6. Feeling of Unity and Sentiments of Gratitude: a Bridge to the Dead

In the time spent between death and rebirth, man passes through conditions very different from the life-relations of the physical world. We need but refer to the course of lectures on the life between death and rebirth to learn that the ideas and thoughts must be entirely different from those we must employ in speaking of the life in the physical world. Why are the concepts we must then use so different from those customary in ordinary consciousness? It is because in a sense man anticipates between death and rebirth, certain conditions which will only become Life-conditions during the next Earth-embodiment,—that of Jupiter; man lives in such a way that what he now experiences between death and rebirth anticipates—albeit in a subtler, more spiritual form—the life-conditions of the Jupiter-evolution. Since in his earth-life man has, in a sense, retained something from the earlier embodiments of Moon, Sun and Saturn, so also he receives something belonging to the future during his life between death and rebirth. On the other hand, the beings of the higher Hierarchies in so far as man can examine them with human perception, are all united—united in an immediate, present way—with the whole spiritual world, of course, but with the spiritual world in so far as it is coming to fruition in some form at the present time. They will, in coming ages, reveal the future. Paradoxical as this may sound, yet it is true. It sounds paradoxical, because the question may arise as to how the beings of the higher world would exercise their activity on the dead, if the dead already carry the future within them. Of course the beings of the higher Hierarchies also carry the future within them and are able to form it; but they do not do so without also forming something which is distinctly, or directly characteristic of the present; what has been said, however, is the case in respect of the dead. For this reason the perception of what the higher Hierarchies accomplish, forms as it were a preparation for becoming conscious of intercourse with the dead. Not until man has brought about a more or less conscious perception of the beings of the higher Hierarchies in his soul will it be possible for him gradually to attain the power, through his faculties of perception and feeling, of perceiving consciously anything concerning intercourse with the dead. I do not mean by this that man must grasp the higher Hierarchies clairvoyantly; but in so far as Spiritual Science offers the possibility, man must understand what flows into existence from the higher Hierarchies. In all these things the understanding is the chief thing. If a man takes the trouble to understand them by means of Spiritual Science, those conditions of existence can certainly arise which call up something of a union of the so-called living with the so-called dead. For the understanding of this it is necessary to hear in mind the following: