A Matter of Life and Death

Would we suffer in anguish when a loved one dies if we knew what awaited them in the spiritual world they are entering? Would we be inconsolable if we knew that they still exist, outside their physical bodies and that we will be reunited with them when we ourselves die?

When we study the human being using our methods of natural science, we have come so far that we can see the moment of conception when the sperm penetrates the egg, and we can see the moment of death when the last breath is exhaled. What natural science cannot see is where the human being is before its conception or after its last breath. Natural science has its limitations, and scientists and philosophers have all come up against the boundaries of our ability to penetrate these realms. With knowledge gained through spiritual science, however, we can experience the facts of our life before birth and after death, and when we open ourselves to the possibility, we can learn these things – we can know these things – so that this larger perspective grants us immeasurable solace.

We restore our reverence for life by understanding the life between death and a new birth. (See links below.)

We have discussed sleep and death, karma and reincarnation, heredity and destiny in several previous posts that provide much more detail than is being provided today. Today, we offer an overview, a framework, of a human life.

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

… Sleep is a helpful image for death because during sleep we are also withdrawn from the realm in which our destiny awaits for us. While we are sleeping, events in this realm continue without us, and for a while we have no influence on the course they take. Nevertheless, how we live the next day still depends on the effects of what we did the day before. In reality, our personalities are reembodied anew each morning in the world of our actions. It is as if what we were separated from during the night is spread out around us during the day. The same holds true for the actions we carried out in earlier incarnations. They are bound to us as our destiny … a human spirit can live only in the environment it has created for itself through its own actions. The ongoing course of events sees to it that when I wake in the morning, I find myself in a situation that I myself created the previous day. Similarly, my reincarnating spirit’s relationship to the objects in the surroundings sees to it that I enter an environment corresponding to my actions in the previous life.

From the above, we can form an idea of how the soul is incorporated into the overall organization of a human being. The physical body is subject to the laws of heredity. The human spirit, on the other hand, must reincarnate over and over again, and its law consists in having to carry the fruits of previous lifetimes over into the following ones. Our souls live in the present, although this life in the present is not independent of our previous lives since each incarnating spirit brings its destiny along with it from previous incarnations, and this destiny determines its present life.

What impressions our souls will be capable of receiving, which of our desires can be fulfilled, what joys and sorrows will be our lot, what other human beings we will meet—all this depends on what our actions were like in earlier incarnations of the spirit. People to whom our souls were connected in one lifetime will necessarily encounter us again in a later one because the actions that took place between us must have their consequences. Souls that have once been associated will venture into reincarnation at the same time. Thus, the life of the soul is a product of the spirit’s self-created destiny.

The course of a human life within the framework of life and death is determined in three different ways, and we are also therefore dependent on three factors that go beyond birth and death. The body is subject to the laws of heredity; the soul is subject to self-created destiny, or to use an ancient term, to its karma; and the spirit is subject to the laws of reincarnation or repeated earthly lives. The interrelationship of body, soul and spirit can also be expressed as follows: The spirit is immortal; birth and death govern our bodily existence in accordance with the laws of the physical world; and the life of the soul, which is subject to destiny, mediates between body and spirit during the course of an earthly life.

Excerpt from: Theosophy: An Introduction to the Spiritual Processes in Human Life and in the Cosmos by Rudolf Steiner.

Until we are able to experience the spiritual world, we are confined to the limits of our senses. However, within these limits, we are able to elevate our thinking to understand the concepts of the spiritual world revealed by the initiates who do experience it. Rudolf Steiner is such an initiate; he was especially adept at putting into words what he experienced firsthand in the spiritual realms. He was extremely prolific with more than 6000 books, lectures and essays contained in his complete works.

Below is a list of posts that focus on the questions of sleep and death, karma and reincarnation. Reading the excerpts from Dr. Steiner’s work in each post gives us a glimpse into the processes which are invisible to us but nevertheless exist as facts of life.

Sleep:

https://www.whoareyou.blog/blog/while-you-were-sleeping;

https://www.whoareyou.blog/blog/more-sleep;

https://www.whoareyou.blog/blog/the-stuff-of-dreams;

https://www.whoareyou.blog/blog/the-final-sleep;

Karma and Reincarnation:

https://www.whoareyou.blog/blog/love-fate-relationship;

https://www.whoareyou.blog/blog/causeoreffect;

https://www.whoareyou.blog/blog/time-after-time;

https://www.whoareyou.blog/blog/our-last-moment;

https://www.whoareyou.blog/blog/panorama-of-life;

https://www.whoareyou.blog/blog/not-so-very-instant-karma;

https://www.whoareyou.blog/blog/you-cant-always-get-what-you-want;

https://www.whoareyou.blog/blog/burning-desires;

https://www.whoareyou.blog/blog/our-karma-ourselves;

Not So Very Instant Karma

When somebody has done something that hurts another person, it has a certain effect on his whole life. Any action of man that hurts another being or creature or the world in general, hinders the doer in his development. This is what the pilgrimage of life means for me, that the primary force of the soul, as it goes from incarnation to incarnation, is set for further development. – Rudolf Steiner

What comes next in our journey after we’ve crossed the threshold? In the last two posts we discussed the moment of death in Our Last Moment, and the retrospective of our life in Panorama of Life. Now we come to the next phase: Kamaloca. We may remember discussing karma and reincarnation previously; now we will find how we recognize the need for karmic justice in our lives. During Kamaloca, a term Dr. Steiner uses from the Sanskrit meaning Place of Desire, we review our lives going backwards from our last moment before death to our first moment at birth. This process occurs over a period of time that lasts roughly 1/3 of our lifetime, so that a person who dies at age 60 would experience Kamaloca for approximately 20 years. (You may have noticed how this corresponds with the period of time we spend asleep during our lives.)

We can imagine that this thorough life review will show us the effect we had on the people we encountered while we lived. However, we do not merely observe our effect on others, we actually feel exactly what they felt from their encounter with us. The good and the bad, all of it. As we go backward through our entire life and finally arrive at our birth, we will have experienced objectively our entire life on earth. How, then, do all these feelings resolve themselves into karmic action?

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

You experience objectively in the spiritual world everything you yourself did in the external world, and in the process, you acquire the strength and the inclination to compensate for the pain in one of your future incarnations. Your own astral body tells you what it felt like, and you realize you have laid an obstacle in the way of your further development. This has to be cleared away, otherwise you cannot get beyond it. This is the moment you form the intention of getting rid of the obstacle. So when you have lived through the Kamaloca period, you arrive back in your childhood filled with the intention of getting rid of all the hindrances you created in life. You are full of intentions, and it is the force of these intentions that brings about the special character of your future lives on earth.

Let us suppose that in his twentieth year B hurt A. He now has to feel the pain himself, and resolves to recompense A in a future life, that is, in the physical world, where the injury was done. The force of this good resolution forms a bond of attraction between B and A and brings them together in the next life. That mysterious force of attraction that brings people together in life springs from what they have acquired in Kamaloca. Our experiences there lead us to those people in life whom we have to recompense or with whom we have any kind of connection.

Now you will realize that the Kamaloca forces we have taken into ourselves for the righting of wrongs in life can by no means always be worked out in a single life. It can then happen that we form connections with a great number of people in one life, and that next time we are in Kamaloca we have the possibility of meeting them again. Now this depends, too, on the other people, whether we meet them again in the following life. That spreads itself over many lives. In one life we correct this, in another life that, and so on. You must certainly not imagine that we can immediately put everything right in one life. It depends entirely on whether the other person also develops in his soul the corresponding bond of attraction.

Excerpt from: The Being of Man and His Future Evolution, Lecture 6: Illness and Karma, by Rudolf Steiner. Berlin. January 26, 1909,

If we just step back a bit, we can see what a miracle we are contemplating now: the true justice, the harmony, of the universe and our place within it. We are always making progress, moving forward, becoming better human beings. We aren’t punished in the afterlife for the wrong we’ve done by some external and imperious judgment; we ourselves—our highest selves, our spiritual selves—are consciously resolving to right our wrongs by fully realizing them. As a result of our time in Kamaloca, we are filled with good intentions that bring us back into our next lives. These good intentions brought us back into the life we’re living now. All of us.

Recognizing that everything done has karmic consequences, however, does not mean that we get to sit idly by while injustice or pollution or hunger or poverty or any of the evils still exist in the world. We must resolve to change all these things for the better within our power to do so. Every gift of love and service we give to the world is a movement in the positive evolution of us all.

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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.

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