The Ego-consciousness of the So-called Dead

We know that our next experience is a kind of retrospective memory, that lasts for days. But this retrospective memory is inappropriately designated (but nevertheless with a certain right) as a retrospective memory, for we have before us now, for a few days, something that resembles a tableau, or a panorama, woven out of all we have experienced during our past life. It does not, however, rise up in the same way in which an ordinary memory rises up in our physical body. You see, the memories that live in our physical body are of such a kind that we draw them out of our memory. Memory is a force that is connected with our physical body. Our recollections rise up in the form of thoughts; through the power of memory, we draw them out successively, within the stream of time. But the retrospective memory after death is of such a kind that everything that occurred during our earthly life, now surrounds us simultaneously, as if it were a panorama. Our life-experiences now rise up in the form of imaginations. We can only say that we now live, for whole days, within our experiences. What we experienced just before death, and what we experienced during our childhood, stands before us simultaneously, in powerful pictures. A panorama of our life, a life-picture stands before us and it reveals, simultaneously, in a woof woven out of the ether, what normally occurs successively, within the stream of time. Everything that we now see before us, lives in the ether.