The Human Being's Journey Through the World of the Senses, Soul and Spirit
This is the one experience that comes after the human being has crossed the threshold of death. But we must characterize it more precisely. This experience is quite peculiar. It is not that we experience the events of the past life exactly in the same way as we went through them in life. In life, the events of the day make an impression on us of pleasure, of joy, of pain, of suffering. They approach us in such a way that we have sympathy and antipathy for them. In short, these events stir our emotions, and also spur us on to exercise our will, our desire, in this or that way. All these things, our pleasure and suffering, joy and pain, our sympathy and antipathy, our interest in the outer phenomena of existence, all this is, for the time just discussed, as if extinguished in the human soul, and the memory picture stands there, truly like a picture. If we have a picture before us, a scene we imagine, where we would suffer terribly - we endure it objectively, neutrally, when it is presented to us in the picture. But so does the memory picture of the whole of life come to our soul: we experience it without the participation that we have otherwise had in life.