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

The time between death and a new birth is determined by the fact that when a person incarnates, say in any given century, he grows into very specific hereditary circumstances through the birth. We know that we cannot imagine the human core of being, the spiritual soul of the human being, as if it were added together from the qualities of the parents, great-grandparents, great-great-grandparents and so on. We have emphasized that just as the earthworm does not grow out of the mud, the human soul does not arise out of the physical. The soul arises out of the soul, as does the living out of the living. We have emphasized that this human soul points us back to a previous life and that it comes into existence through birth in such a way that it draws together the hereditary characteristics. But when we consider the soul, we must also realize that when we look back on a previous life, we carry with us from that earlier human life, through birth, those qualities that gradually unfold in the course of time between death and a new birth. We then take with us through the gate of death what we have newly gained between birth and death, what we have not yet been able to draw from a previous life. So that we now carry through the gate of death everything that has been gained bit by bit in the last life. We can now, when we go through life in the spirit between death and a new birth, only develop this in a new relationship if we do not depend on finding the inherited conditions that we had in the previous existence in this new existence. In a previous existence we had absorbed into our soul certain qualities of our ancestors. We would not encounter anything new in a new existence if we were to encounter the qualities of our ancestors in the same way. If we have embodied ourselves in a particular century, then, in order to be able to live out our lives in a new existence in this direction as well, we have to pass through the spiritual world until all those inherited qualities to which we previously felt drawn, and to which we would feel drawn for as long as they are present, have been lost. Our re-embodiment depends on those qualities that have been handed down through the generations having disappeared. So when we look up to our ancestors, we find certain qualities in our parents, grandparents, great-grandparents and so on, which have been passed down through inheritance to our present existence. Now, after death, we enter the spiritual world. We remain there until all the qualities to which we felt attracted in this embodiment have disappeared in the line of inheritance. But that takes many centuries, and spiritual research shows that the time takes so many centuries that we can say, for example, that certain qualities are inherited from generation to generation. It takes about seven hundred years, then the qualities that are passed down from generation to generation have disappeared to such an extent that we can say: What we found in our ancestors at the time has evaporated. But now qualities must develop to such an extent that they again pass through seven hundred years. And we come to the point where we can indicate two times seven hundred years as the time - it is, of course, only an average figure, but it shows itself to spiritual research as the time that elapses between death and a new birth - until the soul enters into existence again through a new birth.