5. Life between Death and Rebirth I

Concrete investigations showed that we take the whole cosmos into our being and bring it forth again in our earthly existence. Of the forces that man carries with him, only a few have their origin on the earth. We study man in connection with the forces that work in the physical, etheric and astral bodies, and in the ego. Of course, the forces that play into our physical body come to us from the earth, but we cannot draw directly out of the earth the forces we need for the etheric body. These forces can only approach us between death and rebirth during the period we are expanding into the planetary spheres. If one takes an immoral attitude of soul into these spheres, one will not be able to attract the right forces during the time between death and a new rebirth. A man who has not developed religious impulses cannot attract the right forces in the Venus sphere, and so the forces that are needed in the etheric may be stultified. Here we see the karmic connection that exists between later and earlier lives. This indicates how the knowledge that we obtain through occultism may become impulses in our life of soul and how the awareness of what we are can lead us to rise to an ever more spiritual life.