Our eyes are fixed on the shadow side of death. They only see how the form disintegrates. The view of the continuing life in subtle structures remains closed to them.
Thus we have created a caricature of death, a counter-image, a shadow image that we pass off as reality.
O how sublime is the spirit that, under the guidance of true wisdom, perceives himself with spiritual eyes refined by life and light. Man is born of God, the Father of all light and life. That is why the spirit who discovers that he is created from life and light, returns to life and light.
Robert Fludd, 1574-1637
At all times there have been thinkers who, regardless of profession and level of education, struggle to grasp the true meaning of life and death. The insights they arrive at are mostly speculative for the mind. They go beyond it. But since we are more than our mind, the statements can evoke resonances within us and can fill us with inner certainties. For what has risen in the consciousness of others can also touch and awaken latent layers of truth within us. It is remarkable how much the inner realisations, achieved in the most diverse ways, are in agreement or complement each other.
Why am I born, why do I have to fight my way through so much only to die at some point?
What is currently making it difficult for people to understand spiritual life is the fact that the spiritual sense organs that would enable them to feel and live this [spiritual life] have fallen asleep.
Omraam Michaël Aivanhov
A bright wintry Sunday morning in Berlin. I am walking along a park that leads to Potsdamer Platz. There is much to discover: modern shops, futuristic architecture …, and above it all the blue sky shines. My mood is excellent, I am happy and feel uplifted. In the middle of this state of mind, a question flashes through my head, the question of the mystery of death.
We are living in the 21st century and realise that to science, despite all its merits, the true meaning of death remains obscured. Yet there are spiritual teachers in all cultures, and they give us important clues.
In any case, everything is in a state of perpetual, progressive development, that is, the whole of creation, the whole universe, is moving towards a perfection that seems to recede as one approaches it, because what appears perfect at one point in time, it is no longer perfect after a certain time.
Sri Aurobindo, Mira Alfassa
The urge for development inherent in all living things, if one takes this view as a basis, reaches the limits of the existing forms. At a certain point in time they are no longer capable of further progress. Goethe’s Faust spoke to the earth: You stir and stimulate a powerful resolve, / to strive ever onwards to the highest existence. The actual function of death is to release the inner being and the life energies it has shaped from the solidified form.
Our eyes are fixed on the shadow side of death. They only see how the form disintegrates. The view of the continuing life in subtle structures remains closed to them. Thus we have created a caricature of death, a counter-image, a shadow image that we pass off as reality. It creates fear, and this is fuelled in many ways. It is suitable to exercise power over people. Entire ideologies, systems of power and economic interests thrive on keeping people trapped in their fear of death.
It is true that we experience deep pain when we lose a loved one. However, we can also gain profound insight into the meaning of death if we are able to accompany the soul of the person who has discarded his material body through our love for him or her for a while longer.
Matter had to take on form; the individualisation and the concrete embodiment of the forces of life or consciousness would have been impossible without matter.
Sri Aurobindo, Mira Alfassa
If one sees only the shadow, the physical side of the event, one creates a counter-image of what death really means. Our inner self transmits to us the idea of the beautiful, harmonious and eternal. On the outside, we are increasingly confronted, it seems, with the ugly, the threatening and the perishing. The force of disappointment, the sense of the catastrophic nature of certain events, indeed of evil, can only be explained in view of the ideal image that lives within us. The cruelty, barrenness and senselessness that we encounter in reports, films, books and also in our lives seem to embody a mocking laughter at us. Once you will certainly be disturbed by your God-likeness, says Mephisto, the adversary spirit in Goethe’s Faust.
In the encapsulation from the whole, especially from the spiritual side of life, is where the mass illusions, the struggle for existence, the striving for power, self-harm and harm to others, the wars originate. People cling to the existing narrow structures of their existence and fight for them. In this way they block the further development of their being.
Life is pure energy and strives for the unification of spirit, soul and body, of being, consciousness and bliss. In the broken consciousness – in the “unhappy consciousness”, as Hegel says, the consciousness that is torn within itself – the trinity of body, soul and spirit cannot be achieved. The minds of countless people indulge in philosophies of doom. But this robs death of its renewing energy, denying its transformative power the space to unfold. Through their fear of death, people create a dualism. But life has no opposite. It always encompasses birth and death simultaneously as a continuous process.
There are two essential forms of pain in the cosmos: the pain that arises through the binding of energy to a form and the pain that results from the detachment of the energy from the form.
based on Robin Kaiser
We bind ourselves to the periphery and do not, like Galaad, cross the narrow bridge to the Grail, our spiritual-soul dimension. Yet the matter of our body and our world is certainly open to such a path. We are also “capable of light” as far as our physical constitution is concerned.
There is a basic feature of matter that is full of finality and only bears its possible fruit in a latent not-yet.
Ernst Bloch
Rudolf Steiner explains in relation to matter:
Matter is a heap of debris of the Spirit. It is extraordinarily important to bear in mind this very definition that matter is a heap of debris of the Spirit. Matter is therefore in reality spirit, but broken spirit.
There is an image for this in the writings of Jewish mysticism, the Kabbalah. In a first creation, which took place in high spiritual worlds, the first forms in which life was to take shape were broken. The Kabbalists speak of the “breaking of the vessels”, or the “dying of the “primal kings”. The first subtle forms could not support the excess of energy that flowed into them. The fragments of their etheric forms fell far down and eventually gave rise to the origin of the present gross material world. We ourselves are embodiments of these fragments. We redeem them by creating the right spiritual-soul structures for our true self – the “primal king within us”. Then life in the higher worlds becomes possible again.
When a spiritual form, an etheric archetype “breaks”, it manifests or realises itself, according to Steiner, in countless individual, spatially and temporally comprehensible, similar physical phenomena, all of which obey the same etheric law of formation, from the still radiation-like elementary particles to atoms, molecules and crystals, up to the more complex physical formations.
This gives rise to numerous analogies between the biological, the transient and the transcendental, the eternal. The philosopher and scientist Robert Fludd assigned a star in the universe to every plant on earth. The artist Anselm Kiefer, a student of Joseph Beuys, depicted Fludd’s concept of unity in his works.
The Western-orientated man has for centuries turned to the outer world of sensory experience and has lost himself in it. Now the time is ripe to turn inwards, to explore the inner universe within the heart and begin the long and exciting journey to the innermost centre. Compared to this the exploration of the moon and the planets is child’s play.
Bede Griffiths
The cosmos is filled with ethereal celestial regions. Their inhabitants are free of a physical shell such as we possess. Some of them have made it their task to preserve the abundance of vitality and life on our planet. In hierarchical connection they form structures of life energy from top to bottom, from the subtle to the gross, and from bottom to top. Our future bodies, which we can attain on a path from bottom to top, are in principle prepared for us. However, we must actualise them by a new way of thinking, feeling and acting, to merge with them on a path of transformation.
A thorough mental investigation clearly showed that apart from this natural order there is an original realm, a realm […] that distances itself very emphatically from this nature with its two spheres.
Jan van Rjickenborgh
Gnostic groups in particular had and have the knowledge that the human “microcosms” are not in harmony with the divine-spiritual macrocosm. Albigensians or Cathars, Bogomils and Essenes, Manichaeans and Druids left behind corresponding knowledge. They saw the microcosm, especially its spiritual and mental sphere, as being literally immersed in a “sleep of death”. Jan van Rijckenborgh developed the idea of focussing the forces of light in a group activity and thus to bring about an inner awakening and enable the emergence of new soul structures. For the transfigured, new form there is no death. Sri Aurobindo also emphasises the necessity of a new form:
There comes a moment in this ever-increasing inequality, in this growing discord between the form and the force acting upon it, when the complete dissolution of the form becomes inevitable. A new form must be created. New harmony and new equality must become possible again. This is the true meaning of death and its benefit for nature.
Sri Aurobindo, Mira Alfassa
Divine Wisdom – Divine Nature. The Message of the Rosicrucian Manifestos in the Visual Language of the 17th century, In de Pelikaan, 2014 (on Robert Fludd)
Omraam Mikhaël Aivanhov, Thoughts for the Day, edition 2024, Prosveta Verlag, Dietingen
Sri Aurobindo, The Mother (Mira Alfassa), Death and Rebirth, Sri Aurobindo Digital Edition, 2020
Robin Kaiser, BewusstSein: Der Weg zum EinsSein (Consciousness: The Path to Oneness), eBook
Ernst Bloch, Das Materialismusproblem, seine Geschichte und Substanz (The Problem of Materialism, its History and Substance), Complete Edition, Volume 7, 3rd edition, Suhrkamp, 2015
Rudolf Steiner, Die Welt der Sinne und die Welt des Geistes (The World of the Senses and the World of the Spirit), Complete Edition, Volume 134, Dornach
Gershom Scholem, Die jüdische Mystik in ihren Hauptströmungen (Jewish mysticism in its various forms), Suhrkamp, 1980
Jan van Rijckenborgh, The Universal Gnosis. Rozekruis Pers, 1995
