Everything living dies that is how we know
it is alive. Death wants to lead us somewhere. It wants to awaken us to a
broader life, a life in spirit. The dead are a lot more aware of us than we are
of them. They too want us to awaken to a life which includes them, which
includes spirit.
So what is spirit? It is worlds arranged one
within the other and our everyday world is just the outer surface of these
worlds. Not only do we need to become aware of them but also to include them in
our understanding of ourselves, humanity, and the world. We need to bring thinking,
feeling, and will alive so that these three soul forces can penetrate beyond
the surface of things. A start to the journey of greater understanding can
begin with death.
Only what we love can truly die and in its
death we connect to the spirit within and behind it. Love and death are two
sides of the same coin. What we love we want to unite with and this can only
happen in the spirit. It is death that stands at the portal of all spirit
vision.
Death is the brith in spirit and the first
part is intimately bound to love for three days. When people say they saw their
life flash before their eyes, that is the first part of death. In anthroposophy
it is called the memory tableau. One’s whole life is spread out before one in
an instant yet it doesn’t fade away, at least not for three days. You look at
the life you have just lived with another being, a mighty being of love. The
appearance of this being could be anyone: someone you loved, a benevolent
teacher, a beloved grandparent. Whoever it is together you look at your past
life with the focus on moments when you felt or showed love towards others and
on self love.
After three days one’s etheric body passes
into the world ether and you begin your journey into the soul world. This world
is arranged into seven layers and corresponds to the planetary spheres (moon,
mercury, venus, sun, mars, jupiter, saturn). We begin karmaloca, purgatory, where
we experience all that we have done in life from the world’s perspective. If we
spoke harshly to someone here we experience what that was like for the hearer. Your
life, just lived, is experienced in reverse from your death back to birth. It
takes roughly about a third of the time you lived or approximately the amount
of time you spent in sleep. This is a purification process where all of the
earthly dross is burnt out of us.
It is the usual time that this karmaloca
process takes a third of one’s life just lived. It need not, it may take longer
if we get stuck at a certain stage or it may happen much quicker if we have
made strides in our earthly life to overcome the materialistic soul tendencies.
Either way it is the degree that a soul is aware of what is happening to it
that can make of it a hellish or heavenly experience. For the average
materialist who has not concerned himself with spiritual development it has
smoky overtones of confusion and not knowing what is happening. With clarity of
insight one wants to experience this purification to get to what is beyond.
After the soul world, karmaloca, we enter the
spirit world before we meet the midnight hour and return back through the
worlds just passed, quickly picking back up our unresolved karma and then enter
a new life. But let’s look at how Steiner describes the seven layers of the
soul world (astral plane) in Theosophy:
“The lowest region of the soul
world is that of Burning Desire. Everything in the soul that has to do with the
coarsest, lowest, most selfish desires of the physical life is purged from the
soul after death by it, because through such desires it is exposed to the
effects of the forces of this soul region. The unsatisfied desires that have
remained over from physical life furnish the points of attack. The sympathy of
such souls only extends to what can nourish their selfish natures. It is
greatly exceeded by the antipathy that floods everything else. Now the desires
aim at physical enjoyments that cannot be satisfied in the soul world. The
craving is intensified to the highest degree by the impossibility of
satisfaction. Owing to this impossibility, at the same time it is forced to die
out gradually. The burning lusts gradually exhaust themselves and the soul
learns by experience that the only means of preventing the suffering that must
come from such longings lies in extirpating them. During physical life
satisfaction is ever and again attained. By this means the pain of the burning
lusts is covered over by a kind of illusion. After death in the “cleansing
fire” the pain comes into evidence quite unveiled. The corresponding
experiences of privation are passed through. It is a dark, gloomy state indeed
in which the soul thus finds itself. Of course, only those persons whose
desires are directed during physical life to the coarsest things can fall into
this condition. Natures with few lusts go through it without noticing it
because they have no affinity with it. It must be stated that souls are the
longer influenced by burning desire the more closely they have become related
to that fire through their physical life. On that account there is more need
for them to be purified in it. Such purification should not be described as
suffering in the sense of this expression as it is used in the sense world. The
soul after death demands its purification since an existing imperfection
can only thus be purged away.
In the second region of the
soul world there are processes in which sympathy and antipathy preserve an
equal balance. Insofar as a human soul is in that condition after death it will
be influenced by what takes place in this region for a time. The losing of
oneself in the external glitter of life, the joy in the swiftly succeeding
impressions of the senses, bring about this condition. People live in it to the
extent it is brought about by the soul inclinations just indicated. They allow
themselves to be influenced by each worthless trifle of everyday life, but
since their sympathy is attached to no one thing in particular, the influences
pass quickly. Everything that does not belong to this region of empty nothings
is repellent to such persons. When the soul experiences this condition after
death without the presence of the physical objects that are necessary for its
satisfaction, the condition must ultimately die out. Naturally, the privation
that precedes its complete extinction in the soul is full of suffering. This
state of suffering is the school for the destruction of the illusion a man is wrapped
up in during physical life.
Then a third region of the
soul world is to be considered in which the phenomena of sympathy, of the wish
nature, predominate. Souls experience the effects of these phenomena from
everything that preserves an atmosphere of wishes after death. These wishes
also gradually die out because of the impossibility of satisfying them.
The region of Liking and Disliking
in the soul world that has been described above as the fourth region
imposes special trials on the soul. As long as the soul dwells in the body it
shares all that concerns the body. The inner surge of liking and disliking is
bound up with the body. The body causes the soul's feeling of well-being and
comfort, dislike and discomfort. During his physical life man feels that his
body is himself. What is called the feeling of self is based upon this fact,
and the more people are inclined to be sensuous, the more does their feeling of
self take on this character. After death the body, the object of the feeling of
self, is lacking. On this account the soul, which still retains such a feeling,
has the sensation of being emptied out as it were. A feeling as if it had lost
itself overcomes the soul. This continues until it has been recognized that the
true human being does not lie in the physical. The impressions made by this
fourth region on the soul accordingly destroy the illusion of the bodily self.
The soul learns to feel this corporeality no longer as an essential reality. It
is cured and purified of its attachment to the body. In this way it has
conquered what previously chained it strongly to the physical world, and it can
now unfold fully the forces of sympathy that flow outwards. It has, so to
speak, broken free from itself and is ready to pour itself into the common soul
world with full sympathy.
It should not pass unnoted that the
experiences of this region are suffered to an especial degree by suicides. Such
a one leaves his physical body in an artificial way, although all the feelings
connected with it remain unchanged. In the case of natural death, the decay of
the body is accompanied by a partial dying out of the feelings of attachment to
it. In the case of suicides there are, in addition to the torment caused by the
feeling of having been suddenly emptied out, the unsatisfied desires and wishes
because of which they have deprived themselves of their bodies.
The fifth stage of the soul
world is that of Soul Light. In it sympathy with others has already reached a
high degree of importance. Souls are connected with this stage insofar as they
did not lose themselves in the satisfaction of lower necessities during their
physical lives, but had joy and pleasure in their surroundings. Over-enthusiasm
for nature, for example, in that it has borne something of a sensuous character,
undergoes purifying here. It is necessary, however, to distinguish clearly this
kind of love of nature from the higher living in nature that is of the
spiritual kind that seeks for the spirit revealing itself in the things and
events of nature. This kind of feeling for nature is one of the things that
develop the spirit itself and establishes something permanent in it! One must
distinguish, however, between such a feeling for nature, and a pleasure in
nature that is based on the senses. In regard to this, the soul requires
purification just as well as in regard to other inclinations based on mere
physical existence. Many people see a kind of ideal in the arrangements of
civilization that serve sensuous well-being, and in a system of education that,
above all, brings about sensuous comfort. One cannot say that they seek to
further only their selfish impulses. Their souls are, nevertheless, directed
toward the physical world and must be cured of this by the force of sympathy
that rules in the fifth region of the soul world and lacks these external means
of gratification. Here the soul gradually recognizes that this sympathy must
take other directions. These are found in the outpouring of the soul into the
soul region, which is brought about by sympathy with the soul surroundings.
Those souls also are purified here that mainly seek an enhancement of their
sensuous welfare from their religious observances, whether it be that their
longing goes out to an earthly or to a heavenly paradise. They, indeed, find
this paradise in the “soul-land,” but only for the purpose of seeing through
its worthlessness. These are, of course, merely a few detached examples of
purifications that take place in this fifth region They could be multiplied
indefinitely.
By means of the sixth region,
that of Active Soul Force, the purification of the part of the soul that
thirsts for action takes place in souls whose activity does not bear an
egotistical character but spring, nevertheless, from the sensuous satisfaction
that action affords them. Viewed superficially, natures that develop such a
desire for action convey the impression of being idealists; they show
themselves to be persons capable of self-sacrifice. In a deeper sense, however,
the chief thing with them is the enhancement of a sensuous feeling of pleasure.
Many artistic natures and those who give themselves up to scientific activity
because it pleases them belong to this class. These people are bound to the
physical world by the belief that art and science exist for the sake of such
pleasure.
The seventh region, that of
the real Soul Life, frees man from his last inclinations to the sensory
physical world. Each preceding region takes up from the soul whatever has
affinity with it. The part of the soul still enveloping the spirit is the
belief that its activity should be entirely devoted to the physical world.
There are highly gifted individuals whose thoughts, however, are occupied with
scarcely anything but the occurrences of the physical world. This belief can be
called materialistic. It must be destroyed, and this is done in the seventh
region. There the souls see that in true reality there exists no objects for
materialistic thinking. Like ice in the sun, this belief of the soul melts
away. The soul being is now absorbed into its own world. Now free of all
fetters the spirit rises to the regions where it lives entirely in surroundings
of its own nature. The soul had completed its previous earthly task, and after
death any traces of this task that remained fettering the spirit have
dissolved. By overcoming the last trace of the earthly, the soul is itself
given
One sees from this description that
the experiences in the soul world, and also the conditions of soul life after
death, take on an ever less repellent character the more a man has stripped off
those elements adhering to him from his earthly union with the physical
corporeality and that were directly related to his body. The soul will belong
for a longer or shorter time to one or another region according to the conditions
created during its physical life. Wherever the soul feels affinity, there it
remains until the affinity is extinguished. Where no relation exists, it goes
on its way without feeling the possible effects.”
