1. Investigations Into Life Between Death and Rebirth I

Let us consider the following instance. Suppose after death we meet someone in the spiritual world who died before us. He is there for us in reality, we stand before him, but we must be able to perceive him, must establish a relationship to him in the visionary world, just as in the physical world we would establish a connection with someone by means of our eyes and ears. Now, however, we encounter a difficulty that exists in the experience of the initiate and also in the life between death and rebirth. As previously explained, the world of visions presents at first only a reflection of ourselves. When a man meets us in the spiritual world a vision appears, but to begin with this vision only reflects the measure of affection or antipathy that we felt towards him on earth, or it reflects some other connection that we may have had with him in the past. We can therefore find ourselves in the presence of a person in the spiritual world and yet perceive nothing more than what was within our own soul before death. It may happen that we meet a person in the spiritual world but remain cut off from him because of our feelings or affection or dislike that envelop us like a visionary cloud. Such meetings after death are accompanied by deep feeling, by a real inner experience, and this is most important. We might feel, for example, that we have not loved someone on earth as much as we should have done and now after death, notwithstanding that we are in his presence and wish to love him more, we find that we can only bring as much affection as we had for him on earth. This is true in spite of our earnest desire to love him more and make amends for what we failed to do on earth. We experience this sense of limitation, this total incapacity to develop further one's inner powers, as an immense weight on the soul after death.