The Rudolf Steiner Archive

Ninth Lecture

[ 1 ] Today we want to consider some of the truths we know that can be summarized for a wider circle of anthroposophists. You may be familiar with the kind of description I gave in my book *Theosophy* of those worlds that a human being must pass through between death and a new birth. Today I would like to describe some aspects of these worlds, initially from a slightly different perspective than the one presented in that book.

[ 2 ] That book draws largely on imaginative depictions of the soul and spiritual worlds through which a person passes after crossing the threshold of death, on the way to evolving toward a new earthly life. Today I do not wish to describe the matter to you so much from an imaginative standpoint as from a standpoint that arises more from inspiration. In order to gain even the possibility of understanding, we can start from the experiences we have during our earthly life.

[ 3 ] At some point between birth and death, we face the world in our physical body. We call that which is within our skin—that which is within our physical body—simply our human being, our human existence. We assume that this human being encompasses not only anatomical and physiological processes, but also that psychological and spiritual processes are somehow at work within it. But when we speak of ourselves, we mean what lies within our skin, and we look out into the world—the world is all around us—which we call our external world. Now we know that we form mental images of this external world, and these mental images then live within us. So we have the external world around us and, in a sense, mirror images of the external world within our inner life.

[ 4 ] When we are in the state of life between death and a new birth, we are within the same world that is now our external world here on Earth. Everything that you can see more clearly or can only sense as the external world—that is then your inner world. You will then refer to this as: “My self.” — Just as you now regard your lungs as belonging to your self, so between death and a new birth you will regard the sun and the moon as your organs, as that which is within you. And the only external world you will then have is yourself, as you are on Earth—that is, your earthly organs.

[ 5 ] When we say here on Earth: “Within us a lung, within us a heart; outside us a sun, outside us a moon, outside us the zodiac”—then in the life between death and a new birth we say: “Within us the zodiac, within us the sun, within us the moon; outside us a lung, outside us a heart.” — Everything that we now carry within our skin becomes, more and more, our outer world, our universe, our cosmos during the time between death and a new birth. Our view of the relationship between the world and the human being is completely reversed when we live between death and a new birth.

[ 6 ] And so it is that when we pass through death—that is, when we step through the gate of death—we initially have a clear image of what was there, of how we were on Earth—just an image. You must imagine that this image gives you the impression of the external world. At first, you have this image within you as a kind of apparition. And after death, you initially still have an awareness of what you were here on Earth as a human being, in the form of earthly memories and earthly images.

[ 7 ] But these are ceasing more and more, and you are progressing further and further in your conception of humanity: the “I-world,” the “universe-human.” This is intensifying more and more. Just don’t imagine that the lungs will look the same as they do now. It would not be a sight that could replace the beautiful sight of the sun and moon for you; but what the lungs and heart will then be is something far more magnificent, something far more awe-inspiring than what the sun and moon are now to the human eye.

[ 8 ] It is only in this way that one truly begins to get a sense of what Maja actually is. People speak of Maja, of the great illusion that is the earthly world here, but they do not really believe in it; people, after all, secretly believe that everything is just as it appears to earthly eyes. But that is not the case. The lungs are only an illusion; the heart is only an illusion. In truth, our lungs are merely a magnificent part of our cosmos, and our heart even more so; for in its true nature, our heart is something far more majestic, something far more magnificent than a sun.

[ 9 ] We are indeed gradually seeing an immense cosmic world dawn, about which we speak in such a way that we then also say: “Below is heaven.” But what we actually mean is: Below is that which prepares the human head for the next incarnation; above, we then say, is the lower realm. Everything is turned upside down. There are all the forces that prepare the human being to go to Earth, so to speak, to stand on his own two feet in the next earthly life.

[ 10 ] We can summarize this as follows: The closer we come to a new earthly life, the more the human universe, so to speak, contracts around us. We become increasingly aware of how this initially majestic universe—which is particularly majestic at the midpoint between death and a new birth—how this majestic human universe, so to speak, shrinks together; how the planets we carry within us, the interweaving of the planets, becomes that which then vibrates and pulsates in the human etheric body; how what the fixed stars in the zodiac represent becomes what constitutes our sensory-nervous life. This shrinks together, takes shape, and becomes a body that is first spiritual, then etheric. It is only then—once it has become very small—that it is received by the mother’s womb and clothed in earthly matter.

[ 11 ] And then comes the moment when we approach earthly life, when we feel, as it were, that the universe we once had is slipping away. It shrinks, it becomes smaller. And this creates within us a longing to come down to Earth once more, to reconnect with a physical body, because, in a sense, this universe withdraws from our spiritual gaze. We observe how we become human. And we must reckon with entirely different time frames here. Life between death and a new birth spans centuries, and if a person is born in the 20th century, their descent begins to take shape slowly, as early as the 16th century. And there he is, the human being, who then, in a certain sense, exerts an influence on earthly conditions.

[ 12 ] One of your great-great-grandfathers fell in love with a great-great-grandmother in the 16th century; they felt an urge to be together. In that urge to come together, you were already at work from the spiritual worlds. And when, in the 17th century, a more recent great-great-grandfather fell in love with a more recent great-great-grandmother, you were once again, in a certain sense, the mediator. You brought the entire generation together so that, ultimately, what could become your mother and father would come into being.

[ 13 ] And within this mysterious uncertainty inherent in earthly love relationships, forces are at work that emanate from those who seek future incarnations. That is why there is never complete freedom or complete awareness regarding what brings male and female individuals together under external circumstances. These are matters that lie entirely beyond human understanding today.

[ 14 ] What we call history today is, after all, really just something quite external. In our external lives today, we don’t have much of the spiritual history of humanity. People today know nothing of the fact that human souls still felt quite differently in the 12th and 13th centuries. Not as clearly as I have just described it—but rather in a dreamlike way—people in the 10th, 11th, and 12th centuries still knew of such mysterious forces that work their way into our lives from the spiritual world, but specifically through human souls. In the West, not much has been said about repeated earthly lives, about reincarnation. But everywhere there have been people who knew about these things. Only the churches have always suppressed and condemned any thoughts of repeated earthly lives. And you really need to understand that many people in Europe, right up into the 12th and 13th centuries, knew that human beings go through repeated earthly lives.

[ 15 ] Then came the time when Western humanity was to develop through intellectualism. Human beings must gradually earn their freedom. There was no freedom in ancient times, when dreamlike clairvoyance existed. Nor is there freedom in those human relationships—at most a belief in freedom—that are, shall we say, dominated by earthly love, as I have just described. The interests of the souls descending to Earth are always at play there.

[ 16 ] But humanity must become freer and freer within the course of Earth’s evolution. Only when humanity becomes freer and freer will the Earth reach the goal of its evolution. However, intellectuality has been necessary for this in a specific age. That age is ours. For if you look back at earlier conditions on Earth, when people possessed a dreamlike clairvoyance, spiritual beings always lived within that dreamlike clairvoyance. At that time, a person could not say, “I have my thoughts in my head.” — That would have been wrong. In ancient times, they had to say: “I have the life of angels in my head.” — And later, they had to say: “I have the life of elemental spirits in my head.” — Then came the 15th century, and in the 19th and 20th centuries, human beings no longer have anything spiritual in their heads—they have only thoughts in their heads, thoughts.

[ 17 ] Because he no longer possessed anything of a higher spiritual nature within himself—only thoughts—he was able to form images of the external world. But could human beings be free as long as the spirits lived within them? They could not. The spirits controlled them completely and dictated everything. Human beings could only become free when no spirits were directing them anymore, when they had only mental images.

[ 18 ] Mental images cannot force you to do anything. When you stand in front of the mirror—no matter how evil the people in the reflection may be, they will never slap you; they will never actually slap you, because they have no reality—they are merely images. If I want to make a decision about something, I can have my reflection mimic that decision; but the image itself cannot make any decisions.

[ 19 ] In an age when intellectuality merely plants thoughts in our minds, freedom arises, for thoughts cannot compel. If we allow our moral impulses to remain mere thoughts, as I have outlined in my *Philosophy of Freedom*, then we can attain freedom in our age. Thus, the intellectualistic era had to come about. It sounds strange, but it is true: essentially, the time when people were allowed to develop mere intellectuality—mere conceptual thinking—is over. That came to an end with the 19th century. And if people now continue to cultivate these mere image-thoughts, then these thoughts will fall prey to the Ahrimanic forces; then the Ahrimanic forces will find a way into the human being; and then he will once again lose his freedom to the Ahrimanic forces. And this is the danger facing humanity at present.

[ 20 ] Humanity currently faces the choice of either grasping spiritual life—understanding that such a thing is real, as I described at the beginning of this discussion today—or denying it. But if one denies it today, one can no longer think freely; instead, Ahriman—the Ahrimanic forces—begin to think within humanity. And then the entire development of humanity proceeds along a downward path.

[ 21 ] It is therefore of the utmost importance that more and more people today come to understand: We must return to the spiritual life. And this sense that we must return to the spiritual life—that is what people today should seek within themselves. If they do not seek it, humanity will fall prey to Ahriman. From a higher perspective, the situation of the people of Earth today is that serious. And one should actually place this thought before every other thought, and consider every other thought in the light of this thought.

[ 22 ] I wanted to present this as the first part of today’s discussion. Perhaps Mr. Kaufmann would be so kind as to translate the first part. I will then continue speaking.

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[ 23 ] Such descriptions may help illustrate that the life we experience in the spiritual world between death and a new birth is quite different from what we experience here between birth and death. Therefore, even images drawn from earthly life—no matter how ingenious they may be—are not sufficient to characterize the actual spiritual life of the human being; rather, one can only slowly and gradually guide people toward an understanding of what is real in the spiritual world. I will cite some examples of this.

[ 24 ] Suppose a person leaves their earthly body here and passes into the spiritual-soul world with their soul-spiritual life. And let us assume that someone who has attained initiatory knowledge in the deeper sense is able here to continue observing souls in their life after death. This requires a great deal of preparation, as well as a certain karma that connects the person here with the person on the other side. The point is that one now gains the ability to communicate with a deceased person. I am speaking to you here of extraordinarily difficult spiritual experiences, for it is generally easier to describe the spiritual world than to make even the slightest contact with a deceased person. People readily believe that it would not be difficult to make contact with a deceased person; it is much more difficult to truly make contact with the deceased than it is to gain general spiritual insights.

[ 25 ] Now I would like to describe to you some peculiarities of communicating with the dead. First of all, it is only possible to communicate with the dead by putting oneself in their position and accessing their memories of the physical world. The dead still retain a certain affinity for human language, even for the specific language they primarily spoke here on Earth. But their relationship to language changes. For example, when communicating with a dead person, one notices that very soon they no longer have any understanding—not the slightest understanding—of nouns. Nouns are words that the living here can address to the dead; the dead, if I may use the expression, simply do not hear them. In contrast, the dead retain an understanding of all verbs—that is, action words—for a relatively long time.

[ 26 ] You can usually only communicate with the deceased if you know how to ask him questions in the right way. Sometimes you have to approach these questions in such a way that, on a given day, you concentrate on the deceased in as complete a state of calm as possible, sharing with them something that is quite concrete—for after death, their soul contains more images than abstract ideas—so you must focus on something that is a real, concrete experience that they enjoyed having here in life, and in this way you can gradually draw closer to the deceased. .

[ 27 ] You don’t usually get an answer right away. You often have to sleep on it—maybe even sleep on it several times—and you’ll get an answer after a few days. But you actually never get an answer from the dead if you ask them a question using nouns. You have to try to express everything that is a noun in verbal form. This preparation is absolutely necessary. What the dead understand best are verbs that you make quite vivid. For example, the dead never understand the word “table”; but if you manage to vividly describe what is happening when a table is being made—that is, something in the process of becoming— then one can gradually become so understandable to the deceased that he grasps the question and that one receives answers that are always in verbal form—though very often they are not even in verbal form, but rather in what we here on Earth would refer to as interjections or words of feeling.

[ 28 ] Specifically, the deceased speaks in combinations of letters and sounds. And the longer he remains in the spiritual world after death, the more he is able to speak in a language that one can only master once one has acquired a discerning understanding of earthly language—when one no longer clings to the abstract meaning of words, but instead penetrates the emotional content of the sounds.

[ 29 ] It’s just as I’ve said in my lectures on education: With “A,” we feel something like wonder. We take that sense of wonder into our own soul, so to speak, when we don’t just say “A,” but “Ah.” That is to say: A = I am amazed, and that sense of wonder enters into me: ch. And if I now add an “m” at the beginning and say, “mach”—then I have a sense of pursuing whatever it is that amazes me, as if it were approaching in steps—“m”—and I am completely immersed in it! It is often within these understandings of sound that the answers of the “dead” come. They do not speak English, they do not speak German, nor Russian; they speak in a way that only the soul and the heart can understand, when the soul and the heart are connected to the ears.

[ 30 ] I told you earlier: The heart is more majestic than the sun. From an earthly perspective, the heart is located somewhere inside, and if we were to remove it anatomically, it would not be a pretty sight. In truth, the heart is present throughout the entire human being, permeates all the other organs, and is even found in the ear. We must become increasingly accustomed to this “language of the heart” of the dead, if I may call it that. |

[ 31 ] We grow accustomed to this as we gradually discard everything substantive and enter into the verbal realm. The dead continue to understand activity and becoming for quite some time after death. But later, they come to understand a language that is not a real language. What we then receive from the dead, we must first translate back into an earthly language.

[ 32 ] Thus, a person outgrows his physical body and gradually grows into the spiritual world as his entire soul life undergoes a transformation. And when the time gradually approaches for a human being to descend to Earth, he must once again transform his entire soul life, for the moment is drawing ever closer when he will face a monumental task: first assembling the astral form and then the etheric form of the entire future human being who will physically dwell here on Earth.

[ 33 ] What we do here on Earth is external work. Our hands are engaged in something that takes place externally. When we are between death and a new birth, our soul is occupied with putting our body together. It is only seemingly the case that a human being comes into being through heredity. Through heredity, only the outermost physical shell is provided; but even the form of one’s organs must be developed by the individual. I’d like to give you an example of this, but I’d need a glove to do so.

[ 34 ] When a person approaches earthly life, they still have the sun and moon within them. But gradually, the sun and moon shrink together. They then feel within themselves as if their two lungs were shrinking together. That is how you then feel your cosmic existence—your sun and moon organs—shrinking together. And then something detaches itself from the sun, and something from the moon. Now, instead of having had the sun and moon within you as before, you have before you something that is a kind of image of the sun and moon. Shining and glittering, you see before you two spheres that at first appear enormous, one of which is the spiritualized Sun, the other the spiritualized Moon: one sphere in bright, shining light, the other glowing, more warm within, with a warming, fiery quality, and holding the light more selfishly to itself.

[ 35 ] These two spheres that detach themselves from the cosmically transformed human being—from this Adam Kadmon, who still exists today—these two spheres that detach themselves draw ever closer and closer together. It is said that when one descends to Earth, the sun and the moon become one. And that is what guides one; that is what leads one—all the way back from one’s great-great-great-grandmother, great-great-grandmother, great-grandmother, grandmother, and so on—until finally to the mother who is to give birth to one. There, the Sun and the Moon guide one, while drawing ever closer and closer to one another.

[ 36 ] And then one sees a task before oneself. Then, in a sense, one sees—as a single point—that which is still distant in the human embryo. And one sees what has emerged from the sun and moon as a unified whole, drawing closer to the mother. But one sees a task before oneself that I can characterize as follows.

[ 37 ] Imagine that this [the glove] is what moves before you as the united sun and moon, and you know: When your cosmic consciousness has completely faded away, when you pass through a darkness—that is, after conception, when the human being is immersed in the embryo—you will have to turn it inside out so that the inside faces outward. You must turn inside out what was once the sun and moon, and a small opening will appear; through this you must enter with your “I,” and this will then be your human body on Earth in its image.

[ 38 ] Look, this is the pupil of the human eye. From that single point, a “two” is formed, as if two mirror images were being created: these are the two human eyes, initially united in themselves, but like the united sun and moon, then turning inside out.

[ 39 ] It is up to one to carry out this task, which is performed unconsciously: One must turn the whole thing inside out, turn the inside out, and enter through the small opening. Then it splits apart: two physical images are formed in the embryonic state. For the physical embryonic eyes are two images: that which arose from the sun and the moon.

[ 40 ] This is how one works—by taking what one experiences as the entire universe and giving it a specific form—to develop the individual parts of the human organism, which then clothe themselves and re-clothe themselves solely from the plastic material, from matter. They merely take this on. But the forces—those are formed: they are formed from the universe itself.

[ 41 ] For example, if one passes through the period preceding birth in such a way that the Sun is in the sign of Leo—it need not be at the moment of birth; it can lie further back in time—one does not form one’s eye from the Sun and Moon during this time; that happens at a different time; but during this time one unites with the innermost core of the Sun. If one were to enter this innermost core of the Sun, it would look entirely different from what physicists imagine today. That physical conception is so clueless! This innermost core of the Sun is not a ball of gas, but something that is less than space—where space itself has even been removed. If one thinks of space as something expansive that exerts pressure, then one would have to imagine the interior of the sun as suction-like—negative space, emptier than space itself! Very few people arrive at an adequate conception of it. When one passes through it, one experiences something that can then be further developed and that, for example, goes on to take the form of the human heart.

[ 42 ] It is not the case that only the shape of the eyes is formed from the sun and the moon; the shape of the heart is also formed from the sun, but only if the sun simultaneously contains within itself the forces that come from the constellation of Leo.

[ 43 ] Thus, human beings do indeed build their entire human organism, whether from the movements or from the constellations of the stars in the universe. This human organism is a reflection of the world of the stars, and a large part of the work between death and a new birth consists in shaping our body out of the universe. The human being, as it stands on Earth, is a universe—but a shrunken one. And natural science is so naive that it believes human beings arise solely from the physical human germ! This is just as naive as if someone were to look at a magnetic needle that always points north with one end and south with the other—and were to seek the forces that cause it to align in this way solely within the magnetic needle itself, without regarding the entire Earth as a magnet.

[ 44 ] This is what happens when someone says: “The human being arises from the physical human germ.” — The human being does not arise from the physical human germ at all, but from the entire universe. And his spiritual-soul aspect between death and a new birth is a collaboration in the supersensible-etheric-soul form of the human being, which then shrinks just enough to be able to clothe itself in physical matter. The human being is truly only the stage upon which the universe—and the human being himself, with his transformed forces—acts upon his physical body.

[ 45 ] This is how human beings gradually develop. It begins with language, as they cease to use nouns and enter into a special language—the verbal. Then the process moves from language to the inner contemplation of the world of the stars, and then the human being lives within the world of the stars. And then he begins to distill from the world of the stars and shape that which he will become—that which he will become in his next incarnation. Thus, through the transformation of language, the process moves from the physical into the spiritual; and in turn, through the transformation of the universe, it returns to the human being. And indeed, only when one understands how the spiritual-soul aspect—which is so lost in language—becomes one with the world of the stars and then withdraws again from the world of the stars, does one comprehend this entire cycle of human life between death and a new birth. |

[ 46 ] These things were still clear to many people at the time when the Mystery of Golgotha unfolded on Earth. People never really held the view that Christ Jesus was primarily the being who had developed on Earth; rather, they believed that Christ Jesus had previously been in the world to which one belongs between death and a new birth—and they reflected on how he had descended from there and entered into the Earth.

[ 47 ] The science of initiation had just been eradicated by the Roman world; only the old dogmas were to remain. A special organization that existed in Italy in the 4th century A.D., following the Mystery of Golgotha, made every effort to ensure that the old methods of initiation would not be transformed into new ones; people were to be left with only knowledge of the outer physical world, and the supersensible worlds were to be revealed only through the old dogmas, which they would gradually take in with their intellect merely as concepts—no longer even comprehending them, but merely believing in them. And so the knowledge that once existed was torn apart into knowledge of the earthly world and belief in another world, until this belief had shrunk to such an extent that for some it consists only of a collection of dogmas that are no longer understood, while for others it is merely a point of reference for being able to believe. What, then, does modern man believe, who no longer clings to the dogmas of the Trinity? He believes in something vague, something spiritual in the most general sense. But we must return once more to the true vision in which we immerse ourselves in the spiritual; that is to say, we need once again a science of initiation—a science that speaks to us of such things as: “Marvel at the human eye, which is indeed a small world in itself.” — It is not merely an image; it is something real for the reasons I have just explained to you. For this eye was once, when we were between death and new birth, a single entity, and this unity, which was then turned inside out, was actually a confluence of the images of the sun and the moon. And that is why we have two eyes: because if we were predisposed to see with only one eye, like the Cyclopes, we could never develop the “I” in the visible world; we would develop it only in the world of feelings.

[ 48 ] Helen Keller has a different emotional world and a different world of imagination than other people; she is able to communicate only because language has been made clear to her. Without it, we would not develop a sense of self. We develop it, after all, by being able to place our right hand over our left hand, especially when we overlap the symmetrical limbs. In the same way, we also develop a subtle sense of the self because we cross the visual axes of our two eyes when focusing on an object. Just as we cross our hands, so do we cross the two visual axes. Whenever we look at something, we cross our eyes.

[ 49 ] The two physical eyes are one in the spiritual realm. And this one eye—this spiritual eye—sits here behind the bridge of the nose; it projects itself and becomes the two eyes. It is precisely because a person can be both a “right” and a “left” person that they can feel themselves to be human. If a person were only right or only left—if they were not a symmetrical being—then all imagination would flow out into the world; one would not arrive at a unified self.

[ 50 ] By uniting the two images of the sun and the moon into one, we thus prepare ourselves for our future incarnation. We tell ourselves: You cannot, after all, be scattered throughout the entire world; you cannot become a sun-human and have the moon-human beside you. You must become a unified being. — But then, so that this unity can also be felt, that unified Sun-Moon human eye arises once more. The Sun-Moon human eye is the transformation into the form of what we then carry within us as an eye, and our two eyes are precisely the images of the unified Sun-Moon human eye.

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[ 51 ] That is what I wanted to tell you today, my dear friends, about the very different experience we have when we are in the spiritual world compared to here in the physical world. And yet, once again, these things are connected. But they are connected in such a way that we are completely turned inside out. If we could turn a person here inside out—so that his inner self were turned outward, so that, for example, the inner self, the heart, would then become the person’s outer surface—he would not survive as a physical human being, as you can well imagine— but if one could turn them inside out—grasp them inwardly at the heart and turn them inside out like a glove—then they would no longer remain the kind of human being they are here; instead, they would expand into a universe. For if one concentrates on a single point—the heart—and then has the ability to turn oneself inside out in the spirit, one becomes that world which one otherwise experiences between death and a new birth. This is the mystery of the human inner being, which cannot be turned inside out in the physical world alone. But the human heart is also an inside-out world, and thus the physical earthly world is connected to the spiritual world. We must get used to this turning inside out. If we do not get used to it, we will never gain a true understanding of how the physical world here actually relates to the spiritual world.