13. Sleep and Death from the Point of View of Spiritual Science

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.