that people, especially in our present age, insist upon—that as soon as anyone has formed an opinion, they immediately want to pass it on to as many followers as possible. The one who, from within the spiritual world, knows the conditions of existence—the fundamental laws of existence—knows that, strange and paradoxical as it may seem, a human being may actually begin to influence the depths of the souls of their fellow human beings only after they have died, and only after they have undergone one spiritual year—that is, thirty years. Immense benefits would be gained if that selflessness were to spread a little further in the world, so that those living today would join forces with the departed and strive to maintain the continuity of evolution in a truly conscious manner. Whether it is a pure affinity of choice or some other kind of kinship brought about by karma: drawing upon those who strive to send the rays of their activity from the spiritual world is, if we live it consciously, something of immense significance.

[ 27 ] I have tried to evoke in you a sense of the nature of the interaction between the so-called dead and the so-called living. We simply need to be clear about how the conditions in the spiritual world are entirely different from those here. You will find a good portion of these conditions and the conditions of experience in the spiritual world in the lecture series “On Life Between Death and a New Birth,” which I gave in Vienna a few years ago. However, one can only ever pick out certain aspects of these things that are important from one perspective or another. It must be said that there is something in the spiritual world that is both similar to and, at the same time, very dissimilar to our physical life. Before we fully enter the physical world here, we go through the embryonic stage, during which the conditions of life are entirely different from those that exist from the moment we have fully entered the physical world as beings who breathe the outer air. In a certain sense and in a certain way, the period we go through in the first spiritual year—which has so often been called the Kamaloka period—is already similar to the embryonic period. For just as a human being, so to speak, enlists the help of another human being, through whom he is carried into the physical world over the course of ten lunar months, so too does he allow himself to be carried into the spiritual world by all that binds him to the physical world through his desires and longings—which he is slowly shedding. And the consciousness in this first spiritual year—thirty years after death—is still somewhat similar to the consciousness here in the physical world, even though the skills and the like that can only be acquired in the physical world can be conveyed only indirectly through the etheric body. But then other conditions of consciousness set in; a much higher consciousness than the one we can have here in the physical body then emerges. If you recall some of what was said in the cycle mentioned earlier, you can see how this consciousness in the spiritual world has a different character. You need only consider how much consciousness depends on what can enter into it. And when we go about here in the physical world as ordinary human beings, the phenomena of the mineral, plant, and animal kingdoms, as well as those of the physical human kingdom, enter into us along with other soul experiences, cultural experiences, and so on. After death, we no longer perceive the mineral world as such; of the plant world, we perceive only its general life force. Please refer to my book Theosophy to learn how things are during the ascent into the so-called spiritual world.

[ 28 ] All of this is also connected to a completely different kind of experience in the spiritual world. Well, as you can understand, there are really no words to describe all of this. Our language is, after all, designed for the physical world; so it is always difficult to describe these different conditions accurately. That is why one can so easily be misunderstood. Above all, one can only express oneself in relative terms. Here in the physical world, you stand—I would say—at a single point within the entire structure of the world; you look out with your eyes in all directions around you. In the spiritual world, it is not like that. There you are on the circumference, looking in from the circumference, as it were, toward the interior of a hollow sphere—only this is a comparison, for it is not a hollow sphere, since time has a much greater significance than space. So, looking in from the circumference, you see everything; there are entirely different conditions of imagination, entirely different conditions of perception! And within the act of imagining itself, there are, in turn, entirely different conditions. Let’s suppose a person has passed through the gate of death at the age of sixty, seventy, eighty, or even earlier: Now they clearly feel an inner experience. When you feel hunger or pain here in physical life—here or there in some part of the body—you do not say, “The hunger is here or there,” but rather, “The hunger is within you.” So when you look inward from your entire field of perception and sense something in a certain place, you know there is something there that wants to have something to do with you. Now you must begin the effort to remove what is manifesting there, what has revealed itself! And only when you have removed it does the truth emerge—the truth that wants to manifest itself here. So we can say: As spiritual beings, we have a concept within us; but this concept does not yet tell us anything—it must first be removed, and only when we have removed it do we find within ourselves—yes, as paradoxical as it sounds, it is so—an angel or archangel who reveals himself to us! We must first earn this presence by allowing this presence to announce itself to us, initially through our imagination. Thus, understanding the spiritual world is connected with a determined effort, with determined work. Only then can souls who have remained here in their physical bodies—to a greater or lesser extent—manifest themselves to the deceased without undergoing this exertion of effort, provided they truly direct their thoughts here toward the deceased or present something to the deceased, such as by reading aloud or the like.

[ 29 ] My aim in saying all this is simply to help you understand just how different the conditions of perception, life, and experience are in the spiritual world. And if that is the case, then you will not find it surprising that, so to speak, thirty years of spiritual time equal one year of physical time; for in the spiritual realm, we stand in a circle and look inward toward the center. And it is very important to keep this in mind.

[ 30 ] You can see just how difficult it is to speak about certain spiritual matters from the fact that, because one must clothe them in physical concepts, some things come across in exactly the opposite way, and one is therefore very easily prone to misunderstandings. Isn’t it true that, because we initially view the matter from the perspective of the physical world, we rightly say: Human beings go through repeated earthly lives. — That is correct. But why do they go through repeated earthly lives? As they live here between birth and death, they live through a certain span of time. Then they pass through the gate of death into the spiritual world, complete a cycle, but within that cycle return once again to the same point in time. And time and again, as we live through a life, we are actually at the same point in the world. That is very interesting! In the realm of the spirit, it is not so much time that reigns, but duration. We return again and again to the same point. We actually repeat life in the same circumstances—with what we have experienced in the meantime—at the same place in the world. We always return to the starting point. We are actually tracing circles. You will say: that is hard to imagine. It is indeed hard to imagine, and among the various things that are easier to imagine—which I have also brought up today—I would like you to make such a matter the subject of your meditation in your inner life. One must sometimes meditate on such things for a long, long time if one wishes to understand them in their full significance.

[ 31 ] Today I have set myself the noble task of describing, at least in part, the way in which those souls who have passed through the gate of death influence the world in which the people with whom they were connected while in their physical bodies have remained. And from another perspective, you have thus seen once again that the world is truly a unified whole, that the dead are truly dead only from an external, physical point of view. For the moment they pass through the gate of death, they gain a different access to our soul, and that is the whole difference. They now work upon us from within, whereas when they were alive they worked upon us from without. Such things should increasingly cease to be mere external theories and instead take root in people’s consciousness; they should not merely become worldviews, but rather a worldview—indeed, I would say, a sense of the world. Then spiritual science will bear the fruits it is meant to bear—and which it is also capable of bearing.

[ 32 ] One final remark. Consider for a moment what it means that human beings must carry within themselves—namely, during a specific period between death and a new birth—the experience of the hierarchies as an inner reality! This is indeed the case! This could lead human beings into the most terrible arrogance, which could dwell as a dark feeling in their souls when they are reborn. In ancient times, a barrier against this arrogance was created by the fact that when people passed through the gate of death and entered the spiritual world, they knew, as it were, that they were not seeing with their own eyes, but that within them lived the highest beings of the highest hierarchies, who enabled them to see. But human beings have lost this connection in the spiritual world just as they have lost the old, atavistic clairvoyance here in the physical world. In its place, however, must come to pass what Paul expressed with the words: “Not I, but Christ in me,” and what a true spiritual feeling attains through the words: “We are born of God; into Christ we die.” When we learn this in all its depth through the feeling that can come to us from spiritual science—that Christ is for the Earth—we will place ourselves in the right way within this contemplation from the surrounding sphere. And when we pass through the gate of death with the right feelings of “In Christo morimur,” then, looking out from the outer sphere, among the beings we behold—those belonging to the higher hierarchies, who are also elemental beings, but also those who are human souls incarnated here or who are already disembodied human souls— we find among all these our own “I”-being as well. And we observe from the outside the relationship of this “I-being” of ours to the other beings I have just described. To be able to have these feelings after passing through the gate of death is something immensely important. For only then can we truly find our way back into the embodiment of the flesh if we can have these feelings toward our own “I.” But we can only have them if we owe them to having truly passed through the gate of death with the feeling: “We have died into Christ.” This union with Christ gives us the ability, in a sense, to view our relationship in the spiritual world through the soul-eye of Christ—to see ourselves as an “I”-being among other spiritual beings.

[ 33 ] That is what I always hope to achieve: that we do not merely take away a certain kind of knowledge from reflections such as those we have engaged in today, but that this knowledge is transformed into a sense of feeling, into emotion. And even if all the ideas presented today were to pass by like “dreams,” if only a fundamental feeling remains—which I have tried to summarize in these closing words, such as “dying in Christ”— enables us to truly place ourselves within the spiritual world, so that we may carry it through the physical world into our next earthly incarnation—if this feeling remains with us, then we carry the essence of such a reflection forward into our future lives.

[ 34 ] Let us, then, be united in such feelings, regarding them as the most intense bonds of connection; and this will gradually give rise to the true, invisible community of those dedicated to anthroposophy in the world: this unity in such sensations and feelings that are born from the ideas of spiritual science. The world needs, I would say, this invisible community of souls capable of bringing into the world the forces of such unity as has been described. In this sense, let us continue to be united spiritually in the future, even when we are not physically together for a time. And so it shall always be among us that our spiritual unity will forever sustain our physical unity.