From a Fateful Time
GA 64 — 16 April 1915, Berlin
13. Sleep and Death from the Point of View of Spiritual Science
In the course of these lectures, I have often emphasized that it is quite natural, as a matter of course, that from the point of view of the majority of people today, objections about objections must be raised against spiritual science. But I also emphasized in the lecture I gave here on the question of immortality from the point of view of spiritual science that genuine. Spiritual Science wants nothing to do with what is all too often done in its name, but that it is in complete harmony with natural science. But it is also in complete harmony with what a healthy philosophy has to say. Since this is noteworthy for our consideration today, I would like to emphasize this harmony with philosophical thinking in a few introductory remarks.
What spiritual science always has to assert is not based on philosophical speculation, but on what has been called the inner experience, the inner experience of spiritual facts; it has to assert the independence, the self-contained nature of the human soul — to put it more popularly: that the human being has a spiritual-soul existence that goes beyond the physical-bodily. I said that this is entirely consistent with a healthy philosophy based on scientific principles, because many people, from the way of thinking of our time, perceive such an assertion as the extreme of all unscientificness. It is easy to say from a scientific point of view: How can one speak of the human soul as something independent when physiologists show that everything is dependent on what develops physically in the human being. We see how, when a part of the brain is injured, disturbances occur immediately due to the loss of a part of the brain functions. Must we not be led to the thought that the soul activities lie in the normally behaving nervous system or brain? One can point out how mental abilities grow with the adolescent human being, how in old age, when the external system withers, hardens, mental abilities decrease and so on. On the basis of such observations, many a train of thought could be formed that would have to suggest the idea that spiritual experience basically consists in nothing other than the activity of the nervous system and the rest of the organism. Let us hear what an astute philosopher, Otto Liebmann, whom I have mentioned in my book “Riddles of Philosophy,” has to say about this. He is not one of those who make assertions based on superficial thinking, but rather he states what the facts of the analysis of human thought are capable of providing. He deals with the belief that the human soul exists only in the physical, and says remarkable words, corresponding to a sharp-witted philosophy that coincides with the current state of natural science. In summary, he says: It is by no means certain what Munk and others have established regarding the dependence of mental activity on the brain, because, for example, an injured part of the brain can be replaced by other functions. But if we had reached our goal, then in principle nothing would have changed. That is to say, modern philosophy says that no matter how far one advances in the study of the connection between the soul and the physical, one can only know that one must use certain internal organs in order to think, feel and will. We can draw the parallel that we need certain parts of the brain for the soul, just as we use the hand to grasp. But when we use this hand to grasp, the mechanical action of the hand is added to the soul. We cannot speak of the soul actions of the brain in this way. However, this is only because the investigations of natural science are not complete. As it moves forward to prove the connection between the physical and the soul, it will find that there is a different connection between thinking, feeling, willing and the nervous system than between the hand and grasping. It will find that they are connected in the same way as the imprints that feet make in soft soil are connected to the soil.
What specifically can be found in the brain can be derived from the soul's activity, just as footsteps can be derived from feet on the earth. Just as there could be no connection between walking and footprints without solid ground, so it is with everything that is done in the physical body. Everything that a person thinks and wills leaves an imprint in the nervous system in the physical body; but it does not emerge from it, any more than footprints emerge from the earth. One needs the physical body as a surface for resistance, just as one needs solid earth to walk on. Therefore it is self-evident that one must find imprints. It is a scientifically legitimate endeavor to find them; but it is unscientific to want to extract from the physical what has been impressed by the soul-spiritual. In this respect, Liebmann's assertion is false. The imprint is only the accompanying phenomenon of the soul-spiritual. It is precisely this that natural science will prove in the most eminent sense by its means; it will show how one can follow the traces, but will not want to explain them from within the organism. Natural science is already on this path; today, full-fledged proof of this could be provided. Spiritual science does not dispute any of the facts of natural science; spiritual science fully recognizes natural science. It only rebels against the unwarranted claim of the natural scientists to be doing something that they themselves do not know about — against the despotism of the scientists. This goes even further. One could almost grasp how they are driving individual philosophers into what spiritual science wants to present, following on directly from the example already given by Otto Liebmann. What he says is exemplary in terms of acumen and dissection. He says that someone might say that a hen's egg contains not only egg white and yolk but also a ghost; that it embodies itself, pecks open the shell, runs out and immediately pecks up the scattered grains. One could understand that someone would take this as a joke. But Otto Liebmann certainly does not mean it as a joke. He continues by saying that there is no reason to object to this, except that the preposition “in” must be understood not spatially but metaphysically. Understood in this way, it is quite correct, says Otto Liebmann. The fact is that an astute philosopher must admit: one cannot object to the statement that a chicken egg contains not only yolk and egg white, but also an invisible ghost that materializes. Otto Liebmann does not believe, however, that one should form a worldview immediately after reading a few books, but wants to carefully consider how one sets one's thinking in motion. From the spiritual science lectures, one can see how what Otto Liebmann addresses here as a “ghost” that materializes is present in the human being himself as a supersensible being.
Today I cannot talk about the methods that are used to detach the soul and spiritual from the physical and bodily, and to discover something in thinking of which one knows nothing in ordinary life; likewise to discover something underlying the will and feeling, of which the will and feeling are only an impression. For the spiritual researcher, what Otto Liebmann describes here in theory in regard to the chicken egg can become an inner experience for the human being. Spiritual science will not claim that it can present it ghost-like, for instance in a halo of light, to the physical eye; if it did so, it would be a physical and not a spiritual experience. But it can be realized consciously, just as the experience is mediated by the bodily in everyday life, but only by detaching oneself from the bodily. Otto Liebmann sensed that the bodily is based on a spiritual. Spiritual science proceeds by showing how the spiritual-soul methods lead to developing the consciousness of what Otto Liebmann speaks of. This consciousness can be developed. Just as the outer, sensory world becomes an object for ordinary consciousness, so too, when a person frees their soul and spirit, they become an object themselves: they look at themselves from the outside.
It could be objected that one would then claim to be in harmony with philosophy, but it remains to be seen whether Otto Liebmann would accept these musings or declare them to be just that – musings. But suppose that in the time when the telephone was yet to be discovered, one physicist had spoken to another about it, and the other had said that it was impossible. Does that mean that the telephone as we know it today is not in line with what physics was at that time? This is how it is with spiritual science. With a way of judging as suggested, one would be forced to fight against all human progress from the prejudices of a once adopted point of view.
Man can truly free himself from the physical body. From this point of view, some light will be shed on the mysteries of sleep and death. When man frees himself from the physical body, he enters a state in which he can see through his entire humanity as it is in the physical world. Only now is true self-knowledge possible. Only now do you become an object, like the hydrogen that is otherwise in the water only becomes an object when it is released by the chemist. Now you are able to relate this new insight to states of consciousness that cannot be related to each other in ordinary everyday consciousness: the experience of being awake in relation to the experience of being asleep.
When a person is absorbed in sleep, the spiritual and mental have stepped out of the physical. Otto Liebmann's “ghost” temporarily detaches itself from the physical, and a purely spiritual-soul relationship is established between the state as one gains it through spiritual development and the state of sleep; a relationship as between what I am now experiencing and a memory of what I once experienced. As I look at what I once experienced, so I look at the state of sleep and find that the spiritual and soul-life is outside the physical and bodily from the moment I fall asleep until I wake up. One must connect with it spiritually and mentally. So one overlooks the two parts of human nature, the physical body that has remained in bed and that which has left, just as one overlooks hydrogen and oxygen when they have been separated from water. But even more: one sees that what has remained as corporeality is indeed a duality, namely the physical body and that which prevents it from following its own chemical laws, which makes it a living being; this is the etheric body – the word is not important – a finer body of forces. The word etheric body should not be pressed; it has nothing to do with what is called ether in physics today.
What goes out during sleep, namely the word used for it, can be ridiculed. Let people ridicule. What goes out is the astral, the actual soul body and the I. So we have the fourfold human nature before us: on the one hand the bodily and the etheric, on the other the soul, in which the I-nature is embedded, as it were. In ordinary sleep, the I is not able to produce consciousness because, at the present stage of humanity, it is developing its I-activity in connection with the bodily-physical. You can't walk on air either, and just as little can the I-consciousness develop without the resistance of the bodily-physical; it develops from it. In sleep it does not find this resistance and therefore cannot come to consciousness. It develops a dull consciousness; but this is only a paradoxical expression, since it does not come to consciousness.
Likewise, from the moment of falling asleep until waking up, the soul body is continuously active. We could compare it to the way we are active when we think about something that happened some time ago. Its activity is a reverberation of what it has experienced in the etheric and physical body. We can imagine the meaning of this reverberation as follows: We think, feel and want in our waking hours with our etheric body, which offers resistance within the physical body. That is, only the thoughts that reflect the effect of the etheric body resonate. Because we are so active in the etheric body, we imprint the after-effects on it: what we think during the day is impressed on it. But the ether body offers resistance; it has its own inner movements. It is these that constitute the life that permeates the physical body. By forcing into it what is carried out in our thinking, we impose something alien on it; after all, its primary purpose is to convey life. Because of the tensions that arise between the ether body's two activities, the astral body cannot absorb what has been imprinted on it. During sleep, it resonates with what we ourselves have pushed into our ether body during the day; it is like a memory of what we have thought, felt and willed during the day. Thus we can say that the human being cannot develop consciousness in relation to his ego during sleep, but that the astral body resonates with everything that has taken place in us during the day through the activity of the soul. This activity of the astral body cannot come to consciousness either; for if it continued for a long time, it would intensify to such an extent that we would become fully conscious of it every morning, with a clear memory of what had been forced into the astral body. We do not have to visualize all the individual acts we have performed during the day, but rather the activity of thinking, feeling and willing. By exercising these, we give the astral body a structure, a general imprint – not through the individual acts – in which it resonates. Then, in the morning, we have, in the image suggested, we can say, in what we experienced the day before, not in thinking, feeling, willing, something new. We would overlook this if the astral body did not have to develop the urge to return to the physical and ether bodies, that is, to wake up. The highest tension leads us to submerge into the physical body. Otherwise, one should be able to draw out, at least for a very short time, the force that one has to leave behind in the physical body and in what is called the etheric body during sleep. In what can be called the real, spiritual view, one actually revives what can be called the unconscious power of the etheric body, making it flash. One must then wait for the moments when the etheric body also detaches itself during waking life; it is like a blood pulsation: the etheric body is first more intimately connected to the physical body – and then withdraws. By using such moments, one gains consciousness of the etheric body for a brief moment. Then the supersensible consciousness flashes: one is in the spiritual world and can ask questions in it.
We see what an intimate process underlies it. What really happens is like something that flits by. If you want to put it into scientific forms, what remains is like a memory, like a memory of dreams that flit by. Therefore, in spiritual science one does not arrive at success by stringing together conclusion after conclusion on what one already has. It is not a logical recollection, not a thinking, but a growth arises through such fleeting moments. Therefore, the spiritual researcher, when writing down what he gains in this way, cannot proceed as one who describes from memory. He cannot, for instance, claim that a lecture he is giving for the twelfth time will be easier because it is fixed in his memory. If one really wants to be honest, in spiritual science one cannot allow anything to become fixed in one's memory; rather, one must always speak anew out of the inner work of the soul, not out of memory. That is why a lecture is as new the fourteenth or fifteenth time as it was the first time. It is much more a deliberate performance, a continuous active process in the soul that develops activity. Therefore, in the case of an honest spiritual presentation, the person who presents something from direct contact with the spiritual world will try to shape the words anew each time. It is precisely for this reason that only inner, genuine honesty can lead to the presentation of spiritual science. It is said that anyone who wants to lie must have a good memory. The spiritual researcher, on the other hand, must be imbued with honesty to the highest degree. He must not color; then what he says will already correspond to what he does not need to remember in the ordinary way. But the way of remembering of ordinary consciousness cannot be applied.
Through such insight into the structure of the human being, one sees through the nature of sleep. In Vienna, I described this process as the separation between the physical and etheric bodies on the one hand, and the astral body and the I on the other. This is only to be understood relatively; relationships remain and are established. While the astral body, as it were, resonates in its feeling back, it encounters the ether body in its ordinary experience, and in this way, what it would experience purely is mixed with what happens in ordinary life, and dreams arise. They are chaotic or more or less lawful, even prophetic, mixed with what can happen in ordinary life. If Schopenhauer had not judged merely from the ordinary philosophical point of view, he would not have seen the world merely as will and representation; but he would have seen that the representation can be condensed in itself, that one can soul-spiritual can be consciously experienced in it as spiritual, and that what he sees as will in the human organism pours out into the whole environment and is revealed for the spiritualization of the entire world. In the astral body, that which makes a person more at the end of the day than at the beginning resonates. The same occurs in all of life. To understand this, let us think of a plant and the ripening seed; let us let this image take effect on us. But that remains in the etheric body; the astral body only resonates. But it takes the ether body with it through the gate of death: and now, drawn out of the physical body, the astral body can develop full consciousness together with the ego; it is now suddenly imbued with the life-force of the ether body, and consciousness emerges. But then, when it is so animated – because the etheric body is actually the provider of life for the physical body and cannot serve for more – when the extract is drawn from it, so to speak, what only maintains the life functions is expelled into the rest of the etheric world. Through the spiritually held consciousness, which arises from the impetus of the astral body and the ego on the extract of the ether body, the human being must first struggle until he comes to the use of the new consciousness, in which he spends the time between death and a new birth. During this time, the human being accomplishes a great deal. We can only gain insights into the length of time that passes if we consider the individual human life in the context of all earthly lives. Then we can see what attracted him to the earth, what led him from the spiritual realm to this life; the forces that led the human being down have thus found their conclusion, their goal. Meanwhile, the earth must have changed so much that the person can experience something new. Therefore, it takes centuries for a person to gather his strength to descend into a new life on earth.
In the time between death and a new birth, one must also imagine two alternating states of inner experience. In everyday life we have waking and sleeping; in the time between death and a new birth, there are alternating periods, successive states of inner activity and of isolation from the spiritual environment, where one knows nothing of the spiritual environment but inwardly lives out what one has previously absorbed in it. These experiences are like a mighty inner image arising from within oneself. Then again, one is completely absorbed in the spiritual worlds and incorporated into them.
One can assume a spiritual center in the time between death and a new birth. In the first half, what has newly begun in the last life on earth is processed; in the second half, what is taken up is what makes the spiritual-soul permeate the physical person in a new life on earth.
What is presented as spiritual science only appears to contradict natural science. In the future, spiritual research into the values of human life will advance in the same way as the physical sciences do in their own field. Spiritual science still appears to many to be a fantasy because they shrink from the strict mental work and mental discipline it demands. Many would like to arrive at spiritual science by easier means than are possible. They do not want to take the difficult step, which consists in a further development of consciousness. The progress of chemistry can be utilized without being a chemist; in the same way the results of spiritual research can be appropriated. And even if one cannot engage in spiritual research oneself, one should at least endeavor to cast aside one's prejudices. But many would like to arrive at spiritual science by a more comfortable route than by overcoming their prejudices, and then use it primarily for their own benefit in life. Misunderstanding of spiritual science is the result of such an attitude.
Natural science will increasingly reveal itself not as the source of answers but as a field that poses questions in new ways. The answers will then come from spiritual science – the answer that Faust craves:
Mysterious in broad daylight
Nature cannot be robbed of her veil,
And what she may not reveal to your mind,
You cannot force from her with levers and with screws.
You cannot penetrate its inner workings with levers and screws. You have to illuminate it with the light and power of the soul.