The Connection Between the Living and the Dead

GA 168 — 3 December 1916, Zurich

The Connection Between Humans and the Spiritual World

From yesterday's public lecture, you were able to see how the spiritual world in which we find ourselves between death and a new birth is intertwined with the physical world, just as, in essence, the spiritual world and the physical world are intertwined in our so-called physical life between birth and death. We give ourselves, as it were, the direction for the way in which we are born with these or those characteristics by being connected between death and a new birth with what happens here in the physical world, and thus also with the stream of heredity that ultimately leads to our birth.

We can now look at the whole development, which we considered yesterday from a more external point of view, in a somewhat more internal way, by trying to bring the connection between the human being and the spiritual world before our soul from a certain point of view. Between birth and death, we live here in the physical world. We know this physical world through our sensory perceptions. It is a triviality, hardly worth mentioning: if we did not have our sense organs, we would know nothing of our connection with the physical world. But everything that our sense organs convey to us about our connection with the physical world naturally separates from us when we pass through the gate of death, so that we can say that It is our task between birth and death to become acquainted with the physical world. We are incorporated into this physical body in order to become acquainted with the physical world through it.

However, we are not only members of the physical world, but we are just as much members of spiritual worlds. The next spiritual world, which in a sense borders on our physical world, is the one we have become accustomed to calling—whether the expression is appropriate or not is of little importance—the etheric world, or the elemental world. This elemental world is initially unknown to human beings as they live in the physical world. It is the first supersensible world. But because it is the first supersensible world, it is no less significant for human beings than the physical world, the sensory world. As soon as human beings become aware of this elemental world, which happens when they are able to perceive imaginatively, it becomes clear to them that this elemental world is just as richly populated by beings as the physical world. Human beings themselves, insofar as they have an etheric body, belong to this elemental world. As etheric beings, they are citizens of this elemental world. However, the conditions in this elemental world are somewhat different from those in the physical world.

First, I would like to make a remark about the fact that perception in the elemental world can only begin when human beings are able to free themselves completely from what makes them earthly human beings. This freeing of oneself from what makes human beings earthly human beings is generally not difficult. However, it is more difficult for people today than it was for people in ancient times. We all know about the atavistic clairvoyance of ancient times. This consisted largely in the fact that human beings were able to free themselves from what makes them earthly human beings. As earthly human beings, we are only to a very small extent made up of solid matter. We consist largely of fluid. The moment we can emancipate ourselves from what is solid within us, when we feel only our fluid nature, the emergence of the imaginative can begin. Only our existence in the solid world prevents us from knowing what surrounds us as an elementary world through imaginative perception. This imaginative perception will return just as it was lost to humanity. However, the lost imaginative clairvoyance was a kind of unconscious, dreamlike state. What will gradually form in our fifth post-Atlantean epoch will be fully conscious imaginative vision. But this will become integrated into human beings through a completely natural process of development.

Returning to what I said earlier, that our relationship to the elemental world is different from our relationship to the ordinary physical world, I would first like to give an example that will confirm this: In the physical world, we form our relationships to this or that being out of free human will, at least apparently at first; we form our friendships and other relationships to the beings around us. In the elemental world, where we exist through our etheric body, this is not immediately the case in the same way, but rather we stand more or less in a closer relationship to certain other elemental beings throughout our entire life. Thus, we can truly compare our relationship as independent elemental beings — which we are through our etheric body — to a number of other elemental beings that actually accompany us throughout our entire life with the relationship of the sun to the orbiting planets. Our own etheric body is a kind of solar elemental being, and it is accompanied by a number of elemental beings that belong to it as the planets belong to the sun, so that these elemental beings together with it form a kind of sevenfold being, just as the planets form a kind of sevenfold being with the sun according to older views.

Throughout our entire physical life, between birth and death, there is a constant interplay between these elemental companions and ourselves. Not only does our well-being depend on the way our elemental or etheric body relates to its satellites, but our relationship to the outside world, to certain external beings, especially to other people, is also regulated by the interrelationships between these satellites and our own etheric body. In the future, there will be a kind of medicine that will take into account what I have just said. There will be a medical-physiological approach that will determine how one or the other of the satellites relates to the etheric body, and on this basis it will be possible to assess whether a person is sick or healthy. For what we actually call illness today is in truth only the outer physical image of what is really there. In reality, there is some irregularity in what I have compared to a planetary system, and illness is only a reflection of this irregularity.

One could now say: Those who know such things should establish a doctrine of disease today: Hic Rhodus, hic salta! — one could say — and occultism should show its art here. Certainly, it will do so the moment its legs are freed, for one cannot dance with one's legs tied; and the tying of the legs consists precisely in the existence of the present materialism that has taken hold of the entire medical science. This cannot be improved by one person or another doing this or that, but only by the collective will of a large number of people to truly enforce a medical system that allows spiritual principles to penetrate medicine.

In this connection, it is particularly important to realize that Paul did not utter a tremendously significant word in vain, but one that is never really understood because people always believe they are Christians when in reality they are not at all. Paul explained that sin came into the world through the law, that is, that sin is there because of the law. In a broader sense, that which disturbs order is there because of the law. Even today, one can only hint at these things, because in general, our materialistic age always cries out for laws whenever something is not right, without knowing that it is precisely that which is not right that comes from the laws that are made. But, as I said, this can only be hinted at, because a great deal is still needed to understand these things. I said: People only believe that they are Christians. For something like this in Paul is read by countless people, but little understood.

So, because we are ethereal beings, we stand in an elemental world, and a certain system is more closely related to ourselves. This system, that is, those elementary beings, etheric beings, which accompany us, are also those who, through their powers, because they are arranged in a certain way, when we pass through the gate of death, first pull our etheric body out of our physical body and then transfer it, and thus the human being himself, into the elementary world. This elemental world, as I have already indicated, can be perceived through imaginative cognition. In this elemental world there are a number of beings that can be called nature spirits. But at first there are also all the human beings who have passed physically through the gate of death, but only for a short time, as we know, only a few days. Then what we call the etheric body is handed over to the elemental world. It is laid down like a second corpse. But one must not believe that this second body, which has been laid aside, is now hastily destroyed in the elemental world. That is not the case. Rather, it dissolves, so to speak, in the elemental world, but this dissolution, this becoming thinner and thinner, does not mean that it is not perceptible to beings who are capable of imaginative perception. Above all, this elemental body, this etheric body, is always perceptible to those who have themselves passed through the gate of death. Man has laid down this elemental body and now lives on between death and a new birth, but he remains in constant connection with this discarded etheric body. It is not like the physical body, with which the human being loses all connection when he has laid it down; with the elemental body, the opposite is true: the human being retains his connection, and this connection that the human being has with his elemental, etheric body can also continue down into the physical world.

When a person here in the physical world has made their soul receptive by acquiring elementary, imaginative perception, they can also consciously maintain a connection in their ideas — which are then naturally much finer than ordinary ideas — with the dead. This is conscious connection with the dead. But what becomes conscious in this way is actually always present unconsciously if there was a relationship during life between the one who remained here in the physical world and the one who ascended into the spiritual world. Let us assume that we have lost a beloved person through death. Whether we know it or not — those who have developed imaginative perception can know it — the dead person acts as if they were sending their will into the etheric body they have left behind, as if into a mirror, and the mirror in turn sends the rays back to us; the dead person acts back on the living through the elemental and etheric bodies. This is the influence that is, in a sense, indirect.

If we want to characterize how this indirect influence is expressed, I can say: within our ideas, which we carry with us through the world. For the most part, human beings, especially in our materialistic age, are only aware of the ideas that are reflected in the external physical reality. But among the ideas that we carry through the world in this way, there are constantly those that are, so to speak, subtle, so that they are not directly perceptible. We simply do not pay attention to them. If we were accustomed to paying closer attention to our soul life, and if we did not allow the coarser ideas flowing in from the physical environment to drown out the finer soul life, we would see how finer ideas are always there. And these come from those who have been in contact with us, who have passed through the gate of death before us, and who, especially in the first period after passing through the gate of death, can convey their deeds, actions, and thoughts to us in the manner described.

Thus, for a time, we ourselves carry within our ideas the essence of the dead, because we belong to the elemental world as etheric beings. When one speaks of monism and wants to stand on the ground of reality, one must speak mainly of the monism I have just indicated, of the monon that is formed from the interaction of the living and the dead. In truth, those who have passed through the gate of death are not at all far from us. They are much closer to us than we believe.

Now, as human beings live through the time between death and a new birth, they develop more and more, so that they can also directly influence the world here from themselves. And from a certain point in time, we perceive the influence of the departed dead, as if their rays of energy were penetrating our soul life. But these rays, this direct influence, cannot enter directly into our imagination, into our thoughts, but rather live themselves into our habits, into the way we are, into the way we conduct ourselves here; into this flows what works down from the spiritual worlds and what comes to us from those who have passed through the gate of death before us. We must only be clear that such interaction between the dead and the living is bound to many different conditions. The dead person is in an environment where there are beings like themselves, that is, soul beings, all the entities belonging to the higher hierarchies down to the human being, and through their discarded etheric body, which acts as a mediator, they can also have perceptions of the people who are, in a sense, veiled from them by the physical body; but he penetrates this veil with the help of his etheric body. Those who have passed through the gate of death are subject to the conditions under which one lives in the soul world and the spirit world, and they must submit to them. Now I need only point out one main thing, and you will understand what is actually meant here. We know that Luciferic and Ahrimanic forces are at work in the world in which we live in the most diverse ways. If these Luciferic and Ahrimanic forces did not exert their attraction on us, then what is expressed in human beings as wrong or evil actions would not exist in the world. The Luciferic and Ahrimanic must have an effect on human beings; they must give human beings the opportunity to follow them.

If we really think about this, we will realize that human beings are something other than the beings we often make them out to be in our criticism. If we had the ability in the physical world to always see how the Luciferic and Ahrimanic forces work in human beings, we would judge people very differently. Not that we would perhaps be less critical, for when we divert our judgment from human beings, we must fight not human beings, but Lucifer and Ahriman. But we would be infinitely more tolerant toward human beings as human beings. Those who live in the soul life between death and a new birth practice this tolerance both toward the beings who are with them in the spiritual world and toward those beings who are still embodied here as human beings in physical life. And it is simply part of the nature of those who have passed through the gate of death that they acquire this tolerance, that they always see through: this or that part of a human being belongs to Lucifer or Ahriman. They do not say: This is a bad person who follows evil desires — but they see through: Lucifer has this much share in him. He does not say, “That is an envious person,” but rather, “Ahriman has such and such a share in him.” This is how those who live up there between death and birth judge, because it belongs to their nature, just as it belongs to our nature to have healthy eyes when we are naturally healthy. Since this belongs to the nature of the dead, it causes the dead immense pain when they maintain the connection they established in physical life and encounter a different attitude here. Let us suppose that, out of personal antipathy, we harbor a particular hatred toward a person who was also connected with the dead. then this hatred causes immense pain to the deceased, who may be connected to us, and this hatred must always be overcome by the deceased like a sword, like a barbed sword, like a spear drawn against him, when the deceased, as he must, because he is connected to us, wants to approach us.

Thus, the way in which the dead want to influence us and how they themselves experience this influence depends very much on the mood of our soul. The influence always occurs, but the nature of the influence depends very much on the mood of our soul. These immediate influences from the dead, which I have described, play into our ordinary ideas borrowed from the environment, into our sensations, into our emotional tendencies, into our temperament, into our habits. But there is a constant interrelationship between what is happening in the realm of those who have passed through the gate of death and our own souls.

If you now consider all this, you will say to yourself: There is a complicated workings within what we carry within us as soul, and much is needed to understand all that pulsates mysteriously in a human soul, all that pulsates in such a way that the human soul itself has little awareness of what is pulsating there. But the overall mood of the soul, what one can or cannot do, depends on it. For all this is in turn largely determined by our karma; the fact that we are brought together here with precisely these or those people, who then in turn affect us in the way I have described, is of course connected with our karma in the broader sense.

By keeping this in mind, we must be clear that our time, according to what spiritual science is supposed to bring to humanity, has real, genuine longings, but that these real longings are still being satisfied in many ways that are most mistaken. There are a number of people today who have completely overcome the prejudice that was widespread among people in the middle, and even in the last third of the 19th century, that everything spiritual can be explained solely by physical, physiological effects. But half-truths or quarter-truths often have a much worse effect than complete errors. And such half-truths or quarter-truths underlie what is so often referred to today as analytical psychology or psychoanalysis.

People search, but they search blindly. They sense that something is hidden at the bottom of their souls, but they cannot bring themselves to take the steps into the spiritual world to find what is hidden there. What do psychoanalysts say today? They say: When a person comes to us in life, their overall state of being depends not only on what is in their consciousness, but on a whole series of factors that lie in the unconscious, below the threshold of consciousness. A person comes along and feels, in a sense, depressed. An irregularity occurs in their entire nervous system. The psychoanalyst believes that one must then look for what the person may have experienced many years ago, what they have not fully processed as an experience, but have suppressed into the subconscious. But just because it has been forgotten does not mean it is not there. The psychoanalyst suspects that what has been removed from consciousness has not been removed from reality; it is just down there in the subconscious. He then assumes that if you lure it up into consciousness through a kind of catechism, you will discover what is eating and consuming you down there. Starting from this point—I cannot, of course, discuss psychoanalysis in all its ramifications here, but I will show some aspects of it—the psychoanalyst now searches for many things in the depths of the soul. Years ago, the person had these or those ideals in life, these or those hopes, these or those plans. He did not carry them out, could not carry them out. Certainly, they are out of his consciousness, for the reason that he lives in his present life; but they are not out of the reality of his soul. There they feed, there they eat, and his entire well-being depends on what is down there in his consciousness. He has had some kind of unhappy love affair—and this is what psychoanalysts find most often, because they look for it. This is an isolated province of his soul consciousness; he has fought against it, it is no longer in his consciousness, but it continues to have an effect. According to psychoanalysts, it continues to have an effect especially when only the feelings of love were there and the beloved was not, when he remained unsatisfied. Then, deep down in the soul life, the psychoanalyst searches, apart from the destroyed hopes of youth, apart from what I have just indicated, for the “animalistic sludge” of life, that which continually works up as the “animalistic sludge” of life, the connection with everything that man has as an animalistic, as an animal being, and which plays into his soul life. And such analytical psychologists who go further say: If one penetrates further and further down, one finally finds what arises in the soul from racial connections, from national connections, and so on, what plays into the soul in a more or less unconscious way, but finally, at the very bottom, the demonic, the most indeterminate thing that lies beneath the “animalistic sludge.” Such people, who today are particularly fond of psychoanalysis, often quietly suggest that in these demonic depths below there are impulses that lead to gnosis, theosophy, anthroposophy, and the like. Even if this is sometimes hinted at in a somewhat hidden way, it is still hinted at. Read one of the latest issues of “Wissen und Leben” (Knowledge and Life), and you will sometimes find such hints, albeit hidden between the lines.

Now, I said that half-truths and quarter-truths often have a worse effect than complete errors. In analytical psychology, half-truths and quarter-truths lie in the search for the subconscious reasons of the soul. But let us compare this with what we have pointed out today, that everything that lives at the bottom of the soul in reality has an effect from the realm of the dead, then we are driven to a completely different way of thinking, then we will not search for the “animalistic sludge” of the soul or for the devious eroticism behind some mood of the soul, but we will often have to look for the cause of a mood of the soul in this or that departed person whom we are making difficulties for through our own behavior, and these difficulties express themselves in the fact that this or that dissatisfaction pushes its way into consciousness. In short, we would do well to bring to our consciousness in a reverent, sacred way the connection that exists not only between our world and an abstract, pantheistic, vague spiritual world, but also the real spiritual world in which those who have passed through the gate of death are real beings who are with us as they were in life, only that what they interact with us is much closer to our soul than what they did in life, when we were always separated by our bodies, which stood like a barrier between us.

Then comes a later time when man has become completely free from the astral body, has cast off the astral, and some time after that, man can then work down from the spiritual world into the physical in an even more intense way because it is more internal. In the past, external life was often organized according to such instinctively known truths, even if what arose in external life was often derived from ordinary external reasons. But underlying this external aspect — often known only through instinct — is an inner aspect. I have said that after passing through the gate of death, the dead stand in such a direct connection with the people they have left behind here, and to whom they are especially attached in love, that they influence their habits. Therefore, in times when such things were still felt quite instinctively, care was taken to ensure that the son left the circle of his parental connection as little as possible. Access was easier there. Learning the same trade, working in the same profession, and in general the whole real-conservative adherence to the same current were instinctive expressions of a facilitation of the influence of those who had passed through the gates of death on those they had left behind here. If they were in similar situations to the deceased themselves, it was also easier for the deceased to find their way to them. And one will one day be able to trace such subtle impulses and reasons in the historical development of human beings.

When a person has been dead for a long time, they have completely shed their astral body. This only happens after decades, because the movement we undergo in the spiritual world is much slower than the movement in the physical world; thirty years in the spiritual world correspond to approximately one year in the physical world. Human beings rush about here in the physical world; in the spiritual world, they always have to complete a revolution, so to speak, in a much larger circle than here in the physical world. In short, one year in the physical world corresponds to thirty years in the spiritual world; in thirty years in the spiritual world, one experiences roughly the same part of the world as in one year in the physical world; one experiences this part of the world more inwardly, more intensely.

In general, what human beings experience here is connected in many ways with the greater world, with the macrocosm, so that what is experienced here in the microcosm, in human beings, can always be expressed in terms of its relationship to the macrocosm. I would like to draw attention to one example: if we calculate the number of days in a human life, we arrive at the same number that the sun needs to pass through the entire Platonic year, the world year. Thus, human beings live a lifetime of as many days as the sun needs to advance through the entire circle of the world, from one sign of the zodiac to the next. When it has passed through all the signs of the zodiac, it has taken approximately 25,900 years. This is approximately how many days a human being lives – of course, this is not the same for everyone – in their individual life between birth and death.

And another interesting connection is that humans also take as many breaths in a day as the number of days they live and as the sun travels through the entire zodiac in years. You see, the world is truly organized according to measure and number in the deepest sense. And one would think that this fine classification of humans in the world, this correspondence of harmonies, would lead the crude materialists of our time beyond their worldview, which sees nothing in the universe but a mechanism. Admittedly, it is a strange mechanism that structures its individual beings in such a way that they stand in wonderful, numerically harmonious relationships to the whole.

And so it is also very remarkable that when we look at the world spiritually, we can truly say: As human beings go through the development between death and a new birth, they move forward more slowly in order to make everything more thorough. In fact, they move forward in the spiritual world as many times slower than Saturn moves around the Sun slower than the Earth. Saturn revolves around the sun as many times slower than the earth does, as human beings move more slowly in the spiritual world than here on the physical earth. For this reason — not because they knew less than today's astronomers — the ancients considered Saturn to be the outermost planet still belonging to the solar system. This is also astronomically correct, because the other planets that are now included, Uranus and Neptune, flew in later and joined the system, and they also orbit in a completely different order, even in a different rotation than the planets that belong to the actual solar system.

Now, at least one such spiritual year, that is, thirty Earth years, must have passed before the soul, when it has reached a normal age of seventy to eighty years, can enter not only into the habits, but also into the whole way of looking at things, into the whole spiritual life of those who have remained here or who have voluntarily joined them. But in this way, the dead also influence our lives in a very comprehensive manner. It is absolutely true that we carry within us, in relation to the entire spiritual nature in which we are embedded, the impulses of people who died long ago, which continue to influence us. This is what brings about the connection between the future and the past, that such a harmony between the dead and the living takes place. Just as the indirect revelation of the dead through the etheric body they have shed acts upon imaginative knowledge, so what enters into habits in the manner described acts upon inspirative knowledge, and what I have described last which can only take effect after a person has gone through a spiritual year, has an effect on intuitive knowledge when it is to become conscious. But it has a continuous effect. I would say that the meaning of evolution can only be understood correctly if one consciously takes such things into account.

Forgive me if I insert something very personal at this point—you know I don't like to do this and therefore do so very rarely. Anyone who tries to look at what I began writing decades ago will see that I completely disregarded what I had to say as my own opinion. I did not write my opinion about Goethe, but tried to express the thoughts that could come from Goethe; I wrote an “epistemology of Goethe's worldview,” not my epistemology. In this way, one can consciously connect with those who have long since passed away and work from their spirit. That is also what gives one, in a sense, the certificate to be allowed to influence the living. For it is a poor certificate, which people insist on, especially in our time, that as soon as someone has formed an opinion, they immediately want to pass it on to as many followers as possible. Those who know the conditions of existence from the spiritual world, the fundamental laws of existence, know that, strange and paradoxical as it may be, human beings can only influence the depths of their fellow human beings' souls after they have died, and only after they have gone through a spiritual year, that is, thirty years. It would be a tremendous gain if this selflessness were to spread a little further in the world, so that those who live longer would join the deceased and try to consciously maintain continuity in evolution. Whether it is a pure elective affinity or some other kind of kinship brought about by karma, if we live it consciously, drawing on those who strive to send the rays of their activity from the spiritual world is something tremendously significant.

I have tried to evoke in you a feeling of the kind of interaction that exists between the so-called dead and the so-called living. We just need to be clear about how different the conditions are in the spiritual world compared to here. You can find a good part of these conditions and the conditions of experience in the spiritual world in the lecture series “On Life Between Death and a New Birth,” which I gave in Vienna a few years ago. But you can only ever pick out a few things from these things that are important from one side or the other. It must be said that something similar and yet very dissimilar to our physical life exists in the spiritual world. Before we enter the physical world in the full sense, we go through the embryonic period, in which the conditions of life are completely different from those at the moment when we enter the physical world as breathers of the outer air. In a certain sense and style, the time we go through in the first spiritual year—which has so often been called the Kamaloka period—is already similar to the embryonic period. For just as human beings, in a sense, take the help of another human being who carries them into the physical world over ten lunar months, so they allow themselves to be carried into the spiritual world by all that holds them together in the physical world, which they slowly shed, namely their desires and cravings. And consciousness in this first spiritual year — thirty years after death — is still somewhat similar to consciousness here in the physical world, even though skills and the like, which can only be acquired in the physical world, can only be mediated indirectly through the etheric body. But then other conditions of consciousness come into play; a much higher consciousness than we can have here in the physical body then emerges. If you remember some of what was said in the cycle mentioned earlier, you can see how this consciousness has a different character in the spiritual world. You need only consider how much consciousness depends on what can enter into it. And when we go about here in the physical world as ordinary human beings, the phenomena of the mineral, plant, and animal kingdoms and of the physical human kingdom enter into us with other soul experiences, cultural experiences, and so on. After death, we no longer perceive the mineral world as such, but only the general life of the plant world. Read in my “Theosophy” how things are in the ascent into the so-called spiritual world.

All of this is also connected with a completely different experience in the spiritual world. Now, as you can understand, there are really no words for all of this. Our language is basically created for the physical world, so it is always difficult to describe these different conditions correctly. That is why it is so easy to be misunderstood. Above all, one can only express oneself in comparative terms. Here in the physical world, you stand, I would say, at one point in the entire structure of the world; you look out with your eyes in all directions around you. In the spiritual world, it is not like that. There you are in the periphery and look in from the periphery, as it were, into the interior of a hollow sphere, only that this is comparative, because it is not a hollow sphere, since time has a much greater significance than space. So you look at everything from the periphery; there are completely different conditions of imagination, completely different conditions of perception! And within the realm of imagination itself, there are yet again completely different conditions. Let us assume that a person has passed through the gates of death at the age of sixty, seventy, eighty, or even earlier: now they clearly feel an inner experience. When you feel hunger or pain here in physical life, in one place or another of your body, you do not say: the hunger is there or there, but rather the hunger is within you. You feel this by looking in from the whole environment, at some point you know that there is something that wants to do something with you. Now you must begin the effort to remove what has manifested itself, what has revealed itself! And only when you have removed it will the truth that wants to manifest itself here appear. So we can say: As spiritual beings, we have an idea within us; but this idea does not tell us anything yet; it must first be removed, and only when we have removed it will we find within ourselves—yes, as paradoxical as it sounds, it is so—an angel or archangel who reveals himself to us! We must first earn this presence by allowing it to announce itself to us in our imagination. Thus, understanding the spiritual world requires decisive effort and decisive work. Only then can souls that have remained here in the physical body, more or less, manifest themselves to the dead without going through this effort, if they truly unfold their thoughts here toward the dead or present something to the dead, through reading aloud or the like.

Through what I have said, I simply want to make it clear to you how completely different the conditions of perception, life, and experience are in the spiritual world. And if that is the case, then you will not find it surprising that, in a sense, thirty years of spiritual time are equivalent to one year of physical time; for in the spiritual world we stand in a circle and look in toward the center. And it is very important to keep that in mind.

You can see how difficult it is to talk about certain spiritual things from the fact that, because we have to clothe them in physical concepts, some things appear to be exactly the opposite, and we are therefore very easily exposed to misunderstandings. Isn't it true that, because we initially view things from the physical world, we rightly say: Man goes through repeated earthly lives. That is correct. But why does he go through repeated earthly lives? By living here between birth and death, he lives through a certain period of time. Then he enters the spiritual world through the gate of death, makes a circuit, but returns to the same period of time in that circuit. And every time we live through a life, we are actually in the same place in the world. That is very interesting! In the spiritual realm, it is not time that reigns, but duration. We return to the same place. We actually repeat life in the same circumstances, with what we have gone through in the meantime, in the same place in the world. We always return to the starting point. We perform real circles. You will say: that is difficult to imagine. It is also difficult to imagine, and among the various things that are easier to imagine, which I have also presented today, I would like you to make such a thing the subject of your meditation in your soul life. One must sometimes meditate long, long on such things if one wants to understand them in their full significance.

As an excellent task for today, I have set myself the task of describing a little the way in which those souls who have passed through the gate of death work down into the world in which the people with whom they were connected within their physical bodies have remained. And from another point of view, you have seen again that the world really is a coherent whole, that the dead are only dead in the physical sense. For at the moment they pass through the gate of death, they have a different access to our soul, and that is the whole difference. They now work upon us from within, whereas when they were alive they worked upon us from without. Such things should increasingly cease to be mere external theories and become part of people's consciousness; they should not merely become worldviews, but world perceptions, yes, I would even say world feelings. Then spiritual science will bear the fruits it is meant to bear, and indeed can bear.

Finally, one more remark. Consider what it means that human beings must carry within themselves the feeling, namely during a certain period between death and a new birth, that they carry the hierarchies within themselves as their inner experience! That is how it is! This could lead human beings into the most terrible arrogance, which could live as a dark feeling in their souls when they are reborn. In ancient times, a barrier against this arrogance was created by the fact that when people passed through the gate of death and entered the spiritual world, they knew, in a sense, that they were not seeing for themselves, but that the highest beings of the highest hierarchies were living within them and enabling them to see. But human beings have lost this connection in the spiritual world just as they have lost the old atavistic clairvoyance in the physical world here. In its place must come what Paul expressed with the words, “Not I, but Christ in me,” and what a true spiritual feeling attains through the words, “We are born of God; we die into Christ.” When we learn this in all its depth through the feeling that can come to us from spiritual science, that Christ is for the earth, we will place ourselves in the right way in this viewing from the circle. And when we pass through the gate of death with the right feelings of “In Christ we die,” , we will find, looking from the circle, among the beings we see, those who belong to the higher hierarchies, who are also elemental beings, but also beings who are human souls incarnated here or human souls who have already left the body, and among all these we will also find our own I-being. And we look at the relationship of this I-being of ours to the other beings I have just described from the outside. To be able to have these feelings after passing through the gate of death is something tremendously important. For only then can we find our way back into the embodiment of the flesh if we can have these feelings toward our own I. But we can only have them if we owe them to having passed through the gate of death with the feeling: “We have died into Christ.” This connection with Christ gives us the opportunity to see our relationship in the spiritual world with the soul's eye of Christ, so to speak, to see ourselves as an I-being among other spirit beings.

I would always like to achieve that we do not just take away a certain knowledge from such reflections as those made today, but that this knowledge is transformed into feeling. And if all the ideas that have been put forward today were to pass away like dreams, if only one basic feeling remained, which I have tried to summarize in these concluding words, such as “dying in Christ,” enables us to place ourselves correctly in the spiritual world so that we can carry it through the physical world into our next incarnation on earth, if this feeling remains with us, then we carry the right thing from such a contemplation into our future life.

Let us therefore be united in such feelings, considering them the most intense connecting feelings, and this will gradually give rise to the true invisible community of those devoted to anthroposophy in the world: this cohesion in such perceptions and feelings born out of the ideas of spiritual science. The world needs, I would say, this invisible community of souls who are able to carry into the world the forces of such cohesion as has been characterized. In this sense, we want to be together spiritually in the future, even when we are not together physically for a time. And so it should always be among us that our spiritual togetherness always carries our physical togetherness.