At death the five outer senses fall silent, while the inner senses of life, movement and balance awaken as organs of supersensible perception.
The Inner Senses After Death in Anthroposophy is Rudolf Steiner's teaching that a human being keeps a second, inward-facing group of senses when the outward five are surrendered at the gate of death. Steiner set it out at Weimar on 13 April 1913, in the lecture published as part of The World of the Spirit and Its Impact on Physical Existence (GA 150). Sight, hearing, smell, taste and touch depend on bodily instruments and stop the moment those instruments are laid aside. The senses of life, movement and balance do not, because they were never turned outward. They are how a person registers hunger and satiety, the pull of muscle and tendon, and the upright line held by the semicircular canals of the ear. Atrophied while the body carries them, these three expand after death: balance becomes perception of rhythmic and musical harmony, and movement becomes the soul's power to be everywhere in the universe. Waldorf sense-care schools the same three senses in childhood.
The inner senses after death are the self-perceiving senses Steiner said survive the loss of the body: the sense of life, the sense of movement and the sense of balance, the three by which a person knows hunger, muscular effort and the upright. In physical life they stay dim behind sight and hearing. After death they become the organs through which the soul reads the spiritual world.
In Steiner's Own Words
In my book 'Theosophy', in the description of Devachan, you will find how mutual life consists in the unfolding of the musical-rhythmic harmony. Indeed, the upper and lower are joined by the forward and backward, while we only know that we are walking upright through the sense of balance. We perceive the beings that are above and below, right and left. So the inner senses, which are now atrophied, expand and convey the spiritual world to us. Then the sense of balance develops into a sense of harmony and rhythm, and the sense of movement is added. When we are liberated from the whole apparatus of muscles and tendons, the sense that is otherwise concentrated through the physical body will spread and we will come to the possibility of being everywhere in the universe as we are in our own body through the sense of movement.
What it Means Today
The senses Steiner grouped as inward, touch, life, movement and balance, became the ground of a distinct strand of Waldorf practice. Albert Soesman, a Dutch anthroposophic physician, gave that strand its best-known English statement in Our Twelve Senses: Wellsprings of the Soul, published by Hawthorn Press in Stroud in 1990. Soesman treats life, movement and balance as will senses, reached through the body rather than the head, and holds that a child unsettled in them stays unsettled in everything built above them.
The practical arm is older than the book. Fritz von Bothmer came to the first Waldorf school in Stuttgart in 1922 as its gymnastics teacher and built the movement forms still taught as Bothmer gymnastics, whose whole subject is the child's relation to uprightness, direction and surrounding space. A class working those forms is not training athletes. It is schooling the three senses Steiner said would widen into perceptual organs once the body is laid down.
Thalira synthesis: the reason Steiner's death-teaching sounds so stubbornly physical, semicircular canals, muscles, tendons, hunger and satiety, is that he refused to treat the afterlife as a separate subject, and read the grave backwards through the nursery.
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