Chapter III: Sleep And Death

Further perceptions are possible in the spiritual world, comparable to the warmth and also to the light of the physical world. Warmth permeates all earthly things and creatures, and it is none other than the world of thoughts which in like manner permeates all things in Spirit-land. Only these thoughts must be conceived as independent living Beings. The thoughts man apprehends within the manifest world are but a shadow of the real thought-being, living in the land of Spirits. One should imagine the thought, such as it is in man, lifted out of him and as an active being endowed with an inner life of its own. Even this is but a feeble illustration of what pervades the fourth region of Spirit-land. Thoughts in the form in which man perceives them in the physical world between birth and death are but a manifestation of the real world of thoughts—the kind of manifestation that is possible by means of bodily organs The thoughts man cultivates—those above all which signify an enrichment of the physical world—originate in this region of Spirit-land. This does not only apply to the ideas of great inventors or men of genius. Fruitful ideas “occur” to every human being—ideas he does not merely borrow from the outer world, but which enable him to work upon this world and change it. While feelings and passions occasioned by the external world belong to the third region of Spirit-land, all that can come to life in the soul of man so that he becomes creative, acting on his environment in such a way as to transform and fertilize it, is manifested in its archetypal being in the fourth region of the spiritual world.