What the Dead Want to Know

As we began to develop scientific thinking in the early 1400s, we lost our awareness of the spiritual world. This loss was essential to our evolution as human beings because we needed to develop this type of thinking exclusively; however, the time has come to renew our connection to our spiritual home. The topic of death is a tough one because most of us fear it; we have lost our ability to understand it. Yet now in our time, the veil between life and death is thinning for a variety of reasons. Humanity is evolving. We are at an important transition from using purely scientific reasoning to using the intellectual power gained by it to understand the spirit.

Many of us are reluctant to make that transition, and that has widespread ramifications for us and for those in our lives who have died. Rudolf Steiner tells us that souls who enter the spiritual world are capable of “seeing” amazing and profound things, but unless they have acquired spiritual knowledge while alive, they are unable to fully understand everything they are seeing.

Just as we can enjoy music without knowing how to read notes or play an instrument, those who are able to do those things have an enhanced appreciation for music. Similarly, people who die do so with the knowledge of the spiritual world that they acquired while they were alive. If they don’t know anything about the spiritual world before they die, their experience will be limited. In other words, their ability to understand what is in their new environment is predicated on what they learned during their lifetimes. This is an immediate issue for them because they want to know about the beings and environment of the spiritual world they now live in, but they lack the concepts to do so. We can help them.

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

If human beings on earth allow spiritual thoughts to permeate their souls, those thoughts can be perceived by souls in the beyond, and those earthly souls remain real for them. What we are touching upon here is the fact that the spiritual thoughts nurtured by souls here on earth can not only be perceived but be understood by the souls beyond. And, even more significantly this fact can have a practical consequence. Building on this insight, we can do something that could become very significant for the relationship between souls here and souls beyond. I refer to what we may call “reading to the dead.” Reading to the dead is often extraordinarily important.

A seer can have the experience that human beings who have entirely disregarded spiritual wisdom have a strong longing for it and wish to hear about it after they have passed through the gate of death. If souls who have remained behind make a clear mental image of the dead person, and at the same time bring to mind a spiritual train of thought or read from a spiritual book (in thought, not aloud) then the dead person whose spiritual image stands before them will become aware of it… One can often see how the dead long to hear what gets through to them from here… It is a grave error to think that a human being merely needs to die in order to contact the whole spiritual world… it is a deep misconception to believe that souls become wise as soon as they pass through the gate of death. A soul cannot be easily instructed by souls in the beyond immediately on passing through the gate of death if there is no basis for a connection with them.

… While materialism permits us to bring to life only relationships between souls confined to their earthly existence, spiritual science opens the way for free communication and exchange between souls on the earth and souls that dwell beyond the earth in the other world. The dead will live with us. And, when that happens, what we may call the passage through the gate of death will often after a time be experienced as merely a change in the form of existence. The whole transformation in the life of spirit and of soul that will take place when such things become common knowledge will be of enormous significance.

Excerpt from: Occult Research into Life Between Death and a New Birth, Lecture II: The Establishment of Mutual Relations between the Living and the So-called Dead by Rudolf Steiner, Stuttgart February 20, 1913.

Steiner is saying that the souls of those who have died are hungry for knowledge of the spirit—even if they were opposed to it during their lifetimes. Last month, we discussed how these departed souls miss us just as we miss them. This month, we see that they may need our help to understand what they are experiencing in the spiritual world. Reading to them is an ideal gift because we are learning too while we read. Reading scientific works doesn’t reach them—those concepts are unnecessary in the spiritual world—but reading spiritual scientific works does reach them because spiritual science explains the images they are seeing.

Communication does go both ways. The dead have reasons to communicate with us and attempt to do so in a variety of ways. We will learn to attune ourselves to the efforts and means of these communications in future blogs.

Meanwhile, we could pick up a book by Rudolf Steiner, such as Theosophy: An Introduction to the Spiritual Processes in Human Life and in the Cosmos and read it to one of the people we know on the other side. Steiner, the initiate of the 20th century who has over 6000 published works, continues to be the source of knowledge for this blog.

Unbounded

“This spiritual science is not trying to found either a new religion or a new religious sect of any kind. It hopes to be able to fulfill the tasks required spiritually of our contemporary culture.”

– Rudolf Steiner, July 13, 1914.

Even though religious tradition is the impulse behind our holiday celebrations, it is no longer the focus for many of us. There’s a reason for this: as human consciousness evolved, we lost the shadowy clairvoyance of earlier times, clairvoyance that allowed us some experience of the spiritual worlds as Dr. Steiner reminds us below. That kind of consciousness was gradually replaced with scientific thinking, which is strictly dependent on physical perceptions.

Religions no longer satisfy some of us because much of what they profess doesn’t make sense to our cognitive reasoning, even though we may get comfort from some of the remaining religious rituals.

Scientific thinking is an essential development for humankind in the cosmic scheme of things. It gave us our independence: we are, each of us, our own person. What we are not, however, is finished. We are constantly evolving. Our current earthly consciousness isn’t our final state. That may not be obvious now, but even the most earthbound materialists will understand it once they cross the threshold and find themselves still “alive.” How much we see and understand once we’ve crossed over into that realm, however, depends very much on what we think, feel, and do during our lifetimes.

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

The ideas we have gained through sensory perceptions and the brain-bound intellect will be of no use to us when it comes to giving effective power to the part of our feeling and will which does not come to birth during life. The impulse and impetus we shall need after death can only come from ideas that do not relate to outward reality but make us turn to higher things and look up to a world of the spirit.

… When we take in ideas of the supersensible, these are not merely ideas based on knowledge but something which will be active after death—which means that now, when we are in a physical body, people who refuse to give any thought to active principles of this kind will laugh about them and, being materialists, reject them. But if they do not let ideas of the supersensible enter into them, their power to bring the unborn elements in the feeling and will to development will be crippled.

… In earlier times, the Imaginations, Inspirations, and Intuitions which are veiled by the world perceptible to the senses, were given to human beings as religious faith and belief, in order that they might not lose all impetus for the time after death and might have something in the inner core of the soul that would keep them alive once they had laid aside their physical bodies…

 It is sheer prejudice of the intellect and the senses which makes people consider the ideas relating to the supersensible world which are presented by spiritual investigators to be nonsense and figments of the imagination. If we accept these ideas, they will give impetus to the inner core of our beings, so that in all future ages it will find its way in the cosmos.

Investigation of the contents of the spiritual world is only possible if one has achieved esoteric development; but to have knowledge of these contents, to work through them inwardly in consciousness and have ideas and concepts of them, to make them our own and know for certain that the soul exists in the world of the spirit—this is something human beings will need more and more as essential nourishment for soul and spirit.

Excerpt from: The Inner Nature of Man and Our Life Between Death and Rebirth, Lecture 5 by Rudolf Steiner. April 11, 1914, Vienna.

In the quote at the top of the blog, Steiner refers to tasks required spiritually of our contemporary culture. What are the spiritual needs of our contemporary culture? We need to have spiritual concepts, spiritual ideas formed before we die so we’ll have the energy to find our way in the cosmos after we die. This energy is no longer given to us as a gift from the gods, we have become independent as we have evolved. It’s up to us now to find out for ourselves about the spiritual world outside us and inside us.

Steiner encourages us not simply to believe him, but to do the meditative and contemplative work to elevate ourselves to the levels where we can experience spiritual realities. It won’t hurt, in the meantime, to learn as much as we can from the scientists of the spirit, of which Steiner is one of the most prevalent.

We are often reminded of humankind’s ideals during the holidays. Love, goodwill to all, peace and harmony, selflessness, devotion, compassion—these all have their roots in our spiritual selves. Let us rededicate ourselves to exploring the vast consciousness of which we are a part.