Afterlife (29 page)

To speak of geometry as ‘purely spiritual’ pulls us up sharp.
Spiritual?
Yet this notion is the very essence of Steiner’s thought, and it gives him an importance that far transcends that of any other ‘spiritualist’ of the nineteenth — or indeed the twentieth — century.
What Steiner was learning, from nature as well as geometry, was to
withdraw into himself
.
The Danish philosopher Kierkegaard said: ‘Truth is subjectivity’, meaning that the
experience
of truth — as distinguished from merely ‘knowing’ that something is true — is a kind of
access to inner worlds
.
As Chesterton points out, if I say ‘The earth is round’, it is true, but I don’t mean it.
In order to mean it, I would need to be an astronaut hovering up in space.
And the same applies to most of our ‘truths’.
But when I relax into a warm bath, and experience a deep sense of pleasure and relief, I again experience a form of ‘truth’.
The astronaut might experience this same inner certainty when he looks down for the first time and says: ‘My God, the earth
is
round!’

According to Steiner, this sense of ‘inwardness’ is the starting point of ‘spiritual life’.
What we must learn to do is to
anchor
ourselves down there, and not allow the world to drag us into a region of doubt and compromise.
This, in a sense, is what Shakespeare means by ‘To thine own self be true.’ But it is more than that.
It means learning to listen to inner voices, and
learning their language
.
Listening to an inner voice is not merely a question of deciding either to do or not to do something, according to its advice.
It is like studying some ancient wisdom written in an unknown language.
It could become the study of a lifetime.

Now most of us can understand how that ‘retreat into
oneself can lead us to deeper appreciation of everything.
To appreciate music, you close your eyes, or at least, concentrate wholly and completely on the music.
When we are ‘in tune’ with nature, it is because we are in that state of ‘inwardness’, and the paradox is that the more ‘inward’ we are, the more deeply we appreciate what is ‘outside’.

But Steiner goes a step beyond this.
He insists that when we are in this ‘inward’ state, we also become aware of the world of the supernatural — both in the sense of spiritual and in the sense of paranormal.
This seems to have been Steiner’s own experience.
He claims that after the vision of his father’s cousin in the station waiting room, he became aware of Spirits of Nature — presumably he means the same kind of ‘elementals’ that Rosalind Heywood claims to have encountered on Dartmoor — and of the spirits of the dead.
(We may also recall Rosalind Heywood’s comment, describing her telepathic encounter with her dead friend Vivian: ‘I quickly became aware that I could not hold the
absorbed
state which contact with “Vivian” demanded …’ (my italics), suggesting that contact with the ‘dead’ demands a certain inner-absorption.)

In his Autobiography, Steiner claims two contacts with dead men, neither of whom he knew.
These were not ‘mediumistic’ experiences, but involved some kind of inner communion.
In Vienna in his early twenties, Steiner was introduced to a cultured, middle-class family.
He says: ‘One could sense the presence in this family of someone unknown to us.
It was the father.
We [Steiner and other friends] never met him, yet one felt his presence.’ The father was an unusual man who avoided social contact and lived like a hermit.
From things his family said about him, and from the man’s books, Steiner gradually came to feel that he knew him.
Finally, the man died, and Steiner was asked to deliver his funeral address.
He spoke of the father with such apparently intimate knowledge that the family told him that it sounded as if he knew him well.

It sounds as though Steiner means that he learned to ‘know’ the father through hints dropped by the family.
But later in the Autobiography, it becomes quite clear that he means far more than this.
Ten years later, he had moved to Weimar, to work in the Goethe archive, editing Goethe’s scientific writings.
He was introduced to a widow named Anna Eunicke, who was later to become his wife.
Living in her house as a lodger, he once again became intensely aware of the personality of her dead husband.
And in the Autobiography he states: ‘The powers of spiritual
sight which I then possessed enabled me to enter into a close relationship with these two souls after their earthly death.’ What Steiner claims, in effect, is that he was able to ‘follow’ the progress of both dead men in the ‘spirit world’.

And now it should begin to be clear why Steiner had so little patience with Spiritualism, and why he declared on one occasion: ‘The Spiritualists are the greatest materialists of all.’ A medium going into a trance, or using a pencil to trace out the words of a ‘spirit’, knows nothing of the real nature of the dead, of their inner reality.
Rosalind Heywood’s description of her encounter with her friend Vivian Usborne after his death comes altogether closer to it.
She says that she ‘ran slap into “Vivian” himself, most joyfully and most vividly alive’.
And ‘Vivian’ ‘conveyed in some fashion so intimate that the best word seems to be communion’ what he had to tell her.
Mrs Willett also spoke about ‘sensing’ Myers and Gurney in the same direct fashion.
This is what Steiner means by contact with the dead, and he feels that Spiritualism has substituted a far more superficial and ‘materialistic’ contact, without the inwardness.

According to Steiner, men in the remote past had a direct sense of contact with the dead.
There is, in fact, one interesting piece of archaeological evidence for this claim.
Modern human beings belong to a breed known as Cro-Magnon man, who appeared on earth about fifty thousand years ago, and who is believed to have exterminated his predecessor, Neanderthal man.
Neanderthal man was small, squat and ape-like, and his method of communication was probably confined to grunts.
Yet his graves contain mysterious spherical stones, which are probably images of the sun, and other ritual objects that suggest that, like the ancient Egyptians, he possessed some kind of belief in life after death.
It is hard to believe that creatures who were hardly superior to the ape should have evolved the idea of an afterlife.
But if Steiner — like the modern psychologist Stan Gooch — is correct in believing that Neanderthal man was far more ‘psychic’ than modern man, then his belief in a life after death was not a matter of philosophy so much as of direct experience.

And so, says Steiner:

According to Steiner, the dead need intercourse with the living to nourish their being.
In former times there was a direct link between the living and the dead, so that the living could follow the progress of dead relatives in the ‘afterlife’.
This clairvoyant faculty was gradually lost, but even then, there was a kind of semi-conscious feeling of the presence of the dead.
Now, he says, this has virtually disappeared.
But insofar as men learn to gain ‘access to inner worlds’ through ‘spiritual science’, they will regain the ability to communicate with the dead.

What happens to man after death is described by Steiner in one of his most important early works,
Theosophy
(although it is necessary to add immediately that even as early as 1904, Steiner’s concept of Theosophy had evolved a long way beyond Madame Blavatsky’s).
Like all ‘occultists’, Steiner accepts that man consists of four ‘bodies’ — physical body, etheric body (or aura), astral body and ego.
After death, the astral body and ego leave behind the physical body.
The etheric body takes about three days to dissolve.
During this time, the ‘soul’ (astral body plus ego) sees the whole of its past life unfolding in review.
Then it enters a realm called ‘kamaloca’, which corresponds roughly to the purgatory of Christian doctrine.
The past life is relived and examined.
Since the astral body is still capable of feeling, it will suffer from its unsatisfied desires and lusts.
When purified by suffering, it can finally dissolve.
In kamaloca, the astral body also experiences all the sufferings it has inflicted upon others from its own point of view.

After this, the purified ego rises to the ‘spirit world’, in which it can choose its own next life.
It will choose the form in which it intends to be born, and the circumstances.
(Steiner emphasises that no one should bemoan his lot, because he has chosen it himself.) These are carefully chosen to afford opportunities for evolution (which explains why we do not all choose to be fabulously successful).
And, in due course, the soul will return to earth to live another life.
One of Steiner’s most fascinating books is an eight-volume work called
Karmic Relationships
, consisting of lectures delivered not long before his death, in which he claims to have used his power of ‘spirit vision’ to trace the
past incarnations of many famous men.
Even for those who regard it as pure fantasy, it offers an interesting vision of Steiner’s sense of the way reincarnation operates.

One eminent member of the Society for Psychical Research, Whately Carington,
^*
produced in 1920 a brilliantly suggestive work called
A Theory of The Mechanism of Survival
in which he offers the following criticism of Theosophy:

It is a valid point, but it applies less to Steiner than to Madame Blavatsky.
Moreover, Steiner’s explanations have much in common with the theory Carington puts forward in his book.
Carington begins from the concept of the fourth dimension, as discussed in the work of mathematicians such as Riemann and Lobatchevsky, and goes on to argue that much of the evidence for ‘survival’ suggests that the dead exist in a world that has one more dimension than ours has.
(And this receives support from the ‘near-death experience’ of Sir Auckland Geddes, described in Chapter Two, in which Geddes said that he was ‘now free in a time dimension of space, where in “now” was in some way equivalent to “here” in ordinary three dimensional space.’) In a lecture delivered in 1918 under the title ‘The Dead Are With Us’, Steiner explains that:

In modern physics, time is regarded as the fourth dimension; what Steiner seems to be saying is that the ‘spirit world’ has, in effect, yet another dimension which means that time is, in some sense, ‘static’.
(A modern investigator, T.
C.
Lethbridge, came to much the same conclusion on the basis of some curious experiments in dowsing, using a pendulum.
^*
)

While many people will feel inclined to dismiss Steiner’s account of life after death as completely unverifiable, it cannot be denied that there is an impressive consistency about his views, and that this makes a strong appeal to the intelligence.
He writes:

This notion that the world of the mind
is
the spirit world is somehow far more convincing — certainly more thought-provoking — than accounts of life after death that make the spirit world sound like a cross between fairyland and a holiday camp.