7. Personal and Supersensible Aspects (Relating to Certain Individuals)

These words were spoken at the beginning and the end of the funeral oration, after which the cremation began. And it was possible to observe, dear friends, that this moment—please note, not the moment when the words were spoken but the moment when the heat of the furnace took hold of the body—was the time when something of a first conscious moment after death occurred. I shall go into this in more detail later on. What I mean by ‘conscious moment’ is this immediately after death a review of life presents itself in the fain of a tableau in the ether body. This goes away after a few days. Now' at the time it proved necessary to have a fairly long interval between death and cremation. Death had occurred at 6 p.m. on the Wednesday; the cremation took place the following Monday at 11 am. At that point the time had already been reached when the life tableau was disappearing. The first moment when there was some degree of consciousness after the life tableau therefore came when the heat of the furnace took hold of the body. It then became clearly apparent that such a nature become spirit has a different way of seeing things' a different way of regarding the world, from a human soul that still remains in its physical body.