The Human Being's Journey Through the World of the Senses, Soul and Spirit

That is one thing. The other is that the human being now experiences something immediately after passing through the gate of death, which he has only become acquainted with to a very small extent between birth and death, if he has not become a spiritual researcher himself. In life we are always outside of things, outside of the entities that are around us. The tables, the chairs are outside of us, the flora spread over the field is outside of us. The impression immediately after death is as if our being would pour out over everything that is outside of us. We plunge into things, as it were, we feel at one with them. There is a feeling of the soul spreading and expanding, a merging with the things in the external environment as images. This experience lasts for different lengths of time, as spiritual research shows us with the methods we have been talking about; but in general it is a brief experience after death. Today, after more exact clairvoyant research on this subject, we can even speak of how long the time period is for each individual, depending on their individuality. You know that different people, in their normal state of life, can stay awake for different lengths of time, if need be, without being overcome by sleep. One person can keep awake for three, four, five days on my account, another can only do it for thirty-six hours, and so on. As long as a person on the average has been able to keep awake in the normal state of life without being forced down by sleep, so long, on the average, does this tableau of memories last. So it is to be calculated in days and is different for different people.