# Supplements to Member Lectures

## GA 246 — 9 October 1910, Stuttgart

### 31. Life after Death

At the beginning of his lecture, Doctor Steiner recalled the recent death of our member Mrs. [Frentzel] and then 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 for the ideal that our love becomes independent of our intercourse on the physical plane, because then we will gain the strength to let love work beyond physical existence; it will then also be a great help for [the] other person. For we cannot give him more than when we can say: Love continues beyond death as it was in life. Only love that can overcome death is immortal. Feelings of love that end with death die with temporal existence. Everything that Theosophy gives us should only have an educational effect on us and lead us to this kind of love: Staying together with those who have passed the gate of death. We will learn this more and more, and we will feel that Theosophy broadens our view in such a way that we can say: We have met with this or that person so that we may have the opportunity to weave a bond with him not only for this time, but for eternities.

For an external view, death means something that cuts deeply into human life; but a logical objection can substantially modify this view. For what is the difference between man before and after death? All that man experiences about death is that, as long as he remains on the physical plane, he is experienced and seen by others, but afterwards he is no longer seen. 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.

What is the difference between man before and after death, and what does occultism have to say about it? We find much about this in theosophical books; but if we take what is written in the books, we find that everything is written more with the individual life in mind. Now there are things in life which are common to us all, and others which affect us only individually. These individual destinies are different for each person, but what we experience communally is that we see and associate with things around us that belong to the four kingdoms of nature. These are common to us all. When we have passed through the gate of death, everything individual becomes much more significant than before, because how good, how wise and so on we were determines our personal destiny after death, while in life the communal far outweighs the collective. Our personal experience is only ever a small part of it.

Now we must ask ourselves: Are there not also common things after death, similar to those on the physical plane, are there also realms where we are together in it? Yes, there are also realms where we are together, first of all man's perception of himself. - Is there now also a connection between man and our animal kingdom here on earth? No, the individual animal cannot be perceived after death, when we have left our physical tools. With the onset of death, the animal kingdom begins to withdraw. It is as if we look out to sea [and see ships with red flags and ships with white flags] and then all the ships with the red flags suddenly disappear, sink. The figures of people do not disappear. But to the same extent that the animal forms disappear, man begins to perceive the realm of the Angeloi, the angels. So man must throw off the compulsion to see the animal, then he will see the next higher thing, the angels.

And now we go further. First we lose the plants, which leave us with even less after-feeling than the animals. But as soon as the vegetable disappears, the archangels appear; and when the mineral even disappears, the spirits of personality appear. Thus man lives himself into three other realms. So this is what we have in common, how we grow into the four kingdoms of nature at birth.

The environment into which we grow after death, however, also faces us in a kind of maya, just as everything here also shows itself to us through the mist of illusion. Maja spreads over the existence of the physical world. This maya comes, as we have often seen, from the Luciferic and Ahrimanic influences. These work together to give us what we call the illusion of the physical plan. Again, this is something we all have in common, because all people here are subject to the same maya. And anyone who grows out of the maya here on the physical plane will initially no longer be understood by the person next to him.

After death there is now also maya again; and it is our own, our personal nature that prevents us from tearing the veil of the devachanic maya. We weave this veil for ourselves through our passions and desires. And so the maya after death is not a communal but an individual matter; and Kamaloka is the liberation from this veil. After death, therefore, the human being exists. But what about the 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 at all before the gaze of eternity. The following drawing should help us to understand things better.

What lies below the line A B represents the sense world, what lies above it, the spiritual world. How should we draw man's part in these two worlds into our figure? We must bear in mind that the physical world is only ever a reflection of the true, spiritual human being. In our drawing, the true and the mirror image of the human being therefore also overlap, because the human being always takes something from the physical world with him; he does not live in it for nothing.

What is the animal form? In animals we see the spiritual above and the physical below. Something appears from above, and something is merely reflected in the physical world. The angelic world is reflected in the animal world. Now you will say: It's terrible that we should see the animals as a reflection of the angels! No, it is not terrible; for what is happening is that the mirror has been corrupted by the Luciferian influence, so that here in the physical world we see the animal forms instead of the noble forms of the angels.

Similarly, in the plants we have the figures of the archangels corrupted by Ahriman, and in the mineral kingdom the reflected images of the spirits of personality through the asuric influence. Thus in the animal, plant and mineral kingdoms we have the distorted mirror images of the higher world.

In the teaching institutions of the universities we hear sentences in psychology such as: When man is hungry, he wants the feeling of satiety, not this or that food. - But man not only wants the feeling of satiety, he also wants the feeling of pleasure in food, and we owe this feeling to the Luciferian influence. It is through him that the lust of the palate is implanted in man; and this makes things appear desirable to him which are not at all beneficial to him. Without this feeling, man would only eat the things, the food, that are best for him.

After death, however, it is important whether we have familiarized ourselves with what has eternal value before death or whether we have failed to do so. And then we can only take with us what we can carry up into the spiritual world if, firstly, we have become acquainted with something of what we call truth and, secondly, something of what we call art - for all its works are closer to the spiritual world than the forms of the physical world.

In the beautiful, we can see that there is something that points beyond the physical world. Truth is only present when a thing tells us the same thing in our memory as it did when it stood before us, even if the thing itself has disappeared thousands of years ago. Beauty can only have an effect when it is right in front of us, because it does not have the same intensity in memory. What is beautiful is that which arouses our interest without interest. We must therefore be completely indifferent to its possession. The triumph of beauty is that it speaks to us in the present like something eternal.

Then there is the third, the good, virtue. What is significant about it is that we like it, that we have to connect with it before it is physically present. The true, the beautiful and the good behave like the past, present and future. [Why do these three words have such a good ring to them? Because people have felt that there is something that has an eternal, lasting value.

What we recognize as the true, the beautiful, the good, so many threads we already weave here for eternity. But we cannot see the true here, because we only see the world of illusion; rather, we must develop the true ourselves. Today we only see the physical man, but in the past man looked into the spiritual world and saw the spiritual man, even if only in a cloud. This overlapping of the physical and spiritual worlds is expressed by ancient art in the centaur. Theosophy, which tells us what things are, does not merely give theories, it also tells us that we are surrounded everywhere by Maja; and we must learn to feel beyond the physical plan. We must try to assimilate other feelings, indeed, we must settle into a completely different emotional world. If Theosophy excites our emotional life in this way, we will develop more feelings in ourselves than would otherwise be the case.

If we see in every external thing only a distorted image of something spiritual, then the powers of the soul will grow and develop something that belongs to the spiritual world. Love in the spirit is of this kind; there we suspect the spiritual long before we can see it. All Theosophy is the seed of that which we call love. It is the high school of what we call love. Through the true, the beautiful, the good, we develop that which is to pass from the earth into the universe, namely love. This love rejuvenates man; egoistic, sensual love ages him. [Rejuvenating] love should become the harvest of our earthly existence. Let us sow the seed through wisdom. Let us breathe in wisdom in order to be able to breathe out love!