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

If we want to understand this spiritual life that man enters after the time of purification, then we can do so in the following way. It is difficult to capture in words the very different experiences that the spiritual researcher has when he examines the life between death and a new birth, the very different essential impressions that cannot be compared to anything that the eye can see in the world of the senses and the brain-bound intellect can think, to capture it in the words of our language; but one can get an idea of what the spiritual researcher can experience as a new world through his insight into the spiritual world, in the following way. When you look around you and want to understand the world, when you want to understand what is around you, then you do this by thinking, by forming ideas of the things that are around you. It would be a logically absurd idea if someone were to think that you could scoop water out of a glass in which there is none. It would be just the same if you imagined that you could extract or scoop out of a world of thoughts and laws when there are no thoughts and no laws in it. All human knowledge, all human insight would be vain dreams, would be nothing but fantasy if the thoughts that we ultimately form in our minds did not already underlie things as thoughts, that things have sprung from thoughts. All those who believe that thoughts are only something that the human mind forms, that is not the basis of things as the actual forces of action and creation of things, should just give up all thinking altogether; for the thoughts that would be formed without corresponding to an external world of thoughts would be mere fantasies. Only he thinks truly who knows that his thinking corresponds to the outer world of thoughts and, as in a mirror, awakens the outer world of thoughts within us; he knows that all things originally sprang from this world of thoughts.