The Rudolf Steiner Archive

Second Lecture

[ 1 ] Yesterday we attempted to connect the human being to the universe. Through such reflections, we hope to gain a foundation that will enable us to fully penetrate the supersensible nature of the human being. Today I would like to add a few supplementary remarks to yesterday’s discussion—initially in a more external, supersensible manner—insofar as we must also consider the supersensible nature of the human being when the physical body and its associated elements, the etheric body, have been shed; that is, when the human being has passed through the gate of death and is traversing the path between death and new birth. And today I will begin by presenting, more in the manner of a description, what, so to speak, presents itself to the outer imaginative perception within this path between death and new birth. Through this, we will gain a foundation for being able to grasp the actual spiritual-soul nature of the human being.

[ 2 ] We must simply always be clear that it is actually absurd to speak of a separate physical aspect and a separate spiritual-psychic aspect of the human being. For what we encounter physically in a human being—what appears to us in the sensory world as his physical body—is in fact permeated and interwoven throughout with the spiritual and soul aspects. The shape of the forehead, the shape of the entire face, and everything else about his form—this human being possesses these only because spiritual forces give him this form. And that is why we need not be surprised when someone who possesses spiritual insight must still speak of a human form even after the person has passed through the gate of death. In fact, for imaginative insight, it is the case that when a person has passed through the gate of death, albeit in terms of physical perception, appears as a sort of shadow image—but a very clear, striking shadow image—a “form” that, in a sense, initially gives the impression of something external, because we must, after all, conceive of the human being’s spiritual-soul nature in moral-spiritual terms. But we cannot arrive at a tenable spiritual conception unless we first speak of these imaginations, of these image-figures, which a human being still carries within themselves even after passing through the gate of death.

[ 3 ] Upon death, a person sheds their physical body, and we can completely disregard what happens to that physical body, for the manner in which a person’s physical body disintegrates is far less significant than people today believe. In fact, this dissolution—whether through decay or cremation—has significance only for one’s fellow human beings; it has no great significance for a person’s life after passing through the gate of death, so that we need only speak of the physical body, as it appears to the senses, as that which dissolves into external nature and its forces. Then, shortly after death, the human etheric body dissolves as well. You are familiar with this from my description in Occult Science. As the human being sheds these two outer manifestations of their being, something, as it were, emerges from these two “sheaths”—though the term “sheath” is not entirely accurate. And anyone endowed with the appropriate imaginative insight perceives this entity emerging from the two envelopes precisely as a form that, even immediately after death, is in a certain sense similar to the human physical form. Only this—I will call it the spiritual form—undergoes a continuous transformation.

[ 4 ] I have, after all, often described life between death and a new birth from a wide variety of perspectives. However, one can only gain a proper understanding of it when it is described from a whole range of perspectives. Today, I would like to describe it again from a specific perspective. One must then add this to what has already been said; only then does a complete picture emerge.

[ 5 ] This spiritual form of the human being undergoes a continuous transformation; indeed, it becomes more and more such that we can only describe it accurately by saying that it becomes entirely physiognomy. In the imaginative vision possessed by the initiate—and by one who has already passed through the gate of death—one beholds something of the human being that one might call a kind of physiognomy. This physiognomy is the whole human being, not merely half of one. But the whole human being, as seen in his spiritual form through his physiognomy, now appears in such a way that this physiognomy is the expression of his essence in terms of his moral and spiritual inner nature; thus, after death, an evil person looks different from a good one, and a person who made great efforts in life looks different from one who lived a careless or frivolous life. All of this, however, is expressed in such a way that it is no longer merely the face. The face even changes to the point that it loses the physiognomy that was pronounced in physical life; it retains only a part of its physiognomic expression, but it becomes increasingly indistinct. In contrast, the rest of the body becomes very expressive; in particular, the area where the respiratory organs are located internally becomes expressive. In this physiognomy—which occupies the area where the respiratory organs were in physical life—one sees, in particular, the person’s enduring character traits expressed physiognomically. The chest protrudes, taking on a distinct physiognomy, and in this distinct physiognomy—in the spirit image after death—one can see whether the person in question possessed more or less courage in the various spheres of life, or whether they were somewhat cowardly; whether they approached life with a certain boldness and bravery, or whether they went through life retreating from everything, and so on.

[ 6 ] After death, the arms and hands possess a special capacity for expression. One can literally read a person’s life story—from birth to death—in the arms and hands, most clearly in the hands — the hands, which are already so significant to the perceptive observer even in physical life because of their physiognomy, which reveals so much even in physical life, so that one can glean a great deal from the way someone moves their fingers, how someone offers their hands to you—whether, when meeting you, they merely extend their fingertips or offer a warm handshake. But even the way the hands take shape as a person simply goes about their daily life or performs their work is already so revealing in physical life. People don’t pay attention to it, but most people are already much more interesting simply through the posture and movement of their fingers and hands—at the very least, they reveal themselves through them. This is now intensified in the most profound sense after death. One can practically read a person’s life story from them.

[ 7 ] And the same is true of the other organs. After death, everything takes on a distinct physiognomic character. And so one can say: After death, a person bears their moral and spiritual physiognomy within themselves.

[ 8 ] Yesterday we spoke of how the human being, as it is formed out of the cosmos, out of the universe, first presents its form to us, and how this form—arising from what is inscribed in the world ether—finds expression in the skin and in the sense organs enclosed within the skin. But what the human skin form is—what appears in physical life on Earth as what we know as physical form, that is, the entire skin covering—becomes the physiognomic expression of the moral-spiritual human being. And this remains so for a long time.

[ 9 ] As people enter into this “way of life,” if I may put it that way, they encounter there, in particular, those people with whom they were already connected here on Earth—those with whom they shared a bond of mind, heart, and spirit. And no one there can fool anyone else! For what each person is like, and how they feel toward others, is faithfully reflected in that physiognomy I have just described. And during this phase of life after death, which follows the period of trial—which I do not wish to discuss today—people primarily interact with those with whom they were connected by fate in some way during their most recent earthly life or during their time on Earth in general. They get to know one another intimately there. But during this initial phase, it is precisely through the sight of this physiognomy—which I have described—that they come to know one another intimately. And what people experience during this time is precisely this process of getting to know those with whom they are bound by destiny. You must imagine what an intimate mutual—it sounds trite, but it is indeed the right word—“contemplation” this is: Each person stands before the other unveiled, with the full significance of their fateful connection. This is how they then pass one another by; this is how they live together.

[ 10 ] At the same time, this is the stage of life for human beings when, by virtue of being what they are—that is, possessing such a physiognomy—they come into contact with the beings of the third hierarchy: the Angeloi, Archangeloi, and Archai. For these beings, by their enduring nature, are always physiognomy. They have, so to speak, emerged from the beings of the higher hierarchies, in that their entire spiritual-soul nature manifests itself in their spiritual form to those who can perceive them in the imagination. This is therefore something that, during this period, adds to a person’s experience alongside their interactions with those people with whom they are bound by destiny. Of course, the sight of the people with whom one is fatefully connected is a very varied one. For example, one sees people who have wished one dead, yet with whom one is nevertheless fatefully connected. One recognizes quite clearly what they had in mind and what they have done to one. This sight of people is quite different; it is a very varied one. And among these walking forms appear the beings of the third hierarchy, who then walk among these people like radiant figures, like solar figures. Certainly, the words I use are figurative, but we have no other way to express ourselves than in earthly language. But it does describe reality when one says that during this time, a person encounters those with whom they are fatefully connected. What is peculiar, however, is that during this period, a person can show understanding and empathy only toward those other people with whom they are fatefully linked. Those human souls with whom one is not bound by destiny are, so to speak, invisible; one has no grasp of them, no way of perceiving their moral and spiritual characteristics. One does not take notice of them; one cannot take notice of them, for only this bond of destiny gives one the power to see. If it were left up to human beings here on Earth to see with their physical eyes in the same way one must see in this phase of life after death, then human beings would fail to see many things on Earth, for human beings love to see passively on Earth, allowing things to shine into them. In our present civilization, they even have very little inclination to be actively engaged inwardly in order to perceive their surroundings. Many people today who actually focus their vision—let’s put it this way—particularly on cinematic pursuits, that is, who always want only impressions to which they can passively surrender, would—if they were endowed with the same power of vision that we possess after death—be able to sit here and not see their fellow human beings at all. For after death, it depends on our attention—which is, of course, then instilled in us by the way we are fatefully connected to others—that we also perceive the others.

[ 11 ] Thus, this period—the one initially spent after death—is a time for getting to know one another, and specifically for learning how these people are received into the spiritual world by the beings of the third hierarchy. One then sees the joy that the beings of the third hierarchy—the Angeloi, Archangeloi, and Archai—take in the people who ascend into the spiritual world in the form I have described, or conversely, how little joy they derive from them. One sees the impression these people make on those beings of the higher hierarchies who are initially closest to them in the invisible world.

[ 12 ] Then comes a different time. The time comes when people who have gotten to know one another in this way—who, in a sense, have always observed one another—now begin, as befits this life after death, to understand one another in a spiritual sense, where they come to acquire, so to speak, a spiritual understanding of these moral-spiritual physiognomies. The fact is that in the early period after death, one lives, as it were, in a world of pure memories. One is together with the people to whom one belongs; one naturally experiences the “present”—one acts, one lives, one weaves one’s way through all the interrelationships that arise there, particularly between human beings and the beings of the third hierarchy—but throughout this entire time, one lives as if in a kind of memory of earthly life. But then a time comes when one begins to have spiritual understanding, when one begins to comprehend—in the sense that comprehension must occur in the spiritual world—what these moral-spiritual physiognomies of one’s fellow human beings mean to one another. One learns to “understand” one’s fellow human beings. One learns to understand them in such a way that one says: This moral-spiritual physiognomy reveals this to me; it points back to destinies we have shared, and so on. Well, one experiences this immediately after death, for one looks upon this destiny; one looks upon one’s fateful communion with others. But now one experiences it in such a way that one says to oneself everywhere: “If we have lived together thus far as it has turned out, based on our mutual understanding of these physiognomies, then our continued life together must proceed in such and such a way.” One now experiences, so to speak, with understanding the possibility of destiny’s continuation, and from that point on one gains the very feeling of the continuation of the life circumstances that have begun. One looks, as if through a perspective, at how the threads of life’s destiny—which have been woven together and are revealed in the moral and spiritual physiognomies—will take shape in the future. And this becomes increasingly intimate, so that a true growing together—literally a spiritual and soulful growing together of the souls—takes place. And in the process, it becomes apparent that what was most expressive in a human being here on the physical Earth gradually disappears as he lives his way into this time. The head disappears, dissolving into a kind of spiritual mist.

[ 13 ] As the head disappears, the features of the moral-spiritual physiognomy that were present there undergo a transformation, as something emerges everywhere that seems to point from the past into the future. And during this time, human beings are drawn into the spirit of planetary movements, into the spirit of the forces within the planetary system. As a result, people who are spiritually connected approach the spiritual solar existence at a specific time after death. The planetary forces bring them into the spiritual solar existence, and everything that these people have gone through together is now, in a sense, carried into the spiritual solar existence as shared experiences and shared seeds for future experiences.

[ 14 ] It is actually childish, from the perspective of a truly profound understanding, for modern science to conceive of the sun as a ball of gas out there in the universe. That is, after all, merely the appearance the sun presents to the Earth. As soon as one beholds the Sun with those spiritual eyes, those eyes of the soul that one possesses after death—beholding it from outside in the universe—the Sun is, in fact, a spiritual being, or rather, a gathering of spiritual beings. Mingled among these spiritual beings are precisely the human souls, who carry themselves into the spiritual existence of the Sun in this way—not only with their spiritual contents but also with their shared destinies. And this entire system of human souls, together with the judgments that the beings of the second and third hierarchies pass regarding the worth of these human beings, now shines out into the universe, into the cosmos.

[ 15 ] From any vantage point on Earth, one can only truly visualize the Sun correctly if one imagines it in the following way. When we look at the Sun from the Earth’s surface, it appears to us as a luminous sphere, and we can even draw a schematic diagram of it. Now, people usually imagine that if they were to ascend in a balloon and look at the Sun from up there, it would look just the same as it does here from Earth. But that is not the case. If one were to form a schematic image and draw, in a physically perceptible way, how the Sun appears to spiritual vision, one would have to imagine spiritual rays emanating from the Sun in all directions into the vast universe. What can be seen of the Sun from Earth is, after all, only the aspect of the Sun that shines toward Earth. To spiritual vision, however, something appears that—gradually, it is true—becomes a spiritually audible perception, which then becomes an impact on the music of the worlds, an impact that is sometimes very impressive. But this impact is something that human beings have experienced, and which they also experience after death. All of this is carried into the Sun and radiates out into the cosmos. And then, when this happens, the human being, in the spiritual form I have described, has, in a sense, already taken on the form of the Sun. It sounds paradoxical, of course, but these facts must be described, for they correspond to reality. Everything that, after passing through the gate of death, was an expressive physiognomy—a spiritual form—becomes rounded, and when the human being arrives in the sun, spiritually speaking, he has actually become a spiritual sphere. Every single human being has become a spiritual sphere. And the entire universe is reflected in this spiritual sphere. And now, having become, so to speak, entirely spiritual sensory organs, we no longer receive impressions from the Earth; but having become entirely spiritual eyes, we perceive the entire universe through these spiritual eyes. We feel at one with the entire universe. And what we used to be on Earth, we now feel outside of ourselves. But now that we reflect the entire universe within ourselves as if in a spiritual eye, we feel completely at one with the fates we have experienced in ourselves and in other people.

[ 16 ] As we go through this for a time, we enter more and more into the sphere of the first hierarchy—the Seraphim, Cherubim, and Thrones. We connect with this first hierarchy. First, then, we connect with the third hierarchy, where we walk among our fellow human beings bound to us by destiny, where we walk in our moral-spiritual form. Then we are carried by the planetary forces into the spiritual solar existence; there we are outside the first hierarchy and connected to the second. And now, as we feel ourselves, through our own solar existence, to be at one with the entire universe, we are connected to the first hierarchy—the Seraphim, Cherubim, and Thrones. And there it becomes increasingly clear that we are beginning to be allowed to take an interest not only in those people with whom we were fatefully connected from before, but now other souls are appearing who are only now entering our sphere of destiny in this life, between death and the next birth. We are beginning to be able to observe human souls other than those with whom we were fatefully connected—human souls who will then be fatefully connected to us in future lives.

[ 17 ] But in those people with whom we were bound by fate—depending on the degree to which this was the case—we are now beginning to notice, under the influence of the Seraphim, Cherubim, and Thrones, an important transformation of form, which I will first describe, once again, in more external terms.

[ 18 ] When one observes with the physical eye a person walking through the world in this way, one sees him putting one foot in front of the other and moving along; one sees, as it were, a series of snapshots of this person. But whoever then observes this person in this sphere after death through imaginative perception sees them precisely as if the steps—the movement of the legs with each step forward—were carrying, right there in our limbs, the entire destiny that the person has lived through, the destiny that has taken shape during their earthly life. Not only on the legs, but also on the arms, we carry what constitutes the content of our destiny—the good and the bad we have done to other people with our hands. What evokes a certain impulse toward justice in the world and becomes woven into our destiny can be seen in the way a person begins to move. And in the same way, one can now see the inner destiny that a person has created for themselves through their moods—through the way they have experienced life inwardly—in their blood circulation.

[ 19 ] What one perceives as part of one’s destiny can still be seen long after a person has entered the sphere I have described; in fact, it can still be seen in the form of the limbs and other human features, with the exception of the head and chest. On the physical Earth, the sight of a human being lacking a head and chest, walking past us in this state, would certainly not be a very pleasant one; but here, between death and new birth, everything has been transformed into the moral-spiritual realm. The sight there is far more powerful than the sight of a human head on Earth can ever be. And this is what people experience who are bound together by destiny and who, during their spiritual existence in the Sun, experience these fateful events in that time between death and new birth, which I have described in my Mystery Dramas as the “midnight hour.” There, the various individuals now work—according to the degree of their connection to one another—on the transformation of what they were in their previous earthly life, so that one can see how this takes place in detail. There one sees, for example, how the substance of the legs is transformed for the future earthly life into the formation of the lower jaw. What the arms and hands are is transformed into the upper jaw and into the entire associated nervous system—but in a spiritual vision. The entire lower human being is transformed into the upper human being.

[ 20 ] However, this is not the work of a single person alone, but rather the work of people who belong together, depending on the degree to which their destinies are intertwined. One person works upon the other. And through this working of one upon the other, spiritual affinities are formed, which then bring about the fact that one person finds the other in life and comes together with them. This spiritual affinity, which brings us together with the other in a more or less intimate way, has indeed been brought about in this manner during the life between death and the next birth. In fact, a spiritual form of the new head is formed through the collaboration of people who are destined to be together. And this is indeed a form of work in the spirit world that is by no means less substantial than the work here on Earth; on the contrary, it is far more substantial.

[ 21 ] As you have already seen from this: Just as one can generally describe what happens to a human being between birth and death in terms of the images of physical earthly life, so one can describe in concrete detail what happens to a human being between death and a new birth. It can be described in very concrete terms. It is a magnificent, awe-inspiring process—the way the limb system and the blood-metabolic system are transformed. But everything that is transformed in the spiritual existence midway between death and a new birth consists of the human being’s moral and spiritual qualities. And regarding what emerges from this transformation, one must then say: What has been transformed there resounds as world music. This form of the human being, which is modeled after the sun and is a mirror of the universe, reveals in the world tone that which constitutes the human being’s outer form. So it is not that one then has—if I may put it in comparative terms—a visual conception of the human being, but rather one has, in the sound of the world, a conception of the transformed essence of the lower human being.

[ 22 ] And as this process continues further and further, the human being becomes a part of the World Word itself. It comes to pass that what was at first merely a combination of melody and harmony is now structured into articulated parts of the World Word. Human beings thus come to express their own essence as if speaking from the universe itself. So that one can say: There is a time between death and the next birth when human beings become spiritual speech—not one consisting of a few syllables, but one that is immensely meaningful, containing not only the entire essence of humanity in general, but also this particular individual human being in question. At this moment between death and a new birth, the human being possesses immense, mysterious knowledge, and reveals to the universe—perceptible to the divine-spiritual beings—what he is. — When one human being works on another in this way to bring about a metamorphosis—so that the lower human being is transformed into the higher one—for the higher human being has gradually been worn away—when, according to the degree of their connection, work is done precisely to foster further connection, then it is as if, in the course of this work, something spiritually plastic were being shaped into sensations. One takes in what is spiritually sculptural; one reworks it, and it transforms into sound and ultimately into speech.

[ 23 ] At first, as I have described to you, one moves among the spiritual physiognomies of those connected to one, by looking at them. One becomes aware of one another; one gets to know one another in spiritual form according to moral and spiritual qualities. But at first it is simply perception—perception that, admittedly, brings human souls intimately together, but still only perception. Then begins the phase I have described as that of mutual understanding. One understands the other; one looks at the other, gazing deeply and sympathetically into their inner being, knowing how the future will be linked to the past in a fateful connection. Then, emerging from this, begins that process of transformation in which one works on the other out of a deep insight, and in which what is received through spiritual plasticity is transformed into sound and speech. Then it happens that one not only understands the other, but that one responds to the other with one’s own warm, creative word. Here on earth we speak with our speech organs; here we tell one another what we have come to know through our speech organs. Behind what resides within us and speaks stands the physical body, and within it lives our ordinary speech as something fleeting to which the higher realm communicates itself. And as we articulate with our speech organs what we wish to say to one another, we thereby erase what lives behind that which is merely sensual. And now imagine this: what a person utters, what passes into the fleeting word, would at the same time be like a person’s self-expression—their essence and, at the same time, their revelation—then you have how human beings, in the midst between death and new birth, encounter one another by distinguishing and revealing their own essence. Word meets word, articulated word meets articulated word, inwardly animated word meets inwardly animated word. But human beings are, after all, the words themselves; their harmonizing is the harmonizing of the articulated essence of the word. There, human beings live in such a way that there is no impenetrability: There, people truly live with one another, and the one word—which is one person—merges into the other word—which is the other person. There, those fateful connections are formed which then remain in the aftereffects for the following earthly life, and which manifest themselves in such a way that when people meet, they come together and, so to speak, feel sympathy and antipathy. Then this feeling is a reflection of how people addressed one another in the spirit world, halfway between death and new birth. Thus we spoke to one another—we who were speech itself—just as we now find one another again on Earth only in the shadowy image of that feeling.

[ 24 ] This is roughly what a person should tell themselves if they were to perceive what they experience on Earth with other people as the emotional echo of what they once were—between death and new birth—as they expressed themselves in the Word of Creation. That is the time when human beings are truly meant to be there for one another. And this earthly togetherness is, I would say, the projection of essential togetherness shaped from the spiritual realm and brought down to Earth.

[ 25 ] Then, once a person has lived through this phase, another phase begins, in which he gradually leaves behind the essence of the first hierarchy—the essence of the Seraphim, Cherubim, and Thrones—where they once again enter the realm of the second hierarchy, once again enter the realm of the forces that the planets exert upon one another, and where the perceptions that human beings now gain of the world come into play; perceptions that were not present to the same degree before, but actually only to the extent that they were, in turn, experienced within the other beings. Now the world also appears as an external world. One becomes aware of mutual relationships with beings that are none of one’s concern; one becomes aware of relationships with those human beings who have just emerged in the middle between death and new birth. This occurs at the time when human beings once again enter the planetary sphere and come into connection with the beings of the second hierarchy. They were that way before, too, but the context is now different, because the first hierarchy has faded once more and is ultimately no longer present at all. And there one finds the seeds—initially spiritual seeds—for the renewed plastic formation of the human being, for the new “chest-human” and the new “limb-human.” The human being increasingly takes shape once more in his spiritual prototype. That which he expressed in the World Word becomes, in turn, spherical music; from this spherical music arises the pictorial form of his being. And so he draws ever closer to the moment when he is ripe to enter into connection with an embryonic human germ that comes to meet him from his father and mother—with which he simply unites. For there is a spiritual form that descends from the spiritual world into physical earthly existence and which is the true essence of the human being, whereas that which approaches the human being through the physical embryo exists solely so that the human being may enter into a connection with the earthly substances and become permeated by them.

[ 26 ] Thus, what takes place between death and a new birth is a life rich in content. The work that human souls perform there takes place between the beings of the higher worlds and among the human souls themselves. However, the entire nature of this life, in its outward form, is different from that of life on Earth. And if we now wish to make further progress in our ever-clearer understanding of this supersensible nature of the human being, then we must also become clear about the following.

[ 27 ] We live, first and foremost, here in the physical, sensory world of the Earth. Here, we perceive the external world through our senses. We must tell ourselves: What we perceive here is perceptible and physical. After all, in our earthly life, we perceive nothing other than what is perceptible and physical. Superimposed upon this is another world, to which our etheric body itself belongs, a body that permeates our physical one. This world is, for the time being, imperceptible to human sensory perception, and it is also not physical; it is supraphysical. Thus, our perceptible, physical world is bordered by another, imperceptible, supraphysical world. This is the next world, in which the third hierarchy lives: the Angeloi, the Archangeloi, and the Archai. For the embodied earthly human being living in the physical world, who does not develop spiritual insight, this world is initially imperceptible, and it is also not physical: although it manifests its effects in the physical world, it is not physical.

[ 28 ] Then a third world follows on from this. This, too, is not physical; in this respect, it is similar to the second, the etheric world—it is supraphysical. But what is peculiar is that it is perceptible. It is perceptible from our world, and this brings us to a characteristic of a world that extends into our own—one that is perceptible yet supraphysical. Therefore, at first, human beings do not interpret it in its true nature. This world, which is supraphysical yet perceptible, includes, for example, what floods toward us in the sunlight. The entire population of the Sun—these spiritual beings—are supraphysical, yet they are perceptible on Earth. For it is nonsense to believe that sunlight is merely what physicists believe it to be; sunlight is the revelation of the solar beings. The solar beings are perceptible, but human beings perceive a form from these solar beings that they cannot interpret. The light of the stars, the light of the moon, the sun, and other light besides that of the sun, moon, and stars—it is perceptible; it is just that what lies behind it as its essence is not correctly interpreted by human beings. Therefore, we have here a world that is perceptible yet supraphysical, one that adjoins the physically perceptible world. It is very important that we provide this characterization:

[ 29 ] 1. our world, perceptible and physical,
2. the second world, adjoining the first; within it are the Angeloi, Archangeloi, and Archai: imperceptible and superphysical; it is the dwelling place of the third hierarchy, but also the dwelling place of human beings when they are in communion with the third hierarchy during the life between death and rebirth,
3. the third world is perceptible and, in turn, superphysical; it is the abode of the second hierarchy.

[ 30 ] All that remains for us now is to

[ 31 ] 4. an imperceptible, physical world.

[ 32 ] If you add a fourth category—an imperceptible, physical world—you have exhausted all possible worlds: perceptible-physical, imperceptible-physical, perceptible-superphysical, and imperceptible-superphysical. So we have a fourth world, one that is imperceptible yet physical. How can we imagine it? It is present among us; it exists in a physical sense, but it is imperceptible. Think about it: When you lift your leg—it’s heavy; gravity acts on the leg. It is physically active gravity, but imperceptible through the senses. You do experience gravity internally, but it is physically imperceptible. — And just as with gravity, so it is with other things: You experience within yourself—albeit in feelings that human beings cannot interpret—which is why it is imperceptible in a physical sense—that which an earlier spiritual science, which was more instinctive, called the “Mercurial,” that which seeks to form itself in the shape of a drop. You have it within you constantly—as the protein components you possess, you seek to form it: again, something physical, yet imperceptible in its own configuration. You see, a living combustion takes place within you, a physical effect that you do not perceive, one that lives in your will, but you do not interpret it as such: imperceptible physicality. It is within this imperceptible physical realm that the first hierarchy dwells—the Seraphim, Cherubim, and Thrones!

[ 33 ] And now you encounter a curious aspect. By passing through the gate of death, we first enter the imperceptible superphysical realm. We disappear, so to speak, from the world. We then proceed further into the sphere of the second hierarchy, thereby entering the perceptible superphysical realm—that is, we live in a time when we learn to understand our destinies in something like flowing sunlight or starlight. Whoever has learned to see this does not merely gaze thoughtlessly out into the vastness of the world, into the sphere of the stars, or at the sun, but knows: In this flowing light, the threads of humanity’s destiny take shape; this is the perceptible superphysical realm, in which the dead—the seemingly dead—live. And when a human being then undergoes this transformation, this metamorphosis, back into the earthly realm, they are on Earth. However, the world in which they now wander during the time between death and a new birth lies in the imperceptible-physical realm; it is in the realm of heaviness, in the mercurial and phosphoric formations. — We will gradually come to understand what these formations are like. — We are thus first taken out of life into the invisible realm, but we return in an imperceptible way so that, after being taken out once more, we may prepare ourselves for the future, perceptible physical life on Earth. We make our way between death and new birth—from the perceptible physical earthly life through the other states to the imperceptible physical earthly life: There we are at the midnight hour of existence, make our way back again, and re-enter physical earthly existence.

[ 34 ] This is, for now, just an outline that we intend to elaborate on in full detail in the next lecture. But as you can see, one cannot merely offer general, abstract ideas about human life between death and rebirth; rather, one can point out, for example, how a human being—in order to prepare for their future life in a visible world—comes to Earth in an invisible way between death and rebirth. Just imagine how our understanding of earthly life is deepened when we know what spiritual realities live within physical earthly existence at the midnight hour of our being! Here in physical earthly life, we have among us not only physically embodied human beings, but we also constantly have among us—as an important spiritual-essential aspect of earthly life—those human beings who, between death and rebirth, are in the middle, in the midnight hour of existence. The reason we do not perceive these people is that they do not live through earthly existence at the hour of noon, but rather at the hour of midnight.

[ 35 ] We'll discuss what all of this means in the next class.