Every night while we are sleeping, we work with our Angel to preview the coming day. Most of us don’t remember this.
Just like we plan our coming life with the hierarchies while we are between death and our new birth, we plan our coming day with our Guardian Angel—plans, for example, to be somewhere at a certain time to meet someone we need to meet or to be where we need to be to experience something important. These intentions exist in addition to the practical plans appearing on our calendars.
This probably sounds incredible, but if we spend some time thinking about this idea, we may come to realize how our plans for the day include goals we wish to accomplish on a higher level. We can become more mindful, more aligned with what is actually best for us just by thinking this way. We may begin to recognize the experiences that are a fulfillment of the work we’ve done with our Angel the night before.
Let’s see what Dr. Steiner has to say:
There is a secret intimately connected with the present stage of human evolution, which is not known today. In earlier times, before the middle of the fifteenth century, it was not necessary to take much notice of it, but today it must be reckoned with. This mystery of life is that the human being, constituted as we are today in body, soul, and spirit, every night looks, to a certain extent, at the events of the coming day, but without always carrying that vision over into full day-consciousness. It is our “Angel” who has that clear consciousness.
But what is experienced at night in community with that being whom we call the Angel is a pre-vision of the coming day. This is not a subject for human curiosity, but a matter for practical life. Only when the feeling of this fact fills our inner being can we make right decisions and bring right thoughts into the course of daily life. Let us assume that a person has something definite to do, say at noon. This thing the person has to do has already been arranged by that person and the Angel and during the preceding night, though the fact is not necessarily kept in consciousness and human curiosity has no part in it.
People should be filled with the conviction that during the day they should realize in a fruitful way what they have arranged at night in cooperation with this Angel being.
Much that has happened of late might draw our attention with almost shattering force to what I have just said. The last four or five years of agony (World War I) should have taught us that the consciousness of our association with higher beings through the experiences of the night did not, alas, exist. If the feeling had permeated us that our doings in the day were in harmony with the decisions made with our Angel in the preceding night, how different events would have been!
These things must be spoken of now, to point out how we must learn to regard this life between birth and death as a continuation of the life of spirit and soul which was before birth. It must be made known that we in the future should be able to experience throughout our whole life the revelation of the Divine in our own being, and what through all our life in the day this vivid consciousness should persist as: “What I do from morning till evening I have discussed with my Angel while I slept.”
We must turn to feelings which are more concrete with regard to the spiritual world… Our attitude to the spiritual world must move in this appointed direction.
Excerpt from: The Problems of Our Time, Lecture II by Rudolf Steiner. Berlin, September 13, 1919.
Here we are reminded once again that the life between birth and death is a continuation of our spiritual life before birth. Just as we have intentions for this life prior to being born into it, intentions we formed in alliance with the hierarchies, so we have intentions we make each night as we sleep. The time we are asleep is also part of our life, and it happens every day. We make other kinds of plans arising from our higher self and in agreement with our Angel whether we are aware of them or not.
We’ve already explored how knowledge of karma shows us the consequences of unhealthy trends of thinking, of feeling, and of doing to ourselves and the world around us. The more clearly we see this, the more we naturally strive to become better people. This additional element, the work with our Angel during the night, does the same thing on a daily basis.
Perhaps the miscommunications, the hostilities, the materialistic thinking that are leading our world into chaos would be mitigated if we woke up each morning knowing of the intentions made the night before. Perhaps we would choose to pursue lives that align with the harmonious working of the spiritual world.