The Rudolf Steiner Archive

Earth-Death and Universal-Life V

[ 1 ] We have attempted, particularly with regard to human souls that have already passed through the gate of death, to explore the relationships that exist between the world in which a person lives between birth and death, and the world in which they live between death and a new birth. We will attempt to examine these relationships from a wide variety of perspectives.

[ 2 ] Over time, as humanity—in order to fulfill its human mission in the coming ages, as it will inevitably have to do—approaches the spiritual world with self-awareness, it will become convinced that a true, comprehensive understanding of the world and its relationship to humankind extends far, far beyond what can be explored through physical-sensory science and the intellect to which this science is bound. In a sense, human beings know only a very small part of the real world—I mean the active world in which they themselves are actively engaged—when they refer only to what is perceptible through the senses and can be ascertained by the intellect bound to the senses. In the course of these lectures, I have pointed out how human beings can, in a sense, refine their observation, how they can extend it to various aspects of life that but which are actually overlooked in life because we focus only on what happens during a person’s waking life from morning to evening, and do not take into account what might happen—things that, in a certain sense, we are prevented from allowing to happen. In order to give you at least a preliminary understanding of these things—which one must initially sense rather than think about—I have pointed out that one need only consider, for example, how one might be prevented from leaving the house at a certain time of day—a departure one had planned—because someone comes to visit. You may have planned to go out at eleven o’clock in the morning, but you can’t leave until half an hour later. Now imagine—under certain circumstances, of course—how the day might have unfolded quite differently if one had gone out at the intended time; how something else might have happened during that half-hour one missed, something that one has now completely missed out on and that did not happen at all. Consider how many such and similar events befall people in the course of a day, and you’ll get an idea of everything that could have happened. You’ll be able to compare, on an emotional level, this idea of everything that could have happened with what actually occurred from morning to evening according to the chain of cause and effect.

[ 3 ] It would be wise to form a truly clear picture of these things and to compare them with similar phenomena in the natural world; for in nature, in a certain sense, things occur that must be assessed in a similar way. I have often pointed out that one should pay attention, for example, to how seed forces are constantly being lost in large numbers in nature. Just think for a moment about how many of the vast quantities of herring eggs develop into actual herring over the course of a year, and how many are lost in the process. Extend this idea to encompass all of life. Try to imagine how many germs predisposed to life fail to reach their full development in the course of the world’s history, how much remains stuck in the course of the world’s history—that which cannot reach full development, that which is not present in fully developed, sprouting, and budding life. But do not think for a moment that this does not also belong to reality. It is just as much a part of reality as that which reaches its full development; it simply does not reach a certain point, but takes a different course—just as our own life processes take a different course when, as I have indicated, we are held back by something; the former are life processes, the latter are natural processes that are inhibited and which, by being inhibited, then continue in a different way. Such things can be extended much further.

[ 4 ] One might now ask whether there is not another example, very similar to these two, that intrudes into human life in a questioning and enigmatic way. We know that the normal lifespan of a human being is seventy to ninety years. But we also know that the vast majority of people die much earlier, and we see from this that the fulfillment of life is not attained. Just as in nature the seeds are held back at a certain stage and do not reach full maturity, so too do the life processes of human beings fail to reach full maturity. And again, we also see how our daily actions do not reach full maturity, for the reasons just mentioned. All of this can “draw our attention to the fact that, in a sense, there is a great deal hidden between the lines of life that goes unnoticed—that, rather than passing over into the realms where it can be sensually perceived, remains stuck in spiritual realms.”

[ 5 ] If you do not regard something like this merely as a fantasy, but give it serious thought, you will find the path—if not to a fully valid proof, then at least to a conception of something very significant. When we act as human beings in everyday life, we proceed by considering our actions, our deeds, and the impulses of our will. We consider what we should do, and then carry out what we have considered. But life does not unfold merely in this way—that we resolve to act and then carry out those actions—but rather in such a way that something enters into life that very often appears to us merely as a series of coincidences, that seems to us to be irregular, connected precisely by chance, and which we describe with the term “our fate.” For the materialistically minded person, fate is precisely that which is composed of the events that, as he puts it, “befall” him from day to day. Certainly, many people sense that there is a certain plan underlying this fate. But as a rule, people do not progress from merely grasping the idea of such a plan of fate to truly understanding what is actually taking place, because what I am referring to now—even though it is something very significant—is not taken into account in daily life. At present, so-called analytical psychology—psychoanalysis—is addressing many of the issues that are now knocking at the gates of humanity. The proponents of this analytical psychology approach these matters with only inadequate means of understanding. — I have often drawn attention, among our circle of friends, to a paradoxical example that psychoanalysts now use constantly, because at the very outset of psychoanalysis it led people to realize that there are all sorts of spiritual aspects to life of which ordinary people have no concept. Let us bring this paradoxical example to mind once more, even if some of you are already familiar with it.

[ 6 ] A lady is invited to an evening gathering and attends it; the gathering is being held because the lady of the house where the party is taking place is leaving that evening. She is going to a spa because she is ill. The evening gathering proceeds in an impeccable manner. The lady of the house has already left for her spa resort; the guests, so to speak, set off at the same time as she did and leave. A group of these guests is on the street. And as they continue walking, a horse-drawn cab comes around the corner. I explicitly say: a horse-drawn cab, not a car. This horse-drawn cab races down the street. One of the ladies breaks away from the rest of the group. While the others walking with her step aside to avoid the horse-drawn carriage, she has the peculiar idea of running right in front of the carriage’s horses; she keeps running down the street ahead of the horses—the horses behind her and she ahead—until it occurs to her that she must do something to save herself from this situation. As she runs ahead of the carriage’s horses, she comes to a bridge spanning a river and thinks to herself: If she jumps into the water now, she’ll be safe from the horses. But the other members of the group who were walking with her—as you can imagine—have run after her and catch up with her just in the nick of time. And as circumstances would have it: she is brought back to the house she had just left and is taken in there. Well, the lady of the house is away; she is taken in there and is now in a position to continue a relationship with the master of the house that had once begun during a previous stay with him.

[ 7 ] The psychoanalyst now searches for hidden regions of the psyche. He discovers that this woman, when she was a child, had some kind of experience with horses, that these experiences are now surfacing from the unconscious, and so on. But anyone familiar with the inner life of human beings will not be able to go along with all this psychoanalytic nonsense; for even if such hidden realms of the soul and the like do exist—which is by no means to be denied—they are merely precursors to what really matters, and not the issue at hand. What really matters is that a person—including this lady we are now discussing—possesses a subconscious consciousness that, under certain circumstances, is far more astute and sophisticated than the conscious mind. In her conscious mind, as most of you will surmise, that lady behaved rather clumsily, but in her subconscious mind, Something was thinking much more shrewdly than what was going on in her conscious mind. In her subconscious, something thought: “The lady of the house has gone out tonight; I must find a way to get together with the man; I must do something, I must seize the next opportunity.” The subconscious is even somewhat prophetic; it foresees what will happen when one runs before horses. All of this can be orchestrated in the most sophisticated way by the subconscious mind. The conscious mind is not that clever; the subconscious mind, however, possesses this cleverness, which is further enhanced by the addition of a certain prophetic gift. I mention this example because it is merely a specific instance of something that exists quite generally. Every person carries within themselves something that is much more comprehensive—and also much more intense in a wide variety of directions—than their ordinary consciousness. Indeed, if a person knew everything that they actually know in their subconscious, they would be incredibly clever and astute, and would be capable of conceiving an immense amount.

[ 8 ] One might now ask: Is what dwells in the human subconscious actually completely inactive? For those who know how to observe the world spiritually, it is not entirely inactive. On the contrary, it is constantly active—truly constantly active. What has come to light in a particular way in this lady—and in similar cases, the matter only comes to light in an abnormal way under the influence of very specific events, desires, and inclinations—but what has come to light in this lady in a particular way is always present in a person in a certain area; it accompanies them throughout their entire waking life. Why is that? The fact that it once came to light in such a way in this lady—it could, of course, also be a gentleman—stems solely from the fact that this subconscious knowledge that a person has of life sometimes goes a bit overboard. This also happens in ordinary consciousness: one does something unusual that actually falls outside one’s usual habits, something that is an exception in life. The same is true of this subconscious. But here, in this case, something special has simply come to the fore—something that is always at work within a person—how is it at work?

[ 9 ] What we call fate is really quite a complicated matter. Our fate seems to approach us in such a way that its events simply happen to us. Let’s take a striking example of fate—one that many people are familiar with. Let’s suppose someone meets another person who then becomes their friend, wife, husband, or the like. The ordinary conscious mind interprets this as something that simply happened to us—that we ourselves did nothing to bring it about, that the person in question simply entered our sphere of life. But that is not the truth. The truth is quite different.

[ 10 ] With the power that lies dormant in the subconscious—the one I have just alluded to—we set our life’s course from the moment we enter existence through birth, and even more so when we begin to refer to ourselves as “I,” in such a way that it crosses the path of another at a specific moment. People simply do not pay attention to what remarkable things would come to light if one were to trace a specific life path—for example, that of a person who becomes engaged at a certain moment. If one were to trace that person’s life as it unfolded through childhood and youth, from place to place, until the moment they became engaged to another, one would find much meaning in the course of their life. One would then discover that the person in question did not simply arrive at that point by chance—that something merely happened to them—but rather that they moved toward it in a very purposeful way until they found the other person. The whole of life is permeated by such a search; the whole of destiny is such a search. Of course, we must imagine that this search does not proceed in the same way as actions carried out under ordinary deliberation. The latter proceeds in a straight line; action in the subconscious proceeds powerfully and personally. But then it is something that takes place meaningfully within a person’s subconscious. It is not even correct to speak of the “unconscious”; one should say “superconscious” or “subconscious,” for it is unconscious only to ordinary consciousness. In the case of that lady who so cleverly arranged things to return to the house of the man in question, the subconscious is far more conscious of itself than the lady herself is in her superconsciousness. And so it is also with what guides us in life, such that our destiny is a certain fabric that guides us, and that is very, very conscious. The fact that people often disagree so strongly with their fate does not contradict this at all. If they could survey all the factors, they would find that they could already be in agreement. Precisely because the superconscious is not as astute as the subconscious, it misjudges the facts of the latter and tells itself: “Something unpleasant has happened to me”—whereas, upon deeper reflection, the person has in fact sought out precisely what the conscious mind finds unpleasant. An understanding of the deeper connections would lead them to realize that a wiser person seeks out the very things that then become fate. What is the basis for all this? |

[ 11 ] This is based on the fact—when one speaks of such things, for which ordinary language has no proper words, one can of course only ever speak in terms of comparisons, but these comparisons refer to realities—it is based on the fact that our ordinary mental consciousness, of which many people are so proud, is, so to speak, a sieve. It is a comparison, but a valid one that points to a reality. Our conscious mind is a sieve. When you pour water into a sieve, it runs through; it does not fill the sieve. These things that are thought and considered and then find expression in the fabric of destiny pass through our conscious mind as if through a sieve. That is why we know nothing about them in the conscious mind. The conscious mind lets them pass through as if through a sieve, but the person in the subconscious mind does not let them pass. Just because they pass through the conscious mind as if through a sieve, he knows nothing about them; yet they are still held back within the person.

[ 12 ] Once natural science is truly pursued in a reasonable manner, people will ask themselves: How do such things manifest in animals, and how in humans? In animals, these experiences pass right through the animal; the entire animal acts as a sieve. In humans, they are not retained in the head or the mind, but are nonetheless held back by the whole person. It is only because, in ordinary life, it is merely the head that thinks and not the whole person that humans do not think these things through under normal circumstances. Only when, for example, hysteria sets in—which consists of the other part of the human being also beginning to think—which can indeed occur under pathological conditions, though generally should not—do such exceptional cases arise, in which what otherwise unfolds as fate is consciously processed, and in which the human being, as one might say, “makes fate” — like that lady who indeed “made” her own fate. So humans do hold the process back after all, and this reveals something most peculiar. Why does the process run its course throughout the entire animal kingdom, and why is it held back in humans?

[ 13 ] This is because animals do not have hands; that is, their limbs are always connected to the ground—they are either legs or wings—which makes the process somewhat different. But the fact that humans have transformed the limbs that are legs in animals means that their arms and hands are so integrated into their organism that they hold their thoughts about their destiny within themselves. One cannot think with one’s hands; one can only hold back one’s destiny with them; therefore, humans overlook their destiny. The hands are organs of thought just as much as the etheric part of the head is. When thinking, the etheric part of the head does something very similar to what a human being does with his hands in life: with his hands, a human being halts within himself the stream of action that runs through his destiny. Human beings are constituted in such a way that only the coarser intellectual activities of the hands and arms are expressed. Everyone knows that they possess a special sense of perception in their hands, especially in their fingertips; but this sense of perception represents the coarsest aspect in this regard. For what is at stake here is something much more subtle: it is a very faint, barely glimmering thought that people develop and are able to express through artistic activity; but the hands are actually so integrated into the human organism as a whole that they serve as the organ of thought for destiny. In the present cycle of development, human beings have not yet learned to think with their hands. If they were to learn this—if they were to come to know the mysteries of the hands—it would simultaneously serve as an introduction to the understanding of the fundamental laws governing the interplay of fate.

[ 14 ] This looks very strange, but it is true. Here we have one of the points where spiritual science, on the one hand, says: Destiny is conceived in the hands that develop subconscious thinking. — Natural science does not yet take this into account. If it considers the human organism only in very broad terms, it must naturally conclude: “Man is a more perfect animal.” — And indeed he is. But the very thing that is overlooked here is precisely the essential difference between man and animal. Consider this: What is the head like in an animal? In an animal, the head rests directly on the ground. In humans, the head rests in such a way that what supports the earth in animals is supported by the human being himself; the line of the head’s center of gravity falls into the human organism before it touches the earth—to put it roughly: it passes through the diaphragm. The human being stands in relation to himself just as the animal stands in relation to the earth. If we take the line of the head’s center of gravity in an animal, it falls directly onto the earth without passing through the diaphragm or the organism. The essential aspect of the human being lies in the organism’s orientation toward the entire cosmos, and connected to this orientation is the fact that the human arms and hands are organized differently than the corresponding limbs in animals. This is one direction in which natural science will work in the future; it will one day ask: How is it actually related, in the case of human beings, to the dynamic forces and the balance of forces within the universe that humans, emerging from the cosmos, are not quadrupeds but bipeds? This is organized for them from the cosmos! And they work toward this by being organized from the cosmos in such a way that the line of the center of gravity of their head falls into themselves, and they become their own earth. By organizing his hands and arms in a particular way, he works toward the point where his hands, in turn, can take fate into their own hands—just as the organization of the human head is also connected to his upright posture. Human beings have a more perfect brain because the line of the head’s center of gravity passes through them and does not fall directly onto the Earth. There are forces everywhere in the universe, and when something is oriented differently, mass is distributed differently. This is acknowledged in inorganic nature, but in the case of human beings, it cannot yet be taken into account today. Consequently, one fails to realize how the material works against the spiritual in human beings, how the material permeates the spiritual throughout their being.

[ 15 ] That is one side of the story. Here we can say: We allow the human being to contemplate how he rests upon his own diaphragm, and we stand within it when we think down to the diaphragm with the subconscious, in the sense of fate, just as we otherwise stand only in the sense of deliberate actions. But now the human being stands within life in yet another way; for we have seen that, when we consider not only his head in isolation but his entire remaining organism, he determines his destiny—and knows his destiny—through deliberation, though a subconscious deliberation.

[ 16 ] But there is something else that is true of human life. We perform actions. These actions bring us a certain degree of satisfaction—or dissatisfaction—in life. Just think about it: You have done someone a favor, which has given you satisfaction; or you had to do something to defend yourself against something, and that is associated with dissatisfaction, and so on. So there are various things that a person does in life through their actions. Yes, we do not merely carry out our actions and experience the resulting conscious satisfaction or dissatisfaction. We can see this most clearly when we examine actions that have less of an impact on life from a spiritual-scientific perspective. An action is an action even if it has no moral significance—for example, when we chop wood. What we accomplish while chopping wood is an action; it causes us fatigue. People have all sorts of ideas about fatigue. You know from the last public lecture that people imagine they must fall asleep because of fatigue, that fatigue is the cause of falling asleep. Everyone knows, of course, that fatigue occurs as a side effect of such actions as chopping wood, for example. But this fatigue has a very profound significance when examined from a spiritual scientific perspective. Fatigue is actually not at all what it appears to be to us. We experience it as what we call fatigue, but it is something entirely different. You can also easily imagine that fatigue, which manifests itself in such activities—activities that pertain more to moral or intellectual life are merely more refined in this regard; it does not always manifest itself as clearly in them as when we consider more elementary activities such as chopping wood—that this fatigue is an ambivalent process. At first, we must draw upon burgeoning, sprouting life forces connected to our growth; but then we have exhausted these forces, and a process of depletion takes place within our organism. This process of depletion is experienced as fatigue. But this fatigue is in truth a numbing, the deeper meaning of which we actually experience as something entirely different from a consequence—in this case, of chopping wood. For ordinary life, fatigue is merely a numbing. What is truly experienced?

[ 17 ] Of course, this can only be said on the basis of genuine spiritual scientific research. When we are tired after chopping wood, a distinct radiance appears at one of the lotus flowers in those areas we know as parts of the human spiritual organism—you can find more details about this in the book *How to Attain Knowledge of the Higher Worlds*— A spiritual achievement is taking place; it does not come to the person’s consciousness. This spiritual achievement remains unconscious to them. What does come to their consciousness is that which numbs them, so that they do not perceive within themselves what is actually present as a spiritual achievement. For what is actually radiating there is truly spiritual. “And one understands this even better when, in order to grasp the spiritual nature of these emanations, one considers, say, an action subject to moral judgment. Let us suppose we have not merely chopped wood, but have done something that is subject to moral judgment. Such moral judgment is, admittedly, usually considered only in relation to the narrowly defined sphere of life. But it has another significance as well. Everything a person does has value in the entire course of human development. Even an individual action has value in the entire course of human development. In ordinary consciousness, a person does not grasp this assessment of how much an action is worth in this process of development any more than he comprehends the workings of fate through his mind. But he does not allow this evaluation to pass through his being as if through a sieve; rather, it flows like a ray of light and radiates outward through the lotus flowers. Human beings constantly and subconsciously exercise an assessment, an evaluation of each and every one of their actions. You may be an angelic being and do good to all people: in your subconscious, you judge the value of such conduct for the overall development of humanity—and you do so very objectively, which sometimes turns out quite differently from what one would believe in the conscious mind. Or you might be a thief—by which, of course, I mean nothing more than that—but as you commit the act of theft, you are judging it quite objectively in terms of its value within the overall process of human development. And you inevitably radiate this outwards through the lotus flowers. Just as our judgments of fate, which pass through the head like through a sieve, are held back by our arms and hands, so too are the judgments we pass on our actions—including our mental actions—channeled by us with the help of our astral lotus flower organization; these are radiated like a glow through our lotus flower organization and emerge from within us. And this glow extends very far. It passes into time; it does not remain in space. That is why the lotus flowers are so difficult to imagine—because they are constantly moving and constantly making the transition into time. There, space truly becomes time. Human beings cast a radiance before themselves, but in such a way that this radiance passes into time, becoming a continuous radiance that extends far beyond death. Throughout our entire lives, a voice within us judges in the subconscious. Just as a voice within us conceives of our destiny, so does a voice judge all our actions, and we radiate this judgment as a radiance.

[ 18 ] This is, of course, once again because it is an imaginative act, expressed in figurative terms, but this figurative expression corresponds to reality. Life is like a beam of light radiating far and wide from a spotlight. You just have to imagine it not in space, but in time. For example, today, as a forty-year-old, you have done something; your life continues, passing through your fiftieth and sixtieth years, then through death and onward into the existence you spend between death and a new birth. And as you go through this existence, you gradually immerse yourself in what you have continuously radiated into that existence through your lotus flowers during your earthly life. You encounter everything you have radiated into the future. To put it figuratively, it is roughly as if you were to project a beam of light with a spotlight that shone far and wide, and you were then to follow that beam, saying to yourself: “This is what was projected; I am encountering it all again.” Only these are the judgments regarding your deeds that you encounter in this way in the life between death and rebirth. In this regard, a human being is not a sieve—or, if you will, a sieve: he allows through what he himself has subconsciously created.

[ 19 ] Once again, then, there is something within human beings that acts as a constant critic—if we do not wish to use the word in a pedantic, philistine sense—of their own “actions,” and which they project into their own future. Here, too, one can, if one wishes, draw on the natural sciences. Because human beings are built upright and thus, in their ordinary consciousness, rest upon themselves as upon their own earth, what emanates from their movement across the earth—in the broadest sense of the word—is held back at the points of the lotus flowers. There it is held back, redirected at a right angle, and sent out into life.

[ 20 ] We can see, then, that what is otherwise encompassed only by the general term “the unconscious” enters human life in a complex yet entirely comprehensible way. Precisely because, on the one hand, a person is separated from what lies below by his diaphragm, he is connected to the fabric of his destiny through his subconscious.

[ 21 ] In animals, this radiation through the lotus flowers does not occur. Why? This, in turn, is related to the animal’s orientation in the universe. Because humans have positioned their spine vertically, at a right angle to that of animals, they develop above all that which cannot develop at all in animals, since the animal’s spine is horizontal and not vertical. Consequently, animals cannot have a “critic” at their side, nor can they project judgments about actions in animal life into the future. Much will come to light when the natural sciences bring themselves to move beyond the trivial comparison of the structures and forms of animal limbs with those of humans, or of animal heads with human heads. Although humans have a more highly developed brain, in other respects the human head is not all that different from the animal head, and this is why materialist theory was able to easily place humans within the animal kingdom. But what distinguishes humans from animals is their orientation within the universe. Once this is studied, scientific inquiry will arrive at an entirely different conclusion. Here, too, spiritual science will provide guidance, just as it does in other areas, by pointing to certain processes of life that can only be understood once one has received the relevant direction through spiritual science.

[ 22 ] We see, then, that human beings are organized in such a way that there is something within them that, on the one hand, can be said to be wiser than they are—and sometimes even more astute—when it comes to judging their fate, and that, on the other hand, there is also something within them that serves as a more objective critic than they are in their conscious lives. In a sense, therefore, what one might call “another human being” is already present within a person in a complex way, and this is also expressed in life. As a rule, a person does not observe his own actions. The critic within him remains subconscious; he only becomes conscious of it between death and rebirth, when that appearance I have spoken of is encountered everywhere, step by step. However, upon a reasonable, thorough reflection on life, one can already come to realize how this critic behaves differently in each individual.

[ 23 ] Compare two types of people that one might encounter in life. One type is often described as a jack-of-all-trades. There are people who can be found everywhere, who never have time, who must constantly be on the go, who must stick their hands—and, one might say, their noses—into everything, who must get involved in everything, and so on. People don’t give it much thought; they consider it merely a way of life based on all sorts of subconscious factors. But what is actually connected to this is that the critic occupies a special position in this incarnation, where the person is a jack-of-all-trades. These critics also have their own unique individuality. People only realize this after death. With such a jack-of-all-trades—it’s very good if one can also speak about such things with humor, because by not letting one’s sense of humor wither away completely when entering spiritual science, one can overcome that mood which so impairs spiritual science; for this mood is something that greatly impairs spiritual science—in the case of such a jack-of-all-trades, this critic is something like an actor who very much wants to be seen—not just by people, though he imagines that to be the case, but by all manner of spiritual beings—who takes pleasure in the fact that everything swarming about in the spiritual world can always see him as he goes about his business. In the spiritual world, this type of “jack-of-all-trades” is someone who is always running around and wants to be seen, and it is from this desire to be seen—which manifests as an unconscious impulse—that the character of the “jack-of-all-trades” originates. — Let’s take the opposite character. This is the person who accomplishes what life imposes on him, what life urges him to do, what it demands of him. He is not to be seen everywhere, but acts even where he is not seen, where life demands it, and so on. The critic also occupies a special position in relation to this type. These things become clear when viewed from a spiritual-scientific perspective. Here, the critic occupies a special position that stems from the unconscious belief that everything one does—even if it is not seen by the swarming spirits around us, as the jack-of-all-trades would like—is not in vain; that no force in the world is in vain, but has its significance in the world. This beautiful belief—that everything you do, even if it should only come to light in millennia, will somehow have its significance in the overall life of the world—this awareness underlies the opposite type of the jack-of-all-trades: a certain peace within the world, a certainty that stems from the belief just described. From this we see how life brightens when one considers that human beings truly have not only the relationships in life that are outwardly visible in the sensory world, but that they truly have relationships in life that are grounded in their connection to the spiritual world. I have presented these remarks today primarily because I have thereby shown you two elements in the human being: one element that is connected to the human physical organization between birth and death in such a way that the physical organization points to a subconscious realm, by showing that the arms and hands are organs of thought—albeit in this peculiar way—providing a special foundation for that which the head acts as a sieve for. In this respect, the human being is a remarkable vessel: His head is a sieve for destiny; but when the thoughts that shape destiny have congealed, they are held back by the arms and hands. The other element in the human being is that which radiates through the lotus flowers and enters into the life between death and new birth. — Much of significance depends on the relationship that develops between these two currents within the human being. For if you consider the whole human being in such a way that you truly imagine the diaphragmatic level, you will see that even there he is a dual being: something enters him, stalls there—stalled by the power of the arms and hands—yet still descends all the way to the diaphragmatic level. This is something that is held back by the fact that the human being is a vertical being, not a horizontal one like the animal. It is indeed evident—as strange as it may sound, but the world is full of mysteries—that the animal’s legs stand in a different relationship to it than the arms do to the human being. This has something to do with the Earth. For one can actually see the rays coming through the Earth and penetrating the human being, yet directed by the lotus flowers and radiating into the future. These are two currents that reveal the human being as an ambivalent being. In ordinary life, these two currents are completely separate from one another, and life is based on this. If the two currents were to merge in life, life would not be as it actually is. If they were to converge, human beings could not develop ego-consciousness, for ego-consciousness depends on the two currents being kept apart in life. And yet: they are kept apart only partially; in a certain other sense, they flow together. It is indeed the case that what radiates from a human being—intended to shine into the life between death and new birth—can, if the person brings it to pass, unite outside the human being with those other influxes that are then held back by the arms before they pass through the sieve. The two currents that otherwise pass through the human body but do not converge can, if the human being holds them back, unite. This union makes it possible for the human being to encounter the deceased, those who have passed through the gate of death.

[ 24 ] By characterizing these two currents today, I have thus provided an introduction to what we will discuss in the next lecture: the relationships that a person can have with these deceased individuals from this perspective, in order to examine these relationships from a different point of view.