Lecture VI

Here the difference between life in sensory existence and life between death and rebirth in super-sensible worlds becomes of real, practical significance. Quite different forces are active in our life between death and a new birth from all that we find sympathetic or otherwise between birth and death. What then does a man do who would judge life in super-sensible worlds according to his sympathies and antipathies of sensory existence? Actually, he transplants in perspective into the super-sensible world what he had in sensory existence. It is just as though you were to draw or paint a rose, for instance, on a sheet of glass. Then, if you look at the sheet of glass you will not see it. You look through the glass but the painting that you take for a reality is projected onto the space of the wall behind. But it is not real at all; it is you who have transplanted it there. In the same way, a man, when he wants to judge of the super-sensible world by the sympathies and antipathies of the sensory world, can project into that world something like shadows that may nevertheless have validity there. This something has a certain effect and is in a way authentic. Even if it is not seen, something like a fog is projected onto what stands in that world before the observer.