The Rudolf Steiner Archive

Human Sleep Experiences as a Forerunner of Afterlife Experiences

[ 1 ] In the discussion regarding the relationship between sleep and wakefulness in human beings on the one hand, and the structure of the human being on the other, it became clear how, through sleep, human beings indeed experience a profound division in their earthly existence. From the various discussions of the past few days, we have seen how we must distinguish within the human being that which is perceptible to the senses and physically: the physical body; and that which is no longer perceptible to the senses and physically, but can only be perceived in the imagination: the etheric body—or, as I must also say, the body of formative forces. This form-forming body contains the life forces that cause the human being to grow, that underlie the processes of nutrition, the entire structure of the human being, and so on. But this form-forming body also contains, as we have seen, the entire system of human thoughts. Integrated into this body of formative forces—or etheric body—and into the physical body are the two higher members of the human being: that which is called—as I have already said, one should not take offense at the terminology—the astral body, and what can be described as the actual “I” organization.

[ 2 ] As a person goes about their daily life, these four aspects of human nature are at work within one another, interacting and forming an intimate connection. When a person enters the state of sleep, the physical body and the body of formative forces separate from the astral body and the I—they remain, if I may put it that way, behind in bed—and the astral organization and the I-organization enter a purely spiritual world. Thus, from the moment a person falls asleep until they wake up, their being is divided: on the one hand, there is the physical organization together with the etheric organization, which at the same time holds back the person’s entire world of thought; and on the other hand, there are the ego organization and the astral organization.

[ 3 ] I believe someone recently expressed the following concern: If the entire world of thought remains within the etheric organization during sleep, then one could not influence the state of sleep through thoughts that can only be grasped while awake. So, in a sense, a kind of fear came to the surface in the person who said this—as if, for example, when one formulates certain wishes in thought—say, for one’s fellow human beings—or when such thoughts pertain to someone who is asleep, the power of these thoughts might be lost because the person does not carry them over into sleep. Well, I would like to respond to this with an analogy.

[ 4 ] You have probably never heard of anyone who, when trying to hit a target with a shotgun, has to immediately throw the shotgun away. He fires the shot, but keeps the shotgun. One cannot, therefore, suggest that nothing goes toward the target simply because one keeps the shotgun. Nor do the effects of waking life—of thinking while awake—fail to reach the life of sleep simply because one retains one’s thoughts within the physical and etheric bodies rather than sending them over into the life of sleep. Precisely with these matters—which are, after all, subtle—it is essential to think always with precision, with great exactness, in a way that is never actually necessary in the physical world, since there the things of the external world immediately correct one. But it is clear from what has been said here in recent days that there is a much more intimate relationship between the physical body and the etheric body than, for example, between the etheric body and the astral body. For throughout one’s entire earthly life, the physical body and the etheric body remain together. They never separate, not even during sleep. The etheric body and the astral body must separate during sleep.

[ 5 ] Once again, there is a close connection between the “I” and the astral body, for these two never separate during earthly life. But the connection between the astral body and the etheric body is a looser one. This is where a separation can occur. This has a very specific effect on human life on Earth as well as on the human being’s life beyond the Earth. When we are in the waking state, we animate our senses with our “I” and our nervous system with our astral body, and then send what arises in this way into the etheric body and the physical body; for if one wishes to live in the physical world, one must send down everything one experiences in the “I” and in the astral body into the etheric body and the physical body. That is why materialism believes that the physical body can be everything in the human being, because in fact everything must be imprinted in the physical body and must manifest itself in the life between birth—or, let us say, conception—and death.

[ 6 ] But this process of integrating the experiences of earthly existence into the etheric body and the physical body does not proceed without obstacles and hindrances. We are never, as it were, readily able to send down directly into the organs belonging to the formative body and the physical body that which we experience through the senses—that which we incorporate into our nervous system through our thinking. What we take in from the external physical world is, at first, when we take it in, shaped and formed in such a way that it resembles external existence. If, for example, we perceive something that is angular in shape, the experience of angularity first takes shape within our “I” and our astral body. But this cannot be taken up directly into the etheric body. At first, the etheric body resists this absorption of what we experience in the external sensory world. Only imaginative insight can shed light on these conditions. Ordinary sensory observation, sensory experiments on human beings, or intellectual speculation are not sufficient to observe this process, which consists in the necessary transformation and reconfiguration of what we perceive through our senses, so that it may be made suitable to continue living on in our etheric and physical bodies, enabling us to separate from it during sleep. And only when one can observe what the relationship between waking and sleeping actually is for the earthly human being does one realize that a constant struggle takes place in life. One takes in an external impression, an external experience. But this cannot immediately descend into the physical and etheric bodies because—to use this crude example—the experience one has of an angular object must first enter the etheric body and then the physical body by first being rounded off, by first taking on their own form. A thorough transformation must take place.

[ 7 ] This transformation of what initially exists as fleetingly as the “I” and the astral body itself into a three-dimensional form that can then live in the etheric body, and into a shaping movement that can then continue to exist in the physical body—this transformation involves an inner struggle that, however, remains unconscious to ordinary human consciousness today. But anyone who possesses imaginative insight can observe this struggle, which generally lasts two to three days. One must have slept on an experience two, sometimes three times, before it connects with the other experiences that are already imprinted in the physical and etheric bodies. One must have slept on it two to three times. And the dream world actually expresses this struggle externally—but only externally. As I have already explained, when a person dreams, their ego and astral body push their way into the etheric and physical bodies, causing a blockage. This blockage is the expression of the struggle I am now describing to you, which lasts about two to three days. Once a person has slept through the experience once, it has not yet been sufficiently absorbed into the etheric body. Only after sleeping through it two or three times is it absorbed into the etheric body. Thus, where a person is loosely connected with regard to their astral body and etheric body, one sees a continuous interweaving.

[ 8 ] Drawn very roughly and schematically [original drawing not preserved]: If this is the etheric body and that is the astral body during sleep, then upon waking or falling asleep, a constant struggle takes place at the boundary—a living impulse that is expressed outwardly in dreams but which, inwardly, signifies the interweaving of experiences into the etheric and physical bodies. And only when a person has slept two or three times—sometimes more—on a particular experience does that experience reconnect with what was already connected to the etheric and physical bodies as a memory; for that is what matters: that the experience is transformed into a memory, which then remains in bed with us when we sleep, because it is essentially the expression of the physical and etheric bodies in thought—thus, only after two or three days has the experience become interwoven with the memory.

[ 9 ] It is an immensely interesting experience for imaginative insight to perceive this. Even the form in which this is expressed is significant. We approach our external earthly experiences in such a way that we give them certain contours according to natural laws. We experience precisely that which is present in our earthly existence with definite contours—one might say in a form governed by natural laws. These natural laws are dissolved as the experiences become integrated into the ethereal. Everything that has definite contours here transforms into—I would say—a soft, pictorial quality. What is static becomes dynamic; what is angular becomes rounded. Everything transitions from what one experiences as an intellectual being to what one experiences as an artistic being.

[ 10 ] This is the underlying reason why, in those earlier times when people still instinctively perceived what I have just described to you, art was rooted in life quite differently than it is today. Even during the Renaissance, when artists drew upon ancient art—as seen in Raphael and other Renaissance artists—there were at least traditions of transforming the intellectual into the artistic. For the moment one ascends into the supersensible, the intellectual is immediately lost in its intellectual form, and everything is transformed into the artistic. By relying so heavily on naturalism in art today—by wanting to create everything according to a model—people demonstrate that they have strayed from true artistry. Humanity must once again immerse itself in this true artistry.

[ 11 ] And so, as I have described, human life is actually structured in such a way that one can always say: I have an experience; it flows into the etheric body over the course of three days. The next day, the experience lived through immediately flows into the etheric body one day later. And so, with regard to their etheric body, a person is, so to speak, only done with an experience after two, three, or four days.

[ 12 ] When a person passes through the gate of death, the etheric body separates from the physical body—something that never occurred during earthly life. Everything that has been woven into the etheric body over the course of two, three, or four days is now dissolved again in the etheric body, which has been freed from the physical body. And this dissolution takes about as long as the weaving took. Imagination, which is capable of making a correct assessment, reveals how the physical body holds together, through its resistance, that which has gradually migrated into the etheric body. Once the physical body has passed away in death, one can observe in the first few days after death how that which has become interwoven into the etheric body passes back into the general cosmic ether and dissolves once more. And this experience of the dissolution of the entire store of memories is what the human being experiences again two, three, or four days after death. One might call this the shedding of the etheric body. But this shedding is actually a process in which the memories become ever larger and larger; they lose their third dimension, become two-dimensional, and take on a purely pictorial form. And the entire tableau of one’s life stands before the person, unfolding in vivid images, after they have passed through the gate of death, for about two, three, or four days, varying individually from person to person.

[ 13 ] But just as someone who has studied botany can tell from a plant seed what kind of plant will grow from it, so too does the person who has attained imaginative insight see this transition of the etheric—that is, the entire system of memories of the cosmos—not only at the moment of death, but already when it is present in the image. And in the image, it is always present in the human being. If one knows how to correctly understand what merges completely within three days—or possibly more—one sees in this incorporation of experiences into the etheric body a pictorial preparation of what is experienced inwardly by the human being two, three, or four days after passing through the gate of death. While a person in earthly life experiences—more or less unconsciously, unless they attain imaginative insight—this incorporation of experiences into the memory held together by the physical body, immediately after death they experience the unfolding, the unraveling, and the passing into the cosmos of their memories. Thus, whatever we leave behind as our treasure trove of thoughts each time between falling asleep and waking up passes into the entire universe immediately after death, connecting with the cosmos. This is what we have to surrender to cosmic existence at the moment of death.

[ 14 ] These things must be grasped not only with the intellect, but also with the heart. For one senses in such a process not merely that human beings exist in a way that allows them to view their existence selfishly, but how they stand in the world as thinking beings—and that these thoughts are not merely something they are permitted to retain, but rather something that, after their death, must pass into the entire cosmos, becoming forces that continue to work within it. If we think well, we pass on our good thoughts to the cosmos after death. If we think badly, we pass on our bad thoughts to the cosmos after death. For the human being is not merely here in earthly existence to unfold as a free being—that is what he is meant to do, and that is precisely what he can do on this basis, which, moreover, is also relevant to him—but he is also here to be a being upon whom the gods themselves work in order to guide the cosmos from epoch to epoch. And I would like to say: What the gods must weave into the cosmos as thoughts, they must prepare through what can be thought and contemplated in the life of each individual human being. There lies the place of cultivation—that place where the gods must nurture the thoughts they continually need in the development of the world, in order to incorporate them into their cosmos as the actual impulses of power.

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[ 15 ] When a person is in that state between falling asleep and waking up, he lives, with his “I” and his astral body, outside the physical and etheric bodies. In this state, as a soul-spiritual being—as the “I” and the astral body—they are interwoven with the spiritual forces that permeate the entire cosmos. They are in that world which, if I may speak figuratively, lies outside their skin; they are in that world from which, from waking until falling asleep, they receive only sensory impressions. He thus enters into the inner essence of the things that reveal their outer aspect to him during waking life. But only that which the astral organism experiences out there, beyond the physical body and the etheric body, can be brought back into the thoughts of the etheric body. What the “I” experiences out there cannot be brought back. Therefore, the actual “I” experiences throughout the entire earthly life—those “I” experiences that are undergone during sleep—remain subconscious to ordinary consciousness and even to imaginative consciousness. They are revealed only to inspired consciousness, as I have described in recent days.

[ 16 ] So we can say: For whatever a person experiences in such a way that it can be imprinted on the mind, they have enough strength—enough strength gathered during sleep—to imprint it down into the etheric body. But during their earthly life, they do not have enough strength for what the “I” experiences from falling asleep to waking up—the wishes and desires that are rooted in earthly experiences and that are also lived through from falling asleep to waking up. Thus, in our epoch, only the part of the sleep life that is to be transformed into thought—or the part to be imprinted upon thought—actually passes over into the conscious waking life of the human being on Earth. In contrast, what the true “I” experiences during human sleep remains hidden, I might say, behind the veil of existence.

[ 17 ] Here, things come to light for the imaginative and inspired consciousness that, while certainly comprehensible to sound common sense if one is open-minded enough, are met with immense prejudice, particularly in today’s civilization. Even the mere fact that everything in the physical world that is three-dimensional—and in the physical world, after all, everything is essentially experienced as three-dimensional—must, in order to be imprinted on the etheric body, transition from a plastic to an pictorial form, from the three-dimensional to the two-dimensional; grasping this alone requires an open-mindedness. For the moment we enter into imagination, we are no longer dealing with three dimensions—or even, as a certain branch of science believes, with four dimensions—but rather with two dimensions. The difficulty in imagining what is being experienced there lies in the fact that we are completely accustomed to reckoning with three dimensions in our earthly experiences, to imagining everything in three dimensions, and that therefore, when we are to make the transition to two dimensions, we say: “Yes, but the two dimensions are contained within the three dimensions; the two dimensions of the plane can be oriented in one way or another, so that one would still have the third dimension.”

[ 18 ] That is simply not the case; rather, as soon as one enters the imaginative world, the third dimension becomes completely irrelevant; it does not matter which way the plane is oriented; the third dimension ceases to have any significance the moment one enters the ethereal imaginative world. Therefore, all equations for the ether must be transformed so that they apply not to the three-dimensional world, but to the two-dimensional world. This is just a side note I’m adding for mathematicians.

[ 19 ] But now, if one wishes to enter the world that is accessible to inspiration—the world in which we, as the “I,” find ourselves between falling asleep and waking up—then this world becomes a one-dimensional world. Then we are dealing exclusively with a one-dimensional world. And the transition to the one-dimensional world—which is presupposed by the capacity for inspiration, by the capacity to truly perceive the spiritual realm in which we live between falling asleep and waking up—this understanding of the one-dimensional world has been upheld throughout the ages by the science of initiation.

[ 20 ] I have described to you how, in the Jakob Böhme type, the hidden solar forces—not the external, physical light of the sun, but the hidden solar forces—become manifest. These hidden solar forces do not extend in three dimensions, but are perceived only in one dimension. An older, more instinctive initiatory insight was able to penetrate to this inspiration without having a self-conscious, clear understanding of it, but it did penetrate. And much of what has been handed down in the records from earlier epochs of human history can only be understood if one knows: This is meant to refer to the spiritual, one-dimensional world that is to be attained through inspiration—that is, in relation to our earthly life, it refers to the hidden forces of the sun and the stars. But it is not in the manifest forces of the sun that we live between falling asleep and waking up, but in the hidden forces of the sun. |

[ 21 ] These hidden solar forces, for example, permeate certain stones, even though the physically manifest solar forces do not pass through them. But by penetrating these stones, they become one-dimensional. And the one who attains the vision of inspiration can then see—not the physical light, but the hidden solar forces—through the otherwise opaque stones; so that the stones become permeable to the hidden solar forces, but also become permeable to the forces of inspiration. |

[ 22 ] In earlier times, in the very early stages of human development on Earth, such aids were not needed. But when the ancient instinctive clairvoyance—which had formed the basis of the ancient initiatory knowledge—was already on the wane, people turned to such aids—I would say, abbreviations—in order to perceive what could no longer be seen through instinctively inspired insight. And so one could, for example, resort to such abbreviations: Imagine, for instance, arranging a number of stones—I’ll first draw them as if viewed from above. Now I’ll draw them from the side. Now I place a stone on top of them, drawn from the side, like this. If this is arranged in such a way that, on certain occasions, the sun’s rays pass through and strike the top stone, then the physical sunbeams are blocked by the top stone, while the hidden sunbeams pass through (see note).

[ 23 ] When the person who has trained himself to do so stands there and looks through from the side, he sees the spiritual, one-dimensional rays of the sun streaming in and disappearing into the earth. So if one created such an abbreviation during times when this was no longer directly perceptible through instinctive clairvoyant powers, one was able, in the small shadow space that resulted from looking from the side, to perceive that world of spiritual sunbeams in which a person sleeps every night, that is, to gaze upon the world that a person experiences every time between falling asleep and waking up. Thus, in such devices—which one encounters right here in this region—one can see that which, during a transitional period that lasted a long time, certain wise guides of humanity sought to use to penetrate the hidden solar forces—precisely that into which a person like Jakob Böhme, in turn, instinctively penetrated simply by gazing at earthly things.

[ 24 ] Even though one sees such arrangements of stones in appropriate places today, their true meaning can only be explained by what spiritual science can reveal. Otherwise, one will simply gloss over these things with a superficial explanation that misses the point.

[ 25 ] Of course, one can also arrange such stones in such a way that, when distributed in a circle, they illustrate the specific differentiation of the spiritual rays of the Sun according to the individual constellations.

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[ 26 ] I have tried to explain the nature of the world in which our “I” lives between falling asleep and waking up. This world is not held together by the forces inherent in the physical and etheric bodies. However, it is from these physical and etheric bodies—which alone bring about clear consciousness in earthly human beings—that the judgments arise which we form, both emotionally and through our will, regarding our own actions, our own inner experiences, and our thoughts. Therefore, when we are awake, we judge our outer life as best we can, depending on the thoughts we have been able to impress upon our physical and etheric bodies. But it is not merely our own self that speaks to what we experience; the entire spiritual cosmos speaks to what we experience and what we do. It is the cosmos that judges. It is the cosmos that declares an action, a thought, or a feeling to be good or evil. What we ourselves judge between waking and falling asleep regarding what we are as human beings—that is what we say. What the cosmos—the spiritual content of the cosmos, which, as I have sufficiently described in these lectures, encompasses both moral and natural laws—says about our human being and our human deeds, the “I” processes this between falling asleep and waking up. And this “I”—as inspiration reveals—experiences once again, even during the briefest sleep, everything that the human being has gone through from the last waking until falling asleep—the very act that led to this sleep, whether it be short or long, in which the person currently finds themselves. Thus, when the successive states are: waking, sleeping, waking, sleeping, a person always relives in sleep what they have experienced during the last period of wakefulness, particularly insofar as they have experienced it themselves.

[ 27 ] Insofar as it is an experience of the “I,” this experience remains, at first, unconscious to ordinary earthly consciousness. Inspiration can bring it into consciousness. Then the special nature of this experience reveals itself. Then one comes to understand what this experience is like. Now, this experience is such that one goes through it in the exact opposite direction from that which one experiences during the day. So when you go through your experiences during the day—I will now exclude shorter sleep experiences—from morning to evening, you relive your experiences in reverse during the night while sleeping, from evening to morning, in a true reverse order. They are relived in such a way that what the cosmos, the spiritual cosmos, says about our daytime experiences is relived.

[ 28 ] But this cannot be brought into the consciousness of present-day human beings at all during their earthly lives. Yet it must enter their consciousness; otherwise, human beings would fall out of cosmic existence in the course of their own existence. Inspired knowledge also reveals that at the moment when, after death, the human being—as I have said—has surveyed that scene for two, three, or four days, the memories are sent out into the cosmos; and that then, after this experience of the two, three, or four days following death has taken place—during which the expansion of memories occurs, what is often also called the detachment of the etheric body—a period begins for the human being in which he can look back on his earthly life in a different way than before.

[ 29 ] If we consider these two, three, or four days or so following death, a powerful tableau of life emerges. But this tableau of life initially includes only what was experienced during those “days,” during the waking period. But in reality, a person has not only gone through what they experienced during their waking periods, but also what they experienced during their sleeping periods. When you look back on ordinary earthly life—even through ordinary memories—you always leave out your sleeping periods. You look back as if you had experienced August 25, 1923, but not the night, in your inner experiences. Then you do not immediately append the nighttime experiences to the 25th—since those elude your consciousness—but rather to the 24th, the 23rd of August, and so on, all the way back to the point after your birth that you do not remember.

[ 30 ] That is, in fact, what occurs during the two to three days following death. Afterward comes the period when the soul-spiritual aspect, having become strong enough after death, is now able to experience in the spiritual world what it could previously only unconsciously form into images each time between falling asleep and waking up. This occurs as an experience. And the person now relives about one-third of their life, for that is roughly how much time a person spends asleep in a normal earthly life. Therefore, after death, a person now goes through a period in which they relive their nights in reverse order for about one-third of their life, corresponding to the duration of their earthly life. Human life is relived in reverse: first the last night, then the second-to-last, then the third-to-last, and so on, until we reach birth or conception.

[ 31 ] From other perspectives, I have described this journey of the human being backward through a completely different world after death in what I have set forth in my Theosophy as the passage of the human soul-spiritual being through the world of souls.

[ 32 ] Now, after a person has passed through the soul world in this way—if he lived to be twenty or twenty-one years old in life, that amounts to about seven years after death; if he lived to be sixty, about twenty years; which is exactly as long as the time they slept through during their life here on Earth—they now stand ready to experience what has become of their entire being as a result of that earthly existence, which the gods created in order to advance the world a little further with the help of the human race. By the end of this backward reliving of the nights, the human being has experienced, after death, what has become of him and what he means for the cosmos. Now the human being must experience what has come about for the Earth itself through his life. This requires a long time—we will speak more precisely about this tomorrow—and it fills half the time between earthly death and a new earthly life.

[ 33 ] First, as we travel backward through the nights, we arrive at birth. Once we have arrived there—having traversed the world of souls and arrived back at our birth by moving backward in time—we must then travel back through time to our previous earthly life. In this way, a person can carry their previous earthly life forward with them, shaping it for a further, third earthly life. Human beings must therefore not only go back to their birth, reliving their life after death, but all the way back to their previous earthly life.

[ 34 ] This brings us into the realm of the ancient science of initiation, which must be renewed today in a way appropriate to present-day human capacities, where this science of initiation has transformed knowledge into the religious experience of the human being. For the science of initiation is always true knowledge, but a kind of knowledge that leads from the sensory world into the spiritual world, so that it can inspire the human will in such a way that this will is shaped precisely in a religious manner. And it has been a very important insight for the science of initiation throughout the ages—one that arises from the third kind of knowledge I have described in recent days, namely intuitive knowledge—that it is of very special importance for a person, as he now journeys backward through life to his previous earthly existence, to encounter along this path a being who can become his guide after death.

[ 35 ] In a certain region of the Earth, people said to themselves: “I must embrace in this earthly life the teachings of the last Bodhisattva who appeared on Earth.” This person may have lived, say, three hundred years after the Bodhisattva’s appearance. But after wandering back following death to his previous earthly life—for this wandering back, this life between death and rebirth, takes longer—he still arrived at the time when the last Bodhisattva was on Earth. And in the ancient science of initiation, this encounter with the last Bodhisattva was attributed to the fact that a person can truly find the connection to his or her previous earthly life—that is, can find the strength for eternal life, which can only be found if a connection to the previous earthly life can be established.

[ 36 ] This possibility of encountering the Bodhisattvas, who descend from certain regions of the spiritual realm into the earthly realm, ceased at a specific point in human evolution and the development of the worlds. And today, human beings would find themselves in a situation where, after death, having retraced their path back to their birth or conception, they would then continue to search backward toward their previous earthly lives—and they would be unable to find the connection to those previous earthly lives.

[ 37 ] You see, this connection could be found in the first millennia of Earth’s evolution, before the Mystery of Golgotha, by tracing back to the age of the last Bodhisattva. Today, it is only of benefit to human beings if they undergo this journey back under the guidance of the Being who, through the Mystery of Golgotha, has united with the Earth, in other words, when such a relationship between humanity and the Mystery of Golgotha is established that Christ can become the guide for humanity, because Christ embodies the guiding powers that have always been present for life between death and a new birth through the Bodhisattvas who appear on Earth.

[ 38 ] Thus, the unfolding of the Mystery of Golgotha is one of the most important events in the entire evolution of the Earth, particularly with regard to the experiences between death and a new birth. If, therefore, one wishes to understand the spiritual evolution of the Earth and how this spiritual evolution of the Earth fits into the spiritual evolution of the cosmos, and if one also wishes to understand what the human being experiences in his spiritual life after death—between death and a new birth—in connection with this spiritual evolution of the Earth and the cosmos, then one must situate the Mystery of Golgotha within the entire development of the worlds. Thus, for people today, the transition must be made from observing human evolution to observing the evolution of the world, while at the same time contemplating, in this transition, the Mystery of Golgotha in all its fundamental significance for the events of Earth’s evolution and the evolution of humanity within the earthly realm.

[ 39 ] Tomorrow’s lecture will deal with these matters—insofar as they can now be revealed by modern initiatory science—which take place in connection with what a person experiences after death, following the recollection of their night experiences; it will focus on these post-death experiences in the context of world evolution.