The Soul's Journey After Death

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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 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.

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.

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.

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

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 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.