8. Death, Physical Body and Etheric Body

At death the physical body disintegrates into earthly matter. This is of significance. All the time we are asleep, a desire to return to the physical body lives in us, as I've often described. It dominates us from the moment of falling asleep to our awakening; we long to get back into it. When, at death, we have laid it aside, we can't go on longing to do this; we are unable to press ourselves back into it again. The result is that from now on we cannot develop the desire to return to the physical body, so the longing we have during sleep now falls away, and something else takes its place. Its place is taken by the thought of the physical body that now makes its appearance in the astral body and our ego. We contemplate our physical body. It lives in our consciousness and becomes part of its content. And the disintegration of our physical body into its elements results in our maintaining awareness of our physical body during the time between death and rebirth.