The Rudolf Steiner Archive

10. Accurate Knowledge of the Supernatural Worlds in the Spirit of Anthroposophical Spiritual Science

[ 1 ] There is no doubt that a large number of people today long to know something about the spiritual and supersensible worlds, and even men of science have, in recent times, frequently sought ways to gain insight into the supersensible world. Yet in all these attempts to enter the supersensible world, modern people are always hindered by what modern science imposes as a standard of judgment—by the authority inherent in modern science. And when faced with many a source from which one believes one can draw knowledge of the supersensible world, the judgment prevails: “Yes, but there can be no exact knowledge—such as we are accustomed to developing in science—of the supersensible worlds, for none of this holds up.” In contrast, the anthroposophical spiritual science, about which I shall take the liberty of speaking to you today and in the coming days, strives for a truly exact knowledge of the supersensible world. An exact understanding not achieved by conducting experiments in the same sense as in the science of the external world, but rather by developing the soul’s inner faculties—which otherwise lie dormant in human beings in everyday life and in ordinary science—in such a way that, throughout this entire process, human discernment is maintained just as it is in exact science. So while in exact science one retains one’s consciousness as it is in ordinary life and then adheres strictly to the methods of investigating the external world, in anthroposophical spiritual science one proceeds in such a way that one eventually submits to what I would like to call “intellectual humility,” by saying to oneself: You were once a child; back then you had abilities that did not even remotely come close to those you now possess as an adult—abilities you have acquired through education and through life. — Just as one has developed certain abilities from childhood that were simply not there before, so one can tell oneself that there may also be abilities in the adult that lie dormant, just as one’s present abilities lay dormant in the soul of the child. And through certain methods, one can draw these abilities out of the soul.

[ 2 ] Now, in the case of anthroposophical spiritual science—which is what is meant here—these abilities must be drawn out of the soul in such a way that the methods one then applies to one’s own development before proceeding to gain insight are carried out precisely within that very development. One thus prepares oneself for looking into the higher world in such a way that the preparation one applies to oneself presupposes a precise method. That is why, as I already mentioned in my last lectures here in this hall, one can attain precise clairvoyance in this way. It is acquired in a precise manner, just as one otherwise explores nature in a precise manner using ordinary knowledge.

[ 3 ] Today I will have less to say about how to acquire this exact form of clairvoyance. I will mention this topic occasionally, since I have already spoken in the previous lectures I mentioned about the methods by which one attains precise clairvoyance, and one can learn about these methods specifically from the book that has been translated into English and bears the title *The Way of Initiation*.

[ 4 ] Today, however, I would first like to draw attention to what prevents human beings in everyday life from entering the higher worlds. Above all, they are prevented from doing so because they can only perceive the world in the present moment. Through our eyes, we can see the world and its phenomena only in the present moment. Through our ears, we can hear sounds only in the present moment. And so it is with all our senses. Everything that belongs to the past of our own earthly life, we can know only through memory—that is, through faded thoughts. Just compare how vivid and concrete our experiences were ten years ago, and how pale and shadowy the thought is with which we recall them today.

[ 5 ] And so, for the ordinary human consciousness, everything that extends beyond the present moment can exist within it only as a shadowy memory. But this shadowy memory can be kindled and stirred into a higher life. And this is achieved through those methods which, as I said, I do not wish to discuss in detail today—through the method of mental meditation, concentration on thoughts, self-education, and so on.

[ 6 ] Anyone who applies such methods to themselves—through which they learn to live just as intensely in thought as one otherwise does only through external sensory impressions—acquires a certain ability, which consists in being able to perceive the world beyond the present moment. Such exercises, which lead to the ability to view the world beyond the present moment, must, however, be carried out over a long period of time—depending on the individual’s aptitudes—through careful, systematic, and indeed precise meditation and concentration. Some people, especially in the present age, are born with the ability that can be developed in this way. That is to say, it is not present at birth in such a way that it can manifest itself, but it emerges from within at a certain point in life, and one knows that one would not have acquired it in ordinary life if one had not already possessed it at birth. This ability consists in being able to live within one’s thoughts just as one otherwise lives in the sensory world through one’s body.

[ 7 ] One should not take such a statement too lightly. One should bear in mind that human beings owe everything by which they attribute existence to themselves to their experience of the sensory world. When a person reaches the point where, without relying on the impressions of the eyes, the ears, or other senses, yet develops an inner life that is now as intensely lived inwardly as the life of the senses otherwise is—an inner life that does not merely exist in shadowy thoughts but in thoughts that are inwardly alive, such that one experiences these thoughts just as one otherwise experiences sensory impressions—then one does indeed experience a second existence; then one experiences a different kind of self-consciousness. One experiences precisely what I would like to call: awakening—not outside the body, but awakening to life within the human being, even though the physical body is as still and as unresponsive through the senses as it is otherwise only during sleep.

[ 8 ] When we look within ourselves, we find that in ordinary life we actually know only what we have taken in through the senses. We know nothing of our own inner being through direct perceptions. Through ordinary consciousness, we cannot look into our inner organization. When we acquire self-awareness through pure thought, we learn to look inward just as we are otherwise able to look outward.

[ 9 ] Then we feel something like this: When we normally look outward, there must be the sun or some light that casts its rays onto the objects around us. Through this light, which is outside of us, we see the objects around us. When we become conscious in this second state of existence—a pure thought process, which is, however, a process of perception as vivid and intense as sensory perception—then we experience, so to speak—indeed, not merely so to speak, but in the true sense of the word, though the “sense” here is meant in a spiritual sense— we perceive an inner light, a light through which we shine into our own inner being just as objects are otherwise illuminated by external lights.

[ 10 ] That is why this state of human experience can be called clairvoyance. And this clairvoyance, which arises from awakened self-awareness in the spirit, first and foremost gives one the ability to return to every moment one has ever experienced on Earth.

[ 11 ] For example, one can quite clearly experience this: You were eighteen years old, and at that age you went through this or that experience. — But one does not merely have a memory of these experiences; one actually relives them to a greater or lesser degree. Once again, you are the person you were at eighteen, or at fifteen, or at ten. You can transport yourself back to every moment of your life, and through this you arrive at an inner, enlightened perception of what might be called a “time body”—in contrast to the “spatial body” that contains our senses and provides us with external perception.

[ 12 ] But this “time-body” is suddenly there. It is not that one experiences it in successive moments; it is simply there all at once. It is there in its inner fluidity. One surveys one’s entire earthly life up to that point, just as one would otherwise only recall this earthly life in vague, shadowy thoughts. One examines one’s entire earthly journey, but in such a way that one stands within every moment of it.

[ 13 ] When one experiences this inner enlightenment, one knows that one does not merely carry this physical human body, this spatial body, within oneself. One knows that the human being carries within a second, more subtle body—a body that is actually woven from the images of one’s earthly life thus far, but from images that simultaneously creatively shape this earthly life itself: namely, they shape our organism and our activities—our organism in which we exist, and the activities we have carried out. In this way, one comes to know a second human being within oneself.

[ 14 ] And this second human being, whom one comes to know in this way, is perceived as actually experiencing himself—just as the physical body experiences itself in a physical world—in a finer, ethereal, I might say, luminous world. The world is there once again. The world is present in finer forms. Everything physical is underpinned by finer, ethereal forms, which one perceives in this way.

[ 15 ] And one experiences the peculiar fact that one can retain only for a short time everything one experiences in this finer body. It is usually the case that the person who has acquired this precise clairvoyance—and thereby has illuminated his etheric body, or body of formative forces, as I might also call it—perceives the etheric aspect of the world and the etheric aspect of himself, but at the same time must recognize how incredibly quickly these impressions vanish. One cannot hold on to them. One feels a kind of anxiety to return quickly to the perceptions of the physical body, so that one may have an inner stability as a human being, as a personality. And one experiences oneself in one’s etheric body. One also experiences things of the higher world in this etheric body—that which is etheric in the higher world. But at the same time, one sees how fleeting all these impressions are; one cannot hold onto them for long; one can only hold onto them by helping oneself in some way.

[ 16 ] I would like to give an example of how I help myself to prevent the impressions of this ethereal vision from fading away too quickly: Every time such impressions arise, I try not only to observe them, but also to write them down; so that the activity being carried out is not merely performed through the abstract faculties of the soul, but is preserved through the act of writing it down. It is not important to read these things later, but it is important to infuse a stronger activity into the one that is initially a purely ethereal one.

[ 17 ] In this way, one pours—so to speak—that which is immensely fleeting and fluid, and which quickly slips away, into one’s ordinary human faculties. None of this happens unconsciously, as it does with a medium; rather, it happens with full consciousness. But one pours all of this into one’s ordinary human physical faculties. In this way, one can hold onto it. This also enables one to grasp something very important. One is enabled to understand how to grasp, first of all, a supersensible-etheric world—we will speak later of other supersensible worlds—but a supersensible-etheric world that encompasses oneself in one’s life so far and that encompasses the etheric aspect of external nature all the way up to the world of the stars. One comes to know this etheric world. One learns to experience oneself within this etheric world; and one knows that, without returning to the physical body, it is impossible to hold onto this world for longer than two or three days at most. If one has developed these abilities to a very high degree, one is able to hold onto this world for two or three days. And since one can then, as a modern initiate, survey all of this through the means I will discuss shortly, one also knows how to assess what it is that one holds onto there—without relying on physical faculties—in one’s etheric body or in one’s body of formative forces. It is that which, when a person passes through the gate of death out of the physical body—which decays and is cast off—is first perceived from one’s higher self-consciousness, and which, for this reason, cannot remain within human self-consciousness for longer than two to three days after the death of the physical body.

[ 18 ] Through the practice of exact clairvoyance, one experiences the initial states that occur in human beings after death; one experiences them because one has already experienced them in advance with full awareness.

[ 19 ] What the initiate experiences in advance through insight now occurs in every human being when they shed their physical body. But the human being would otherwise have no consciousness—though he does, in fact, have consciousness after death, as I will explain later—the human being would have no consciousness during the entire time in which he is able to retain his etheric or formative body through higher knowledge, that is, for two to three days.

[ 20 ] Two to three days after death, a person thus has a consciousness of the etheric world that resides in the etheric body. Then they shed this consciousness. They experience how the etheric body, so to speak, falls away from them, just as the physical body fell away before, and how they must transition into a different state of consciousness in order to continue living after death as a conscious human being.

[ 21 ] What I am describing to you here as, so to speak, the very first moments—for in relation to existence beyond the world, these are indeed the very first moments—can be affirmed by anyone who has acquired the ability to glimpse into the higher world, because they experience in advance what normally occurs in human life after death. Because they have acquired that strong sense of self-awareness that is no longer dependent on the physical body, they experience these moments immediately after death already within this state of consciousness.

[ 22 ] He comes to shed light on his own higher life, and through this he comes to recognize that light within himself, whereby, in the first two to three days after death, he finds himself in a world that is different from the one we experience when we look out at our surroundings through our senses during our earthly life between birth and death.

[ 23 ] I intend to discuss in more detail what happens after these days, once this part of the lecture has been translated.

[ 24 ] To gain an overview of the supersensible aspect of one’s earthly life—which, as I have said, continues to exist in its own way for several days after death—one needs the inner enlightenment described above. One must, so to speak, kindle within oneself the spiritual light that shines inward. Then one transcends the mere perception of the present moment, as is possible through the senses.

[ 25 ] In order to gain further insights into the supersensible world, it is necessary not only for a person’s state of perception to change, but also for their very condition of life to change. In ordinary life, we humans exist in such a state that our lives are confined within our physical bodies. The boundaries of our skin are at the same time the boundaries of our lives. Our lives extend only as far as our bodies do. Within such a state of experience, one cannot go beyond what I have described so far regarding insights into the higher worlds. One can only transcend ordinary experience to gain insights into the higher worlds by acquiring an experience that is not confined within the boundaries of the physical body, but rather one that experiences the entire world that otherwise surrounds us.

[ 26 ] And such direct experience can also be attained for the purpose of gaining insight into the higher worlds. As I have already said, I merely wish to mention a few of the methods used by the modern initiate through which he precisely attains knowledge of the higher worlds. The rest can be found in the aforementioned work.

[ 27 ] If one not only acquires the ability to lead a second existence in one’s inner life—one that remains confined within the physical body—but also acquires the ability to live outside one’s body, by not merely allowing thoughts to live intensely within one’s consciousness, but also by being able to systematically remove them from one’s consciousness through practice, then one attains this state of experience outside the body. I will describe a simple exercise.

[ 28 ] Suppose one is looking at a crystal. Through one’s eyes, this crystal is right in front of one. Someone who merely wants to be a medium or to induce a kind of hypnosis stares at this crystal, and the impression the crystal makes on them plunges them into a state of recklessness. Anthroposophical spiritual science has nothing to do with this. It must resort to entirely different exercises. For it, the point is that, by looking at a crystal, one ultimately comes to look beyond it, to abstract from it, just as one otherwise abstracts from thoughts. Thus, one has a crystal before one and learns through it not to look at it physically, but to look through it spiritually, so that one does not use one’s eyes to look at it, even though they are wide open, and one shapes one’s spiritual perception in such a way that one no longer has the crystal before one, that one removes it from one’s field of vision, One can also perform these exercises by “removing” a color that is in front of one, so that, even though it is there, one no longer sees it.

[ 29 ] And so one can, in particular, perform exercises aimed at dispelling thoughts that arise in the present moment due to external life, or that were experienced in earlier moments of earthly life and now surface as memories—dispelling such thoughts and emptying one’s consciousness of them, so that one is merely awake and has virtually nothing from the external world in one’s consciousness.

[ 30 ] When one does such exercises, one discovers within oneself the ability to no longer remain confined within the boundaries of one’s physical body, but to go beyond it. One then experiences the life of the entire environment, which one would otherwise only observe through its sensory manifestations.

[ 31 ] As a result, something arises—above all in a completely clear-headed state of consciousness—that I can compare to a memory of the life one spends in sleep, of the life one spends from the moment one falls asleep until one wakes up. Just as one finds oneself limited to the present moment in ordinary perception, so too does one find oneself limited, in ordinary life, to what one has always experienced while awake.

[ 32 ] Just think: when you look back on your life, the times you spend asleep are, for ordinary consciousness, empty. Whatever the soul has experienced from the moment of falling asleep until waking up does not appear in memory, so that in memory we actually always have an interrupted flow. We just don’t always take note of it.

[ 33 ] But what the soul experiences each time between falling asleep and waking up stands before the consciousness—which has awakened to such an extent that the human being can live outside of their body—like an intense memory. This marks the beginning of the second stage of knowledge of the supersensible worlds, and we can first become aware of what we go through as a soul when our body—our physical body—remains at rest, as if soulless, without perception or expressions of will, sleeping peacefully. Through this, we can, in a sense, recall in our ordinary daily life what we have experienced outside the body each time between falling asleep and waking up. We must simply be clear that what occurs there must be judged by us in the right way. We come to understand, after all, that what the soul experiences from falling asleep until waking up takes place outside the body. We can only observe it if we are able to develop a consciousness—a state of being—outside the body. And we are now not only coming to know something that is, so to speak, illuminated by an inner light—such as our own temporal body, as I have described it—but we are now learning, in the day-memory that has risen to this precise, higher form of clairvoyance, to recognize what we actually experience each time between falling asleep and waking up. At first, however, this experience is somewhat startling. Just as we live in our physical body in ordinary consciousness during daily life—with lungs, a heart, and so on within us—so, from the moment we fall asleep until we wake up, we do not in fact possess a personal human consciousness, but rather a cosmic consciousness. We have a consciousness as if—as paradoxical as it sounds, this is evident to the contemplative mind—replicas of the worlds of the planets and stars were living within us. We feel ourselves to be part of the cosmic life. We view the world, so to speak, from the perspective of the cosmic life.

[ 34 ] And by experiencing inwardly within ourselves what is otherwise around us, we go through—in reverse, as it were, in the actual state of life—every time we sleep, everything we have lived through here in physical life from the time we last woke up until we fell asleep.

[ 35 ] So, for example, if we have regularly stayed awake for a whole day and then sleep at night, it becomes apparent that, as we begin to fall asleep, we relive our most recent experiences—those we had in the evening before falling asleep—in reverse order, followed by those from earlier in the afternoon. And so we relive the entire day in reverse throughout the night.

[ 36 ] As I said, the point of the exact clairvoyance I have been discussing here is that one has this recollection of these nocturnal experiences in ordinary daily life. Just as one recalls in ordinary memory what one experienced in waking consciousness years ago, so too can one, through exact clairvoyance, experience this retrospective view of daily life. And so, in fact, one has before oneself something like an expanded memory in this exact clairvoyance. One looks back on one’s experiences during sleep. One knows that while asleep one experiences life outside the physical body; that one is in a real world-entity which, in a sense, holds an afterimage of the entire world within its consciousness; and that within such a world-entity, one relives one’s own waking life in reverse. And one then also discovers that this waking life, when experienced in reverse, does not take as long as it does here in the physical world. As one gradually becomes a true researcher in this field—that is, in a systematic way—one comes to know these things more and more through precise experience; one learns to recognize how this backward experience proceeds three times as fast as physical experience in ordinary consciousness. Thus, someone who is awake for about two-thirds of their time and sleeps for one-third of the time also experiences, within that one-third of the time, what they went through during the two-thirds spent in physical existence. In this way, one comes to know a life that the human being unfolds outside of their body, a life that unfolds in reverse at three times the speed.

[ 37 ] By recalling this nocturnal, sleeping life through precise clairvoyance in ordinary daily life, one knows at the same time that this recollection of the sleeping life has no meaning of its own. What one experiences in daytime consciousness through precise clairvoyance is already a memory. But what one recalls as sleep experiences shows that it has no meaning of its own, but only a preliminary meaning. And that is how it is. Ask yourself: How do you assess a memory of an experience you had twenty years ago? — You tell yourself: I am reliving it in shadowy thoughts. But this memory, by its very nature, offers me the guarantee that I am not dealing with a fantasy, but rather that it is a reflection of what I truly and actually experienced once in the past of my earthly life. Just as the memory contains within itself a guarantee that it refers to something entirely different that truly lies in the past, so too does that which one regards as a nocturnal experience carry within itself the guarantee that it has no meaning of its own, but rather points to something in the future.

[ 38 ] There is no need to prove to memory that it relates to the past. Nor, once one has attained exact clairvoyance, is there any need to prove to oneself—based on what one perceives from one’s nocturnal experiences—that it is not a figment of the present. One can see that it relates to the future of the human being—specifically, to that future in which the human being will have truly shed his physical body upon death, just as he has now shed it only figuratively through exact clairvoyance.

[ 39 ] And through this, one learns to recognize what a person experiences after death, once they have completed the three days I spoke of. Yes, through this process—which is similar to recollection—one also comes to understand the significance of the two to three days following death, during which one feels as if in a universal consciousness, a cosmic consciousness, where one now surveys one’s own etheric body once more from the perspective of the cosmos, looking back on what one has lived through during one’s earthly life. And one comes to recognize what one experiences afterward—namely, that the event of death is followed by a life that unfolds three times as quickly as earthly life. One has, after all, come to know this through the contemplation of nocturnal experiences.

[ 40 ] It is known that the ethereal state, which lasts only a short time after death, is followed by a life that lasts twenty, thirty years, or even less, depending on how old a person became during their earthly life. Roughly—and all of this is, of course, approximate—this life unfolds three times as quickly as earthly life. So if someone lived to be thirty years old, they will experience the life I am referring to after death three times as quickly—that is, in ten years. If someone lived to be sixty years old, they will relive their life in reverse after death in twenty years; but all of this is approximate.

[ 41 ] All of this is perceived—just as a past experience is recognized through memory—in exact clairvoyance. And so we come to realize that our death is followed by a supersensible experience, an experience in the supersensible world that is a re-living in reverse of our entire earthly life. Every night we relive the previous day. After our death, we experience our entire earthly life in reverse. We go through everything again. And by reliving everything we have experienced in our earthly life in a spiritual form, we arrive at an accurate judgment of our own moral worth.

[ 42 ] Through this period we go through after death, we, in a sense, develop an awareness of our moral personality and our moral worth, just as we acquire an awareness here on Earth of life in the flesh and blood. After death, we live as the moral beings we were here on Earth. By reliving all events in reverse order—and thereby no longer being distracted from moral judgment by our instincts, drives, and passions, but instead surveying them purely spiritually—we come to know an accurate, correct judgment of our own moral character.

[ 43 ] This assessment requires the period of time I just mentioned. Once we have spent this time after death, our inner moral life—the recollection of our moral worth on Earth—fades away, and we must continue on through the spiritual worlds with a different consciousness, one that can now also be perceived through precise clairvoyance.

[ 44 ] It is then necessary for the human being not only to learn to live outside of his physical body, but also to learn to live in a state of consciousness entirely different from the one he experiences here within the physical world. Then the human being learns to recognize how, following the experience of his moral quality during one-third of his previous earthly life, a supersensible, spiritual experience follows. He learns to recognize what follows. This is then followed by another, purely spiritual life. To achieve this, however, one must first attain the ability for exact clairvoyance to rise from ordinary consciousness to a pure, higher consciousness and to learn to fully assess this higher consciousness.

[ 45 ] So I have tried to describe two states after death to you. I will describe the third one immediately afterward, once the previous description has been translated.

[ 46 ] If you consider this insight into the experience of moving backward in time during sleep, as I have described it, you will see that in this experience of moving backward in time, a person does indeed have a life outside of their physical body; they are, so to speak, outside of themselves, beside themselves. But this life is, I would say, such that one cannot move within it. Essentially, one must carry out—only in the opposite direction—what one has carried out during ordinary daytime consciousness. And even the person who, through precise clairvoyance, gains a supersensory insight into these experiences I have spoken of feels as if spellbound in a world that they recall in the daytime consciousness of clairvoyance, but in which they cannot move—a world in which they are confined, bound. What one must attain as a third state of higher knowledge and higher life is free movement in the spiritual world. Otherwise, one cannot enter into the knowledge of the purely spiritual, the purely supersensible consciousness.

[ 47 ] In addition to exact clairvoyance, one must acquire what I will refer to as “ideal magic.” This must be clearly distinguished from false magic, which is performed externally and is associated with much charlatanism; what I now mean by “ideal magic” must be clearly distinguished from that.

[ 48 ] By this “ideal magic” I mean the following: When a person looks back on their life from the perspective of ordinary consciousness, they see how, in a certain sense, they have actually become a different person with each passing year and decade. Their habits have changed, albeit slowly. We have acquired certain abilities, and certain abilities have also disappeared. Anyone who takes an honest look at themselves with regard to certain abilities of earthly life can say to themselves that they have become a different person. But that is what life has made of us. We have given ourselves entirely to life, and life educates us, trains us, and shapes our soul.

[ 49 ] But whoever wishes to enter the supersensible world with full awareness—in other words, whoever wishes to acquire ideal magic—must not only intensify their thoughts inwardly to such an extent that they thereby perceive a second existence within themselves, as I have described, but must also free their will from its bondage to the physical body. In ordinary life, we can set our will in motion only by making use of our physical body—our legs, our arms, and our speech organs. The physical body is the foundation of our volitional life. But we can do the following, and this, in turn, must be carried out in a very systematic manner by anyone who, as a spiritual researcher, wishes to attain ideal magic and acquire it in addition to exact clairvoyance. For example, he must develop such a strong will that, at a certain point in his life, he says to himself: “You shall break a certain habit and, in its place, incorporate another into your soul.”

[ 50 ] If one has applied strong willpower, it may sometimes take years to completely transform oneself in this regard with regard to certain forms of experience, but it is possible. One can, so to speak, not only allow life through the physical body to be one’s teacher, but one can now also take this education, this self-discipline, into one’s own hands.

[ 51 ] Through such vigorous exercises of the will—which I have, in turn, described in the books mentioned—the person who wishes to become an initiate in the modern sense comes to do more than merely relive in sleep what he has experienced during the day. They come to be able to bring about states that are not sleep, that are experienced with full lucidity, and that nevertheless offer them the possibility, while they sleep, to be mobile, to do something, so that outside his body he is not merely passive, as is the case with ordinary consciousness—not merely passive in the spiritual world—but can act in the spiritual world, can be active in the spiritual world. Otherwise, a person does not progress during the state of sleep. The one who becomes a modern initiate in this sense carries the abilities to be active and to act into his human being—even into the life experienced between falling asleep and waking up. And when one brings the will into the human being in the state in which this being lives outside the body, one comes to develop a completely different consciousness within oneself: the consciousness that can now truly perceive what the human being experiences in the time that follows the period described after death. And through this different consciousness, one actually experiences the possibility of looking into our post-earthly life on Earth just as well as into our pre-earthly life on Earth. One looks into how one lives through a life that passes through a spiritual world just as physical life on Earth passes through a physical world. One learns to recognize oneself as pure spirit in a spiritual world, just as one recognizes oneself here, within the physical Earth, as a physical body within the physical world. And one is now offered the opportunity to form a judgment as to how long this life lasts—I would say—following the period of moral assessment that I described earlier.

[ 52 ] For by bringing the will into one’s soul life in this way through ideal magic, one learns to recognize this consciousness that one possesses as an adult and to compare it correctly with the dull consciousness one had in the early days of one’s earthly life as a small child, as an infant.

[ 53 ] You know that ordinary consciousness cannot recall these very earliest years of childhood. During that time, a person lives as if in a dull state of consciousness; as if asleep, they find their way into the world. And our ordinary consciousness as adults is bright, intense, and clear—in stark contrast to this dull, dark consciousness that we look back upon and that we possessed while we were going through our first life here on earth. But the person who ascends to ideal magic in the manner described learns to recognize the difference between their ordinary waking consciousness as an adult and this dull childhood consciousness. They learn, so to speak, to recognize that they are ascending, as it were, a step from the dull childhood consciousness to the brighter consciousness of adulthood. And from the relationship—which he is, after all, familiar with—between childhood consciousness, which is like a dream-like state, and his consciousness during adulthood—from this relationship, he also learns to assess the other relationship between his consciousness as an adult and that illuminated consciousness into which he has brought not only precise clairvoyance but also ideal magic, so that he can now move freely in the spiritual world.

[ 54 ] I would like to say that we learn to move freely in the spiritual world, just as we learned to move freely with our physical bodies during our earthly life, starting from childhood, when we were unable to move. Thus, in addition to recognizing the relationship we have from early childhood to ordinary consciousness, we also come to recognize the different relationship of adult consciousness to a highest, purely spiritual consciousness.

[ 55 ] Through this, however, one also learns to recognize not only that in the afterlife—after death—one is a spirit among spirits with whom one works together, but one also gains an understanding of how long this spiritual life among spiritual beings lasts. Once again, I must cite the example of remembering an ordinary experience. One realizes: Just as memory carries within itself a past reality, so too does what one is now experiencing carry within itself a true understanding that, in the higher consciousness of the initiate, one does not possess something that has a meaning of its own, but rather something that points to life as a spirit among spirits after death. And one learns to recognize how this purely spiritual life relates to the earthly life one has lived here between birth and death.

[ 56 ] For when an initiate looks back on his very first childhood life, he knows that the older he gets, the easier it becomes to glimpse into the spiritual world. Certainly, there are relatively young people who can see clearly into the spiritual world. But this insight becomes more precise and clearer with every passing year as one grows older. One acquires more and more the ability to cross over into this other state of consciousness; through this, one learns to recognize how one state of consciousness relates to the other. One comes to realize the following: For example, one has reached the age of forty and can only recall, let’s say, events up to the age of three or four. One considers these circumstances—how many times forty years exceed that unconscious, dreamlike, childlike state of consciousness. One comes to realize how life in the spirit after death will be just as many times longer than this earthly life as a whole is longer than life as a small child in a dreamlike state; this extends over many centuries. Thus, following the afterlife experience of the moral state comes a purely spiritual life of the human being as a spirit among spirits, which lasts for centuries. In this experience, a person is surrounded by the tasks of the spiritual world just as they are surrounded by the tasks of the physical world here in earthly life.

[ 57 ] But these tasks—which become apparent through that precise clairvoyance supported by, I might say, wandering through the spiritual world by means of ideal magic—are revealed in that all the forces necessary for a subsequent life on Earth are drawn out from the very essence of the spiritual world in which one lives after death. This subsequent life on Earth lies before one as a goal from the very beginning of life after death. And this earthly life within the human being is, after all, a true microcosm. This microcosm is shaped out of a profound experience in the spiritual world after death.

[ 58 ] You see, when we speak of a seed here in the physical world, the seed is small and develops; later it becomes a large plant or a large animal. I could also speak of a spiritual seed that a human being develops after his physical life on Earth, after death. In collaboration with spiritual beings, he draws a spiritual seed from the spiritual forces of the world for his future life on Earth. And this process is not merely a repetition of earthly life, but rather encompasses modes of activity and essential qualities that are, of course, greater and more powerful than anything that can be experienced on Earth. Preparing for the future earthly life through the experiences of the spiritual world—that is what a person first experiences for themselves in the afterlife.

[ 59 ] And on top of that, cosmic consciousness arises, just as I have described it. Because cosmic consciousness arises in one person and in another as well—indeed, this cosmic consciousness is already present every night, albeit in a dormant state, so that it is not true consciousness but—if I may use this paradoxical expression—an unconscious consciousness— as a result, human beings, living as spiritual beings, not only coexist with other spiritual beings who never come to Earth but dwell in the pure spiritual world; rather, they also live together with all the souls who are either incarnated in physical human bodies or who have themselves passed through the gate of death and are undergoing the same experience as they are: experiencing the cosmic consciousness that they all share.

[ 60 ] And it is truly the case that what has developed here on Earth from soul to soul—within the family, among people, where we have found one another through our encounters in physical human bodies, and through which we have also found one another as souls— it is true that we have then laid aside everything we have found here on Earth; what we experience as lovers, what we experience as friends, as people who are otherwise close to us, what we experience through our physical experiences in the physical body—we shed that, we lay that aside, just as we lay aside this physical body itself. But because we have developed relationships of family, friendship, and love here, these are spiritually carried forward through the gateway of death into those spiritual experiences that build a future life. And we do not work solely for ourselves; rather, we work—even during the time when we undergo the moral assessment of our past life—together with the human souls who have become dear and precious to us here in the world.

[ 61 ] Through exact clairvoyance and spiritual magic, all of this becomes not merely a matter of faith, but a genuine insight. It penetrates into a person’s direct perception. Yes, we can even say: Here in the physical world, there is a gulf between souls, no matter how much they love one another, for they encounter one another within their physicality, and they can only enter into relationships mediated by physical connections. But when a person is in the spiritual world, even the physical body—which here belongs to a beloved being left behind—is no longer an obstacle to living together with that being’s soul. Just as one must acquire the ability to see through earthly objects in order to look into the spiritual world, as I have described, so too does the one who has passed through the gate of death commune, through the body, with the souls he has left behind here as those closest to him. They continue to experience them—even while they are still on Earth, until their own death—as souls.

[ 62 ] That is what I would like to say first today, at the beginning of these three lectures, regarding what can provide insights into the true supersensible life of the human being. I would like to point out that by striving for exact clairvoyance and ideal magic, it is indeed possible to speak about the higher worlds in such a way—through scientific understanding—as one can speak about the sensory world through exact knowledge of nature. And as people become increasingly familiar with these realms—for there will already be people who are developing their abilities to immerse themselves in these worlds— one will see that no science, however perfectly developed it may be, can be an obstacle to accepting what can be given to human beings—with a genuine scientific attitude—through precise clairvoyance and ideal magic: insights into what they experience, not only here on Earth between birth and death, but also between death and a new birth, right up to a return to an earthly life.

[ 63 ] I will speak tomorrow about what these recurring lives are like and to what extent they come to an end, when I will take the liberty of describing the relationship that the Christ event—the event of Golgotha—has brought into human life on Earth.

[ 64 ] There I will have to show that the insight I have spoken of, insofar as it concerns the individual human being, sheds light on the entire development of the human race through the life of the Earth, and can thereby also shed light on what actually happened for humanity through Christ’s entry into earthly life.

[ 65 ] And so these lectures are intended to show, on the one hand, that one need not go against today’s exact natural science when speaking of supersensible knowledge. And that will be the subject of tomorrow’s lecture: that even the most important event for humanity’s earthly life—the Christ event—appears before the human soul in a new form, in a more radiant form, when that human soul declares itself ready to accept the insights into the supersensible world referred to here.

[ 66 ] My task tomorrow will be to discuss the relationship between anthroposophical spiritual science and Christianity.