The Rudolf Steiner Archive

Fifth Lecture

[ 1 ] When approaching the mystery of death, one must above all always bear in mind—as was emphasized again yesterday—that in order to characterize the spiritual worlds, it is necessary to transform the meaning inherent in our ordinary words, which are tailored to the physical world. For the dead—the so-called dead—enter the spiritual world, and as we have repeatedly indicated, the spiritual world is fundamentally different from the physical world.

[ 2 ] Not only according to insights from the humanities, but even in accordance with ordinary physical reason, one can conceive that when entering the spiritual world through the gate of death, the first thing that happens to the deceased is the separation of the physical body from that which, within this physical body, constitutes their other human being. This is, of course, a very trivial truth. Today, in the sense that it can be explored through spiritual science, we will examine the processes involved in describing the gateway of death and the subsequent journey between death and a new birth, focusing on the inner experiences of the deceased.

[ 3 ] For the person who remains behind here in physical life, it is indeed the case that they have the sensation that what is enclosed within the physical body leaves those who remain behind, and that the deceased departs into another world. The perception that the deceased—as mentioned, according to what is knowable through spiritual science—initially has is that he, in turn, is being left behind by the inhabitants of the earth and also by his physical body, which served as the instrument for his perception, for his thinking and feeling, and for his capacity for will between birth and death. So those who were around him, who were connected to him, are moving away from him: that is his first perception. This perception is initially linked to the processes we have often described: that the Earth itself, in a certain sense, moves away, so that it takes the physical body away from the one passing through the gate of death. It is quite as if, in a sense, the deceased were to feel that he is left behind by a movement that he had not actually perceived here on Earth—that he is left behind by the Earth’s own movement; the Earth moves away from him, and with it everything that surrounded him on Earth. And he is now incorporated into a completely different world—but a world through which he now perceives something that was previously entirely hidden from him, through which he perceives that what was given to him as a physical body is bound to the Earth, and also to the Earth’s movements. He has, so to speak, the feeling—although this is expressed rather imprecisely—that he can no longer follow the path taken by the Earth and its spirits; therefore, they leave him. He remains behind in a state of greater stillness, so to speak, and becomes part of a more tranquil world.

[ 4 ] For the deceased, many things are now based on this perception of being abandoned—namely, of being separated from the physical body and from everything one has learned from people and experienced with them between birth and death. Possession of one’s physical body was something taken for granted during earthly life. Therefore, what one now perceives is something entirely new, and we shall see how different these perceptions are, depending on whether one dies a so-called natural death from illness or old age, or a violent death—for example, the kind of ‘death’ that many thousands must now endure.

[ 5 ] This sense of being separated from what one naturally regarded as one’s own gives rise to something entirely new in the life of the soul. It means that something emerges in the life of the soul that one simply could not have come to know while one was still in the body. The first thing that arises in the life of the soul, I would say, is the opposite feeling toward life. Here on Earth, one has the feeling that life is given from the outside, that one lives through the life forces provided by the external world. Now, so to speak, the Earth departs with what it has given you, and immediately, as a result of this departure, the feeling arises that the life-giving force is now welling up from within. The first thing, then, is the perception of self-animation. It is the transition to a certain activity, whereas until now one had remained in passivity: You animate that which you now are. You are within yourself. What you previously called the world has departed from you. That in which you now live—and by filling it completely—generates within itself the life-giving force; it animates itself. — And in concrete terms, this is how it happens: what emerges is precisely what I have often called the “panorama of life”—the surging life in everything one has experienced between birth and death. The images of this life appear before the soul. The entire past life between birth and death rises, as it were, from the point where one is oneself, like a powerful, self-generating “dream.” But this image needs strength so that it is not merely a dream. It would be like a dream flowing away if one had not, by attaining this awareness—that one’s physical body is detaching itself from the spiritual-soul aspect—gained the power to bring it to life. The dream comes to life. What would otherwise be merely a flowing, dark world of dream images is animated from that very point; it becomes a living world, a living panorama of life. One is oneself the source of this animation for what thus emerges as a dream. This, indeed, is the immediate experience after death.

[ 6 ] All of this is true even though the person is still barely aware that he has emerged from his former state of consciousness; rather, it is as if something within him had stirred—as if from the very center of his being—spreading out, and that life to which he had until now passively surrendered is now fleeing from him. What one did not know between birth and death—that thoughts, which otherwise merely ebbed and flowed like an “I”-dream, are alive—one now knows. And one now lives one’s way out of that formerly alien life and into this life of one’s own. One experiences what it means for that which was previously connected to one more externally to take hold of one’s innermost being. What was previously not life, but rather an image of life, now takes hold of one’s imagination and thought. And as one finds one’s way into this conception, another gradually opens up. This is what one might call: a living into a resonance of the panorama of life with the universe. I have already described these things in more general terms. But one must examine them ever more closely in order to penetrate the mysteries of the world.

[ 7 ] First, one’s innermost life dream comes to life, as it were, becoming a living universe, a living cosmos. Then it fills itself, as it were, with what one might call: the music of the spheres of the universe resounds through this life dream. One experiences how what one was oneself between birth and death—as a fragment of the cosmos—is now absorbed by the cosmos, how it becomes integrated into that which is now no longer earthly. For one has lived through the earthly realm between birth and death. And then the next thing is that one feels how intimately the cosmos permeates that which one was, as it were, a fragment of. One has the feeling as if an inner light were dawning and illuminating what one was. But all of this flows and resounds, so to speak, into the panorama of life. Then the etheric body detaches—for these processes all take place as long as the human being is connected to the etheric body—and what is called the detachment of the etheric body occurs.

[ 8 ] Now, what one experiences there—this perception of the panorama of life, this clothing of the panorama of life with the resonant and luminous substances of the cosmos—is similar to the way the physical body becomes integrated into the human being when one enters existence through birth. Just as, so to speak, the human substance given to us by the Earth integrates itself into the human soul, so too, after passing through the gate of death, does the cosmic, the universal, integrate itself. This experience, as described here, is necessary. And when one truly traces the life between death and rebirth from a spiritual-scientific perspective, one realizes the significance that this first experience after passing through the gate of death holds for the entire life between death and rebirth. Here in physical earthly life—we must make this very clear to ourselves; I have emphasized it often—we possess our “I”-consciousness precisely because we live in the physical body. I emphasize explicitly: the sense of self, not the self. Our self is, after all, assigned to us by the spirits of form; that is something else. But we have our sense of self precisely because we are immersed in the physical body. We need only make the nature of this sense of self in the waking earthly state perfectly clear to ourselves. The best way to understand this is as follows: Imagine you are moving through a room. At first you feel nothing; then you bump into something. The external world bumps into you, but you become aware. You become aware within yourself of the impact the external world exerts on you; you become aware of the external world; you feel yourself bumping into the external world.

[ 9 ] In fact, we gain our sense of self in the physical world by constantly coming into contact with the external world. Of course, this is not limited to the sense of touch; when we open our eyes, we also come into contact—that is, we encounter external light; when sounds reach our ears, we become aware of them as our sense of hearing comes into contact with the sounds.

[ 10 ] But this is also how we become aware of ourselves: by emerging from the spiritual world every morning and immersing ourselves in the physical world. This immersion into our physical body—that is, this collision of our “I” and astral body with the etheric body and physical body—is what gives rise to our sense of self. This explains why self-consciousness is generally absent in the dream world: because we need precisely this convergence with the physical body and the etheric body to achieve self-consciousness.

[ 11 ] We need this clash to achieve a clear, distinct, and alert sense of self. Now, the one who has passed through the gate of death has been stripped of the outer physical body. Just as between birth and death, he cannot generate a sense of self. Without self-awareness, they would have to traverse the path between death and a new birth, were it not for this self-awareness being generated in another way. This other way is that everything we now directly experience in the etheric body after passing through the gate of death remains in existence the entire time between death and a new birth.

[ 12 ] In this respect, too, the experience in the spiritual world between death and a new birth is the opposite of the physical experience here between birth and death. Here in the physical world, no one in normal consciousness can remember the moment of their birth; the memory only sets in later. A person does not remember being born; that lies, so to speak, too far back in time for the memory to reach. But what a person now experiences inwardly from the other side of death remains throughout their entire life, between ‘death and a new birth’ for the soul. The experience of death remains just as certain as the experience of birth disappears when a person enters the physical world. At birth, the physical human being does not look back in the physical world; at death, he looks back over the entire period between death and a new birth. This looking back, this encounter with the experience of death—that is what gives rise to the sense of self between death and a new birth; we owe it to that.

[ 13 ] The sight of death is, after all, only terrifying—if at all—when viewed from the perspective of physical experience. It is only from that perspective that it holds horror and dread. The dead, however, see it from the other side. And viewed from that perspective, there is truly nothing terrifying about the knowledge that, in a sense, the moment of death is eternal for the entire life between death and rebirth. For even if it is annihilation when viewed from this physical side of life, it is the most glorious, the greatest, the most beautiful, and the most sublime thing that can ever be seen from the other side of life. There it continually bears witness to the victory of the spirit over matter, to the self-creating life force of the spirit. In this perception of the self-creating life force of the spirit, self-consciousness is present in the spiritual worlds.

[ 14 ] In the spiritual worlds, then, one possesses this sense of self precisely because one is constantly generating oneself inwardly; one never appeals to an existing being, but always generates oneself, and in this self-generation, one touches back, as it were, to the moment when death occurred. So we can also describe the manner in which the sense of self—self-consciousness—is generated in the period between death and rebirth. This experience in the early period after death holds great significance for the birth of the sense of self. And of course, this very first experience also varies depending on whether a person, let us say, reaches an advanced age and then passes through the gate of death in a natural way, or is perhaps taken from this life in the tenderest childhood or in the prime of life. And of particular significance with regard to the differences in this area is—approximately, though not with pedantic precision—the thirty-fifth year of life. What is now happening in countless ways—that young people in the prime of their lives are passing through the gate of death— tomorrow we shall see how this is further modified by the fact that death approaches them from without. But when a person passes through the gate of death while still young, the experience of beholding this depicted tableau of life with its invigorating processes is already different from when one passes through the gate of death, say, after the age of thirty-five.

[ 15 ] One might put it this way—although it is, of course, difficult to find the right words for these circumstances—that someone who dies in the prime of youth has the feeling: The dream image of your life emerges, and you bring it to life from the very center of your being. But as you pour your own life-giving forces into this tableau of life, there remains behind it something like a remnant of the world from which you stepped out when you were born.

[ 16 ] When a child dies, the tableau of life is, of course, extraordinarily brief. If, for example, a six-year-old child dies, the tableau of life is still rather sparse in content. However, behind this tableau, casting a shadow over it, so to speak, much of what was experienced in the spiritual world before birth—or, as was once said in the German language (Goethe used this expression)—before one “became young”—still emerges from behind. A beautiful expression that has now been lost. And when a child dies who has no memories yet—for whom the point in time has not yet arrived beyond which one can recall the past—the child does not actually yet possess such a life tableau in which it feels as directly immersed as a person does when they die later in life; rather, what emerges through the entire tableau of life—merely slightly modified—is what the child had around it before birth. One could say: This perception of certain remnants of the spiritual world that one experienced before birth is only lost for retrospection after death once one has passed the age of thirty-five.

[ 17 ] One should never—and let me say this by way of aside—be tempted, and I emphasize this explicitly, to indulge in the by no means harmless thought of what might be better for a person: to die before the age of thirty-five, or to die after the age of thirty-five and live through what we are yet to describe. One should not pursue this thought, one should not entertain it, but rather one should consider: When one passes through the gate of death, that should be left, in the strictest sense of the word, solely to karma.

[ 18 ] But understanding these things is important. If one dies after the age of thirty-five, however, one no longer has the opportunity to glimpse anything of the remnants of the spiritual life that preceded birth. That is obscured. Yet the tableau of one’s life still appears. One simply has a strong sense that one is creating it from within, that one is, so to speak, spinning it oneself; but this web is imbued with life. This is what fundamentally distinguishes dying before the age of thirty-five from dying after the age of thirty-five with regard to the tableau of one’s life. The tableau of life before the age of thirty-five has much more the character of something that approaches one from the outside, as if from a spiritual world, and one merely responds to it with what one has experienced oneself. The life tableau after the age of thirty-five is such that what actually comes toward one from the outside is, at first, more of a void, a darkness, and one counters this darkness with what one has acquired in life. Yet it is no less vividly kindled as a result. This inner experience is modified in that, at one moment, it is like the approach of a mirage toward which one walks, while at another moment, the human being carries his or her world into the world of the cosmos. All of this has great significance for life, as we shall see tomorrow. This karmic process—in which our physical body is taken from us at a certain age in our physical life—has great significance for the nature of life after death. But this is intimately connected with our entire karma.

[ 19 ] Then comes the moment when we feel: Now you are truly out of the earthly realm. — To put it roughly, one could say: The very moment you pass through the gate of death, you have the feeling that your earthly body is leaving you. The friends, the people with whom one was together, are leaving you. The experiences one had with them are leaving you. For a while, you are alone with yourself, alone with what you have experienced. Of course, everything you experienced with other people is contained within the dream of life; one regards it as what people have imprinted within one, but in such a way that one lives within oneself throughout the days and brings the dream of life to life within oneself. One has the impression that the Earth, too, is leaving one behind, yet one still lives entirely within the same sphere in which the Earth is located, the sphere that still belongs to the Earth. — And one actually experiences the shedding of the etheric body in such a way that one has the feeling: Now you are not only out of the Earth and its substance, but also out of what is the Earth’s most immediate surroundings, out of the light; you are also out of that which, on Earth as dense substance, renders the music of the spheres inaudible. You are—and this is perhaps the final impression, one that is very significant and becomes something lasting—you are no longer accustomed to having yourself and your surroundings illuminated, as it were, by external light. — I would like to interject here: The most foolish notion is held by those who believe that if one were to fly away from the Earth toward the Sun, one would be flying through light the entire time. Materialistic physicists currently hold this fanciful notion. The belief that the Sun emits light in the way described in physics—that light travels through outer space and falls upon the Earth—is one of the worst forms of superstition. One realizes this after death by the fact that, knowing oneself to be free from the etheric body, one experiences that only in the region belonging to the Earth is there what we have here in physical life as sunlight. One has the perception: Now this light no longer disturbs you. Now it is the inner generation of light that spreads throughout the space that has first been filled with sound. The inner light can now take effect because the outer light no longer disturbs the inner light.

[ 20 ] And now, with the shedding of the etheric body, one begins to enter that world so often called the Kamaloka. Let us call it the world of the soul, for once the inner life-force has first emerged, one then experiences something like an inner resonance of one’s very being, since one is now alone with oneself. And after this inner illumination, there follows what feels like an inner warming. Here on Earth, we experience this warming by receiving heat from the outside and feeling dependent on it in the physical body. And now this inner warming occurs, and this warming is such that one feels once again: You are now able, within the element in which you live, to evoke within yourself the sensation you once had, but in the form of: warmth is acting upon you. — This permeates the tableau of life with warmth. Through this, one enters a completely new element. One has the feeling that the etheric body is now leaving one. And this is precisely the entry into the world that, with full deliberation, has been called the “world of the fire of desire” in my book *Theosophy*, because the warmth that arises from within is at the same time desire—a desire that generates and flows, a sensation of the element of will. And already mingling with this is what remains with us for a certain extended period: the experience of the soul world, which I have often described—we can only describe these things in greater detail little by little—as a reliving of life. One moves backward from the experience of death toward birth. And now one experiences all that one has lived through here in physical life from the other side. But one does not experience it in the same way as one did here in the physical world; rather, one experiences it in a moral sense. If, let’s say, at a certain point between birth and death one has inflicted an injury on someone, one felt within oneself at that time what one had done, but not the suffering that the other person felt. Now one experiences the same thing again, but not what one oneself experienced in terms of anger or antipathy, but rather as the other person experienced it. One extends one’s own experience—if I may put it that way—to the effects of one’s actions that occurred between birth and death. One immerses oneself in all the effects of those actions.

[ 21 ] In a sense, this is the foundation of life between death and a new birth: that during one’s experience in the soul world, one gradually immerses oneself in what one has brought about between birth and death, that one gradually sinks into it. Just as one gradually immersed oneself in nature here from childhood onward—just as one learned to perceive nature and to understand it—so, in the time after death, one immerses oneself in the effects of one’s own deeds, in the effects of one’s own thoughts and words—in short, in the entire world of effects; one pours oneself out into the world of effects. Certainly, spiritual beings are already emerging little by little from this underlying realm: the beings of the higher hierarchies, the beings of the elemental world. Just as we here do not merely experience nature, but animals, plants, and minerals emerge from the soil of nature, so too, within this reliving—where we immerse ourselves in the effects of our deeds (for that is, in fact, the very foundation of our world)—do the spiritual beings of the spiritual world emerge. There, just as physical beings come to meet us in the physical world, we encounter—among the spiritual beings of the elemental realms and the higher hierarchies—the souls with whom we have had a connection, the souls who have already passed away and are in the spiritual world, or the souls who are still incarnated in physical bodies, with whom we have had a connection here. All of this brings to life this foundation of post-death existence, this dissolving into the world of one’s own deeds.

[ 22 ] And in a certain sense, one can perceive that there is a difference between perceiving a soul that still dwells on earth and a soul that has already passed through the gate of death. The deceased, of course, knows whether he is dealing with one type of soul or the other. When he is dealing with a soul that still dwells in an earthly body, the deceased has the feeling that this soul approaches him more from the outside, that the image, the vision itself, takes shape. With a soul that already belongs to the disembodied, the experience is much more active. One has the feeling that the soul is approaching, but that one must form the image for that soul. The deceased approaches with their being; one must form their image oneself; the living person brings their image to you when you look down upon them.

[ 23 ] And so, in a certain way—with a moral emphasis—one relives what might be called one’s actions, that is, the effects of what one has done, thought, and willed. One immerses oneself in it; one lives oneself into it. And one immerses oneself in a very specific way—namely, in such a way that one has, for example, the experience: You have hurt someone; now you experience what the other person experienced as a result of that hurt! — This is truly one’s own experience of what the other person experienced here in the physical world. One goes through this. And as one goes through it, a force arises within one, quite as if through an inner, elemental necessity: You must make amends for this, you must make it right! — It is truly the case that you can use this analogy: A mosquito flies toward you, and you close your eyes. You carry out an action under the influence of an impression. — After death, you experience the consequences of something you have done; then you respond within yourself by generating the strength to make amends—that is, to compensate for what the other person suffered as a result of the injury. This means that by living through this experience—reliving it retrospectively in the realm of the soul—you absorb within yourself the strength to remove that suffering from the person who endured it because of you. This gives rise to the desire to be with that person in earthly life in order to make amends for what one has done to them. During this reliving, all the forces necessary for karma—for compensatory karma—are generated. One absorbs these forces there.

[ 24 ] Thus, even in these first years or decades after passing through the Gate of Death, one brings about the unfolding of karma. And just as there is a growing force within a seed that only later unfolds in full bloom, so it is true that even now, in the time after passing through the Gate of Death, the power exists within the deceased as a root force, which then remains for the entire life between death and a new birth, and which is lived out in the new earthly life or in later earthly lives as karmic compensation for what one has done. Thus the will is generated, which then becomes the unconscious will to karma.

[ 25 ] And now we can take a closer look at what is important for understanding this picture of life between death and a new birth. We can do this by taking another look at the interrelationships between the conditions of earthly life here—which are well known to us in their outward appearance and which we have often reflected upon in terms of their inner mysteries—and by examining the interplay between waking “daytime life” and “nighttime sleep life.”

[ 26 ] Today we want to take another look at this waking and sleeping from a certain perspective. Viewed from the outside, sleep consists of our ego and astral body being outside the physical and etheric bodies. The life of sleep remains, at first, unconscious unless it is interwoven in a certain way with the life of dreaming; yet this does not mean inactivity. On the contrary, this life of sleep is an inner soul life that is far more active—even if it remains unconscious during normal earthly life—than the waking soul life. The waking life of the soul is so intense precisely because the activity of the “I” and the astral body encounters resistance from the etheric and physical bodies, and in this mutual clash between the “I” and the astral body on the one hand and the physical and etheric bodies on the other, a process develops akin to a continuous series of thrusts and counter-thrusts. This is what appears to us as waking daily life, whereas in normal earthly life we are not yet able to bring the continuous but intense activity of night life into consciousness. This activity does not come into contact with the physical and etheric bodies; therefore, it remains unconscious. But in itself, daytime life is weaker; it becomes conscious only because it is constantly drumming against the etheric and physical bodies. We perceive this drumming, whereas the more intense activity of the life of sleep fades into the indefinite, cannot drum against anything, and thus remains unconscious.

[ 27 ] But what does a person do during this life of sleep? When dreams occur in normal life, these dreams are not the actual activity taking place during sleep; rather, they are essentially a visual representation of that activity through memories of everyday life. The images of dream life arise because life spreads its tapestry over the actual inner activity; and through this, various things are perceived in dream life. There, the “I” and the astral body are engaged in lively activity; when this comes into contact with the etheric body and the human being touches the etheric body, then the dream arises. But the dream draws upon the physical memories of life from within the etheric body in order to make visible the activity of the “I” and the astral body, which otherwise remains invisible. One can therefore only penetrate the dream by considering these images in terms of their character and progression—that is, by learning to understand them. “Dreams must first be interpreted correctly; the proper art of interpretation must be applied. Then, indeed, they point to this most significant reality, which is carried out by the ego and the astral body during sleep. This activity, then, which the human being carries out, reveals itself to serious and dignified spiritual research.

[ 28 ] What, then, does this activity consist of, from the moment one falls asleep until one wakes up? It consists in reliving the day’s experiences inwardly in a much more intense way, in becoming, as it were, the judge of one’s own experiences of the day. It is a trivial way of putting it, but deeply true: in normal consciousness, one simply goes about one’s day, letting the events unfolding around one wash over one. At night, however, one takes the day’s events much more seriously and finds them much more meaningful—both as an “I” and in the astral body—on both the “I” and soul levels. One weighs them, examines them in terms of their cosmic value. One reflects on what significance they hold within the broader cosmic context. An immense inner thoroughness in the contemplation of life pervades the period from falling asleep to waking up; it simply remains unconscious in normal life. All of this—what a person goes through every night as if reliving the day’s events—has great significance as preparation for life after passing through the gate of death.

[ 29 ] Consider, for a moment, this continuous life between birth and death through the lens of ordinary physical observation. Of course, people say they can only remember back to a certain point in this life. In truth, one does not remember one’s entire life; rather, in the evening, one remembers what happened up until the morning. Then the memory breaks off. Then comes the preceding “day” again, followed by the night, which one does not remember. So one remembers backward, but it is, as it were, link by link in a chain—a white link and a black link. One does not remember the night in the life between birth and death. The peculiar thing is that it is precisely during this time, while living in the soul realm, that one remembers the way in which, going back night after night, one has lived through the experiences of the day. Here in physical life, one remembers one’s days; in the soul realm, one remembers the same things, but one remembers how one wove through and lived through the days during the nights. One retraces one’s nights. In this way, one gains insight into the entire nature of experience in the realm of the soul.

[ 30 ] If you think about it in detail, it is like this: You met a person on a certain day in your life, and you experienced this or that with them. You experience it not only with them during the day, but also again at night, and on the following nights as well; then it becomes a kind of reminiscence. You relive it inwardly within your ego and astral body. Everything you have experienced here in your daytime consciousness, you experience again in your nighttime consciousness. And just as you have experienced it in your nighttime consciousness, so does it provide you with the tools you need in the soul world. You relive your nights. This is a very significant truth of spiritual research, and through such an insight one can always be reminded of the fact that research into the spiritual realm is not what many believe it to be. Many believe that once one has entered the spiritual world, the spiritual researcher suddenly knows the entire spiritual world and is aware of everything. This belief is just as naive as believing that someone who has traveled across part of the Earth knows the whole Earth. They know certain parts of the Earth quite well, but they know nothing about other parts. Similarly, someone who is familiar with the spiritual world at any given point does not need to know everything about the spiritual world. This is the subject of a gradual process of research. That is why it is so difficult to speak about spiritual science, because one repeatedly encounters this prejudice. When lectures on spiritual science are given, people demand during the question-and-answer session that information be provided on every subject. Such questions should be viewed in the same light as if, for example, someone had become familiar with a certain number of minerals or plants, and one were then to ask him about the mysteries of the animal world, saying: “He knows one thing, so he must also know the other!”

[ 31 ] It is certainly true that all the details of the spiritual world must first be worked out. And above all, one must be able to wait until one or the other matter reveals itself. Now you have seen that in my *Outline of Esoteric Science* and *Theosophy* I spoke about the approximate duration of what is called the kamaloka life, the life in the soul world. From a certain point of view, one can certainly say it exactly as I did there. But now the spiritual researcher enters a specific context that can truly be compared to traveling through different countries. One moves from one place to another, and in the same way, one moves here from one realm to another. Thus, the spiritual researcher can arrive at a different perspective; and from this perspective, the question: “What do the ego and the astral body do at night?” yields the following answer: The experiences of the night can be viewed as a re-processing of the day’s experiences. — The question may arise: What is life in the soul world like, knowing that the nights are lived through in the soul world? — I have indicated that life in the soul world accounts for about one-third of one’s last earthly life. If one lives through the nights, how long will life in the soul world last? Well, one sleeps through about one-third of one’s life here on Earth; some people sleep more, others less, but one sleeps through about one-third of one’s earthly life.

[ 32 ] Such are the immensely significant impressions one can have regarding the validation of spiritual science. For this is indeed how it is in spiritual science: From a certain point of view, one is given something that allows one to look into the spiritual world. From this, a truth emerges. One might doubt this truth. But if one approaches it from a different perspective and arrives at the same truth—as is now the case with the experience of the nights— This is what constitutes verification. This inner harmony is an important criterion. And you will find this everywhere in spiritual science, wherever it is pursued seriously and with dignity: that the same thing is sought from different perspectives, and that the same truth emerges from these different perspectives. Once people develop a sense of the value of truth inherent in this way of approaching spiritual truth and then finding it, they will also realize how immensely more true is what can be explored in this realm than anything that can be explored in the physical world. This is the essential point, the important thing: that here in our physical earthly life we have a memory for what is experienced in waking consciousness, and that during the time we spend in the soul-world, we retain a recollection of what is further developed during the nights on the basis of what waking consciousness has experienced.

[ 33 ] So that we may approach the profound truths we are to discuss tomorrow in a truly fruitful way, let us recall something I have already mentioned here in a different context with regard to the great events of our time: When a person passes through the gate of death in such a way that their life is, so to speak, torn away from the outside—especially if they die at a young age—then, shortly after passing through the gate of death, separation from the etheric body also occurs. But this etheric body would, in fact, possess the power to continue supplying the remainder of the life with external life forces. Normally, a person receives from the etheric body those forces that can sustain them with life forces well into old age. If life is cut short, these forces remain nonetheless. They are also present in the shed etheric body. And just as in the physical world nothing is lost in terms of forces—but is merely transformed—so too these forces are not lost, but remain present. If you apply this concretely, you will say to yourself: When a person dies in the prime of life, in the bloom of youth, they leave behind for the world whatever life forces they still have in their etheric body—forces that they themselves could have used up. — Imagine it even more concretely. Take, for example, a person who, let’s say, was struck by a bullet at the age of twenty-five: he leaves behind for the world, in terms of life-etheric forces, what he could have used from the age of twenty-six onward for the remainder of a long life. That remains; it is a gift that the deceased bestows upon the spiritual atmosphere of life in which we exist. We remain surrounded by these forces. And embedded in these forces are the spirit of sacrifice with which the departed person’s etheric forces were imbued. That remains. And future generations have no idea how they actually live within the forces left behind in this way by their ancestors, how they are surrounded by them, and how our spiritual atmosphere is permeated by them. They pay no attention to what remains of those who have passed on at a time like this, when, within a relatively short period, so many etheric bodies still fit for life are being surrendered to the spiritual atmosphere of the Earth. — Building on this, we will continue our discussion tomorrow.

[ 34 ] We wish only to direct our attention to what becomes revealed to us through such profound connections, through which we can glimpse into the spiritual world—no longer viewing the spirit in the sensory world in a merely abstract, trivial, and even blurred way, but rather perceiving the spiritual in a concrete and essential manner. There we see—alongside the unfolding of destiny for those who have passed through the gate of death—beings of the higher hierarchies, beings of the elemental world. But we also see what remains inwardly connected to the Earth: that which has been left behind in the etheric bodies. What those who have met their death in the great fields of events leave behind for the children of the Earth in the form of unspent etheric forces will have a concrete effect. This will combine with the understanding that the children of the Earth show toward these seeds for the future. And looking at this, we say what we have often said at the end of our reflections:

From the courage of the fighters,
From the blood of the battles,
From the suffering of the forsaken,
From the sacrifices of the people
The fruit of the spirit grows
Guiding souls, spiritually aware,
Toward the realm of the spirit.