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Deeper Secrets of Life After Death - From the Works of Rudolf Steiner
Your studies of Rudolf Steiner wouldn’t be complete without an examination of what the spiritual polymath spoke and wrote about life after death.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R2F0KXHp2x4
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VoJ3LlpxVEU
Transcribed by Whisper
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https://neoanthroposophy.com/2024/08/10/...ter-death/
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Part One
Welcome to the podcast today. My name is Douglas Gabriel. I'm here with John Barnwell.
Today we're going to discuss a new book that John has proofed and edited and I wrote with the help of my dear beloved wife
called Life After Death, Rudolf Steiner's Book of the Dead. So that's today's topic and we are going to take you places
you've probably never been before, both concerning sleep and death. Welcome to the show, John.
Well, hello, Douglas. It's always a pleasure. This is the high point of my week as I get to talk about the things that interest me the most.
With the person who I can go the deepest with as he's my greatest pupil and also my greatest teacher. So good to see you again.
And it really does come down to the fact that the books that we've written in this series from the works of Rudolf Steiner
are essentially things I've been doing for 20, 30, 40 years, teaching people Anthroposophy and teaching Waldorf teachers how to be Waldorf teachers.
And the number one question that comes up, or at least the question that has the greatest interest, is really the question of all of human existence.
What happens before birth and what happens after death? And in between, where the heck do we go when we sleep?
And so we have over the years studied this and we've presented some of these things in our books and we've studied brain waves
and we've studied what Steiner says about it. And it is no simple task. But in the old days, I'd hold up the book now,
but it just so beat up and it's so used because, as I say, it was the number one question.
My parent just died or someone I know just died. What do I do? How can I help them?
And people feel helpless when this happens. And what is the number one question of life?
That would be the most avoided question in life, which is death. What happens at death?
I remember the old days when my friend Robert and I used to give talks.
He in every single talk would say and he'd get very, very vehement about this.
He'd say, everyone in here is going to die. He yelled this at the crowd and he'd yell it over and over again.
And then almost invariably, some guy would get up and say, I'm not going to die and run out of the room.
And I'm not exaggerating. It was just absolutely hysterical.
It was like watching Werner Glass give a talk. And I knew exactly his motions that he was going to do at each stage.
So when Robert would feel an uncomfortableness in the room, he'd basically get rid of the one person who was so negative,
so materialistic that he denies that he's going to die. And then you go ahead, ask anybody, are you going to die?
Now, if they're our age, they're going to go, oh, yeah, any minute.
But when they're young, they don't think they're going to die. They have no concern. They have no interest.
So here we are in a Waldorf training course.
And they're finding out that pretty much everything you do with the child in elementary school has to do with what they brought to you from before birth.
The pre-birth condition. And so, you know, I've trained many public school teachers have no spiritual awareness whatsoever.
And they'd say, what are you talking about? There's no place we came from.
And I say, well, where are we going? And they were not going anywhere.
Well, where do you go at night when you sleep? I don't go anywhere.
And so when they explain these things that when you explain these concepts that Werner Steiner gives,
it is literally. In some cases, the most significant moment in a person's life,
when they finally realize that they are part of an inner penetrating set of realms and worlds that are working in us at all times.
And every night we go to sleep. And when we die and or if you're a high initiate or very much along the path of spiritual development,
you can wake up in your dreams and you can be awake after you die.
But the sad news is, like the guy who jumps up and yells, I'm not going to die and runs out of the room.
He's not going to be awake in his dreams and he's not going to be awake after death.
And we're going to explain all those things in these talks that we're doing on life after death and why we call it Rudolf Steiner's Book of the Dead.
People are probably wondering why I'm smiling, but this is a glorious story.
And actually, you know, nobody ever talks about it.
But, you know, recently we spoke at length about the apocalypse, you know, of St. John and the Book of Revelation.
And essentially, that's also a roadmap for your after death experience.
And just so you know, it's not just a chronological linear roadmap, but it's also a nonlinear radiant epistemology, so to speak,
in that we are surrounded by a living cosmos.
And it's the highly developed metamorphosis of the efforts of just untold numbers of divine spiritual beings
and meeting the opposition of those rejecting spirits, the spirits that reject that which is being offered by the divine spiritual beings, basically.
So that's kind of a thumbnail sketch about what we're talking about.
But Rudolf Steiner gets very specific in talking about the various stages in which we go through in the after death state.
Now, we go through a kind of a similar thing when we go to sleep at night,
although we don't travel as far out of our physical and etheric bodies, but it nonetheless has the image of the after death states.
And so we'll talk a little bit about how we ascend through the moon and then the planetary spheres to the sun,
which is really where we want to be awake when those things happen to us.
We don't want to be one of those poor souls who has that rejected experience of isolation
because they didn't have social feelings, they didn't have religious feelings, they didn't have universally human worldview.
That is a great way to start off, John, because I hadn't thought of that.
And it really is where we have to start.
What happens when you cross the threshold of sleep or death?
Well, you have an uncovering of the soul.
And if you have a developed spirit and uncovering of the spirit.
Now, most of us get caught even in sleep and in death, after death,
we get caught up in the realms of what seems like swimming in chaos,
what seems like it's completely illogical.
And even ask yourself this question, because Ruth Steiner asks it again and again when he addresses this topic.
Is there any morality in dreams?
No.
And is there any logic to dreams?
Most people think no.
And what is it they really experience?
Well, here's a very strange fact.
They usually say you don't sleep well if you have a guilty conscience.
It's exactly the opposite.
You go into a dead, unwakeful, dreamless sleep when you are very immoral and very evil.
But if you're moral, you're going to stay up even after you sleep,
worrying about the things that you said, that you thought that you said and that you did during the day.
Why?
Because sleep, just like death, is a digestion of your experience on the earth.
Now, how does your digestion feel?
Of course, we don't understand our digestion.
We only understand when it's not going well.
And that's what happens in dreams.
So when you have a nightmare, you should be thankful.
It's trying to wake you up to something that happened that you did or happened to you that you need to resolve in your willpower.
So what happens?
You find yourself running away from something.
But the strange thing is, as soon as you go into the realm of dreams or the realm of afterlife, the realm of living,
it's a living realm that you're in when you die, what you desire just comes to you.
You don't have to go seeking it.
And everything is literally, and we've told you this before and it sounds crazy, but when you're thinking in dreams, it's upside down.
When you're dreaming in your dreams and you take your realm of feeling into the realm of sleep and it causes dreams,
then you're not just upside down, but you're going backwards.
And when you're actually working on what you did in the daytime or through your whole life, your willpower,
in the dream, it's going to seem as if everything is inside out.
Now, imagine you're in a realm and you've just, first off, you might have never been told you have thinking in your head,
feeling in your heart and willing in your limbs.
You might have never known that and you might have never understood that your ego in your heart controls those three most of the time.
But a lot of people go three different directions or four different directions or more all at once because they aren't centered in their heart
and they don't understand that they have a higher self, what we would call the Christ.
So everything is in relationship in the spiritual world to your higher self, one could say, to Christ.
And they're going to take you, these beings that we work with all the time in thinking, feeling and willing,
they're going to take your thinking, feeling and willing into dream and they're going to let you digest it.
Now, you don't really get to be active and control your dreams.
As a matter of fact, many spiritual teachers, bad ones, particularly ones they call coyotes,
tell you to wake up in your dream by doing these exercises of looking at your hand in your dream.
Just imagine in your dream when you get there, you're going to look at your hand.
Well, what is that?
You're thinking, controlling, you're willing and you're trying to get your willpower to wake up in dreams.
That's not what dreams are for.
They'll wake you up on their own if you're spiritually awakened and if you're concerned about other people.
So it's hard to say where to start with this expose on what we have in the book is not just on afterlife.
It's also on dreams because they're somewhat one in the same.
John made a very clear distinction, which you probably didn't notice it,
that in sleep you're in a smaller replica of what happens after death.
In other words, we'll start to describe that in a minute.
But we need to lay down kind of a general backdrop for this.
Soon we're going to be talking again about the threshold and crossing the threshold.
And that's what John mentioned.
When you cross the threshold, if you were a spiritual initiate, you'd see the same things in your own symbols that you read about in the apocalypse of St. John the Divine.
So what is it then?
That's why everyone is different.
When you go to sleep, you have completely different experiences than others.
People called me yesterday saying they had these extreme dreams.
Well, I looked up the astrological aspects and we had a six-planet stellium going on.
We had strong squares to Uranus for Mars, trines to Pluto.
We had all this activity.
So whenever the planets are just right in certain aspects, they will wake you up in your dreams and you're going to try to handle what it is that's in your life.
So I can't tell you how many thousands of times with no exaggeration people have called me up out of the blue and asked me to interpret their dreams because they knew I was a psychic for a long time and I helped people with those kind of things.
Or people would come to me and say, "What is my beloved who died?
What are they doing now?
How can I contact them?"
And so people have come up with the silliest, most ridiculous ways to keep contact with the dead or to prove that there's life after death.
Let me give you an example.
I knew someone who this couple, they loved each other so much that they said, "When you die," because one of them was sick, "to prove to me that you're alive in the spiritual world, I want you to come to me in my dreams and whistle our favorite tune and I'll hear it and I'll know it's from you."
Okay, well that's pretty silly.
Or you have spiritualists who try to contact someone who recently died to get an answer from them that they took with them across the threshold that people on the earth would like to get answers to these questions.
That's not going to happen.
But you do have a direct contact with the dead.
Rudolf Steiner said all the time, "We need to bring the dead into our activities on earth, into our waking consciousness."
So what does that mean?
You cannot come up with a way to synthesize Rudolf Steiner's thoughts on sleep and death unless you spend about 40 years like John and I have, and that's what we put in this book.
These are the answers to the questions that people ask me most frequently and a synthesis of Rudolf Steiner's "Book of the Dead," which is really a book called "Life Between Death and Rebirth, The Active Connection Between the Living and the Dead."
And he means that quite literally.
How is it that we can have a connection with the dead in the living way?
Now, if you listen to John in my series recently where he was talking to me about what it was like being an exorcist, I have been asked to follow people who have died so many times I can't count it.
And to try to comfort those who are still alive, but also to contact the dead to let them get the message that the living still love them.
Now, there's people who believe that that can't happen without a psychic or a spiritualist or someone doing a seance.
No, no, no, no, no.
If you lived -- we recently had a friend who died and he was with his partner.
So right now, because he died recently, and as a matter of fact, I have another friend who they're doing the three-day watch.
Let's go to that person first.
He died two days ago.
A very dear friend.
And now what they did is they laid his body out and they sat there and they read to him.
They read to him that book I just held up, "Life Between Death and Rebirth."
That's what Steiner says to do.
But if you read that book, not only is the person -- because I've done this many times -- not only is the person reading it going to fall asleep because the way Steiner presents it,
but the person who is dead isn't going to get the concepts.
They no longer control their willpower.
They're like floating in an ocean of ethers, quite literally.
And when you contact them and read them the content of this book, it is as much for you to picture where they're at in these realms, much more so for you, than it is to give them the cognitive content.
So here's the deal, as I told everybody.
The issue isn't what you read to the dead.
It's what the dead should have read before they died.
You need to know this now.
What you're going to find out is there's nine realms that you go through.
Three have to do with your thinking, feeling, and willing to contact the angels in your thinking, the archangels in your feeling, the archi in your willing.
Though when I describe to you in a minute these realms that Rudolf Steiner gives in the book "Theosophy," which are the soul realms, we're all going to go through those after we die.
Most times people get caught up there and they can't go beyond their materialistic attachments.
They can't get rid of their attachments to their desires, their wishes, their feelings of sympathy and antipathy, their likes, their dislikes, their love for only their family, their love for their own personal self, their love for their own sensuous desires, and even their love for seeking knowledge like art and science.
Or in the end, when they can finally let go, they have to abnegate their lower self's connection to their body.
In other words, this body I have, if I'm attached to it, well, that's going to really slow me up from going into the realms beyond the three I just described.
And then you go into the realm which you stay there for three giant cycles, and you're on the sun.
And then you go through the realms that are Mars, Jupiter, and Saturn, or at least those realms.
So Rudolf Steiner says in sleep.
Now, in sleep, technically, we'll get into that more later.
But let's just imagine it this way.
It isn't truly this way, and he'll tell you this.
So imagine that when you go to sleep, you're in your heart, and you start to expand outwards.
Well, you're going to expand outwards to the globe of the earth, and then you're going to go to the moon.
And then you're going to expand out to the globe that is inscribed by Venus, and then the globe that is inscribed by Mercury, and then to the sun.
And you stay there three cycles, and then expand further out to Mars, Jupiter, and Saturn.
Then you turn around at sun at midnight, it's called, and come back.
But as you're going out, same thing with sleep.
What you do in those realms has to do with whether you had moral thinking, moral feeling, moral willing.
And then your relationship to the sun being your higher ego, then if you have no relationship to it, then you're going to be completely unconscious in that realm.
You will be in what is called trans consciousness.
So we have waking, dreaming, and trans consciousness.
We are awake in our thinking, we are dreaming in our feeling, and we are completely unaware we are in a trans consciousness when it comes to our willing.
For instance, when I say, "Right hand, touch my head."
I did not control the muscles. I don't know what muscles I used. I don't know what the impulses happened.
No, no, no. I have no idea how I did that.
That is because I'm in a trans consciousness in my deep willing.
When you're in your feeling, you're always in a dream.
So you can walk up to somebody, and if you're a clairvoyant, you can talk to them all day long, but you know, they haven't had a single thought while you were talking to them, because they haven't activated their thinking.
They're not awake. They're simply feeling what you're saying, which they're not going to remember very well later.
And then when you go to do something, and I could use a very visceral explanation for this, but let's just say, when you do things, you pretty much immediately forget it.
If it isn't a habit, that's why we have habits. But when we do something, we really don't remember it.
As a matter of fact, you won't remember it unless you reflect upon it and have feelings about it, and then say it to yourself five times.
Until you do that, it doesn't go into permanent memory. We know this.
So thinking, feeling, and willing, this isn't some imaginary thing that Steiner thought up.
If you go to our book, "The Gospel of Sophia, Volume 2," which is called "The Modern Path of Initiation," you'll see a chart in there.
And I put that chart in a few of the books because it's so important.
It's brainwave charts.
So science measures your brainwaves when you're asleep.
Science measures them when you're awake.
And they know also when you're asleep, when your brainwaves go down to being the lowest.
When you're awake, they're the highest.
When you're dreaming, they're less.
When you're totally in trance consciousness, they're between one to four hertz.
I mean, they're like so low that you can't even believe that you can have that vibration.
But that's because your body had stopped moving, and you become unconscious of it.
So they can map this out.
And strangely enough, once again, Rudolf Steiner's prophecies came 100% true.
No one before Steiner knew of these brainwaves, and no one before Steiner knew of the cycles of sleep, dream, and trance consciousness.
No one did.
It was all speculation.
In the ancient past, if you went to a Greek temple of Asclepius, they would have you sleep in the temple, wake up in the morning, tell the priest or priestess your dream.
And then they would essentially interpret it for you.
And then if you thought you were ill, they'd actually tell you what was causing the illness, like your hatred for someone, then caused your kidneys and your liver to go bad.
So what happens in your feelings then controls what's unconscious in your organs.
Okay?
So when you go to sleep at night, you go through different stages.
And when you go past the threshold of death, you go through different stages.
They're described by Steiner in different ways.
And if you do not have a 30, 40-year history of reflecting upon these things, they may not make sense to you.
So if I told you you could read this in occult science, yes, would you understand it?
You'd understand it from more or less a mental thinking realm.
If you read them out of theosophy, then you would understand them from a feeling realm.
If you read them from life between death and rebirth, that's from the willing realm.
And so it's literally describing exactly what happens to you.
And we can go into this.
It's in the book.
So all the modern studies on science we've synthesized and put in this book and matched it up with what Steiner says.
And what we're talking about here is really the same thing that happens when you meet the three-headed dog of hell.
Right?
As you want to go into the realm of the underworld, into the realm of after death, you're going to be scared.
And if you don't have the coin in your mouth, which is your morality, to pay, you won't go across the river Styx consciously.
And when you meet the three-headed dog or dragon, you may run the other way because that's you.
That's your three doubles.
So in the ancient Egypt, John can tell us about that in infinite detail.
The ancient Egyptians would see, according to Rudolf Steiner, as they went to sleep, the guardian of the threshold a distance away as the Sphinx.
But when they -- that's at sleep.
But when they would go -- when they would die, they would meet -- is this correct, John -- the jackal-headed god who would then weigh their soul against an ostrich feather.
And then that would determine, you know, where you went in the after world.
Anubis.
Anubis, yes.
We have different images for that these days.
But no matter where you go, it's the same experience.
And you must make sure that if you're reading the Tibetan book of the dead or the Egyptian book of the dead, that that doesn't apply anymore.
You have to have the modern experience of the human being crossing that threshold.
And then you have to put it in perspective with what their religious beliefs are and what the symbols that they use to represent their higher -- basically higher thoughts, but their concepts.
So if you have religious symbology, you stay awake more in one of these realms.
If you have a strong connection, for instance, after you die, one of the things that you have to deal with is digesting everything you did.
Good luck on that.
It's called the realm of Kamaloka, which we'll discuss in a minute.
But then you go into a realm that has to do with your family, your friends, your nation.
And then into a realm of did you have any moral thoughts, any moral actions, any moral deeds?
And then into a realm where your religious beliefs connect you to others in kind of a hyperconnectivity.
And then you go into the realm of have you really developed your higher self?
And if you haven't, that's where you're going to become unconscious.
But if you're an initiate and you go beyond that into the outer three realms, you can indeed meet what a signer calls spirit land.
In the lower realms, you meet the soul realm and the seven different realms of the soul realm.
And then when you go up higher, you can actually reach into the spirit land.
So he describes these in great detail from many different vantage points.
So I'm so thrilled about this book because basically now, anytime someone asks me these questions,
I'm going to say, "Why do you get that in the book, Life After Death?"
You know, go ahead, read that, and then come back with your question.
Because if you read this and if you understand this, you know the true meaning of life by understanding death and its little sister, dreams.
Absolutely. And it becomes a question of nuance, though, doesn't it?
Because Rudolf Steiner, he'll like, it's like he gives the analogy of the tree and somebody's taking a picture from one side and somebody's taking it from another side.
It's all the same tree. It's just it is described differently.
And so in being able to take up these characterizations of these actual experiences,
and that's the important thing to understand is that Rudolf Steiner is describing things that are realities that he can perceive because of his own stage of development and initiation.
And other people in other cultures, if you go to all the various religions of the world,
they all have a topology of the relationship to heaven or the spiritual world or what have you.
And they're all ontologically correct, but pre-scientific.
As Timothy Leary once said to me over dinner, you know, I asked him what he thought of like the Rig Veda and the Upanishads.
He says they're ontologically correct, but pre-scientific.
And so, which is an interesting way of looking at it that actually does point to something that's very important,
because Rudolf Steiner gives the example in that he's saying if you went to a Brahmin and asked him about what the Veda said about Copernicus
and the whole idea that the earth is going around the sun rather than the sun going around the earth.
Of course, it's not in the Vedas. That doesn't make it wrong because it's not included in their scripture.
And so, you have all these scriptures that are before certain things came about.
And the most important thing, of course, that came about is the mystery of Golgotha.
And that's the incarnation of the divine spiritual being who passed through human experience and died on the hill of Golgotha.
But being a being that represents that individual nature, that I am the I am of the human individual,
but on a macrocosmic level, which is important to understand.
Whereas we have an experience of the ego on a microcosmic level,
we're aspiring to embrace that macrocosmic Christic I am the I am, which takes in context all humankind within love and all of nature and the cosmos as a whole.
That it's a gesture of love combined with the wisdom of Sophia.
You know, in the training of some priestly orders, they make sure that you experience the full spectrum of human existence.
So they have you experience hydrocephalic children, microcephalic children, people who are dying.
But especially they want you to focus on going to the what are they called?
Maternity ward. So you can see babies being born and then you go to the hospice so you can see people dying.
And what I can tell you is a clairvoyant that I experienced in those days when I did that is it's the same experience.
It's called this experience of the threshold. Now, it turns out to be opposite in terms of the way that human cognition works, the way that you would think it would be.
So when a child is born, you think, OK, well, first off, anything else we're going to say, we should just make sure to know there's that just for today, we're going to say there's a physical body.
Any theory, body and astral body and an ego. OK, we'll talk much more about that in a minute.
But when we realize that the ego is nowhere in your body, it's actually coming to you from outside and from inside at the same time.
The astral body, everybody knows about that because that's that's called hedonism. In most cases in the West, we all know about our desires and our wishes and everything.
You know, our sensuous experience and our food and our gluttony. We know all about the seven deadly sins.
Ask anybody one of the seven virtues. Tell me if you find someone who can list the seven virtues for you.
OK, but if you ask somebody, what are the sins that will take you straight to hell?
Oh, they can name them. Yeah. Why? Because they're involved in them. That's the astral body.
Then there's the etheric body, the most misunderstood thing in probably human spiritual development.
Then there's the physical body, which, again, in the ancient East, they would say we need to get away from the physical body.
It's it's a trap. It's a delusion. It's an illusion. No, it's not.
It's the manifestation of the highest hierarchies in your body.
And if you don't understand your body is a temple. Well, you're looking in the wrong direction.
But let's go back to the etheric. So the child is born in this etheric body, gives life to the physical body.
Physical body on its own is dying all the time. Etheric body is what keeps it alive.
What does it need? Sleep. If you don't get sleep. You're going to become crazy.
Now, people you say, well, what about people who have insomnia? Talk to them long enough.
I've talked to lots of them. They're not normal. OK, they're not normal in any way.
They do get sleep. They just don't. They go deep into what's called slow wave sleep or brainwave delta, delta brainwaves.
They go, boom, they drop into it. So they don't go through the different four realms through a cycle of 90 minutes.
No, they go into it for a minute. They get a little sleep. They come out and they're half crazy.
So I can tell you this. Over 95 percent of the juveniles that I have been responsible for as a superintendent,
about 10,000 of them a year, 95 percent of them have a sleep disorder.
Most criminals have a sleep disorder. And the other thing, most criminals are tone deaf.
So they can't hear the music of the spheres when they're asleep because they go into an unconscious state every night.
When you go to sleep, your etheric body is singing the music of the spheres of the seven planetary spheres,
including the sun, and they're in your organs and they are singing a music that is very beautiful.
But if you get into the higher realm, then that sound is so deafening.
It could literally kill a person who was not prepared for it, who was not a spiritual initiate.
That's why initiation is not a pleasant little stroll down a primrose path.
No, it is putting everything, your life, your death on the line.
So the etheric body is so mysterious that when the child is born, their etheric body is really, really old.
It's a perfect, it has been created by the previous incarnations of that child.
It's been imprinted by the music of the spheres and by the seven planetary spheres, by these nine layers that we're talking about.
So the child comes in with an etheric body that in the first three years basically does more learning than you do for the rest of your life.
From birth to age three and certainly before seven.
So from birth to seven, you learn more than you ever learned the rest of your life.
And where do you learn it from?
Sleep. Sleep is the great educator.
So Steiner calls it.
So when you are just being born, you're bringing in your trails of glory, as it's called.
You're bringing in your etheric body, which is a perfect replica of these realms we're talking about.
And it gets imprinted into your life body.
When you die for three days, it takes your etheric body to separate.
So your astral and etheric body at night when you sleep, they more or less separate.
But when you die, they for sure separate.
And then your etheric body dies.
But guess what?
When your etheric body dies, and so at birth, I would look at this and I go, this is incredible.
The etheric body of the child is more powerful than any other time in its life.
It's so powerful.
It literally is the aura of Christ around the child for three years.
And that's why I love little children, because I just love basking in what they just brought from the spiritual world.
But by the time you die, your poor etheric body has been worked over so bad,
and you didn't do what you were supposed to do while you were asleep to regenerate it.
So your body dies.
Now, when it dies, that etheric body is the youngest it's ever going to be.
It's a baby.
And you're thinking, that's completely crazy.
This person is 70 years old.
How can their etheric body be like a little baby being born into the spiritual world as it falls to the ground and dies and gets reintegrated into the etheric body of the earth?
So this is the great mystery.
And this is like what I was saying before.
You cross the threshold, you're upside down, backwards, and inside out.
So when you go into a dream, this is the advice I give every single person.
And by the way, Steiner says this as well as many other great spiritual scientists.
Is your dream a precognitive dream because you had a dream about you and somebody else?
Do you need to call that person up, which happens all the time, right?
People call somebody up and say, I just had a dream about you, and this and this and this and this happened.
Did that happen to you?
And they say, no, it didn't happen to me.
And I didn't have a dream about you.
And yeah, I don't know what you're talking about.
Right?
And by the way, some people never dream, ever, in their whole life.
Matt, we can solve that problem.
Steiner told us how to solve it, and I've done it hundreds of times for really thick-headed men who say they wanted to dream.
I'll tell you that story later.
But when you -- well, I'll tell you that story now.
If you haven't ever had a dream, take a double-terminated crystal.
It can be small.
Put it under your pillow.
You're going to dream.
Why?
Because it is going to, as Steiner says, create an empty space for the spirit to come in.
So as the spirit is coming into that crystal, it's going to wake up your pineal gland, and you're going to have dreams.
I did this with somebody at work who was a complete materialist, and his daughter kept saying, oh, I have such beautiful dreams.
So he kept coming in and saying, I want to dream like my daughter.
She has dreams that are full living color, and she's running and she's flying and she's doing all this stuff.
Man, I'd love to have a dream.
Do you dream?
I said, yeah, yeah, I dream.
He says, well, can you control your dreams?
Let's not go there yet.
He says, can you help me dream?
I said, yeah, no problem.
So I give him this crystal.
He comes back the next day and hands me the crystal.
He said, it didn't work.
It didn't work.
You're stupid.
This is dumb stuff.
And I said, uh-huh, yeah, you didn't put it under your pillow, did you?
No.
So he put it under his pillow and he had great dreams, and guess what?
He never wanted to have another dream.
It scared the holy snot out of him.
Why?
Because he's a materialist.
And what was his dream?
All of his undigested, immoral experiences.
So it was a living nightmare, full color, full motion, falling, the whole thing, one dream, never wanted another.
That's why some people who are materialists don't dream.
If they dreamed, they would be terrified because their thinking is chaotic, their emotions are immoral, and their actions are unconscious.
Yes, it's one of the more interesting comments of Rudolf Steiner.
He said in his poem about the 1840, moving up towards 1860, he said this was really a culmination of materialism.
And as a result, they developed these fantastic inventions, you know, the train and the telegraph and all of these various devices.
It's interesting what he said about that type of development within thinking.
He said that it arose out of fear.
And so you have this whole concept of that there's this fear that takes place when one is confronted with the super sensible.
And materialism is attempting to develop material reasons why everything happens.
Well, this happens because of this, because they happen to very accurately even notice certain things that take place in the material world.
But then they extrapolate on what that might mean.
And they don't come to an understanding of the divine spiritual beings that exist on the other side of the threshold that brought that experience into being.
And really, the only place where you can get that information on a developed level is the work of Rudolf Steiner.
And so, in my mind, the whole idea that we're looking at here, if you go back to ancient Egypt, for example,
this was made reference to the Egyptian Book of the Dead. And if you look at like, let's say, the papyrus of Ani, and it's a funerary papyrus.
And it shows there's a scene in there. I used to have a giant copy, reproduction of that from the British Museum.
But in there, there's a scene where you have the goddess Maat, which is truth, weighing the heart on a scale against a feather.
And then you have, you know, the ibis-headed Thoth is, that's like Mercury writing down the language of that heart, the ib sitting on the scale.
And the idea that, and there's this like beast over there with these sharp teeth, it's like, they're weighing your heart against the feather.
And if it ends up that you don't make the grade, well, there, that's where you go. You go to the scary realm, you know.
And so it's funny because these materialists, Wittlesteiner says that in ancient Egypt, as the clairvoyance of the ancient world,
in which a lot of these things we could have a developed relationship to,
but it was something that was given to us through the agency of super sensible beings.
But as we move towards the mystery of Golgotha, the old clairvoyance receded and different cultures attempted to provide a substitute for that experience.
And the Egyptians did it through mummification.
And the Persian people had their relationship to the external world in the earlier period.
But in the Chaldean mysteries, they looked at the movements of the planets and the stars.
So they had an outer mystery.
And in studying the grail, you'll see that the sun or mysteries like Egypt is the mysteries pertaining to the physical.
The mysteries to the east is the inner inward mystery.
The mysteries to the west has to do with the mysteries of the outer world, the cosmos.
Whereas the mysteries of the north refer to the individual ego.
And that's the emphasis that needs to be found to unlock this.
Because, as Rudolf Steiner said, really only two philosophers approached attempting to decipher with any degree of success the mystery of ego.
And that was Fichte and Henri Bergson.
Henri Bergson is an interesting figure, which you never hear him mentioned much anymore.
But he was the first Jewish individual to get the Nobel Prize for literature.
And he was the father of Moyni Mathers, who was the head of the Golden Dawn after her husband, who was the head, Samuel Madel MacGregor Mathers.
And the Golden Dawn is like a hermetic, alchemical society that used tarot cards.
And it was a ritual society that worked with Rosicrucian hermetic type symbolism.
And she had an Isis temple in Paris.
Very interesting woman.
But you look at this and you go, well, what is that?
What are these people doing?
And Rudolf Steiner, of course, quite different from that.
But there's still a relationship.
And that's the whole idea of being able to develop your language to where you convert it into pictures.
Because when, for example, like Douglas was talking about, communicating with the loved ones that have passed across the threshold.
And if you're sharing with them what they're going to get, it's almost like listening to music, really.
Because they're not getting your conceptual feed so much as they're getting that you're actually concerned about them and want to commune with them.
That's the important thing.
And if you want to bring it further into focus, reminisce back to things, activities that you actually did together and visualizing that in your mind.
And so, you're creating a bridge to where they can develop an awareness of your concern for them.
Which is quite interesting because if you look at the way Rudolf Steiner describes the ascent to the planetary spheres.
So, you go through the sphere of the moon.
And that has to do with all your earthly involvements and attachments.
And then you move from there.
And sometimes he calls it the sphere of Mercury, sometimes Venus.
That is a whole other episode just to unravel what that means.
But it refers to the planet Venus as being that planetary sphere.
And in there, you get to relate to people that you knew and ancestors.
And things that are direct relationships to you, personally or familial.
But when you move beyond that realm, by the way, but if you're a materialist, well, you start to go unconscious.
Because you don't have anything to maintain your consciousness.
Just as like Douglas was talking about in not dreaming.
But when they go beyond that sphere, they go to the next sphere pertaining to the planet Mercury.
That you have an experience of your religiosity and whatever you might be involved in your religion, whatever religion it is.
You'll find there's like communities of individuals with shared ideas about what that might mean.
But when you go beyond there, by the way, if you don't have any religious feelings, well, you just go unconscious.
And you feel lonely.
So, that's not a lot of fun.
But when you go beyond there, then you go to the realm of the sun.
The realm of the throne of the great sun being, the Christ Logos.
But if you don't have an understanding of the mystery of Golgotha,
Rudolf Steiner says that to be able to come to consciousness of the higher divine spiritual beings that illuminate this realm for you,
it's like it's depicted in the apocalypse where you're wearing that white robe.
And so, you're one of those that gets to be awake when you get to the good part of the story, right?
Other than that, if you're like just a materialist, you just go unconscious.
You know, you're under a trance state and you're not aware of it, which is unfortunate.
It's as if the throne is empty.
But in coming there with the proper moral relationship through your associations and the proper religious wonder, awe, and reverence,
and then to come to the sphere of the sun and having an understanding of the mystery of Golgotha,
that prepares you to go beyond.
Well said. Well said.
So, let's talk about what we can do about this.
Every night when you go to sleep or when you die or when you're meditating and you're trying to get into a transcendental experience to go from the seen into the unseen world across the threshold,
then you cannot carry the evil and your immorality with you.
And that's the three-headed dog of hell.
It's going to go after you and it's going to know more about you than you know about yourself.
Because the world, like that, you said, Thoth writes it down.
That's like the book of life, you know, what you've done.
It's the Akashic record.
You're not getting away from that.
And so at night, Steiner says, or even before you meditate and certainly before you die, you should review your life backwards.
So you review your day backwards in between each night when you sleep.
And when you review your day backwards, he calls it Raksha.
You're supposed to see it not from the vantage point of your eyes, but from the vantage point of the karmic eyes of the people you affected.
So you start to move backwards in time, which is very difficult.
But why do you need that?
Because when you go in the spiritual world, you're going to go backwards in time.
And why do you need to see images and get the images basically because we see it from our own selfish vantage point?
We need to see it from the other person's vantage point.
And then the inside out part that happens, these are images, sounds and actions.
The inside out part is how did that person feel?
What is going to be the karmic outcome of what I did today yelling at somebody?
OK, I'm not going to be concerned about that.
I'm going to be concerned about because I'm a materialist in this version, and I'm going to be concerned about it.
Did I yell loud enough?
Did I get the person to do what I wanted them to do?
Now, as you're reviewing your day, you should say, oh, what did it feel like to be that person, to have a big mean monster like me yelling and screaming at them when I didn't even know the full story?
The person screaming didn't know the full story.
They don't know it from the other person's perspective.
So when you enter into the other person's perspective, you get karmic insight.
Then when you go to sleep and you digest those experiences in the morning, you wake up and you're told, I need to go apologize to that person.
Better yet.
Don't expect the your dream world to do that for you.
Do it before you go to sleep.
Don't go to sleep when you have a guilty conscience.
Call the person up.
Oh, I'm so sorry.
I was such a fool today.
I apologize.
I didn't even think to ask you your version of what happened.
So that's what's supposed to happen as you approach the threshold.
You were supposed to review your day backwards.
Now, that will happen also after you die.
There's in Kamaloka, after your etheric body dissolves for three days, you're going to go through an experience of trying to work through the seven soul realms.
So you're burning desires.
So you've heard hell burns you?
Yes.
In the soul realm, you're burning desires, actually, when you go across the threshold, burn you up.
And then I mentioned them before.
It's called flowing susceptibility is the next realm.
The next realm is wishes.
The next is likes and dislikes.
And so as you go through these different realms at night when you're doing your review of the day, your conscience, not your consciousness, but your conscience should say, hey, Doug, that was the wrong thing to do.
Now, your conscience is there to say, hey, Doug, this is at the moment that you're doing it.
Doug, this is the right thing to do.
It actually is there, but you're not listening.
So before you go to sleep, you need to listen to your conscience and see if you have a guilty conscience and try to resolve that.
Then when you go to sleep and you go through the realms of the angels and the archangels of the archive with your thinking, feeling and willing, you can have them help you digest these experiences and turn them into insight, into wisdom, into that education that Steiner talked about.
Well, that's also true after death.
But let's just look for a moment at what science says.
Science says when you fall asleep, you go quickly for one to seven minutes into an alpha state.
That is somewhat of an awake state.
It's really a dreaming state, but it's a waking, dreaming state.
And it's all in the book.
There's different layers of these brainwaves.
But the point is, try to stay awake when you go to sleep.
You can't.
But if you do, and some people can, you will see flowing in from all directions, an infinite amount of images that are two dimensional.
And they stream into you and you go, I've never seen some of these things before.
Where is this coming from?
Why is this so chaotic?
What are these images?
Are they trying to communicate something to me?
These are not memories.
They're actually seeing that first realm.
And that realm is, of course, the realm of dreams.
It comes as images.
So science calls that first you go into one to seven minutes of alpha, then you go into theta.
In other words, your body drops off into sleep and it stops moving, theta.
And then you go into beta.
And beta is the dreaming realm.
And then you go into delta, which is what's called slow wave sleep or basically trans consciousness.
So you go through these realms and now they know that as you go through them, it's a cycle of 90 minutes.
And it depends on how much thinking, feeling and willing you've done in the day.
And so as you go through them, it's the same thing that Steiner asks you to do before you sleep or before you die.
Review your day.
Review your life.
And see it in the way that the spirit would see it.
See it in the way that other people would see it.
And then you can get the education.
So he points out what is called rapid eye movement.
Rapid eye movement occurs in between each of these realms.
So in between thinking, feeling and willing, you're going to have rapid eye movement.
What is rapid eye movement?
They put these little devices in your eye and they did experiments until they figured out that what Steiner said was true.
I love it.
It takes them 100 years to figure it out.
But anyway, your eyes, when you go to sleep, as soon as your body drops off into sleep in that one to seven minutes,
which you do not stay conscious of, you go into rapid eye movement.
So your eyes start to move.
And they didn't understand this, but watch the person next to you sleeping.
Their eyes, you'll see them.
They're moving all over, right?
What are they doing?
In a reverse order, they now know this because they tracked it and computerized it.
And they put people through different things where they had to see tall things, small things, look this, look that.
So they did that.
And then when you go to sleep in the exact reverse order, your eye is going to see and do the same muscle movement that it did during the day very, very quickly.
Rapid eye movement.
And then when you go from just cognition to dreaming or feeling, it does that again.
And then when you go into really, really deep sleep, it does it again.
Now, how does that happen in death?
That happens in the first three days.
You get to see your whole life flash before you.
So when they say after you die, you're going to know everything, you're going to see everything.
You do, but it's in the reverse order from the other people's perspective.
And so you get to see your whole life flash before you.
And then you go into basically emotionally, like in a dream, reliving everything that you did in a reverse order.
And once you get beyond that, if you can get beyond that between the realm of the earth and the moon and get beyond your own selfish desires, these seven realms of the soul world, when you can finally say, no, no, I give it all up.
All my desires, all my passions, my sensuousness, my desire for sex, alcohol, drugs, pleasure, sports.
No, I give it all up.
Then you can finally rise to the realm of the sun.
But it takes -- actually, you won't rise to the realm of the sun.
You'll rise out of the realm of Kamaloka between the earth and the moon.
And then you digest more of the experience as John just described.
So you can do that.
And what happens then if as you're there on your knees listening to your conscience and reviewing your day backwards, what's going to happen?
Lo and behold, you are going to, with your eyes, replicate the same movements that you do when you have rapid eye movement when you go to sleep.
So you literally will save the spiritual world the time of doing that for you without your control and unwittingly when you go to sleep.
You do it before you go to sleep.
So in other words, you start to enter in -- you enter through your prayers on your knees at night before you go to sleep or however you want to meditate or pray and review your day, do your rakshau, as Steiner calls it.
That is basically short-cutting the neurological, physiological, muscular activities and emotional soul activities that you go through as you are trying to digest your day when you're asleep.
You do it before you go to sleep.
And then what happens?
You can wake up in your sleep.
And if you know the stages, you can actually be active in those stages in your sleep.
And if you do this before you die, then you're going to die with no guilty conscience because you've just gone back and resolved all those things consciously awake on the physical earth.
And you will then basically save yourself a whole lot of burning in these realms after death because of your extreme desires.
And the other thing I want to mention before we close is this.
In the realm of the sun, if you've had morality and you've even gone beyond any religion and you've gone beyond all your desires, you still will not wake up in the realm of the sun unless you know Christ.
And you needed to have developed a personal relationship with Christ while you were on the earth or you cannot experience Christ in the spiritual world.
In other words, if you don't know your higher self and you haven't been seeking out the higher self of everyone you met and trying to develop their higher self and your higher self, in other words, their Christ himself, you're going to go into unconsciousness even when you reach the fourth, fifth and sixth realm of sleep or of after death realm.
So we've tried to show you now in this first talk some of the general characteristics between sleep and dreaming and also spiritual initiation.
Most initiations are about what? A mock death.
A ritual experience of death.
So that is you think you're being put through death in this ritual experience, you go back and you say, oh, my gosh, you know how mean I was to my ex-wife?
I think I better resolve that before I go into the spiritual world because I'm going to pay for it with the fires of hell if I don't.
So the point is, that's the overview that we have.
And now as you look and if you get a chance to get this book, "Life After Death," Rudolf Steiner's "Book of the Dead," it is the training that you need before you go to sleep or before you get initiated, before you go to sleep or before you die.
Which is really an excellent summation of what we're discussing here, which is that we know from previous episodes that there are seven unutterable secrets, as Madame Blavatsky called them.
And C.G. Harrison and Rudolf Steiner, they refer to them as the seven great mysteries and the fourth of which is birth and death.
And so, if you can develop a relationship to Christ, the only being of the divine spiritual world that came here and went through the human experience, but did it on a macrocosmic level, rather than like us on a microcosmic level,
which you're going to have to spend some time thinking about that to perhaps figure it out.
But it's a macrocosmic spirit self and that's our goal and aspiration to be able to come to a conscious relationship with Christ and solve this mystery that we've been discussing today.
And so, I want to thank you all and there will be more to follow.
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