The Rudolf Steiner Archive

31. Life After Death

[ 1 ] At the beginning of his lecture, Dr. Steiner recalled the recent passing of our member, Mrs. [Frentzel], and went on to explain how we should not make our love dependent on whether a person is still on the physical plane or not. Rather, we must strive toward the ideal that our love becomes independent of our interactions on the physical plane, for then we will gain the strength to let love work [beyond] physical existence; it will then also be a great help to [the] other. For we cannot give them more than when we can say: Love continues beyond death just as it was in life. Only love that can overcome death is immortal. Feelings of love that come to an end with death die along with temporal existence. Everything that Theosophy gives us is meant only to have an educational effect on us and to lead us to this kind of love: remaining united with those who have crossed the threshold of death. We will learn this more and more, and we will feel that theosophy broadens our perspective so much that we can say: We have met this or that person so that we may have the opportunity to forge a bond with them—not only for this life, but for all eternity.

[ 2 ] From an external perspective, death is something that profoundly affects human life; but a logical objection can significantly modify this view. For what distinguishes a person before and after death? All that a person experiences regarding death is that, as long as he remains on the physical plane, he is experienced and seen by others, but afterward he is no longer. But is it logically correct to make the existence of a thing dependent on whether we see it or not? This conclusion alone is sufficient for the developed human being to prove the immortality of the human soul.

[ 3 ] How does a human being differ before and after death, and what does occultism have to say about this? We find much on this subject in theosophical books; but if we take what is written in those books, we find that it is all written more with a focus on individual life. Now, there are things in life that are common to all of us, and others that concern us only individually. These individual destinies differ from person to person; but what we experience in common is that we see things around us and interact with those that belong to the four kingdoms of nature. These are common to all of us. Once we have passed through the gate of death, everything individual becomes far more significant than before, for how good, how wise, and so on we were determines our personal destiny after death, whereas in life the communal aspect far predominates. Our personal experience always represents only a small part of the whole.

[ 4 ] Now we must ask ourselves: Isn’t there also, after death, something in common, something similar to what exists on the physical plane—are there realms there as well where we are together? Yes, there are realms there where we are together, and first and foremost, there is a person’s perception of themselves. - Is there also a connection between human beings and our animal kingdom here on Earth? No, individual animals cannot be perceived after death once we have left our physical bodies behind. With the onset of death, the animal kingdom begins to withdraw. It is as if we were looking out to sea [and seeing ships with red flags and others with white flags] and then all the ships with red flags suddenly disappeared, as if they were sinking. Human forms do not disappear. But to the same extent that animal forms disappear, humans begin to perceive the realm of the Angeloi, the angels. Humans must therefore cast off the compulsion to see the animal realm; then they will see the next higher realm—the angels.

[ 5 ] And now let us move on. First, we lose the plants, which leave behind even less of a lingering impression than the animals. But as soon as the plant realm disappears, the archangels appear; and when even the mineral realm disappears, the spirits of personality appear. In this way, the human being lives into three other realms. This, then, is what we have in common: the way we grow into the four realms of nature at our birth.

[ 6 ] The environment into which we grow after death, however, appears to us just as much as a kind of maya as everything here appears to us through the mist of illusion. Maya spreads over the existence of the physical world. This maya, as we have seen many times before, stems from the Luciferic and Ahrimanic influences. These work together to give us what we call the illusion of the physical plane. This, too, is something we all have in common; for all human beings here are subject to the same maya. And for those who, here on the physical plane, grow out of maya, the result is that, at first, they are no longer understood by their fellow human beings.

[ 7 ] After death, maya returns once again; and it is our own self, our personal self, that prevents us from tearing away the veil of Devachanic maya. We weave this veil ourselves through our passions and desires. And so, after death, maya is not a collective but an individual matter; and Kamaloka is the liberation from this veil.

[ 8 ] So, after death, human beings continue to exist. But what about animals? We cease to see them as soon as we look with the eyes of the spirit; and this proves to us the illusory nature of the animal form, for it has no truth and no meaning whatsoever in the eyes of eternity. The drawing that follows should help us better understand these matters.

[ 9 ] What lies below the line A B represents the sensory world; what lies above it, the spiritual world. How, then, should we depict the human being’s share in these two worlds in our diagram? In doing so, we must bear in mind that the physical is always merely a reflection of the true, spiritual human being. In our diagram, therefore, the true human being and his reflection overlap, for he always takes something with him from the physical world; he does not live in it in vain.

[ 10 ] What, then, is the animal form? In animals, we see the spiritual above and the physical below. Something appears from above, and it is merely reflected in the physical world. The angelic world is reflected in the animal world. Now you will say: How terrible that we are to see animals as a reflection of the angels! No, it is not terrible; for what is happening here is that the mirror has been corrupted by the Luciferic influence, so that here in the physical world, instead of the noble forms of the angels, we behold the forms of animals.

[ 11 ] Similarly, in the plant kingdom we find the forms of the archangels, corrupted by Ahriman, and in the mineral kingdom we find the reflected images of the spirits of personality, resulting from the Asuric influence. Thus, in the animal, plant, and mineral kingdoms, we find the distorted mirror images of the higher world.

[ 12 ] In university psychology courses, we hear statements such as this: When a person is hungry, they want the feeling of satiety, not this or that particular food. — But a person does not merely want the feeling of satiety; they also want the pleasure derived from food, and we owe this feeling to the Luciferic influence. Through this influence, the pleasure of the palate has been instilled in human beings; and this makes things seem desirable to them that are not at all beneficial to them. Without this feeling, human beings would consume only those things—that food—that are best for them.

[ 13 ] After death, however, what matters is whether we familiarized ourselves with what has eternal value before we died, or whether we failed to do so. And we can then take with us only what we are able to carry up into the spiritual world—provided, first, that we have become acquainted with what we call truth, and second, with what we call art—for all of art’s works are closer to the spiritual world than the forms of the physical world.

[ 14 ] What we may encounter in beauty is that there is something that points beyond the physical world. Truth exists only when a thing, in our memory, tells us the same thing it did when it stood before us, even if the thing itself has long since vanished—even thousands of years ago. Beauty can only have an effect when it is directly before us; for in memory it does not have the same intensity. Beauty is that which arouses our delight without any ulterior motive. We must therefore be completely indifferent to its possession. The triumph of beauty is that it speaks to us in the present as if it were eternal.

[ 15 ] To this we add the third: the Good, the Virtue. What is significant about it is that it appeals to us, that we must connect with it even before it is physically present. Just as with the past, present, and future, so too do the True, the Beautiful, and the Good relate to one another. [Why do these three words sound so good? Because people have sensed that there is something that has an eternal, enduring value.]

[ 16 ] Whatever we recognize as the True, the Beautiful, and the Good, we are already weaving that many threads here for eternity. But we cannot see the True here, because we perceive only the world of illusion; rather, we must develop the True ourselves. Today we see only the physical human being, but in the past, human beings looked into the spiritual world and saw the spiritual human being, even if only as a vague vision. This intertwining of the physical and spiritual worlds is expressed in ancient art through the figure of the centaur. Theosophy, which tells us what things are, does not merely offer theories; it also tells us that we are surrounded by maya everywhere; and we must learn to feel beyond the physical plane. We must try to acquire different feelings; indeed, we must acclimate ourselves to an entirely different emotional world. When Theosophy stirs our emotional life in this way, we will develop more of our emotional capacities than would otherwise be the case.

[ 17 ] When we see in every external thing only a distorted image of something spiritual, then the powers of the soul grow; and they will develop something that belongs to the spiritual world. Love in the spirit is of this nature; there we sense the spiritual long before we can see it. All theosophy is a seed for what we call love. It is the highest school of what we term love. Through the True, the Beautiful, and the Good, we develop that which is to pass from the earth into the cosmos—namely, love. This love rejuvenates the human being; selfish, sensual love causes him to age. [This rejuvenating] love is to become the harvest of our earthly existence. Let us therefore sow the seed through wisdom. Let us breathe in wisdom so that we may breathe out love!