“… and then I saw my whole life flash before my eyes!” With those words alone, we know the speaker has experienced either a horrible fright or a brush with death. Why does this happen? In previous posts, we’ve explored sleep, dreams, altered consciousness, and even the moment of death. Now we will look at what happens during our first few days after death.
Thousands of cases of near-death experiences (NDEs) have accrued over the last 45 years since the phrase was coined by Dr. Raymond Moody. Many of these documented accounts include survivors who have said that “they re-experience in vivid detail the events of their lives in a sort of holographic, full-color panorama.” Spiritual science tells us that this is very close to the truth of what we experience shortly after we die. The observations of the spiritual scientist recounted in a previous post (More Sleep, September 2019) show us that during sleep, our astral and ego bodies leave our physical and etheric bodies behind, but in death, our etheric body also leaves the physical body. Because we retain our etheric body along with our astral body and ego in these first days after death, we experience the life tableau. *
In the context of our study of reincarnation and karma, we must look at this initial life review as an important part of our experience between death and rebirth. Last month we saw that immediately after we die, we are filled with great joy. We recognize the body we just left behind as the means by which we know ourselves to be a unique individual. Then we begin our life review. What does it mean?
Let’s see what Dr. Steiner has to say:
We know that our next experience is a kind of retrospective memory that lasts for days… This retrospective memory… resembles a tableau, or a panorama, woven out of all we have experienced during our past life. It does not, however, rise up in the same way in which an ordinary memory rises up in our physical body. You see the memories that live in our physical body... rise up in the form of thoughts; through the power of memory we draw them out successively within the stream of time. But the retrospective memory after death is of such a kind that everything that occurred during our early life now surrounds us simultaneously, as if it were a panorama. Our life-experiences now rise up in the form of imaginations. We can only say that we now live, for whole days, within these experiences. What we experienced just before death and what we experienced during our childhood stand before us simultaneously in powerful pictures. A panorama of our life, a life-picture, stands before us and it reveals, simultaneously, in a “fabric” woven out of the ether, what normally occurs successively within the stream of time…
We feel, above all, that we are now surrounded by something that is alive. Everything within it lives and weaves. And then we experience that it resounds spiritually, that it shines forth spiritually and gives warmth spiritually…
We know that this life-tableau disappears after a few days. What makes it cease and what is its essence?
In regard to the physical world, we have the impression that our physical body falls away from us when we die; in a similar way we now have the impression that our etheric body too falls away from us after a certain number of days… It becomes interwoven with the whole universe, with the whole world. It lives in the world and stamps its impressions upon the whole world while we are experiencing our life-tableau.
An excerpt from the lecture: The Moment of Death and the Period Thereafter by Rudolf Steiner, Leipzig, Germany, February 22, 1916.
This panoramic view of our whole life gives us a chance to assess the value of the life we’ve lived; the people who filled our world and with whom we had relationships. After we’ve lived within this life tableau, our etheric body falls away, just as our physical body fell away a few days before.
What we see in the mystery of our after-death experience of the life-tableau is that, ultimately, we share our whole lives with the universe. When our etheric body is released, everything we’ve thought and experienced in the course of our life from birth to death is finally given to the wide world. And the whole world is enriched by each of us.
A modern definition of the etheric body (and the difference between sleep and death) by Dr. Adam Blanning:
https://denvertherapies.com/the-etheric-body-the-foundation-of-a-dynamic-clinical-lens/
Near-Death Experience as a Probe to Explore (Disconnected) Consciousness:
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/31982302/
and:
https://www.cell.com/trends/cognitive-sciences/fulltext/S1364-6613(19)30312-2?_returnURL=https%3A%2F%2Flinkinghub.elsevier.com%2Fretrieve%2Fpii%2FS1364661319303122%3Fshowall%3Dtrue
Getting Comfortable With Death & Near-Death Experiences: Near-Death Experiences: An Essay in Medicine & Philosophy by Raymond A. Moody, MD, PhD
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6179873/
https://www.mdpi.com/2076-328X/10/3/60/htm
If you would like to know more about Steiner’s work as it is applied today, please take a look at this site:
https://appliedanthroposophy.org/overview, especially the Introductory Course. The faculty members are inspiring; it is exciting to see them all in one place.