Spirit as Sculptor of the Human Organism. Lecture 2: Our Life Between Death and Rebirth

 

Rudolf Steiner, Stuttgart, October 14, 1922

Translated by Steiner Online Library

Last time I spoke to you here, I spoke about an area of unconscious life, that is, of that life which remains unconscious for the ordinary consciousness of man as he has it today in his earthly existence. I spoke about the character of the life of sleep and tried to describe to you in detail and very specifically what the human soul experiences from falling asleep to waking up. Perhaps you have been able to recognize that these experiences of the human soul between falling asleep and waking up are clear revelations of the eternal, immortal life of the human soul, because you must have seen that what the soul goes through in the state of sleep are experiences from the spiritual world. And you know, of course, that the cognitions of such supersensible experiences can be gained through that which I have often explained to you verbally and which I have set forth in writing in my book How to Know Higher Worlds, in my Occult Science and so forth. You know that what is present as knowledge in the ordinary consciousness of man can be developed into so-called imaginative, inspired and intuitive knowledge. The experiences that the soul has unconsciously in sleep are, as it were, illuminated by the power that the cognizant human soul can acquire when it develops itself upward to imagination, inspiration and intuition. But by the same development it is also possible to fathom to a certain degree that part of man's unconscious experience of which sleep-life is but a reflection, the part from which the human soul emerges when it enters physical earthly existence through birth, or, let us say, conception, and which it enters again when it detaches itself from this physical earthly existence through death. And today I will at least give you a rough outline of some of the things that lie behind the events of birth or conception and death for the soul and spiritual life of man.

If a person first arrives at imaginative knowledge — I will not describe this here, I have often done so, as well as how it can be acquired — the first thing is that his physical life on earth lies spread out before him as a unity, as in a large tableau. In ordinary physical consciousness, a person has his earthly life only as a memory in his soul. What then are memories? They are something that consists of pictures, pictures that through their own inner essence point to the experiences that the person has gone through since birth or since a point in time somewhat later. But they are images that cannot be said to unfold an existence independently of the body, based on the knowledge of ordinary human life as it is today on earth. Today's physical science is absolutely right when it points out to people how these memory images are dependent on the constitution of the physical body. It is right when it points out that this memory is not yet present in the very first years of a person's life, how it develops with the physical organism, and how it also declines again when the physical organism of the person itself approaches its twilight. And it can also be established from certain symptoms of disease, from examinations of the physical organism of sick people after death, how the loss of memory is caused by certain physical organs. Of course, science has not yet come to a conclusion in such matters; but anyone who penetrates the spirit of the relevant physical scientific results can already see through how the time will come when it will be possible to show how ordinary memory images are connected to the physical human organism. But what we have as individual images of memory, as it were, surging up out of the stream of our experiences, when we look back over our lives, is not what is meant when it is said that imaginative knowledge has the earthly life of the human being, in so far as it is a spiritual-soul life, spread out before it in a great tableau. What one surveys in imaginative knowledge is truly not the abstract memory images that ordinary memory preserves. Rather, imaginative knowledge is preceded by an active, organic experience that not only has the passivity of memory images, but also an inner strength, like the growth forces that are active in our organism when we transform the substances of the external world that we take in as food in a – now, it is permissible to say – wonderful way into that which we need to constitute our organism. What lives and works in us, creating and generating, is something different from what is merely in our memory images in a more passive way. Look at the thoughts. They brighten our consciousness; certainly, we owe an infinite debt to the life of thought during our earthly existence. It is only through this that we actually become human and only through these thought images do we become fully aware of our human dignity. But these are fleeting images, bound to the physical human organism, like the flame to the fuel of the candle. That which the imaginative cognizer surveys as the spiritual-soul life that underlies physical earthly existence, that which he surveys as a wonderful, great tableau, is not something passive. It is an inwardly living alive, and one that, although it presents itself to us spiritually and soulfully, we know through direct soul perception just as we know through the eye what a red-colored external object is. And we can say in imaginative knowledge that we not only have thoughts that flash into our consciousness, but that we become truly aware of such forces at work in our organism.

I would even say that it has been taken amiss, as an absurdity, that I once said in my book “The Spiritual Guidance of Man and Humanity” that all the wisdom of the adult human being is not as capable as the wisdom of the young child, which, however, unconsciously in this little child; but look with the most developed, with the most learned human knowledge of the way in which a human brain, how a human whole organism is in the first human years of life, and look at how man actually forms himself inwardly. All the activity of even the most ingenious sculptor is insignificant compared to what is powerfully carried out by the child's inner spiritual soul through plastic activity, as it develops its brain in a plastic way. Only when we consider and understand this can we gain a true insight into the mysterious wisdom at work here, a wisdom that is a forceful one, not just one that is stored in a person's head to enlighten itself about the world, but of a wisdom that contains within itself a spiritual-soul organism of forces that, so to speak, penetrates the child's outer organization hour by hour and only makes it a full human being. Just try to form a fleeting mental image of what is working there, so full of wisdom and magnificent that the human being, with his intellect and intellectual wisdom, cannot possibly keep up with what is working in the child, what must work for many years out of the unconscious , for example, the miracle of human speech. Try to form a picture, albeit an abstract one, of this wisdom-filled work up to the point where the human being becomes conscious enough to be able to use his intellect. Then, I would like to say, this intellect creates an ephemeral wisdom according to that wisdom that first formed man out of the innermost forces of the world. But we must also be clear about the fact that when we develop the human intellectual mind, I would say, in the upper layers of our being, in the lower layers of our human beingness, that which continues to shape our organism in childhood, full of wisdom, as a wonderful sculptor, continues to do so. What lies at the basis as a system, as an organism of forces, is surveyed in a unified tableau by imaginative knowledge. This imaginative insight is not confronted with abstract memory images, which cannot be said to persist when the organism disintegrates into its elements because they are bound to that organism. Rather, this imaginative insight is confronted with the system of forces that builds this organism, that is, is not bound to it, that is bound to the material no more than the creative, ingenious power of the sculptor is bound to it. In order for the material to become what it becomes, the sculptor's formative power must first be applied to it. For the human being to become what he is in his earthly existence as a physical organism, these entirely non-physical, supersensible forces must underlie it as a spiritual-soul organization that governs the human being's physical existence.

This is the first thing we acquire as an insight when we ascend to imaginative knowledge.

But at the same moment that we are able to do so, that is, to see what it is that works in us as a spiritual-soul element during our earthly existence, which is not only independent of the physical organism but actually brings about the shaping of this physical organism itself . At the same moment that we are able to do this, we are also able to disregard our earthly existence, to abstract from it, as we can abstract from a thought in physical life. We must gain this power through those meditation exercises of which I have often spoken to you, not only to be able to refrain from a thought, not only to be able to suppress a thought, but to be able to erase from our consciousness that which we have only just acquired with great effort in our contemplation of the spiritual and soul in our physical existence on earth. But then, when we are in a position, I would say, in a knowing selflessness, in a knowing altruism, to be able to erase from our inner vision what we are spiritually-soulfully during earthly life, then, before our consciousness, our true spiritual-soul eternal appears before our consciousness, then what we were before we descended from spiritual-soul worlds into physical earthly existence appears before our consciousness as a concrete spiritual-soul being. We learn to look at ourselves as spiritual-soul human beings in our pre-earthly existence. And we learn to speak not only in general, abstract terms about this pre-earthly existence, but we learn to look at it in its development, and today I have described some of this development to you.

You see, when we are here on earth, when we speak of ourselves, we feel connected to our physical body; in our waking state we feel connected to this physical body. No matter how dull the feeling of connection with the physical body may be, it is there, and it becomes particularly apparent when something is wrong with this physical body. Then we feel not only the physical body in general in a dull sensation of life, but also its individual parts. We may feel our lungs, our stomach, our heart, our head organs. In ordinary life, all this is immersed in a dull sensation of life; but unless a person is exclusively healthy throughout his or her entire life, there will come a time when he or she has the opportunity to feel his or her individual organs. In short, man feels himself during his waking consciousness between birth and death in earthly life, in that he feels himself in his being, together with his physical body, with all that is enclosed within his skin. But in the moment when man is not connected with his physical life on earth, in those times when he has a spiritual-soul existence before entering his physical earthly existence, he does not feel as his inner self, of course, what his physical body or its limbs are, but he also has an inner self then. I had to hint to you how the soul experiences inner images between falling asleep and waking up, even if it is not conscious of these images. But in the state in which the soul was before it descended from the spiritual-soul existence into the physical earthly existence, it had the consciousness of a different inwardness. This consciousness of a different inwardness is only hidden, only veiled by the fact that in our physical earthly existence our physical body also becomes an organ of knowledge. And it obscures the soul's introspection, which is only present when the soul is free of the body. But what the soul then experiences as its inwardness is now not what is enclosed within the skin of the physical body, but what the organization of the cosmos is. And just as the human being here in this physical earthly existence is connected with his lungs, with his stomach, with his heart, with his other bodily organs, so in the supersensible existence he is connected with what otherwise appears to our eyes, to our other sense organs, as the outer world of the cosmos. What is the outer world for us in our earthly existence is the inner world for us when we are in our extra-earthly existence. And we look down on our earthly existence as on an outer world from the supersensible existence that we spend between death and a new birth. And just as we are, I might say, steeped in our lungs, our heart and so on here, we are embodied before we descend to physical life on earth in that which appears to us in the outer reflection in the planetary movements, in the constellations of the fixed stars, as forces that permeate and interweave the cosmos. That which is the cosmic external world during our earthly existence is our internal world when we are in extra-terrestrial existence.

You must not be misled by the thought that the external world is one for all earthly people with different bodies; it is precisely that which is significant, that we have a common world when we are in extra-terrestrial existence, that the same world that one person has is also the same world that another person has, and that people who are spatially separate from one another here on Earth, in that each is enclosed in his own skin, are then separate from one another through the inner strength of the soul. In the extra-terrestrial existence, everyone is also an individuality; but he is not separated from the other individualities by space, but by the inner strength of his soul, by the cohesive forces within him. But what flows into these cohesive forces is that which corresponds spiritually to the universe, which appears to us in the physical image of the sun, the moon, the planets, the fixed stars.

Just as we here on earth see a person with our outer senses, only the shape of his face, the shine of his eyes, the movements of his limbs, but we become aware that we ourselves are spiritual-soul beings, that in these formations of his face, in the shine of his eyes, in the incarnadine of his skin, in the movements of his limbs, a spiritual-soul element is of his skin, and in the movements of his limbs, a spiritual-soul element is living itself out. Thus, the person who is able to view the world spiritually and soulfully recognizes that it is not true when it is claimed that the sun and moon, fixed stars and planets, and the movements of the planets are only that which our present-day physical astronomy describes. This description is actually similar to that which someone would give if they only wanted to describe the external movements of a muscle in our face, if they only wanted to describe the movement of the eyelashes, and did not want to see the expression of a spiritual soul in the movements of the facial muscles, in this movement of the eyelids. The one who is able to look at the world spiritually and soulfully sees the physiognomic expression of a cosmic spiritual-soul life in the phenomena of the moon and the sun just as we see the expression of a spiritual-soul life in the human face. In the movements of the planets, he sees expressions of spiritual-soul events, just as one sees in the movements of the limbs of human beings the revelations of spiritual-soul impulses. And in these spiritual-soul backgrounds of what appears to us in the physical image of the outer physical sun, the outer physical moon, the stars and their movements, in this spiritual-soul that corresponds in the cosmos to the spiritual-soul of the individual human being, the human being lives, if he is a supersensible being, before he descends into earthly existence. And just as I can say here as an earthly human being: I have lungs and a heart within me, so as a supermundane human being, before I descend into the sensual-physical existence in order to constitute my physical body, I can say: I have moon and sun within me. However, I must be aware that I do not mean the sensual earthly reflection of the sun and moon, but that which underlies them as spiritual-soul. The entire spiritual world of divinity interweaves and lives in me, in that I am in a supermundane human existence. Only when one sees through this does one get that deep reverence for all real world existence into which man has been woven. For one now sees through the wonderful connections that exist between man and the universe. One learns to look at man as he stands there in his physical earthly existence, and one learns to say to oneself: In that which is enclosed within the walls of the skin, not only what you see with your physical eyes, what the anatomist can look at and unravel on the dissecting table after death, but the ultimate goal of all cosmic activity lives within it. The wonderful saying of ancient religious times, that man is an image of God Himself, takes on a new meaning of infinite intimacy. And inspired knowledge teaches us to look at what man actually experiences in connection with the spiritual-divine powers that underlie the cosmos in his pre-earthly existence.

In scientific terms, when we survey earthly human life, we first speak of the human germ that develops from the mother's body into the physical human form of the growing child. We naturally address the germ as something small that gradually enlarges. In a kind of germ, the human being lives in his pre-earthly existence, only this germ is the experience of the entire spiritual-soul cosmos. In a sense, the human being has become one with the spiritual-soul cosmos; the divine spiritual forces live in him, they are active in him, they permeate him and they develop within him the great spirit germ, which contains within itself the forces that must pass through the spiritual existence until birth or conception, so that they then emerge again when the human being, as the inner sculptor, has to shape his physical organism in earthly life. The formation of the physical organism becomes clear; for this physical organism is the goal of that which the human being experiences in an immeasurably magnificent way in spiritual-soul, fully aware of himself as the cosmic germ of his inner life. The human being receives the physical germ from the physical world; the human being receives the spiritual germ from the spiritual world. And we are, so to speak, in a certain time before we have descended to the physical existence on earth, a huge spiritual-soul human germ that has poured out into the whole world, which then unites with the physical human germ that receives us here when we descend into earthly existence.

We look at our cosmic existence when we look through the inspired knowledge into the pre-earthly existence. Just as we know ourselves as one with our organism here, we know ourselves as one with the whole world through this looking. Here, in this world, the human being looks at the outer revelations of the spiritual in nature and in the human existence; he senses the divine-spiritual behind these physical-sensory revelations. In the pre-earthly existence, he is permeated, imbued and interwoven with this divine-spiritual existence, and this divine-spiritual existence lives itself out in him in such a way that it implants in him those forces that tend towards physical earthly existence. Just as we direct our eyes up to the marvelous starry sky here, so we direct our eyes from our extra-terrestrial existence to the marvelous structure of the physical human being as he lives here in his earthly existence. I would like to say that we look from the earth to heaven in our physical earthly existence, but we look from heaven to earth in our pre-earthly existence. There the earth becomes understandable to us as the work of the gods, as it should actually live in our soul. And all of this is direct experience, initially in the pre-earthly existence.

But after we have gone through this pre-earthly existence, after a certain time something happens: the divine spiritual beings withdraw from us human beings. We do not yet have nature around us, because in this spiritual-soul existence we also have no physical eyes, no physical organs, and so we could not see nature at all. We have around us something that is only like a shining in of the divine-spiritual. That is the great change in the pre-earthly existence, that we first experience an immediate being in, being permeated by and with the divine-spiritual existence, but that then a point in time comes when we look at the spiritual world that surrounds us, which is still a spiritual world, but we have to say to ourselves: before that we lived with the divine spiritual beings, now they show themselves to us through their actions, now their appearance is there. It is a spiritual-soul manifestation that we do not have only in our earthly life, but it is only a revelation of what we ourselves have experienced earlier. We enter from the sphere of experience into the sphere of revelation. And to the same extent that we enter from experience into revelation, we have to say to ourselves: The divine spiritual beings have withdrawn from us human beings for direct experience, we can now only look at them, they are certainly there for us human beings, but only for our spiritual-soul contemplation. In the same moment, in our spiritual-soul pre-earthly existence, that which I can compare to what lives in our physical organism as a desire awakens. Man is inwardly permeated by desire to the extent that the world becomes a revelation before birth. Only now do we actually feel ourselves as a self that is separate from the rest of the world. We move away from an experience that is at once a world experience and an experience of our own human nature. Between death and a new birth, we are not only human beings, we are world beings. World consciousness and human consciousness coincide. Then comes the time when world consciousness and human consciousness part, when we no longer experience the world but it reveals itself to us, when an inner life separate from the world arises in us. In the past, our inner life was one with the world; now an inner life separate from the world arises, and this first announces itself as an inner desire, as a wish, a will. A wish, a want, a desire is always directed at something. This wish and this want and this desire is directed at our future life on earth, to which we will descend after some time. We are filled with the visions of our future life on earth and we absorb those forces, which then become unconscious when we go through the embryonic life on earth. We are conscious there; but consciousness becomes more and more dimmed, and there comes a time when desire grows strong and even the revelation of the divine spiritual world, in which we previously lived and moved, becomes more and more obscured. As spiritual beings in the pre-earthly existence, we feel that we must say: The spiritual world around us becomes increasingly shadowy and shadowy. That which previously still shone brightly as divine revelation becomes increasingly shadowy. As the external world becomes increasingly shadowy, the inner desires become more vehement, the external world darkens within our spiritual existence, the inner world becomes more powerful, but after some time this powerful inner world completely takes away our awareness of future earthly life. For a time, not long before earthly conception, the view of earthly existence darkens. We used to look down on this earthly existence; it was, as it were, the target appearance, that magnificent, mighty world tableau in which we lived. Now our view of the earth is lost to us, but instead another view opens up to us. It is not long before we descend to the earth, but just as we descend, our view of the earth is lost to us and our view of the etheric world opens up. What the ether phenomena are that hold the light, that hold the forces of life, that are spread out in space, but not centrally from the earth up into space, but rather as if from the periphery of the world, pouring in upon the earth, the etheric becomes visible to us. As in a great cosmic fog containing the most diverse formations, an etheric world becomes spiritually visible around us, and from this etheric world we can, with the power that remains to us, with the power of desire, take from the general etheric cosmic fog our own etheric body, can shape it, and by shaping our own etheric form our own etheric body, we form with this etheric body an image of what we used to be in the spiritual-soul world, integrate this etheric body with what is brought to us from the evolution of heredity, what is brought to us by our ancestors in physical substantiality, and we descend to the earthly existence.

I have been able to sketch for you only what arises for imaginative and inspired knowledge when man expands his consciousness beyond ordinary earthly consciousness. In the course of earthly development, man has progressed to the consciousness he has today, which is bound in the narrowest sense to physical corporeality, and has lost an original consciousness. I have often pointed this out. I have pointed out how history actually only describes the external aspects of the earthly life of mankind, how we need a soul history, how this soul history shows us that people have not always had the same state of consciousness as today, when they can only combine with their intellect what the sensory organs perceive, and when they can only bring up what rises from the physical body to consciousness. The further we go back in time to earlier periods of human history, the more we see that people had a kind of original, if dreamlike, clairvoyance. What the human being acquires today in imaginative, inspired knowledge is a fully conscious realization, I would say, as fully conscious as mathematical realization; the people of an earlier time had a dull, dream-like clairvoyance, but it was no less imbued with wisdom. These people of an earlier time not only perceived what today's human being experiences with ordinary consciousness when he looks within, but they also saw something of what I have described to you now. If we go back even further, to the most ancient Egyptian times, and then still further back to still more ancient times, of which there are no records in the form of external history but only in the form of the kind of history I have described in Occult Science, we find men who did not have to acquire the power through such exercises as I have often described to you, but who could speak of this pre-earthly existence because something of this pre-earthly existence lived in their souls during their earthly existence, like a memory. Modern man has bought his freedom by only being able to have a memory in abstract thoughts of the events and experiences that he encounters during his life on earth. Mankind in earlier primeval times did not only have such memories living in the soul, but by looking into this soul, they brought forth, in addition to these memories of this physical life, images from the soul of what I have now told you. Just as one remembers today in the ordinary consciousness what one experienced on earth twenty or thirty years ago, so in a certain sense a person of older epochs remembered what he had experienced in his pre-earthly existence and what I have described to you today from spiritual science. But just as the human being of today is certain, through his memory, that he was not born this morning but was already here before this morning, so the human being of older epochs knew of his pre-earthly existence through what he experienced in his soul. But from this also arose the certainty that what he experienced as such already existed in a spiritual-soul world before he descended to physical earthly existence, that it goes through the passes through the gate of death and is not dependent on the physical organism, that just as it builds up the physical organism for earthly existence, it finds its further existence when the gate of death is passed.

But what goes out of physical earthly existence? What we experience here in physical earthly existence as thoughts is also bound to the physical organism; but what wells up as will in such a wonderful way from within the human being that he can actually grasp his volitional acts only in thoughts, only in images, and can only say: I will raise my hand or arm. But he does not know what happens between these thoughts and between the actual raising of the arm, the whole miracle that lies in between, the tensing of the muscle. All this is in the unconscious, just as the events of the life of sleep itself are for the soul. That which arises as will remains unconscious for the most part, that is, it is reflected only in the life of thought. But he who looks down into this life of will with inspired and intuitive knowledge makes tremendous discoveries within it. Here in our physical existence on earth, which we only view externally, we perform our actions, and a materialistic age could even believe that these actions are exhausted in the physical existence on earth, that they have no further significance.

But he who looks into the true nature of the human will, which remains unconscious to ordinary day-consciousness, sees there how, not out of thinking, but out of willing, to the same extent that man progresses in physical earthly existence, something is formed which is composed of the evaluation of his actions. In our physical existence on earth, we say: an action is good, an action is evil, we are satisfied or dissatisfied with some deed. We can perhaps believe that this is only an abstract judgment that we add to the deed. If we look into the human being's volitional existence with our truly true inspiration and intuition, we see how a real being weaves itself out of what is only a thought here, such as the judgment: I can be satisfied with an action — or: I must be dissatisfied —, inwardly, in accordance with our will, becomes a fact, how a whole being is woven in the depths of our human nature, a being that, if I may express it this way, has a countenance, depending on our actions here in our earthly existence. If we have done bad deeds, which we cannot be satisfied with while fully conscious of our humanity, then an entity with an ugly face develops within us; if we have done deeds that we can be satisfied with, then an entity with a sympathetic face develops. Indeed, the evaluation of our actions becomes an inner being in us, and to the same extent that our thoughts become more and more dependent on the physical organism - in the child they were not yet dependent on the physical organism, they worked on the physical organization, then they became abstract - the same measure in which, I might say, our thoughts become a corpse in our physical organism, for they are not alive, they are dead thoughts. In the same measure, the human being's moral being stirs down there, which he develops during his life. This moral being is there, and this moral being unites with his ego, and this moral being he now carries through the gate of death into the spiritual world. When the human being passes through the gate of death into the spiritual world, he has first laid aside his physical body, as described in my book Theosophy. He is now in his etheric body, and still has a consciousness of his earthly deeds. But this consciousness begins to be permeated by a cosmic world consciousness. That which is the etheric body dissolves into the general world ether; just as it was contracted hard before birth, it now dissolves into the world ether. With the astral body, which you will find in my book called 'Theosophy', the human being gradually reintegrates with the cosmos, but he still lives together with his newly formed moral-spiritual organism; he carries this out with him, and with it he lives out.

And now a task arises for him that is connected with what I already told you the last time I spoke to you about the life of sleep in humans: I explained to you how humans have the strength to re-enter their physical organism during sleep, that they have this strength through what can be described as lunar forces. The lunar forces are what bring the human being back into physical earthly existence, even every morning. Man is initially within this sphere of the lunar forces when he has discarded his physical and etheric bodies. But within these lunar forces he cannot receive the comprehensive world consciousness that I described to you earlier; rather, there the human being still has something that connects him to the earth through this moral earth organism. He must snatch himself from the lunar forces; he must leave behind in the lunar sphere that which he has woven for himself out of his moral actions, out of all that he has done as a moral or immoral act; he must leave that behind in the lunar sphere and must penetrate into the solar sphere, into the world of the stars. Now he must not only penetrate into the image, as I have described it for the state of sleep, but into the real world of sun and stars; he must snatch himself from the lunar sphere.

The clairvoyant consciousness of primitive man also had an experience of this, could speak of these things, which today man can only gain if he develops his spiritual and soul powers. Primitive man could speak of these things through the natural elementary powers with which he was endowed. But primitive man was at the same time always guided, just as man is today guided by science, just as he is guided by the various educational institutions (such as did not exist in ancient times). What human beings could see of the pre-earthly and post-earthly existence was, so to speak, oriented by what the initiates of the mysteries knew through their higher knowledge. And so the members of primitive humanity learned what became an inner experience for some of them, who were knowledgeable in the sense of the word at that time: that man cannot escape the lunar sphere through his own strength after death, that a spiritual being from the cosmos must come to meet him, of which the sun is the external physical reflection. That must come to meet him, that must snatch him from the lunar sphere. He must leave behind what he carries with him from the earth in the form of guilt; he must be led up into the guilt-free sphere of the cosmos by what the ancient initiates called the high being of the sun, which found a wonderful description in all the ancient mysteries. You need, as people said in those days, the power that comes to meet you from the heavens. But man was organized differently in those days. I have already indicated today how differently man was organized in those days. He had clairvoyant powers within him; he knew from inner vision that there is a supersensible world on earth. He had no real fear of death, for what was death? An experience in life. He saw that something within him was independent of death. He had that which was independent in his body, and because he had that in the body, he could see the sun being coming to meet him, he could accept the help after death.

But therein consists the earthly progress of men, that men have lost the natural way of looking at their Eternal. Mankind has acquired an intellectual consciousness that is completely bound to the physical body, that is dependent on the physical body; we have an earthly consciousness depending on the organization of the physical body. This earthly consciousness obscures the spiritual world for us, even before we are born and after we die. For today's man, it is not the same as for prehistoric man or even for man in the older Egyptian times, that he brings a certain light with him through the gate of death and can illuminate the space — if I may express it this way; it is only a figure of speech — of the supersensible world, and can, as it were, hasten towards the high solar being that comes to lead him out of the lunar sphere. Through what he had within him between birth and death, he was able to recognize this high being of the sun.

You see, you need not be offended by the expression; the old initiates, out of their knowledge, had the right to call this being the high being of the sun. But there came a time in the development of mankind when mankind would have lost the possibility of penetrating into those worlds after death, into which it must penetrate if it does not want to lose itself. On the other hand, mankind on earth had to penetrate to that consciousness in which one can only and alone acquire freedom as a human being. As a result, a terrible state would have occurred for mankind at a certain time. The terrible situation that would have arisen for humanity would have been that people would have been cut off from the supersensible world, that precisely because of the perfection they attain here on earth, which predestines them would have been deprived of the supersensible world, because they could no longer find the connection to that spiritual being that would snatch them from that which holds them together with the earth for life after death.

And what has happened to further real progress of mankind? Not an external abstract knowledge, not a theory could help. The only thing that could help was that being, which had previously only lived in the supersensible worlds and came to meet people when they were between death and birth in the supersensible, could only help if the being descended to earth, so that the earthly human being could have a connection with it already on earth. And this descent is the event of Golgotha. The Christ-Being has descended and has assumed an earthly existence in Jesus of Nazareth.

Within his earthly existence, the Meusch gains a connection with the Christ Jesus. What he adds to his earthly consciousness by looking to the Christ Jesus, by feeling with, sympathizing with the mystery of Golgotha, what he instills into his earthly consciousness by not only calling himself an ego that can be free, but by fulfilling Paul's words: “Not I, but the Christ in me,” could he make this word a truth in his earthly life by connecting his ego, which he attains here but which would at the same time cut him off from the supersensible world, by connecting this earthly consciousness with what has entered into earthly existence through the sacrifice of the Christ Being: this is what man carries through death. The ability that used to come to him only through the fact that he had elemental powers within him: since the Mystery of Golgotha, it is the connection of the earthly human being in his consciousness, in his soul life, with Christ, with the Mystery of Golgotha, which secures his life when he passes through the gate of death. For the consciousness that one attains through the physical body would have to be lost with the physical body; one would not find the way through the spiritual worlds. If one finds on earth the Guide, that is to say, the Christ, who has passed through the Mystery of Golgotha, and if one's spiritual powers are linked with those of humanity on earth in the sense of St. Paul's words: “It is no longer I who live, but Christ lives in me,” then one will find a living way through the gate of death. Therefore St. Paul's words can be taken in all seriousness: And if the Christ had not come to earth, that is, if He had not conquered death, then all would avail man nothing in his faith.

The old adepts told men: A supermundane Being will take up the thread of your consciousness, which you have here of your entire human nature, and will lead you out of your lunar existence into pure cosmic world existence. The more recently initiated must tell people: Look to what was accomplished by the Christ in the Mystery of Golgotha, take into your consciousness the substantiality of the Christ with all its power! This goes with you through death and leads you towards those worlds which you must pass through between death and a new birth. In the lunar sphere you will leave behind your moral being, only to find it again when you return to the lunar sphere. And in your earthly fate will appear the image of that which you first left behind and then will find again in the lunar sphere.

From what I can tell you now, human science, through the natural human science, only knows through those powers that came to humanity in the last third of the 19th century. In the past, these powers were more or less obscured in humanity. They were still there, but in the form of dreams from the ancient times that I described to you earlier. In the first centuries of Christianity, people did not have what we can achieve today through imagination, inspiration and intuition, but they had a natural, atavistic clairvoyance, and there were still old initiates at the time of the Mystery of Golgotha; they were able to tell their people who trusted them: The Christ, who was in that world, which you remember as the time of your pre-earthly existence, the Christ, who used to be only in extraterrestrial spheres, descended to Earth through the cross of Golgotha. Therefore, in the first four centuries of the development of Christianity in the West, the main focus was on the descended Christ. Everywhere you find descriptions from the first centuries AD (most of the literature has been destroyed) of how the Christ descended from cosmic and spiritual worlds and took on an earthly existence in the body of Jesus of Nazareth. At that time, the greatest value was placed on this descent, on this leaning towards the earth. But when, with the fourth century A.D., the old initiates began to die out and the new science of initiation was not yet there, which could only come with the last third of the 19th century, when these old initiates had died out, then what had previously been a direct vision had to be hardened into the documents. It had to be handed down traditionally; in order to attain the consciousness of freedom, people had to forget the old, initiated science for a time. That is why, the more humanity approached the 19th century, the more was forgotten about how the supermundane Christ-Being descended into earthly existence and took on an earthly existence in the body of Jesus of Nazareth. In the end, people only looked at the historical event, and gradually they lost sight of the Christ in Jesus. We must begin again today to speak of the Christ as a supersensible entity. We must understand what it means for the Christ to keep the human soul alive, for the body has changed in the course of human evolution. Why did the ancients have clairvoyance? Because the body was softer and the glands within the human body were even more active. It is precisely the glandular activity that has approached a hardening, and the more this hardening progresses, the more the human body hardens, the glandular activity becomes a tougher one, that which can serve as a can serve as a hardened human body for intellectualism, which is becoming more and more developed, as the glandular activity in the human body hardens, the human body itself becomes extraordinarily useful for the intellect. But man must acquire the connection with the spiritual world all the more with the soul. The initiates of the early Christian centuries still knew all this, but they expressed it with a courage that is no longer spoken of today. They said that people would have gradually become physically sicker and sicker if Christ had not come and healed them from the soul. Therefore, in the first Christian centuries, Christ was not only revered in our abstraction, but above all revered as the healer, as the great world physician, as the savior.

Today, all these things must be achieved again; they can only be achieved if man can once more look into the secrets of birth and death. The ability to look into these secrets of birth and death can only be acquired through the path of imaginative, inspired and intuitive science. We must gradually receive knowledge of this, for the one who receives knowledge of it also acquires the vision of it in his soul.

This is what I had to say to you today about the connection between man and those worlds that he leaves through birth and reenters through death.

Source: October 14, 1922