The Soul's Journey After Death

The steadfast soul disposition, named by Steiner in 1918, that life under all circumstances still has something to give, forming a bridge between the living and the dead.

Steiner's claim that the dead, whose judgement ripens after death, know what social life requires, and that the living must carry out that knowledge.

The 19th-century philosopher Steiner read as the honest thinker who reached the edge of the spiritual world and could not cross it.

A germinal human being is a soul between lives, bell-shaped and swift in astral space, gathering new astral substance and searching for its future parents.

The two virtues Steiner sets against envy and lying: goodwill brightens the astral body's aura, contentment strengthens the etheric body's life force.

A living person serving someone who has died by reading spiritual content to them inwardly, so the bond of love keeps working across death.

The Goethe biographer and art historian Steiner named as the closest bridge from conventional scholarship toward spiritual science.

Steiner's reading of the Russian writer as a bridge figure whose ethic of the inner life answered Western materialism with a culture of the soul.

The everyday awareness a person weaves from the laws of the mineral world, the one consciousness carried through the portal of death, kept human only by its moral colouring.

Spiritual thoughts cultivated on earth feed the dead. Where such thoughts fail, the supersensible world suffers a famine and the departed are left hungering.

Steiner's reading of history as the deeds of spiritual beings working through human personalities, so epochs turn on inspired individuals, not outer causes.

The historian Steiner called the prophet of world chaos: a brilliant diagnostician of Western decline whose own mechanized thinking embodied the decadence he described.

Steiner taught that out-breathing pictures the soul's life between its last death and this birth, while in-breathing pictures the life awaiting it after this death.

The image-based awareness humanity lived in before object-consciousness, creative rather than observant, which formed the body's organs from outside and survives now only in dreams.

The soul's after-death art of perceiving its earthly thoughts turned inside out as a world-memory written across the stars.

The Austrian poet (1830 to 1889) whom Steiner read as a bridge from German idealism toward spiritual science, a soul in whom spirit triumphed over suffering.

The companies the dead gather into by inner kinship of conscience, faith, and love, never by the blood-ties or nationhood that ordered earthly life.

Spirit Man, or Atma, is the seventh member of the human being: the physical body itself made transparent to the conscious I.

The formless devachanic region beyond the Akasha Chronicle, holding everything not yet thought, from which every new idea, discovery and invention first reaches human beings.

The third body a human being leaves behind, cast off at the end of Kamaloka, holding every desire the person never transformed.

The universal astral organism of the cosmos, the shared soul substance from which every individual astral body separated like a drop from liquid.

In kamaloka the soul retraces its just-ended life in reverse, feeling, from the receiving side, the effect of every deed it once did to others.

The causal body is Steiner's 1906 name for the fifth human member, the enduring vessel in which the fruits of each earth life are stored.

Steiner's name for the unfree state after death in which perceptions overpower the soul like hypnosis, unless freedom was exercised during earthly life.

The inverted, planet-organed body a soul inhabits in Steiner's Sun-sphere, where Mars, Jupiter and Saturn serve as its head.

Steiner's teaching that souls now embodied in the East will reincarnate in the West, and Western souls in the East, crossing like intersecting waves over the earth.

Steiner taught that beneath ordinary waking consciousness the head dreams without pause, and the content of that continuous dream is the last earth-life, the former incarnation.

The widening the dead soul undergoes as it grows from the single point of its body out to the orbit of the Moon and beyond.

Steiner's name for the rate at which an earthly life forgets its pre-birth wisdom, and the arithmetic that turns that rate into centuries between incarnations.

The work of the journey's second half, where spiritual beings help the soul model the seed of its future physical body out of the cosmos.

The spirit-land read as an elemental landscape: archetypes for solid ground, streaming life for ocean, condensed feeling for air, and the resounding word for fire.

At death the five outer senses fall silent, while the inner senses of life, movement and balance awaken as organs of supersensible perception.

In Steiner's spiritual world, words you send to the dead return sounding like theirs, while their reply must be lifted out of your own soul.

In Steiner's account of life after death, the planetary station of cosmic wisdom, where the world-thoughts are heard inwardly as sounding meaning.

Steiner's teaching that envy, Lucifer's grip on the astral body, returns masked as fault-finding and karmically weakens independence in this life and the body in the next.

For the dead the ladder of nature inverts: the animal world becomes the lowest kingdom, human souls the second, and the Angeloi the third.

Concepts drawn from spiritual science, not from matter, form the one speech a soul still hears after it has laid the brain aside.

Two ranks of higher Beings with offices at birth: the Lipikas steer the incoming soul to its parents, the Maharajas build its etheric body.

Steiner's teaching that those who have died stay in active community with us, the bond held open by interest of heart and feeling.

The after-death realm beyond the Sun where the soul turns outward and the harmony of the spheres begins to sound as the speaking Cosmic Word.

The waking encounter, between death and rebirth, in which the soul comes to live consciously among Angels, Archangels and the higher spiritual beings.

The second region the soul enters after death, where moral quality alone decides whether one finds companions or stays alone.

The first region the soul enters after death, bounded by the Moon's orbit, where every earthly passion is inscribed as a lasting record.

The mighty harmony an initiate hears in upper Devachan, where the paths of the stars sound as tone and every being speaks its own true name.

In sleep the soul leaves the body and meets those who have died, rejoining loved ones each night between falling asleep and waking.

The contracting half of the after-death journey, when the soul turns homeward from the cosmos and descends toward a waiting body and its future parents.

The outermost planetary station of the soul after death, the sphere of cosmic memory where the karmic record of the whole planetary world is read.

The seven-year sections of the backward life-survey opened by Imagination, each chapter shining with a different planetary mystery, from Moon to Saturn.

In Steiner's spiritual science, the soul's journey from death through the planetary spheres to the cosmic midnight and back toward a new birth.

Steiner's teaching from GA 178 that since 1879 the human soul, after death, takes on the exact form of the conception it held of itself during life.

The mid-point of the soul's journey beyond death, where the human being expands to the Sun and finds fellowship only through the Christ carried up from earthly life.

The three forces that disperse the corpse are uprightness, speech, and thought: the human faculties that carry the body's substance back into the universe after death.

The after-death realm of cosmic love, where the warmth a soul felt toward the divine gathers it with others of kindred faith.

The part of every will impulse that never becomes deed; Steiner teaches that this residue, carried through sleep and death, becomes our future karma.

Steiner's teaching that the so-called dead keep acting into earthly life, working into human habits, conduct, thought, and the forces of nature.

The World of Reason is Steiner's Rosicrucian name for arupa Devachan, the highest spiritual region touching earth existence, reached through Intuition.

The world of the stars beyond Saturn, the outermost boundary the soul reaches between death and rebirth, where it receives the forces of the whole cosmos.

Steiner's reading of Thomas More's life, death, and 1516 Utopia as a symptom-document of the dawning fifth post-Atlantean epoch.

In Steiner's reading, the French Enlightenment writer who heralded the consciousness soul, his reason both clearing the old order and blocking the spiritual path.