7. Personal and Supersensible Aspects (Relating to Certain Individuals)

You see, a materialist tends to stick at the question as to whether consciousness persists after death. Spiritual science has shown that when the soul had gone though the gate of death it does not in fact suffer from lack of consciousness but rather has too much of it. A kind of awakening will come at a later stage, not because it is necessary to acquire a new consciousness after death but because there is dazzling consciousness, too much consciousness, and this needs to be gradually subdued in the early stages. You will find more about this in the Viennese cycle[^6] which has also appeared in print. After death, man has too much conscious awareness, an overpowering awareness, and he needs to get his bearings first in this world of over- powering awareness. Gradually he will achieve this and as he does so his awareness will be less in degree than before. Conscious awareness must first be subdued, just as over-powerful sunlight has to be subdued. A gradual subduing of consciousness has to be achieved. So we cannot speak of an 'awakening' in the terms that apply in the physical world, but of recovering from a superabundance of conscious awareness to the point where it becomes bearable, depending on what we have experienced in the physical world. This requires the following: to get our bearings in this flood of light that is our awareness after death, we need knowledge of our own essential nature as a starting point. We have to be able to look back upon our own essential nature to find the guidelines, as it were, for an orientation in the spiritual world. Lack of self-knowledge is what hinders conscious awareness after death. We have to find ourselves in the flood of light. And so you see why a need arises to characterize the person who has died, to assist them to find themselves.