Supplements to Member Lectures

GA 246 — 17 November 1912, Hamburg

52. The Willingness to Understand Other Souls

The fact that it is possible in the present to talk about facts and processes of the spiritual world, that there can be a certain spiritual current which makes it possible to point out what happens to people between death and the new birth, we must regard as an important, meaningful gift which is bestowed upon us from the spiritual worlds. Every age - the one more, the other less - receives certain revelations from the spiritual world, and man should endeavor to gain a relationship to all that can come to him from the spiritual world. It is understandable that this seems impossible to many, because the human soul tends to be comfortable, to stay with what it has once accepted. It seems to such people that it is enough to know what the Bible can give them, what comes to them through tradition. Most of them will still speak like this today. Theosophy, as we practice it here, is what the Godhead has intended for our time in order to recognize our soul correctly. The true solution to the riddles of the soul can only come to us through knowledge of the supersensible world. That is why we must always carefully examine what relates to our supersensible being.

I have just now set myself the task of investigating life between death and rebirth anew. You have to consider how much better you get to know a physical region when you visit it for the tenth or twelfth time than when you see it for the fourth or fifth time. In this consideration we want to leave aside the kama loca life. We only want to start from the point in time when we have shed everything that still connects us to our earthly existence. No soul can get to know itself in terms of morality if it has not taught itself about life in the supersensible world. Just as in physical life we perceive the outer world in sounds, smells, sensations, how all this makes up our world, so we live in a world of imaginations, visions, images when we have overcome the kama loca life.

We are then enclosed by such visions. Image life is what we experience first, like a powerful cloud that enters the spiritual world. But these visions are different from those that a person can already have in physical life. Behind all the visions that surround us in the spiritual world, we have [entities] to see. We are together with all those who have been close to us, but in such a way that we have the clouds of images between their real reality and us. We relate to our surroundings through images. What happens next for different people depends on their moral quality in life on earth. The basic mood of the soul is an important factor. With a less moral soul, the image of the deceased appears to be surrounded by a kind of shell that it cannot penetrate. On the other hand, we can get through this shell if we face the image with a selfless soul. Morality makes us sociable beings in the afterlife; selfishness makes us hermits. But we suffer from loneliness; it is the worst degree of suffering that we are closed off from seeing the visions. In life on earth, morality consists in finding the paths to other souls, in not shutting ourselves off from others in hardness and coldness.

What will always be more important to people in the future is the understanding of one soul for another. What is lacking today is not the will to do good, but rather the will to understand other souls. If Theosophy also wants to fertilize external social life in practice, then the urge to find one's way into every other soul must arise from its teachings. This does not mean that we have to praise the other soul unilaterally; this can also happen out of pure egoism. If we like being with this or that person, our interest often drives us to praise them. True morality, however, is based on the fact that we are able to confront the soul of a person impartially.

We become sociable beings in the devachan through a moral state of soul. During the whole time that our soul needs to pass through a certain sphere of devachan, the more or less moral constitution of the soul has this important meaning. The soul is not a kind of bird that soars upwards in a certain direction, but rather something like an enlargement, an expansion occurs. One grows with one's being up to the circle described in the old sense by the planet Mercury (in the new sense by Venus). This is why in occultism this stage of devachan is called the Mercury sphere. So that we are not hermits in it, we must come with a moral soul constitution.

For the next sphere, what is called religiosity comes into consideration; this is something higher than mere morality. Religion is connected with the ability to relate oneself to the eternal. The rightly attuned person is able to connect with all beings existing in this second sphere, the Venus sphere (in the old sense). The non-religious, on the other hand, will be lonely there. This loneliness is the source of suffering, which, however, does not torment him to no purpose, but serves to improve him. People who have little feeling for the connection between the earthly and the divine are the loneliest, for example, the followers of the monist covenant will have no opportunity to extend this covenant into the time of their Venusian state, because they will all be lonely.

In occultism we speak of spheres of Mercury and Venus because they are so vast that the inhabitants of these spheres live together with the beings of these planets. When someone's spiritual gaze is opened to what is in the supersensible world, he sees beings who have died, so to speak, on Mars or Jupiter. They undergo similar changes to human souls after death. We are always surrounded by such beings who have inhabited the other planets. We cannot become aware of their proximity if we have not trained ourselves for it. But we come together with the beings we have lived with here, more or less consciously depending on the state of our soul.

While we cannot say that a person establishes relationships with all beings, one thing does occur as a significant experience, and it is a shattering experience. If we have shown a certain degree of sympathy or antipathy towards a person here, we may later come to the realization that we have loved him too little, that he deserves to be loved more by us. If we now meet him again over there with this realization, we cannot now carry out the wish to love him more. Due to the nature of the spiritual world, we are forced to stop at the degree of love we already gave him on earth. We can correct our judgment as long as we are on earth, but not in the spiritual world, where the relationship remains as it was here. It is essential for our development that we see how we relate to other people over a long period of time. If, for example, one person has misjudged another, he can know this after death, but he cannot change it, he must remain in the same relationship with him. When one learns the full importance of such facts through research in the spiritual world, one gets a real sense of how much spirituality is involved in the development of humanity. It was precisely in re-examining these states that the following emerged for me.

(I have studied Homer a lot in my life, and a word of Homer's came to my mind:) “Man enters a world in which there is no change”. And I said to myself: You only understand that now. This is proof of what such people, who like Homer were highly clairvoyant (the Greeks called him the blind Homer for this reason), have secretly written into world history. One could otherwise pass by such a word.

Something else has come to my mind in recent weeks, as my investigations have taken me to an important part of the world, near Florence, where the Medici tombs display marvelously sculptural works of art by Michelangelo: Dawn and Dusk, Day and Night in four allegorical figures. Incidentally, what is usually described as the statue of Julius is the Lorenzo and vice versa; in fact, the one statue was once moved over, the descriptions absolutely do not match the figures.

In the beginning, I resisted what came to me when I looked at the allegories. If one examines these figures occultly, first of all the wonderful figure of the night, one can ask: If the astral body is outside the structure of the four-membered human being and the etheric body is working inside, how should this be expressed in gestures and gestures? - And one must answer: in the same way as Michelangelo depicted the night. And on the same tomb on the other side, the depiction of day is correctly explained if you remember that when people wake up during the day, everything that is visible is dominated by the ego. Michelangelo need not have known this, but at the time when he was going through the greatest pain of his life, this wonderfully eloquent figure emerged from the life of his soul: the day.

At dawn one recognizes that the astral body is to be represented in its predominant way. At dusk, the physical body seems to be left to its own devices, limply surrendered to the influence of sleep.

There we have the four limbs of the human being placed all around by an artist. One can imagine how the legend could have arisen that Michelangelo could have breathed life into his figure of the day at sunrise. People will only learn to solve the riddle of these figures when they know that man consists of four limbs. The most important thing, however, is that they recognize that which already mysteriously confronts us in each individual soul.

So we have heard how the state of the soul for the two stages of devachan mentioned is influenced by life on earth. If a person has not developed any religious feeling here, he is a hermit on the Venus sphere. If he has cultivated a certain faith, he is bound to this sphere where it can be found. As true as it is that until today it was natural for man to remain in a certain confession, we are now approaching a time when this restriction must be overcome.

It is difficult for all those who have received a kind of suggestion to gain the necessary impartiality. It is true that some Westerners have already succeeded as Christians in recognizing Buddhism or Mohammedanism without prejudice. But it is incredibly difficult for a Buddhist to recognize Christianity. Even if he tries, he immediately reinterprets it. He is not impartial enough and does not realize that the bias lies with him. In reality, his ancestral religion does not prevent him from accepting Christian doctrine. The reason that it is not in his holy books is irrelevant. Just as it is not against Buddhism for its adherents to accept, for example, the Copernican worldview, which is also not in the holy books, so it is not against Buddhism to recognize the Christian doctrine. Everything personal, all belief in authority should take a back seat. The Indians, however, will immediately regard it as a preference for Christianity if they are given the results of spiritual research about the Christ being just as unbiased as about the Buddha.

We are living through a time between death and the new birth when we feel just as connected with the sun as we do today with the earth. Just as the sun is outwardly distant from us today, we then experience a connection with the essence of the sun, which in reality is quite different from what physical astronomy describes. Whether we will be lonely or sociable there depends on how we have been able to relate to the Christ being on earth. The sun is to our whole system what the Christ is to our earth. If a person does not want to be lonely while he is in the sun, he can only avoid this if he grasps the Christ-entity with his soul. We have heard that we are already surrounded by a cloud of visions during the Mercury sphere. In the Venus sphere, this cloud is only internal, but is illuminated from the outside by the sun. If one examines this illuminated cloud formation, one recognizes that the higher hierarchies gain influence on his being, break through his shells. Man can only become aware of this influence by bringing something of the connection with the Christ from earthly life with him. He is taken up into the world of spiritual beings through the power of the Christ. Here we see the whole intimacy of the Christ idea. We cannot come to clarity about the Christ-entity and cannot come into the right relationship with Lucifer if we have not brought with us from earthly life this awareness of our belonging together with the Christ.

Then we pass over into the sphere of Mars, where we have the sun as if beneath us. Just as we look up at the sun from the earth, we now look down at it. Within the Martian sphere we learn to recognize that the Buddha has become for Mars what the Christ is for the Earth. The Buddha had to accomplish a kind of liberation of the Martian beings. From one star to another, such beings have their mission.

Man has the power to gain a right relationship with Lucifer through the Christ. But the guide to understanding world events is Lucifer. When man enters the sphere of Jupiter and Saturn, his consciousness is dampened. In criminals, however, it can be dampened much earlier, even in the sphere of Mercury. For most people, however, this state only occurs later. It is completely dampened in everyone when they get beyond Saturn. Then the person begins the return journey. The fact that he can integrate what he has experienced into the new life - his karma - is due to the expansion of his soul to these wide limits. Between death and new birth we absorb all the moral, intellectual and spiritual forces that permeate the entire cosmos; and because we ourselves have absorbed them between death and new birth, we carry the entire cosmos within us. And it is our task in life not to let this God, which we have brought with us in our souls from the cosmos, lie fallow. Some people who have only thought about the world inadequately may have had similar feelings to Kant when he speaks of the starry sky above him and the moral law within it and so on. When you read this, it seems to be about two things; but they are not two things at all. We have absorbed the moral law from the cosmos in the time between death and birth. In the harmony of the spheres it has spoken from all worlds to form us inwardly as we have become. The more Theosophy becomes felt, immediate life in every moment, the more it fulfills its task. It is not so much a matter of theoretical knowledge as of something new beginning to speak within us. He only plays with such truth who does not say to himself: The whole world confronts me in every soul. - This feeling regulates our relationship to other people in a new way and gives us the opportunity to place ourselves in life in the right way.