The Rudolf Steiner Archive

2. Spiritual and Emotional Aspects of Human Beings Between Death and Rebirth

[ 1 ] The last time I spoke to you here, I discussed a realm of unconscious life—that is, the life that remains unconscious to the ordinary consciousness of human beings as they exist today in their earthly existence. I spoke about the nature of life during sleep and attempted to describe to you in detail and in very concrete terms what the human soul experiences from the moment of falling asleep until waking up. You may have come to realize that these experiences of the human soul between falling asleep and waking up are clear revelations of the eternal, imperishable life of the human soul, for you must have seen that what the soul undergoes in the state of sleep are indeed experiences drawn from the spiritual world. And you know, of course, that insights into such supersensible experiences can be gained through what I have often explained to you verbally here and what I have described in writing in my book *How Does One Attain Insights into the Higher Worlds?*, in my *Outline of Esoteric Science*, and so on. You know that what exists as knowledge in the ordinary human consciousness can be developed into what is called imaginative, inspired, and intuitive knowledge. Such experiences, as the soul unconsciously has them during sleep, are, so to speak, illuminated by the very power that the knowing human soul can acquire when it develops itself toward imagination, inspiration, and intuition. Through this same development, however, it is also possible to explore to a certain degree that part of unconscious human experience of which the life of sleep is only a reflection, an image—that part from which the human soul emerges when it enters physical earthly existence through birth, or let us say conception, and into which it re-enters when it detaches itself from this physical earthly existence through death. And today I shall have at least a few hints to offer you regarding what lies behind the events of birth or conception and death for the soul-spiritual life of the human being.

[ 2 ] When a person first attains imaginative insight—which I do not intend to describe here, as I have done so many times before, including how it can be acquired—the first thing that happens is that their physical earthly life lies spread out before them as a unified whole, as if in a vast tableau. In ordinary physical consciousness, a person’s earthly life exists in the soul only as a memory. What, then, is memory? It consists of images—images that, through their own inner nature, point to the experiences a person has undergone since birth or from a point in time shortly thereafter. But they are, after all, images of which—based on the insights of ordinary human life as it is experienced on Earth today—it cannot be said that they are capable of unfolding an existence independent of the body. Modern physical science is, of course, quite correct when it points out to people how these images of memory depend on the constitution of the physical body. It is correct when it points out how this memory is not yet present in a person during the very earliest years of life, how it develops alongside the physical organism, and how it also declines again as the human physical organism itself approaches its twilight years. And it can also establish, based on certain disease symptoms and on postmortem examinations of the physical organism in deceased individuals, how memory loss is conditioned by certain aspects of the physical constitution. Certainly, science has not yet reached a conclusion on such matters today; but anyone who delves into the spirit of the relevant findings in physical science can already foresee how the time will eventually come when it will be possible to demonstrate how ordinary memory images are bound up with the human physical organism. But what we experience in retrospect when looking back on our lives—as it were, emerging from the stream of experience we view in reverse as individual images of memory—is not what is meant when it is said that imaginative insight presents the human life on earth, insofar as it is a spiritual-soul life, as a vast tableau before one’s eyes. What one surveys in imaginative insight is truly not the kind of abstract images of memory that ordinary memory retains. Rather, what presents itself to imaginative cognition is an active, organic experience that possesses not merely the passivity of memory images, but an inner power akin to the growth forces at work in our organism when we transform the substances of the external world—which we take in as nourishment—into, well, one might well say—wondrous way into what we need to constitute our organism. What lives and weaves within us in a creative, formative way is something other than what exists merely in our images of memory in a more passive manner. Consider thoughts. They illuminate our consciousness; certainly, we owe an infinite debt to the life of thought within our earthly existence. It is through this life of thought that we truly become human, and it is through these mental images that we first become fully aware of our human dignity. But these are, after all, fleeting images, bound to the physical human organism, just as the flame is bound to the fuel of the candle. What the imaginative knower surveys as the spiritual-soul life that underlies physical earthly existence—that which he surveys as a wondrous, vast tableau—is not something passive; it is something inwardly alive, something that, though it confronts us spiritually -psychic, but of which we know through direct psychic perception just as we know through the eye what a red-colored external object is. And we can say in imaginative cognition that we do not merely have thoughts that flash up in our consciousness, but that we become directly aware of such forces that are at work within our organism.

[ 3 ] It has been taken offense at—indeed, I would say, regarded as nothing short of an absurdity—that I once stated in my little book *The Spiritual Guidance of the Individual and of Humanity* that all the wisdom of an adult is not equal to the wisdom of a small child, which, admittedly, lives unconsciously within that small child; but let one observe—even with the most refined, the most scholarly understanding of human nature—the nature of the human brain and the entire human organism in the first years of life, and let one see how, in fact, the human being first forms itself inwardly. Even the work of the most brilliant sculptor pales in comparison to what the child powerfully carries out in sculptural activity from its inner spiritual and soul life as it plastically shapes its own brain. Only those who reflect on and penetrate this gain a true understanding of the mysterious wisdom at work here—a wisdom that is powerful, not merely one preserved within a human mind to enlighten the world, but a wisdom that contains within itself a spiritual and spiritual nature, which, so to speak, penetrates the child’s external organization hour by hour and is what ultimately makes the child a fully developed human being. Just try for a moment to form a fleeting mental image of what is at work there—wisely and magnificently—in such a way that human beings, with their reason and intellectual wisdom, simply cannot keep up with what is at work within the child, what must work for many long years from within the unconscious, for example, integrating the marvelous structure of human language into the human being—try just once to form a picture—though it will be only an abstract one—of this wise process right up to the point where the human being becomes conscious enough to make use of their intellect. Then, I would say, this intellect creates an ephemeral wisdom modeled on the wisdom that first shaped the human being from the innermost forces of the world. But we must also be clear that while we develop the human intellectual mind, so to speak, in the upper layers of our being, what continues to operate in the lower layers of our human nature is that which, in childhood, wisely shapes our organism like a marvelous sculptor. That which lies at the foundation there as a system, as an organism of forces, is surveyed by imaginative cognition in a unified tableau. This imaginative insight, then, does not have before it abstract images of memory—of which one cannot say whether they will be preserved when the organism disintegrates into its elements, because they are bound to that organism—but rather this imaginative insight has before it the very system of forces that builds up this organism, and is therefore not bound to it—just as the sculptor’s creative, genius-like power is not bound to the material. For the material to become what it becomes, the sculptor’s formative power must first act upon it. In order for the human being, as a physical organism, to become what he is in earthly existence, these thoroughly non-physical, supersensible forces must underlie it as a spiritual-soul organization governing the physical existence of the human being.

[ 4 ] This is the first thing we grasp as a perception when we ascend to imaginative cognition.

[ 5 ] But at the very moment when we are able—that is, to abstract from that which acts within us as a spiritual-soul element during our earthly existence, which is not only independent of the physical organism but actually brings about the very form of this physical organism—at the very moment when we rise to this level, we also become capable of viewing our earthly existence — if I may use a logical expression — to abstract from it, just as we can abstract from a thought in physical life. Through those meditation exercises of which I have often spoken to you, we must attain this power—not merely to be able to look beyond a thought, not merely to be able to suppress a thought, but to be able to erase from our consciousness that powerful tableau of thought which we have first vigorously acquired through our contemplation of the spiritual-soul aspect within our physical earthly existence. But then, when we are thus able—I would say—in a selfless awareness, in a selfless altruism, to erase from our inner vision even that which we are spiritually and soulfully during our earthly life, only then does our truly spiritual and soulful Eternal appear before our consciousness; only then does that which we were before we descended from the spiritual and soulful worlds into physical earthly existence appear before our consciousness as a concrete spiritual -soul being—that which we were before we descended from the spiritual-soul worlds into physical earthly existence. We learn to view ourselves as spiritual-soul human beings in our pre-earthly existence. And we learn not only to speak of this pre-earthly existence in general, abstract terms, but we learn to view it in its development, and I have some aspects of this development to describe to you today.

[ 6 ] You see, when we are here in earthly life, we feel—when we speak of ourselves—connected to our physical body; in our waking state, we feel connected to this physical body. No matter how vague this sense of connection to the physical body may be, it is present; indeed, it becomes particularly evident when something is physically wrong with this body. Then we not only feel the physical body in general as a vague sensation of life, but also in its individual parts. Under certain circumstances, we may feel our lungs, our stomach, our heart, and the organs in our head. In everyday life, all of this is simply immersed in a vague sense of vitality; yet, unless a person remains exclusively healthy throughout their entire life, they will always have the opportunity at some point to sense their individual organs. In short, during their waking consciousness between birth and death in earthly life, human beings—by perceiving their own being—feel a sense of oneness with their physical body, with everything enclosed within their skin. But at the moment when a person is not connected to their physical earthly life—during those times when they exist in a spiritual-soul state prior to entering their physical earthly existence—they do not naturally perceive as part of their inner self what their physical body or its limbs are; yet even then, they possess an inner self. I have already had to hint to you how the soul experiences inner images between falling asleep and waking up, even if these images do not become conscious to it. But in that state in which the soul was before it descended from its spiritual-soul existence into physical earthly existence, it had the awareness of a different inner life. This awareness of a different inner life is merely obscured, merely veiled by the fact that in our physical earthly existence, our physical body also becomes an organ of cognition. And it obscures the soul’s insight, which exists only when the soul is free of the body. But what the soul then experiences as its inner life is not what is enclosed within the skin of the physical body, but rather the very organization of the cosmos. And just as the human being here in this physical earthly existence as an earthly human is connected to his lungs, his stomach, his heart, and his other bodily organs, so too is he, in the supersensible existence, connected to what otherwise appears to our eyes and our other sense organs as the outer world of the cosmos. What is the external world for us in earthly life is the inner world for us when we exist in the extra-earthly realm. And we look down upon earthly life as an external world from the supersensible existence that we spend between death and a new birth. And just as we are, so to speak, rooted here in our lungs, our heart, and so on, so too are we embodied—before we descend into physical earthly life—in that which appears to us as an outer reflection in the planetary movements and the constellations of the fixed stars: forces that surge through and interweave the cosmos. That which is the outer cosmic world during our earthly existence is our inner world when we are in an extraterrestrial existence.

[ 7 ] Do not be misled by the idea that the external world is a single one for earthly human beings, who have different bodies; that is precisely what is significant: that we have a shared world when we are in extraterrestrial existence, that the same world one person has is the one another person has as well, and that people, who are spatially separated here in earthly existence because each is enclosed within their own body, are then separated by the inner power of the soul. Even in extraterrestrial existence, each person is an individual; but they are not separated from the other individuals by space, but rather by the inner power of their soul, by the cohesive forces within them. Yet into these cohesive forces flows that which, spiritually speaking, corresponds to the universe—that which appears to us in the physical image of the sun, the moon, the planets, and the fixed stars.

[ 8 ] Just as we here in earthly life encounter a human being with our external senses—seeing only the shape of his face, the sparkle in his eyes, the movements of his limbs—yet become aware, through the fact that we ourselves are spiritual-soul beings, that in these features of his face, in the sparkle of his eyes, in the incarnate quality of their skin, and in the movements of their limbs, a spiritual-soul aspect is expressing itself—so too does the one who is able to view the world from a spiritual-soul perspective recognize that it is not true when people claim that the sun and moon, the fixed stars and planets, and the movements of the planets are merely what our present-day physical astronomy describes to us. This description actually resembles that which someone might give who sought only to describe the external changes in the position of a muscle in our face, or only the movement of the eyelashes, and did not wish to see in these changes in the position of the facial muscles or in this movement of the eyelids the expression of a spiritual-psychic reality. The person who is able to view the world from a spiritual-psychic perspective sees in the phenomena of the Moon and the Sun the physiognomic expression of a cosmic spiritual-psychic reality, just as we see the expression of a spiritual-psychic reality in a human face. In the movements of the planets, he sees manifestations of spiritual-soul events, just as one sees in the movements of human limbs the revelations of spiritual-soul impulses. And within these spiritual-soul aspects of what appears to us in the physical image of the outer physical sun, the outer physical moon, the stars, and their movements—within this spiritual-soul realm, which in the cosmos corresponds to the spiritual-soul realm of the individual human being—the human being lives, if he is a supersensible being, before he has descended into earthly existence. And just as I can say here as an earthly human being: “Within me live the lungs and the heart”—so can I, as a supraterrestrial human being, before I have descended into sensory-physical existence to constitute my physical body, say: ‘The moon and the sun live within me’—though I must be aware that I do not mean the sensory earthly reflection of the sun and moon, but rather that which underlies them as spiritual and soul-related. The entire divine-spiritual world interweaves with and permeates me as I exist in a super-earthly human existence. Only when one penetrates to the heart of this does one gain that deep reverence for all true cosmic existence into which the human being has been woven. For one now perceives the wondrous connections that exist between the human being and the universe. One learns to look at the human being as he stands in his physical earthly existence, and one learns to say to oneself: Within what is enclosed by the skin, there lives not only what you see with your physical eyes—what the anatomist can observe and unravel on the dissection table after death—but within it lives the ultimate goal of all cosmic activity. — The wondrous saying from ancient religious times—that the human being is an image of God Himself—takes on a new meaning of infinite depth. And inspired insight teaches us to look at what the human being actually experiences in connection with the spiritual-divine powers that underlie the cosmos during his pre-earthly existence.

[ 9 ] When we consider only earthly human life from a scientific perspective, we first speak of the human germ, which develops from the mother’s body into the physical human form of the growing child. We naturally refer to the embryo as something small that gradually grows larger. In a kind of embryonic state, the human being lives in its pre-earthly existence; only this embryo is the experience of the entire spiritual-soul cosmos. The human being has, so to speak, become one with the spiritual-soul cosmos; the divine-spiritual forces live within it, they act and weave within him, they permeate him, and they shape within him the great spiritual germ that contains the forces which must pass through spiritual existence up to birth or conception, so that they may then emerge again when the human being, as the inner sculptor, must shape his physical organism during earthly life. The miraculous formation of this physical organism thus becomes clear; for this physical organism is the fulfillment of that which the human being—in an immeasurably magnificent way, through spiritual-soul contemplation and with full awareness—experiences as the cosmic seed of his inner life. The human being receives the physical human seed from the physical world; the spiritual seed he receives from the spiritual world. And, in a sense, during a certain period before we descended into physical earthly existence, we were a gigantic spiritual-soul human seed poured out into the entire world, which then unites with the physical human seed that receives us here when we descend into earthly existence.

[ 10 ] We look toward our cosmic existence when, through inspired insight, we gaze with understanding into our pre-earthly existence. Just as we know ourselves to be one with our physical body here, so too, through this gaze, do we know ourselves to be one with the entire world. Here, in this world, human beings look upon the outer manifestations of the spiritual in nature and in human existence; behind these sensory-physical manifestations, they sense the divine-spiritual. In pre-earthly existence, human beings are permeated, surging through, and interwoven with this divine-spiritual existence, and this divine-spiritual existence manifests itself within them in such a way that it implants in them those forces that tend toward physical earthly existence. Just as we here lift our eyes to the wondrous starry sky, so do we, from our pre-earthly existence, turn our eyes toward the marvelous structure of the physical human being as he lives here in earthly existence. I would say that we look from earth to heaven in our physical earthly existence, but we look from heaven to earth in our pre-earthly existence. Then the Earth becomes understandable to us as the work of the gods, as it should actually live in our soul. And all of this is direct experience, first and foremost in our pre-earthly existence.

[ 11 ] But at a certain point, after we have gone through this pre-earthly existence, something occurs that is like a kind of withdrawal of the divine-spiritual beings from us humans. We do not yet have a physical world around us; after all, even in this spiritual-soul existence we still have no physical eyes, no physical organs, and so we could not yet perceive the physical world at all. We are surrounded by something that is merely a radiance of the divine-spiritual. This is the great turning point in pre-earthly existence: that we first experience a direct immersion in, being permeated by and united with the divine-spiritual existence; but then a moment arrives when we look with our spiritual eye upon the spiritual world that surrounds us—a world that is still a spiritual world, but we must tell ourselves: before, we lived with the divine-spiritual beings; now they reveal themselves to us through their deeds; now their manifestation is here. It is a spiritual-soul manifestation that we do not first experience in earthly life; rather, it is merely a revelation of what we ourselves have experienced before. We step out of the sphere of experience into the sphere of revelation. And to the same extent that we step out of experience into revelation—as we must tell ourselves: The divine-spiritual beings have withdrawn from us humans as far as direct experience is concerned, we can now only contemplate them; they are certainly present for us humans, but only for our spiritual-psychic contemplation—at that very moment, what I can compare to the desire that lives within our physical organism awakens in our spiritual-psychic pre-earthly existence. Human beings are inwardly permeated by a longing to the extent that the pre-earthly world becomes a revelation. It is only now, in fact, that they feel themselves to be a self that is separate from the rest of the world. We are moving away from an experience that is at once an experience of the world and an experience of our own human being. For a time, between death and a new birth, we are not merely human beings; we are beings of the world. World-consciousness and human consciousness merge into one. Then comes the moment when world-consciousness and human consciousness diverge, when the world is no longer experienced by us but merely reveals itself, when an inner life separate from the world emerges within us. Previously, our inner being was one with the world; now an inner being separate from the world emerges, and this first manifests as an inner longing, as a desire, as a will. A desire, a will, a longing always aims at something. This desire, this will, and this longing are directed toward our future earthly life, into which we will descend after some time. We are filled with visions of our future earthly life, and through them we absorb those forces that will then become unconscious as we pass through embryonic life on Earth. We are conscious of them there; but our consciousness becomes increasingly muted, and indeed there comes a point when desire grows strong, and when even the revelation of the divine-spiritual world in which we previously lived and wove our lives becomes increasingly obscured—a point where, as spiritual-soul beings in our pre-earthly existence, we must feel compelled to say to ourselves: The spiritual world around us is becoming ever more shadowy. What once shone brightly as divine revelation is becoming ever more shadowy. As the outer world becomes increasingly shadowy, our inner forces of desire grow more intense; the outer world darkens for us within our spiritual existence, while the inner world becomes more powerful; but after some time, this powerful inner world completely robs us of our awareness of our future earthly life. For a time not long before earthly conception, our view of earthly existence grows dim. We had previously looked toward this earthly existence; it was, so to speak, the vision of our destination, that magnificent, powerful cosmic tableau in which we had lived. Now our view of the earth fades, but in its place a different vision opens up to us. It is not long before we descend to Earth, but just as we descend, our view of the Earth fades, and our gaze turns toward the etheric world. What the etheric phenomena are—those that contain light, those that contain the life forces—what is spread out in space, not rising centrally from the Earth into space, but rather acting upon the Earth, pouring in as if from the periphery of the world—the etheric—becomes vivid to us. Just as in a vast cosmic nebula containing the most diverse forms, an etheric world becomes spiritually visible around us; and from this etheric world, using the power that remains to us—the power of desire—we can draw our own etheric body from the general etheric cosmic nebula, shape it, and by shaping our own etheric body, we form with it an image of what we once were in the spiritual-soul world; we integrate this etheric body into what is presented to us through hereditary development—the physical substance bequeathed to us by our ancestors—and we descend into earthly existence.

[ 12 ] I have been able to describe to you only in broad strokes what emerges for imaginative and inspired insight when a person expands their consciousness beyond ordinary earthly consciousness. As human beings have progressed in the course of earthly evolution to the consciousness they possess today—which is bound in the strictest sense to the physical body—they have lost a primordial consciousness. I have, in fact, pointed this out on several occasions. I have pointed out how history actually describes for us only the external aspects of humanity’s earthly life, how we need a history of the soul, and how this history of the soul shows us that human beings have not always had a state of consciousness such as we have today, in which they can use only their intellect to process what the sense organs perceive, and where they can bring up into consciousness only what rises from the physical body. The further back we go into humanity’s earlier times, the more we see how people possessed a kind of primal, albeit dreamlike, clairvoyance. What people today attain through imaginative and inspired insight is a fully conscious form of knowledge—I would say as fully conscious as mathematical knowledge; the people of earlier times, however, possessed a dim, dreamlike clairvoyance that was nonetheless no less imbued with wisdom. These people of earlier times not only sensed what modern humans experience with ordinary consciousness when they look within themselves, but they also intuitively perceived something of what I have just described to you. If we go back even further to the earliest Egyptian times, to even older times of which there are no documents of external history—but only a history such as I have presented in my *Secret Science*—then we find people who did not have to acquire the ability to perceive pre-earthly existence through exercises such as those I have often described to you, but who were able to speak of this pre-earthly existence because something of it lived in their souls during their earthly existence, like a memory. Modern human beings on Earth have earned their freedom by the fact that they can have only a memory, in the form of abstract thoughts, of the events and experiences they encounter during their earthly existence. Humanity in earlier primeval times not only had such memories living in their souls, but by looking into this soul life, they drew forth from the soul—in addition to these memories of this physical life—images of what I have just told you. Just as people today, in their ordinary consciousness, remember what they experienced on Earth twenty or thirty years ago, so, in a certain sense, a person from earlier epochs remembered what they had experienced in their pre-earthly existence—and what I have described to you today from the perspective of spiritual science. But just as a person today is certain of this pre-earthly existence—just as a person today is certain, through their memory, that they were not born this morning but were already here before this morning—so too did people of earlier epochs know of their pre-earthly existence through what they experienced in their souls. But from this also arose the certainty that what they experienced as such already existed in a spiritual-soul world before they descended into physical earthly existence; that it passes through the gate of death and is not dependent on the physical organism; that just as it builds up the physical organism for earthly existence, it continues to exist once the gate of death has been passed through.

[ 13 ] But what is it that emerges from physical earthly existence? What we experience here in our physical earthly existence as thoughts is, of course, bound to the physical organism; yet that which wells up from within the human being as will in such a wondrous way that he can actually grasp his manifestations of will only in thoughts, only in mental images, and can only say: “I want to raise my hand or my arm”—but does not know what takes place between these thoughts and the actual raising of the arm—this whole miracle that lies in between, the tensing of the muscle—all of that is, after all, situated in the unconscious, just as the events of the life of sleep are for the soul; that which arises as will remains largely unconscious; that is to say, it is reflected only in the life of thought. But whoever looks down into this life of the will with inspired and intuitive insight makes tremendous discoveries within it. Here in physical earthly existence, which we view only from the outside, we carry out our actions, and a materialistic age could even believe that these actions are exhausted in physical earthly existence, that they have no further significance.

[ 14 ] But whoever looks down into the true nature of the human will—which remains hidden from ordinary everyday consciousness—sees there how, not out of thinking but out of willing, and to the same extent that a person progresses in physical life on Earth, something is formed that consists of the evaluation of their actions. In physical earthly existence, we say: an action is good, an action is evil; we are satisfied or dissatisfied with a particular deed. We may perhaps believe that this is merely an abstract judgment that we attach to the deed. If we look into the human being’s volitional essence with our truly genuine inspiration and intuition, we see how, out of what is here merely a thought, a real being is woven—how the judgment: “I can be satisfied with an action”—or: “I must be dissatisfied”—which, in accordance with the will, becomes a fact within us, as a whole being weaves itself together in the depths of our human nature—a being that, if I may put it this way, has a face, depending on what our actions were here in earthly life. If we have committed bad deeds with which we cannot be satisfied in full human consciousness, then a being with an ugly face develops within us; if we have committed deeds with which we can be satisfied, then a being with a sympathetic face develops. In fact, the assessment of our actions becomes an inner being within us, and to the same extent that our thoughts become more and more dependent on the physical organism—in a child they were not yet so, for they were working on the physical organization, then they become abstract—to the same extent that, I would say, our thoughts in our physical organism become a corpse—for they do not live; they are dead thoughts—to that same extent the moral essence of the human being stirs within, an essence that he himself develops during his life. This moral essence is present, and this moral essence unites with his “I”-essence, and he now carries this moral essence through the gate of death into the spiritual world. As the human being steps through the gate of death into the spiritual world, he has first—as you can read in my book *Theosophy*—laid aside his physical body; he is in his etheric body, and there he still has a consciousness of his earthly deeds. But this consciousness begins to be permeated by a cosmic, universal consciousness. The etheric body dissolves into the general world ether; just as it was contracted and hard before birth, it now dissolves into the world ether. The human being lives with what you will find referred to in my *Theosophy* as the astral body; with it, he gradually reintegrates himself into the cosmos, but he still lives together with his newly formed moral-spiritual organism; he carries this with him at first, and it is with this that he lives his way out.

[ 15 ] And now a task arises for him that is connected to what I already told you last time I spoke to you here regarding the human life of sleep: I explained to you how, during sleep, the human being has the power to re-enter the physical organism, and that this power comes from what can be called the lunar forces. The lunar forces are what bring the human being back into physical earthly existence—even every morning. A human being is initially within this sphere of lunar forces once they have shed their physical and etheric bodies. But within these lunar forces, they cannot attain the all-encompassing world consciousness that I described to you earlier; rather, the human being still has something there that connects them to the Earth through this moral Earth organism. They must tear themselves away from the lunar forces; they must leave behind in the lunar sphere what they have woven for themselves there out of their moral conduct—out of all that they have accomplished as moral or immoral acts—they must leave that behind in the lunar sphere and penetrate into the solar sphere, into the world of the stars. Now he must penetrate not only into the image, as I have described it for the state of sleep, but into the truly real world of the sun and the stars; he must tear himself away from the lunar sphere.

[ 16 ] Primitive humanity also had an experience of this through its clairvoyant consciousness and was able to speak of these things, which people today can attain only by developing their spiritual and soul powers. Primitive humanity was able to speak of these things through the natural elemental forces that were inherent in them. But at the same time, this primitive humanity was always guided—just as people today are guided by science, or by various educational institutions (which, of course, did not exist in earlier times)—this humanity in earlier times was guided by what emanated from the Mysteries. What human beings could perceive of pre-earthly and post-earthly existence was, in a sense, guided by what the initiates of the Mysteries knew through their higher knowledge. And there the members of primeval humanity learned what became an inner experience for some who were “knowing” in the sense of that time: that human beings cannot, by their own power, break free from the lunar sphere after death; that a spiritual being from the cosmos—whose outer physical reflection is the Sun—must come to meet them. This being must come to meet him; it must snatch him away from the lunar sphere. He must leave behind what he carries with him from Earth as guilt; he must be led up into the guilt-free sphere of the cosmos by what the ancient initiates called the high solar being, which found a wondrous description in all the ancient mysteries. “You need,” people used to say to human beings back then, “the power that comes to meet you from the heavens.” — But human beings were organized differently back then—as I have already hinted at today, how differently human beings were organized back then—they possessed clairvoyant powers within themselves; they knew on Earth, through inner perception, that a supersensible world existed. He actually had no real fear of death; for what was death, after all? An experience in life; he saw that within him there was something independent of death. He possessed within his body that which was independent, and because he possessed it within his body, he could see how the solar being came to meet him; he could accept help after death.

[ 17 ] But this is the essence of humanity’s earthly progress: that human beings have, through natural means, lost their perception of their Eternal Self. Humanity has attained an intellectual consciousness that is entirely bound to the physical body and dependent on it; depending on how the physical body is organized, we have earthly consciousness. This earthly consciousness obscures the spiritual world from us, even before we are born and after we die. For people today, it is not as it was for primitive humans or even for people in ancient Egypt, who brought a certain light with them through the gate of death and could illuminate the space—if I may put it that way; this is only a figure of speech—of the supersensible world, and, in a sense, rush to meet the high solar being who comes to lead him out of the lunar sphere. Through what he carried within himself between birth and death, he was able to recognize this high solar being.

[ 18 ] You see, you need not take offense at the term; based on their knowledge, the ancient initiates called this being the “high solar being.” But there came a time in the development of humanity when humanity would have lost the ability to enter, after death, those worlds into which it must enter if it does not wish to lose itself. On the other hand, humanity on Earth had to advance to that level of consciousness in which one can acquire, as a human being, freedom and nothing else. As a result, a terrible state would have befallen humanity at a certain point in time. The terrible state that would have befallen humanity would have been that people would have been cut off from the supersensible world; that precisely through the perfection they attain here on Earth—which predestines them for freedom— they would have lost the supersensible world, because they could no longer find a connection to that spiritual being who snatches them away from what binds them to the earth for life after death.

[ 19 ] And what has actually contributed to humanity’s further progress? Neither external, abstract knowledge nor theory could help. The only thing that could help was that the Being who had previously lived only in the supersensible worlds—and who met human beings when they were in the supersensible realm between death and birth—could help only if that Being descended to Earth, so that human beings on Earth could already establish a connection with Him while still on Earth. And this descent is the event of Golgotha. The Christ Being descended and took on an earthly existence in Jesus of Nazareth.

[ 20 ] During their earthly existence, human beings develop a connection with Christ Jesus. That which they add to their earthly consciousness by looking toward Christ Jesus, by empathizing with and sharing in the suffering of the Mystery of Golgotha—that which they thus infuse into their earthly consciousness, not merely by calling themselves an “I” that can be free, but by fulfilling Paul’s words: “Not I, but Christ in me”—he was able to make this word a reality here in earthly life by connecting the “I” he attains here—which would otherwise cut him off from the supersensible world—with that which, through the sacrifice, has entered earthly existence through the Christ Being: this is what the human being carries through death. The ability that was previously granted to him only through the elemental forces within him: since the Mystery of Golgotha, it is the connection of the earthly human being—in his consciousness, in his soul life—with Christ, with the Mystery of Golgotha, that secures his life as he passes through the gate of death. For the consciousness one gains through the physical body would also have to be lost along with the physical body; one would not find the way through the spiritual worlds. If one finds the Guide on Earth—that is, the Christ who passed through the Mystery of Golgotha—and has united one’s spiritual powers with Earthly humanity in the spirit of Paul’s words: “Not I, but Christ in me,” then one finds oneself passing alive through the gate of death. Therefore, Paul’s words can be taken in all seriousness: And if Christ had not come to Earth—that is, if He had not overcome death—nothing would help people in their faith.

[ 21 ] The ancient initiates told humanity: A superterrestrial being will connect with the consciousness you possess here through your entire human nature, and will lead you out of the lunar existence into the pure cosmic existence of the world. — The newer initiates must tell humanity: Look to what took place through Christ in the Mystery of Golgotha; take into your consciousness the substance of Christ with all its power! It will accompany you through death and lead you toward those worlds you must pass through between death and a new birth. In the lunar sphere, you will leave behind your moral being, only to find it again when you return to the lunar sphere. And in your earthly destiny, the image of what you have first left behind and will then find again in the lunar sphere will appear.

[ 22 ] Of what I can now tell you, human science—through natural human science—has only become aware through those forces that came to humanity in the last third of the 19th century. Previously, these powers were more or less obscured within humanity. They were still there, but as a dreamlike remnant from the ancient times I just described to you. In the early Christian centuries, people did not possess what we can attain today through imagination, inspiration, and intuition, but they did possess a natural, atavistic clairvoyance, and there were still ancient initiates at the time of the Mystery of Golgotha; they were able to tell the people who trusted them: “The Christ who was in that world which you remember as the time of your pre-earthly existence—the Christ who was formerly only in extraterrestrial spheres—has descended to Earth through the Cross of Golgotha.” —That is why, during the first four centuries of Christian development, even in the West, attention was focused above all on the descended Christ. Everywhere in the accounts of the first centuries after Christ—though much of the literature has been destroyed—you will find descriptions of how Christ descended from cosmic and spiritual worlds and took on an earthly existence in the body of Jesus of Nazareth. At that time, the greatest emphasis was placed on this descent, on this turning toward the earth. But when, in the fourth century A.D., the old initiates began to die out and the new science of initiation had not yet emerged—which could only come with the last third of the 19th century, after these old initiates had passed away—it became necessary to codify in the documents what had previously been a direct experience. It had to be passed on through tradition; in order to attain a sense of freedom, people had to forget the ancient science of initiation for a time. Consequently, the closer humanity came to the nineteenth century, the more it was forgotten how the superterrestrial Christ Being had descended into earthly existence and taken on an earthly life in the body of Jesus of Nazareth. In the end, people looked only at the historical event, and they gradually lost sight of the Christ in Jesus; they forgot how to speak of the Christ as a supersensible being. Today we must begin again to speak of the Christ as a supersensible being; we must understand what it means that the Christ sustains the human soul; for the body has changed in the course of human evolution. Why did people in ancient times possess clairvoyance? Because the body was more supple and the glands within the human body were still more active. Glandular activity, in particular, has become increasingly rigid, and the more this hardening progresses—the more the human body hardens and glandular activity becomes more rigid—the more what serves as a hardened human body becomes extraordinarily useful to the intellect, which is being developed more and more as glandular activity in the human body hardens; the human body itself, as such, becomes exceptionally useful to the intellect. But human beings must all the more acquire the connection with the spiritual world through the soul. The initiates of the early Christian centuries were still aware of all this; they simply expressed these things with a courage that is no longer found in speech today. They said that people would have gradually become physically sicker and sicker had Christ not come and healed them from the soul onward. Therefore, in the early Christian centuries, Christ was not only venerated in our abstraction, but above all as the Healer, as the great Physician of the Worlds, as the Savior.

[ 23 ] Today, all these things must be regained; they can only be regained if human beings can once again look into the mysteries of birth and death. The ability to look into these mysteries of birth and death can only be attained through imaginative, inspired, and intuitive science. We must gradually come to know of this; for whoever comes to know of it also begins to gain a spiritual insight into it.

[ 24 ] That is what I had to say to you today about the connection between human beings and those worlds that they leave at birth and re-enter at death.