Consciousness of the dead

The consciousness of the dead is different from that of the earthly embodied human being. What the human being has clearly consciously experienced on earth very soon fades to a faint memory in the life between death and new birth. In significant imaginations, however, in the first third of the post-death life, all that he has unconsciously lived through in earthly life unfolds. In the second third, the meaning of these images is revealed through inspiration. In the last third, through intuition, the human being feels himself transferred into his whole soul and spiritual environment and thereby prepares himself for his rebirth on earth. An echo of these intuitions is the child's ability to imitate in the first seven years of life.

„But at the moment when one has freed oneself from the physical in the inner experience, one knows what it is like for the human being when he lives his life without his physicality. And in the picture the fact of passing through the gate of death, of dying, comes before the soul. Once one has recognised what it means to grasp oneself in one's spiritual powers independently of the body, then one also knows what one is in spiritual existence when one has laid aside the body and has passed through the gate of death. And one also gets to know the environment that is then present for the human being. One learns to recognise how with the body, when it is discarded, that which connects us with the sense world falls away from us. What remains, however, is that which first formed us as human beings, the soul-spirit of the human being. This is how we learn to recognise the experiences we have had with other people. But that which was in these sense experiences, how soul found itself to soul, what lived itself out in the relationships to other people, to those nearer and farther away, what took place in space and in time, one learns to recognise the eternal-spiritual, how it strips off the earthly form of experience. And then the soul experiences all the more that which has been in it spiritually in relationships with other people. And that which is otherwise only the object of faith becomes cognitive certainty.“ (Lit.:GA 231, p. 27f)

Literature

• Rudolf Steiner: Zeitgeschichtliche Betrachtungen. Das Karma der Unwahrhaftigkeit – Zweiter Teil, GA 174 (1983), ISBN 3-7274-1740-4 English: rsarchive.org German: pdf pdf(2) html mobi epub archive.org
• Rudolf Steiner: Die geistigen Hintergründe des Ersten Weltkrieges, GA 174b (1994), ISBN 3-7274-1742-0 English: rsarchive.org German: pdf pdf(2) html mobi epub archive.org
• Rudolf Steiner: Der übersinnliche Mensch, anthroposophisch erfaßt, GA 231 (1999), ISBN 3-7274-2310-2 English: rsarchive.org German: pdf pdf(2) html mobi epub archive.org

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