Clairvoyant consciousness does not charm anything new into being; it merely brings up into consciousness what is present all the time in the spiritual world. All of you are in constant communication with the dead.
Skeletons, witches, devils and demons, ghosts, spider webs, black cats and bats, costumes, pumpkin patches and apple-bobbing, and so on. These are our symbols of Halloween in America. Over 2000 years ago, the Celtic people celebrated Samhaim, their New Year on November 1. They believed that on its eve, the line between the dead and the living was blurred and the ghosts of those who were dead returned to create mischief. And here we are, 2000 years later, celebrating Halloween each year with general spookiness all about us.
Halloween as it is now celebrated, besides being great fun, may also be our way to trivialize that thing that scares us most, death. In some cultures and religions, All Hallows Eve precedes the day in which we honor our dead; a day in which we attempt to communicate our love by bestowing gifts and prayers for those we love who have died. A day to follow the havoc of Halloween when these dead are back where they belong and no longer “wandering the earth”. A day we return with relief to our normal lives where the firm boundary between the living and the dead exists, or so we imagine.
When we pray for the dead or honor the dead, do we imagine that they can hear us? What if they could? And what if we could hear them?
Let’s see what Dr. Steiner has to say:
Today, people think: When a human being has passed through the Gate of Death, his activity ceases so far as the physical world is concerned. But it is not so, in reality. There is a living and perpetual communication between the so-called dead and the so-called living. Those who have passed through the Gate of Death have not ceased to be present, it is just that our eyes have ceased to see them. They are there, nevertheless. Our thoughts, our feelings, our impulses of will are connected with the dead.
People today still find difficulty in acquiring knowledge of the spiritual world…
One way of becoming acquainted with the spiritual world is relatively easy to attain by those who have enough perseverance, along the path described in the book Knowledge of the Higher Worlds and its Attainment and in other writings… The other is what may be called concrete direct communication with beings of the spiritual world that is possible between those who are still on Earth and the so-called dead.
Think of your own biography. You consider the course of your life always with interruptions; you describe only what has happened in your waking life. Life is thus broken: waking-sleeping; waking-sleeping. But you are also there while you sleep; and in studying the whole human being, waking life and sleeping life must be taken into consideration.
Besides waking life and sleeping life, there is a third state, even more important for communication with the spiritual world than waking and sleeping life as such. I mean the actual act of waking and the actual act of going to sleep, which last only a moment, for we immediately pass on into other conditions. If we develop delicate, sensitive feelings for these moments of waking and going to sleep, we shall find they shed great light on the spiritual world.
… In our whole life there are no single moments of falling asleep or of waking when we do not come into relation with the dead.
Excerpt from: Lecture: The Dead Are With Us by Rudolf Steiner. Nüremberg, February 10,1918.
Since the dead, those we have known and loved, are communicating with us anyway, why try to make this communication conscious? Steiner says that the so-called dead have important information to share with us about ourselves, and they have important questions for us that only we can answer. Remarkably, we are already communicating with the dead, but we don’t know it. For example, maybe we’ve found ourselves pondering something at night before falling asleep and when we wake up, we have the answer. It may seem like we figured out something for ourselves while we were asleep, but Steiner indicates that is only the way it appears; we’ve actually received guidance in those transitional moments between waking and sleeping.
As a side note, it is said that Thomas Edison used to nap in a chair with his arms at his side holding a steel ball in each hand. When he fell asleep, the balls would drop, and he would wake up with answers to huge problems. Though scientists have come up with names to explain this, if we look closely, we see these names explain nothing. One may well wonder why Edison kept this a secret for most of his life. See: https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/thomas-edisons-naps-inspire-a-way-to-spark-your-own-creativity/.
We can start by simply taking notice of the moments when we are falling asleep and waking up. We can practice calming our minds before falling asleep and opening ourselves to the quiet thoughts that come. Some of us pray. We can even pose direct questions at that time. When we wake up, we can refrain from checking the news or our texts and see what thoughts are coming to us in the quiet of those first waking moments. As time goes on, we will become more sensitive, more aware.
Meanwhile, Happy Halloween!