Dr. Rudolf Steiner’s* views on time are best illustrated with a passage from a 1918 lecture titled, “The Dead Are With Us” :

“In the spiritual sense, what is ‘past’ has not really vanished, but is still there. In physical life men have this conception in regard to space only. If you stand in front of a tree, then go away and look back … the tree has not disappeared … In the spiritual world the same is true in regard to time. If you experience something at one moment, it has passed away the next as far as physical consciousness is concerned; spiritually conceived, it has not passed away. You can look back on it just as you can look back on the tree. Richard Wagner showed that he possessed knowledge of this with the remarkable words : ‘Time here has become space.’ ”

These views of Steiner’s have something in common with the idea of “stepped” levels of being. On our level, we have three-dimensional bodies and a fourth dimension is experience as duration, or time. In the level above us, there are four dimensions of space and the fifth is experienced as time. And so on up to dizzying numbers of dimensions.

It can be seen that beings in the level above us would see our time as space, thus they would see our lives as a solid object stretching from our birth to our death. To imagine what this might be like think of standing by a river and watching the flow of a small segment of the whole stream. Next, you are standing on a mountain where you can see the whole river from its “birth” as a spring, to its “death” flowing into the sea. The first is our view, the second is the view from the next level up.

For more information on Rudolf Steiner, see my earlier post.