Rhythmic pattern between death and new birth

The topic header of 'Rhythmic pattern between death and new birth' refers to the alternating rhythm of a soul in the ascent process between death and a new birth, alternating between:

• illuminating the spiritual surroundings, or surrender-of self (to the cosmos)
• reflecting in one's self, or self-experience (drawing back into self)

This alternation can be seen as an in- and out-breathing, or as a process of day and night: getting impressions outside of us, and inner processing of what has been experienced.

These aspects of human experience between death and a new birth, can be compared to Man's faculties during incarnate life, see FMC00.247 onWalking, Speaking and Thinking (WST).

Memory and Love

On Earth this spiritual in- and out-breathing of ourself are transformed into the faculties of memory and love.

Memory and love also work as a kind of breathing in physical Earth life.

• Love, in all its forms, is the echo of our being-poured-out into the world of the spiritual hierarchies.
• Our Memory here on Earth is the echo of our being-within-ourselves in the spiritual world.

Illustrations

FMC00.247 compares the faculties of walking, speaking, thinking in incarnate life, with the experiences of Man between death and a new birth

Lecture coverage and references

Overview coverage

To study this topic:

• Start with the two 1914-04-GA153 lectures, together with 1914-03-19-GA063.
• Then read 1923-08-27-GA227.
• Now complement with the 1922-11/12 lectures.
• Only then study 1910-09-05-GA123 and correlate it with the above.

The bridge to 'Memory and Love' can be made with 1922-12-15-GA219

• the followed by 1922-12-04-GA218 and 1922-12-09-GA218
• and 1918-08-18-GA183 about memory and love during physical life on earth, how man is connected to the cosmos during physical life on earth.

Reference extracts

1910-09-05-GA123

uses the language of seven planets and twelve zodiac signs, sketching seven spiral movements passing through the twelve signs.

As, by passing through six times seven stages man attains the key to the mysteries of his own inner being; twelve times seven or eighty-four stages are necessary before he can rise to the spiritual mysteries of universal space.

When we have surmounted the eighty-four stages we are no longer blinded by the complexity of these spiritual cosmic forces. Beyond these eighty-four stages we have attained that calm wherein a way may be found through the mighty labyrinth.

This was taught to a certain extent among the Essenes. A person having attained clairvoyance during sleep, as just described, could pour his being forth into something that is expressed in the mystery of numbers as twelve times seven.

Anyone who has attained to the ‘twelve times seven’ degree is already in spiritual realms, for when he has completed the eleven times seven, he has already reached the verge of the Mysteries. As in the other, the seven times seven, he is already in the spiritual realm; so he is in the twelve times seven.

On the latter path the spiritual realm is beyond the eleven times seven stage. Such are the number of the stages to be passed through by the astral body and ego.

All this is imprinted in the starry script, seven is the number derived from the planets; they are seven in number; what man has to pass through in cosmic space is derived from the number twelve, the number of the Signs of the Zodiac. As the seven planets group themselves within, and pass through the twelve signs, so if man is to live into cosmic space he must pass through seven times twelve, or rather seven times eleven stages, to attain spirituality. ...

He who is in quest of what is divinely spiritual must guide his astral body and ego in this way through eleven times seven stages, and at the twelfth he is in the spiritual world.

and also:

The Twelve Signs of the Zodiac may be pictured as forming a spiritual periphery in the centre of which is man himself. Now man does not reach the spiritual realm spread around him simply by advancing from a centre outwards; he must expand in spiral form; he must advance, as it were, in seven spiral movements. Each time he completes one spiral turn he has passed through all the twelve signs; he has in this way to pass through seven times twelve points. Man gradually expands in spiral form through the cosmos — this is naturally only an image for what man experiences—and in circling thus, on the seventh journey through the twelve signs, spirituality is reached. Then instead of regarding the cosmos from the central point of his own self; he regards it from the spiritual circumference — from twelve points of view— and from these different aspects he views the external world. It is not enough to see things from one point only, they must be considered from twelve aspects.

1914-03-19-GA063

gives a very good description on the alternating conditions

[Alternating conditions]

However, I have to mention one thing: what you experience that way as an inner force of light develops gradually and cyclically.

• Thus, it develops that you feel: in me the force of light has awoken; it enables me to experience certain other beings and processes of the spiritual world; but it dawns away if you have used it for a while. As you feel the outer sun setting in the evening, you feel the inner force of light more and more tiring in the life between death and rebirth.
• However, when this has tired, another condition comes into being. In this condition the soul feels strong in its inside which it experiences repeatedly; but again it experiences that internally what it has brought from the other condition where it had developed the force of light.

Thus, one must say that the conditions in which we are given away to all spiritual processes and beings alternate with those where the inner light expires again and is, completely extinguished. However, our felt willing and willing feeling awakes there again in such a way that everything lives as memories in it that we have experienced in the spiritual world what comes from the outside. Thus, you have conditions that alternate, as if you live once in the outside world, then again as if you have taken the outside world completely in yourself, so that it appears as inner experiences. It is a change between these two conditions.

We can also say that we experience ourselves

• once like in extensive sociability with the whole spiritual world;
• then this condition alternates with inner loneliness in which we have the whole experienced spiritual universe in ourselves. However, at the same time we know that we live now in ourselves. What is experienced there is that what our souls have kept, and we are now not in contact with something else.

With the regularity as sleeping and waking alternate in life, these conditions change in the spiritual world between death and new birth, namely:

• the condition of expanding in a mental outer world
• and the condition of inner self-enjoyment and self-knowledge where one feels: now you are alone in yourself, excluding all outer processes and beings; now you experience in yourself.

Both conditions must alternate, because only thereby the inner force of light survives that the human being is rejected repeatedly on himself.

I have described these processes more detailed in my writing The Threshold of the Spiritual World (GA017)

This cyclic self-experience,

• once in a lonesome,
• then in a sociable life,

is necessary, because thereby the force of light survives. This goes on in such a way that one settles down in wealthier and wealthier spiritual worlds for which one needs more and more inner force of light. This lasts a long time. Then one feels that one is subjected to a certain border because one has settled in these spiritual worlds. This border depends on the capacities that one has appropriated in life. One soul creates a smaller horizon, the other a larger one.

[Also cyclically]

However, I have still to mention that also in the second half of the postmortal existence life runs cyclically.

We have to distinguish the time of life

• in that outside world where we behold our former friends and relatives, our ideals et cetera externally objectively as it were,
• and then that other time where we have them only in our inside.

This alternates again with necessity for the soul as in the usual life waking and sleeping, day and night alternate.

1914-04-08-GA153

introduces the alternating periods of solitute and sociability in a public lecture, (further deepened in the lecture to members a few days later, on 1914-04-13-GA153 - see below)

1914-04-13-GA153

is an excellent lecture worth contemplating in depth

1918-05-16-GA181

With the dead man it is different;

• he sees himself in continuous interchange with that which he perceives. That is one of his conditions; the perception of the flowing-in and the continuous flowing-out of a living stream of thought.
• The other is that this ceases, and a quiet recollection of what has flowed through him comes about; an intense and far-reaching memory, not our abstract memory, but one connected with the whole of the Universe.

These two conditions alternate.

1922-11-19-GA218

As we pass behind the sphere of Saturn, we pass what older traditions call the zodiac, representattive of the heavens with their fixed stars, or in other words of spirit land in general. But precisely when we encompass all the separate stars that compose the zodiac, we delineate the path that the human being has to pursue. The human being takes this path in order to be able to develop the spirit germ of his next physical body from the whole cosmos, in cooperation with the spiritual beings of the hierarchies.

[Alternation of surrender-of self (to cosmos) and self-experience (drawing back into self)]

In this way, between death and a new birth, we progress through an alternation of self-experience and self-surrender.

To say this, however, takes us only as far as if we were to describe events on Earth in the course of the twenty-four hours by saying: Human beings sleep and wake. We have merely gone that far with such a description of a man's experience between death and a new birth in the spiritual world. For the outgoing surrender and the drawing back again of the self in the spiritual world are similar to waking and sleeping in earthly life.

And as in earthly life only those events a man has lived through find a place, so in the completion of these wheels of births and deaths the spiritual events involved are those a man has actually experienced between death and rebirth. In order to grasp these events we must form a sound conception of how matters really stand for a man in earthly life.

1923-08-27-GA227

connects these two rhythms to the circles of the spiral (and in the 1923-08-29-GA227 that is linked to the 2160 years, 1080 for ascent and descent: 30 years for the Moon loop (about the time Man sleeps in his earth life), 12 times as long or 360 years for the Mars, Jupiter and Saturn loops, so 3x360=1080 years)

Related pages

• Memory and love
• Man's cycle of reincarnation
• 25920, see Embedded Rhythms in the Discussion section
• Walking Speaking Thinking (for FMC00.247)