A good night’s sleep is wonderful… a treasured event—we fall asleep easily and wake up feeling refreshed. We may want to think about why. What did we do that day that prepared us to fall asleep without a struggle? After all, many of us do struggle to get to sleep or we can wake up feeling exhausted. When that happens, we could examine the time we’ve been awake since we last slept and try to find a connection. What did we do? What did we eat or drink? What were we thinking about all day? Is the quality of our sleep life due to cause and effect? Only partially.
As we read the excerpt below, we will find a deeper meaning to our sleep life. We will realize that the review of our waking time that naturally occurs when we sleep is a moral one. That’s pretty sobering, especially since most of us are unaware of this aspect of sleeping. “Make good choices” becomes more than a joke. When we realize this, we may wish to renew our meditative practice of going backwards through our day before going to sleep to get a conscious and objective read on ourselves before moving into the unconsciousness of sleep.
Steiner also explains that our sleep life is the context of our life after death. For a period of time commensurate with our time spent asleep in our lifetime, we consciously experience our relationships from a moral perspective as we move backward from our last moment of life until we reach our moment of birth or conception.
Some terms that we may need to review: The life body or etheric body that Steiner refers to below is with us throughout our lives on earth. When we sleep this body stays with us while our astral body and “I” or ego rise to the spiritual world. When we die, the etheric body leaves with the astral body and “I”. Though we have discussed these terms previously, it is easy to take a moment to look up these terms if you are not familiar with them. An awareness of these four bodies is essential to an understanding of sleep and death and the whole human being for that matter.
Let’s see what Dr. Steiner has to say:
If we consider human existence on Earth, the most significant element in life must appear to be our capacity to think or make mental images—the capacity to think for ourselves about the world, our own actions and so forth. Any other view would be a self-deception… Now, when we pass through the gates of death, we lay down our physical and life bodies. And so, in the first days after death (since it takes about three days to let go of the life body), we feel that our thought life is being sucked up by the universe… In these few days, the most valuable aspect of the earthly life that is past departs from the person who has died.
Everything we thought about the things of the world, about our whole earthly environment, what filled our normal consciousness—all this melts away from us in just a few days… and out of this darkening, dimming awareness there emerges what we lived through every time we slept, but which formerly remained outside awareness… This experience stays unconscious [during life], but it is not less lively than what becomes conscious. We do go through it. And once we have done so, it is something that belongs to our inner content. Each morning, we awaken changed; the night has changed us…
Now, the peculiar characteristic of our sleeping experiences is this: that in sleep the world takes place in reverse. Whether our sleep is long or short, once we fall asleep it is all the same, since other states of consciousness also have completely different time-senses. So, the characteristic I am talking about holds true whether you sleep all night or only for a few minutes. From the time we go to sleep until the time we wake up again, we live backwards through everything we just experienced between our last waking and the current moment of falling asleep. But we live through it in a different form than we did at first…
When we are awake, we live through the day from start to finish, every event and every circumstance in terms of physical, intellectual nuances. While asleep, however, we experience it all backwards and in terms of its moral nuances. Moral impulses appear; we pass through everything evaluating how it has made us more or less valuable as moral human beings. We indulge in no illusions, nor can we, but we evaluate everything we did the previous day in terms of our fundamental humanity… Every night as we sleep, we experience this moral ordering of the world. There, we evaluate things morally, that is, in connection with our own human value. We do this every time we sleep.
Excerpt from: Preparing for a New Birth by Rudolf Steiner. June 21, 1923, Stuttgart
How difficult it is these days to consider our own value to humanity. Yet, when we read this excerpt, we can expand our view to see that our own moral life matters not just to ourselves but to all of humanity – actually, to all beings of the universe. This should be how we measure success in life. Our efforts to act morally are to be made not egoistically to have an easier afterlife, but as an effort to raise all humanity by our “good choices”. We matter.
Steiner says that each morning we awaken changed. Let’s become conscious of this. Let’s become active in this process.
This is what we owe each other. This is what changes the world. The whole lecture excerpted above is worth reading; look it up. Meditating is worth doing. Changing the world happens with each human individual and no where else.