The Path Of The Soul After Death: The Community Of The Living And The Dead As Witnessed By Rudolf Steiner In His Eulogies And Farewell Addresses [Paperback]

Rudolf Steiner saw relationships with the dead as the religious attitude of the future in the highest sense. Becoming comfortable with thinking and speaking of the dead as concretely as we speak of the living will profoundly affect human activity. To Steiner, the enlivening and even the sanctification of earthly existence are not merely connected directly with our relationship to death and to the deceased; in fact, that relationship deepens these qualities and makes them possible. Steiner spoke frequently about death and the human soul's continued existence, as well as about the importance of establishing a new kind of community that unites spiritually active human souls that endure beyond death.

The Path of the Soul after Death shows how Rudolf Steiner commemorated the dead, the words he chose to use, and his descriptions--sometimes in great detail--of the inner processes involved. What becomes clear is the extent to which his connections to the deceased shaped his addresses and related to their new stage of existence. Inasmuch as his words were in harmony with human soul development after death, they not only recapitulated a biography but also assisted the deceased individual along the path after death.

We cannot understand the true depth and meaning of Steiner's words about those who have died except against the background of an anthropological study of the period immediately after death. The second part of the book, therefore, is a stunningly clear and detailed account of anthroposophic research into the process of dying and the soul's path after death. He tells us: The phenomenon of death sets in like this: In the moment of death, the connection of the etheric and astral bodies to the physical bodies dissolves--specifically, in the heart. The heart is illuminated, so to speak, and then the ether body, astral body, and `I' rise above the head. Rudolf Steiner described this moment of having died as the consummate eventlch