What the Dead Want to Know

As we began to develop scientific thinking in the early 1400s, we lost our awareness of the spiritual world. This loss was essential to our evolution as human beings because we needed to develop this type of thinking exclusively; however, the time has come to renew our connection to our spiritual home. The topic of death is a tough one because most of us fear it; we have lost our ability to understand it. Yet now in our time, the veil between life and death is thinning for a variety of reasons. Humanity is evolving. We are at an important transition from using purely scientific reasoning to using the intellectual power gained by it to understand the spirit.

Many of us are reluctant to make that transition, and that has widespread ramifications for us and for those in our lives who have died. Rudolf Steiner tells us that souls who enter the spiritual world are capable of “seeing” amazing and profound things, but unless they have acquired spiritual knowledge while alive, they are unable to fully understand everything they are seeing.

Just as we can enjoy music without knowing how to read notes or play an instrument, those who are able to do those things have an enhanced appreciation for music. Similarly, people who die do so with the knowledge of the spiritual world that they acquired while they were alive. If they don’t know anything about the spiritual world before they die, their experience will be limited. In other words, their ability to understand what is in their new environment is predicated on what they learned during their lifetimes. This is an immediate issue for them because they want to know about the beings and environment of the spiritual world they now live in, but they lack the concepts to do so. We can help them.

Let’s see what Dr. Steiner has to say:

If human beings on earth allow spiritual thoughts to permeate their souls, those thoughts can be perceived by souls in the beyond, and those earthly souls remain real for them. What we are touching upon here is the fact that the spiritual thoughts nurtured by souls here on earth can not only be perceived but be understood by the souls beyond. And, even more significantly this fact can have a practical consequence. Building on this insight, we can do something that could become very significant for the relationship between souls here and souls beyond. I refer to what we may call “reading to the dead.” Reading to the dead is often extraordinarily important.

A seer can have the experience that human beings who have entirely disregarded spiritual wisdom have a strong longing for it and wish to hear about it after they have passed through the gate of death. If souls who have remained behind make a clear mental image of the dead person, and at the same time bring to mind a spiritual train of thought or read from a spiritual book (in thought, not aloud) then the dead person whose spiritual image stands before them will become aware of it… One can often see how the dead long to hear what gets through to them from here… It is a grave error to think that a human being merely needs to die in order to contact the whole spiritual world… it is a deep misconception to believe that souls become wise as soon as they pass through the gate of death. A soul cannot be easily instructed by souls in the beyond immediately on passing through the gate of death if there is no basis for a connection with them.

… While materialism permits us to bring to life only relationships between souls confined to their earthly existence, spiritual science opens the way for free communication and exchange between souls on the earth and souls that dwell beyond the earth in the other world. The dead will live with us. And, when that happens, what we may call the passage through the gate of death will often after a time be experienced as merely a change in the form of existence. The whole transformation in the life of spirit and of soul that will take place when such things become common knowledge will be of enormous significance.

Excerpt from: Occult Research into Life Between Death and a New Birth, Lecture II: The Establishment of Mutual Relations between the Living and the So-called Dead by Rudolf Steiner, Stuttgart February 20, 1913.

Steiner is saying that the souls of those who have died are hungry for knowledge of the spirit—even if they were opposed to it during their lifetimes. Last month, we discussed how these departed souls miss us just as we miss them. This month, we see that they may need our help to understand what they are experiencing in the spiritual world. Reading to them is an ideal gift because we are learning too while we read. Reading scientific works doesn’t reach them—those concepts are unnecessary in the spiritual world—but reading spiritual scientific works does reach them because spiritual science explains the images they are seeing.

Communication does go both ways. The dead have reasons to communicate with us and attempt to do so in a variety of ways. We will learn to attune ourselves to the efforts and means of these communications in future blogs.

Meanwhile, we could pick up a book by Rudolf Steiner, such as Theosophy: An Introduction to the Spiritual Processes in Human Life and in the Cosmos and read it to one of the people we know on the other side. Steiner, the initiate of the 20th century who has over 6000 published works, continues to be the source of knowledge for this blog.

Staying Close After Death

People we know who have “died” are still around us. They didn’t go to a far-away heaven somewhere off in space. They didn’t cease to exist just because they died. In fact, they are busy in their lives between death and rebirth. We’ve already discussed in previous posts the phases people go through once they’ve left their physical bodies at death, so now we can expand our understanding to recognize that once people are on the other side, they have many things that occupy them while going through each phase. One of the things that occupy our loved ones after they die is their desire to have contact with us.

How do we go about deepening our relationship with someone who has died? Love for them will draw us closer, prayers and thoughts will draw us closer, and remembering our moments together will draw us closer as long as we harbor spiritual thoughts at least occasionally. If we are completely mired in the materialistic world, they will not find us. This may seem unnecessarily harsh, yet if we think about it, it makes sense. Once we believe our loved ones still exist after they die, we are acknowledging there is a spiritual world.

Acquiring a deeper more conscious relationship requires efforts the results of which we may not achieve in this lifetime. We should start on the path anyway; we have nothing to lose. Because here’s the thing: the person who died misses us just as we miss them.

Let’s see what Dr. Steiner has to say.

… Here on earth, by means of our souls and bodies, we have the most varied kinds of relationships with the physical world, as well as with the spiritual world that underlies it. Likewise, between death and a new birth we exist in relationship with the facts, happenings, and beings of a supersensory world. Human beings have an occupation or activity in the physical world between birth and death; likewise, they have activities—occupations as it were—between death and a new birth. What we can learn about human life and human activity between death and a new birth will lead humanity more and more toward what we may call the overcoming of “the abyss” that, especially in our materialistic times, separates those who live on earth from those whom we call “the dead.” In this process, communication and a mutual entering-into-relationship will increasingly come to be established between the living and the “dead.”

Naturally, those who die before others with whom they had relationships on earth often gaze back from the spiritual world at those they loved who remain here. This being the case, we may ask whether such souls living between death and a new birth can perceive human beings who live here on earth between birth and death… Seers can often have a kind of heart-wrenching experience with souls who feel fettered when they think of those they left behind. Such souls feel that they cannot get through, cannot look down on those earthly souls.

They are fettered not by their own essential being, but by the other souls left behind…

Investigation into why a soul in the spiritual world cannot perceive souls who remain on earth reveals that, because of the circumstances of our time, those souls who have remained on earth have been unable to take in or allow any thoughts to live in them that might otherwise become visible and perceptible to a soul who has passed through the gate of death.

There is a great difference among souls here on earth, depending on their makeup. Imagine a soul living here in the physical body who, between awaking and going to sleep, is concerned only with thoughts taken from the material world. Such a soul—filled entirely with thoughts, concepts, ideas, and sensations taken solely from the material world—cannot be perceived at all from the world between death and rebirth. No trace of it can be seen. But a soul filled with spiritual ideas such as those provided by spiritual science—a soul glowing and illuminated by spiritual ideas—is perceptible from the other world. Consequently, no matter how good they may be as human beings, the souls left behind who are immersed in materialism are not real to the world beyond and cannot be perceived. This makes a shocking, terrible impression upon the seer.

Excerpt from: Occult Research into Life Between Death and a New Birth, Lecture II: The Establishment of Mutual Relations between the Living and the So-called Dead by Rudolf Steiner, Stuttgart February 20, 1913.

Steiner is clear that we ourselves must direct our own efforts to contact those who have died before us; we cannot rely on mediums or seances or drugs like ayahuasca. Our first step is to direct our thoughts to spiritual content at some point every day. Though it is unlikely that we will experience direct, conscious contact early on, we may experience the comfort and good will that arises with our efforts to become closer to those we love who have died. All these efforts are felt by those to whom we direct them.

In the September post we will discuss some of the things it is possible to learn from those who have died and they from us. We will also look at specific practices we can undertake that work to open lines of communication.

Why Bother?

Not everyone walks into an art museum with the same enthusiasm, but almost all of us will find at least one painting we think is beautiful. We may even recognize it from somewhere. We will spend a minute or so in front of it, enjoying its colors and forms whether we understand what the artist is trying to express or not. And then we move on.

Let’s say a docent walks up while we are standing in front of our favorite painting and starts to explain it. We may learn about the artist, the painting’s composition, its historical context, etc. Now we see the painting differently; it is more beautiful than it was before. The painting didn’t change, we did. And from now on whenever we see a piece of art, though we may immediately recognize its beauty, we know that it is also filled with mysterious meaning we can’t see until we understand what we’re seeing.

For all of time, humanity has searched for meaning to the mysteries of life.

Why not be satisfied with a feeling? Why bother to understand?

Let’s see what Dr. Steiner has to say:

… All an investigator of the spiritual world is doing is simply recalling to people’s memories something they have forgotten.

Now imagine that during life on earth you come across another person with whom you remember experiencing something 20 years before, but which he has completely forgotten. By talking with him, however, about the incident which you yourself remember clearly, you can bring the other person to recall it also. It is just the same process, though on a higher level, when I speak to you about the spiritual worlds, the only difference being that pre-earthly experiences are more completely forgotten than those of earthly life.

Now people might say: ‘Why should we be asked during our life on earth to take on this extra task of concerning ourselves with matters which, in accordance with cosmic ordering or, one might say, with divine decree, we experience during life beyond the earth?’ There are those, too, who ask: ‘Why should I go to this trouble before death to gain knowledge about the supersensible worlds? I can very well wait until I am dead. Then, if all these things really exist, I shall come face to face with them.’

All this, however, arises from a total misunderstanding of earthly life. The facts of which the spiritual investigator speaks are experienced by human beings in pre-earthly existence, but they are not then the subject of thought, and only during life on earth can thoughts about them be experienced. And only those thoughts about the supersensible world that have been worked upon during earthly life can be carried with us through the gate of death, and only then can we understand the facts we experience between death and rebirth.

… At this present stage of human evolution people’s lives are extraordinarily hard if, during life on earth, they give no thought to the spiritual world. For having passed through the gate of death they can no longer acquire any real knowledge of their surroundings. They are in the midst of what is incomprehensible to them. An understanding of what is experienced after death has to be striven for during life on earth… it was different for people of earlier ages. But, at the present moment of humanity’s evolution people will have to rely more and more on acquiring here on earth an understanding of what they are going to experience in the supersensible world between death and rebirth.

Excerpt from: The Evolution of Consciousness, Lecture 3: New and Old Initiation Science, August 21, 1923, in Berlin.

Consciousness evolves. Spiritual knowledge, once our birthright, once innate, must now be attained through our thinking. Spiritual awareness disappeared so that our thinking could develop freely, and now we need to lift the power of our thinking into the spiritual realms to understand what we will experience between death and rebirth. Until we can acquire this knowledge firsthand, we need a docent. We have the many works of an initiate, Rudolf Steiner, to provide us with this knowledge. We have much to learn before we cross the threshold.

Our Last Moment

What if we were immortal? What if we could continue to learn and grow forever? If we could have time to do everything we needed and wanted to do? If we could stay with our loved ones forever?

Always, the promise of never-ending life entices us. Ironically, our lack of understanding death is exactly what is preventing us from knowing that we already are immortal. The presumption that we exist only within our bodies between birth and death keeps us from understanding the very basis of what it means to be human: that we are spiritual beings who occasionally occupy physical bodies before returning to our spiritual existence.

In these days of the pandemic, our focus has been turned to the death of thousands of people across the globe, and for some of us, a particular person we have known and loved. It’s a lot to take in. We may find some comfort in studying the moment of death itself. Direct knowledge of this moment, however, can be communicated to us only by a spiritual scientist who, as a result of extraordinary effort over the course of time – or lifetimes, has been initiated (see previous post Primary Source, Apr. 2020). Because fear of the unknown is natural for us; learning about the moment of death may help us look at it with more equanimity.*

Let’s see what Dr. Steiner has to say:

The moment of death is of extraordinary significance. Death is something that most distinctly has two totally different aspects. Regarded here from the physical world it certainly has many sad aspects, many painful sides. However, here we really see death only from the one side; after our death we see it from the other. It is then the most satisfying and most perfect occurrence that we can possibly experience, for there it is a living fact. Whereas here death is a proof of how frail and transitory the human physical life is—when seen from the spiritual world it is actually a proof that the spirit continually wins the victory over everything non-spiritual, that the spirit is ever the life, the eternal, ever-unconquerable life.

Excerpt from: Spiritual Life Now and After Death: Forming Our Destiny in the Physical and Spiritual Worlds. Lecture on November 16, 1915, Berlin.

And:

From this side of life, death appears to be a dissolution, something in face of which the human being has a ready fear and dread. From the other side, death appears as the light-filled beginning of experience of the Spirit, as that which spreads a sun-radiance over the whole of the subsequent life between death and a new birth; as that which most of all warms the soul through with joy in the life between death and a new birth. The moment of death is something that is looked back upon with a deep sense of blessing. Described in earthly terms: the moment of death, viewed from the other side, is the most joyful, the most enrapturing point in the life between death and a new birth.

Excerpt from: The Problem of Death. Lecture I by Rudolf Steiner, Dornach, February 5, 1915.

If we accept that the moment of death is profoundly different for those going through it than it is for us, we will be able to let them go with peace of mind. Of course, we will still feel the anguish that comes with the loss of people we know. Their passage from this world still has very real and lasting consequences for us. We may yet be filled with sorrow, but those who have died are immediately filled with joy.

In our next posts we will be exploring together the three days immediately following death and then the period of time in the spiritual world that lasts about1/3 of the time of our lives – the same amount of time we will have slept during our lifetime.

*Though out-of-body experiences during a near-death trauma have been reported by many (see previous post and links: Dying to Know, Jan. 2019), these reports are made, after all, by people who have returned from the moment of death. While these reports give evidence of our consciousness continuing after signs of life have ceased, we must rely on the reports of spiritual scientists such as Rudolf Steiner for answers about death itself.

If you have never heard of Rudolf Steiner or his work, you may find this film, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RXKSSBHTLzU, featuring people who at the time (1991) were leaders working out of Steiner’s ideas within many disciplines such as science, mathematics, dance, architecture, education, bio-dynamic agriculture, etc. This work continues today.

The Final Sleep

(the last in a series of four posts on sleep)

Christopher Hitchens, a well-known atheist, was interviewed by the BBC in 2010 after his diagnosis with terminal cancer. He said that he was not afraid of death, but of dying. Daniel Dennett and Richard Dawkins, celebrated atheists, converse about death and dying, but they do not offer any enlightenment about the subject of death itself. Intellectually self-satisfied, they see their own lives as products of random chance, a miraculous blip in time. The religions they rail against also fail to provide scientific answers about the nature of death; their faith in an afterlife is devoid of specifics.

Without understanding death, aging is seen as disease that, like other terminal diseases, must be conquered or at least postponed. From cryogenics to life-enhancing genetic manipulation, to organ replacement, to memories preserved on computers, one can imagine that life can be prolonged indefinitely—that death itself can be averted. Yet these efforts, too, fail to provide any insight into death as a phenomenon. Death remains a mystery – and a tragedy.

Let’s see what Dr. Steiner has to say:

When a man falls asleep, whereas his astral body is released from his etheric and physical bodies, the latter still remain united. Not so in death. In death the physical is severed from the etheric body. Left to its own unaided forces, the physical body will now inevitably disintegrate… For the etheric body is now united with its astral body, and the physical body is no longer with them. The fact is that the etheric and astral bodies do not separate immediately after death. They hold together for a time… Man sees his past life from birth to death in a vast series of pictures, simultaneously spread out before him. During his earthly life, memory is only present while—in the waking state—man is united with his physical body. Moreover, it is only present to the limited extent the physical body permits. Yet to the soul herself nothing is lost; everything that has ever made an impression on the soul during this life is preserved.

During the life between birth and death a severance of the etheric body from the physical only takes place in exceptional cases, and then only for a short duration… When a man undergoes an altogether unaccustomed shock or something of that nature, a severance of the etheric may ensue for a brief space of time over a large proportion of the body. This happens if he is brought very near to death, as on the point of drowning, or when in imminent danger of a fall in mountaineering.

What is related by individuals who have had such experiences comes very near the truth. Supersensible observation confirms it. They tell how at such a moment the whole of their past life appeared before them in a vast tableau of memory.

From: An Outline of Esoteric Science, Chapter III: Sleep and Death. 1910.

Observing one’s life as a vast tableau happens immediately when the etheric body loosens from the physical body. This “vision” ends when the person is brought back to life, and just as our dreams end when we wake up, sometimes we remember and sometimes we don’t. As we discussed back in January (see post Dying to Know), many more people are having and remembering near-death experiences because medical science has advanced; people who have “died” are being brought back to life every day now. Scientists are actively investigating rather than merely discounting the reports of people who’ve been brought back to life from the brink of death; the number and similarity of reports is just too great to ignore.

If we allow ourselves to contemplate that our selves do not stop once we die, that we continue to have experiences as suggested by the reports of those who have returned from death, then we must entertain the idea that, if not brought back to life, we nevertheless continue on in another state of being. We may want to consider with greater tolerance, if not open-minded curiosity, the cultural ideas going back for millennia professing life on the other side of the grave.

Did a different consciousness live in the people of yore who took for granted an afterlife? Could they see things we cannot? Can we acquire a consciousness now that will reveal these mysteries to us? Steiner says we can. Such a consciousness exists and, in addition to giving us the tools to attain it, he has written extensively about what we will learn when we get there.

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Christian Hitchens dies at 62
https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-16212418

Richard Dawkins and Daniel Dennett On Death
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zVm8bdJNyMA

Dying to Know

In Bruce Greyson’s paper, “Implications of Near-Death Experiences for a Post-Materialist Psychology,” he states that, “A number of reductionist hypotheses have been proposed to explain NDEs (near-death-experiences)... although (such) speculations generally lack any empirical support and address only selected aspects of the phenomena.” (See paper by Enrico Facco and Christian Agrillo entitled “Near Death Experiences Between Science and Prejudice.”**)

Greyson says, “The most important objection to the adequacy of all reductionist theories, however, is that mental clarity, vivid sensory imagery, a clear memory of the experience, and a conviction that the experience seemed more real than ordinary consciousness are the norms for NDEs, even when they occur in conditions of drastically altered cerebral physiology under which the reductionist model would deem consciousness impossible.”  

In other words, even when the brain and all our senses are shut off completely, consciousness still appears to be happening—we still appear to be having real experiences. Can meditative states reach the level of consciousness experienced by those who have had near death experiences?

Let’s see what Rudolf Steiner* has to say:

“A moment may occur in which the soul gets an inner experience of itself in quite a new way... We are completely shut off from the world of sense and intellect, and yet we feel the experience in the same way as when we are standing fully awake before the outer world in ordinary life. We feel compelled to picture the experience in ourselves. For this purpose we use ideas such as we have in ordinary life, but we know very well that we are experiencing things different from those to which such ideas are normally attached.

...When such a series of representations has been gone through, the inner experience passes back to ordinary soul conditions. We find ourselves again in ourselves with the memory of the experience just undergone. If this memory is as vivid and accurate as any other, it enables us to form an opinion of the experience.

We then have a direct knowledge that we have gone through something which cannot be experienced by any physical sense or ordinary intelligence, for we feel that the description just given or communicated to others or to ourselves is only a means of expressing the experience. Although the expression is a means of understanding the fact of the experience, it has nothing in common with it. We know that we do not need any of our senses in having such an experience. One who attributes it to a hidden activity of the senses or of the brain does not know the true character of the experience.”

Excerpt from: A Road to Self Knowledge. Meditation I: In which the Attempt is made to obtain a True Idea of the Physical Body By Rudolf Steiner, 1912.

Steiner points to the difficulty of trying to put into words the experiences we have when we have lifted ourselves out of our physical nature, when we are experiencing things that are outside our senses, things of the spiritual world. When we come back into our bodies, so to speak, we know we have experienced something intensely real, but if we wish to talk about it, we must use the words and concepts derived from our sense-bound world. These words do not really communicate the experience, hence the skeptical response of many who are hearing about it; they feel justified in assuming that this experience is not real, but is a figment or trick of the imagination. (Whatever that is…)

Nevertheless, the number of NDE accounts is increasing as medical advances continue to successfully retrieve us from death’s door. This, along with the fact that patients and doctors now feel a diminishing sense of trepidation about reporting these experiences, ensures that research in this realm will continue.

Meanwhile, it is clear from what Steiner says that we can work on ourselves so that we develop our “spiritual senses” thus enabling us to see into the spiritual world. We can feel the mental clarity, etc. reported by those who have had near death experiences without the traumatic experience of reaching death’s door. If you want to know more, you can read Steiner’s work.

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**Dr. Bruce Greyson is Professor Emeritus of Psychiatry and Neurobehavioral Sciences at the University of Virginia. He is co-author of Irreducible Mind and co-editor of The Handbook of Near-Death Experiences.

Links:

Near-death experiences between science and prejudice
**https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3399124/

“Implications of Near-Death Experiences for a Postmaterialist Psychology”
https://pdfs.semanticscholar.org/37e4/00dfee9c01483cc7126738197e22dfc19926.pdf

“Meditation as an Altered State of Consciousness: Contributions of Western Behavioral Science”
http://www.atpweb.org/jtparchive/trps-15-83-01-061.pdf Deane H. Shapiro, Jr. Irvine, California  (PDF)

“Altered States of Consciousness”
https://med.virginia.edu/perceptual-studies/research-area/altered-states-of-consciousness/

The Near-Death Experience: In the Light of Scientific Research and the Spiritual Science of Rudolf Steiner
https://www.amazon.com/Near-Death-Experience-Scientific-Research-Spiritual/dp/0880103604