Between Death and Rebirth - LECTURE NINE

("Between" looks like nerv)

And so an individual who in earthly life during the present cycle of time has
rejected all spiritual ideas, passes through the life between death and rebirth in
fearful loneliness, groping in darkness. In the next incarnation he will fail to
bring with him the forces wherewith to build his body efficiently and mould his
organs; he can fashion them in an imperfect form only and consequently he will be
an inadequate human being in his next life.
We realise from this how Karma works over from one life to the next. In one life a
man deliberately scorns to develop in his soul any relationship with the spiritual
worlds; in the next life he has no forces wherewith to create even the organs
enabling him to think, feel or will the truths of spiritual life. He remains dull
and indifferent to spiritual things and spiritual life passes him by as though in
dream � as is so frequently the case today.
On the Earth such an individual can take no interest in spiritual worlds; and his
soul, after passing through the gate of death, is an easy prey for the Luciferic
powers. Lucifer makes straight for such souls. Here we have the strange situation
that in the next life in the spiritual world, the life that follows the dull,
unreceptive one, the deeds and the Beings of the higher Hierarchies are indeed
illumined for such an individual but in this case not as a result of what he
acquired in earthly life but by the light which Lucifer sends into his soul. It is
Lucifer who illumines the higher worlds for him when he passes into the life
between death and rebirth. Now, he can, it is true, perceive the higher
Hierarchies, recognise when they are offering their gifts to him. But the fact that
Lucifer has tainted the light means that all the gifts have a particular colouring
and character. The forces of the higher Hierarchies are then not exactly as the
human being could otherwise have received them. Their nature then is such that when
the human being passes into his next life on Earth he can certainly form and mould
his body, but he moulds it then in such a way that although he becomes an
individual who is, admittedly, able to cope with the outer world and its demands,
in a certain respect he is inwardly inadequate, because his soul is tinged with
Lucifer's gifts or at least by gifts that have a Luciferic trend.

(unwarrented switch? pendulum...va-et-viens...smells coranic)

When we come across individuals who have worked on their bodies in such a way that
they are able to make effective use of their intellect and acquire certain skills
which will help them to raise their status in the world, although to their own
advantage only, snatching at what is in their own interest, dryly calculating what
is beneficial to themselves without any consideration for others � and there are
many such people nowadays � in these cases the seer will very often find that their
previous history was what has been described. Before they began to display their
dry, intellectual, sharp-witted character in life, they had been led through their
existence between death and rebirth by Luciferic beings who were able to approach
them because in the preceding incarnation they had lived an apathetic, dreamy
existence. But these traits themselves had been acquired because such individuals
had passed through an earlier existence between death and rebirth groping in
darkness. The Spirits of the higher Hierarchies would have bestowed upon them the
forces needed for fashioning a new life, but they were unable to receive these
forces; and that in turn was because they had deliberately refused to concern
themselves with ideas and concepts relating to a spiritual world. That is the
karmic connection. Such examples do certainly occur; they appear before the eyes of
spirit only too frequently when with the help of powers of spiritual investigation
and knowing the conditions of human life, we penetrate into higher worlds.

It is therefore wrong to say that here on Earth we need concern ourselves only with
what is around us in earthly existence because what comes later will be revealed in
all good time. But the form in which it will be revealed depends entirely upon how
we have prepared ourselves for it here.
........
(about "unsound-thinking ; switch to "ban"? enters AHRIMAN)
Anyone who is alert to his surroundings will find that this inadequate, pseudo-
thinking is very widespread. If with the help of super-sensible research we trace
the path of such an individual backwards and come to the regions through which his
soul passed between the last death and the last birth, when this illogical
mentality was caused, the seer often finds that this type of human being, in his
last life between death and rebirth, passed through the spiritual world in such a
way that he encountered the spiritual Beings and forces while under the guidance of
Ahriman; and that although those Beings would have bestowed upon him what he needed
in life, they could not make it possible for him to develop the capacity for sound
thinking. Ahriman was his leader and it was Ahriman who contrived that the gifts of
the Beings of the higher Hierarchies could only be received by him in a form that
would finally result in his thinking coming to a halt when confronting actual
facts, and in his inability to make his thinking exhaustive and valid. A large
proportion of those human beings � and their number is legion � who are incapable
of genuine thinking today owe this to the fact that in their last life between
death and rebirth they were obliged to submit to Ahriman's guidance; they had
somehow prepared themselves for this in their last earthly life � that is to say,
in the incarnation preceding the present one.
And what was the course of that preceding life as viewed by a seer? It is found
that these were morose, hypochondriacal individuals, who shied away from facts and
people in the world and always found it difficult to establish any relation with
their environment. Very often they were intolerable hypochondriacs in their
previous life; on medical examination they would have been found to be suffering
from the type of illness occurring very frequently in hypochondriacs. And if we
were to go still further back, to the life between death and rebirth that preceded
the hypochondriacal incarnation, we should find that during that period such human
beings were obliged again to forego the right guidance and could not become truly
aware of what the gifts of the higher Hierarchies would have been. And how had they
prepared themselves for this fate in the life preceding the last two incarnations?
We should find that they had developed what it is certainly true to call a
religious, pious attitude of soul but an attitude based on sheer egoism. They were
people with a pious, even mystical nature emanating from egoism. After all,
mysticism very often has its origin in egoism. An individual of this type might
say: I seek within myself in order that there I may recognise God. But what he is
seeking there is only his own self made into God! In the case of many pious souls
it becomes evident that they are pious only in order that after death one or
another of their spiritual inclinations may bear fruit. All that they have acquired
is an egotistic attitude of soul.
When in the course of spiritual research we trace the sequence of three such
earthly lives, we find that in the first, the basic attitude of the soul was that
of egotistic mysticism, egotistic religiosity. And when today we observe human
beings with this attitude to life, we shall be able, by means of spiritual
investigation to trace them back to times when souls without number developed a
religious frame of mind out of sheer egoism. They then passed through an existence
between death and rebirth without being able to receive from the spiritual Beings
the gifts which would have enabled them to shape their next life rightly. In that
life they became morose and hypochondriacal, finding everything distasteful. This
life again prepared them for the ensuing one when, having passed through the gate
of death, Ahriman and his hosts became their leaders and the forces with which they
were imbued manifested in the following earthly life as defective logic, as an
obtuse, undiscerning kind of thinking.
Here, then, we have another example of three successive incarnations. And we
realise again and again what nonsense it is to believe that we can wait until death
to establish connection with the super-sensible world. For how this connection is
established after death depends upon the inner tendencies of soul acquired here on
Earth towards the super-sensible world. Not only are the successive earthly lives
connected as causes and effects, but the lives between death and the new birth are
also connected in a certain way as causes and effects.