The Problem of Destiny

The fact which I shall explain to you now has also arisen in our present time. When we revert to earlier times we find that man still possessed an old inheritance in regard to his connexion with the spiritual world. Man passed through the portal of death and because he had a certain relationship with the spiritual world through his feelings, through an atavistic clairvoyance and similar experiences, his life in a physical body had something in common with the life which he entered through the portal of death. Because man knew something about the spiritual world (although this was only an instinctive knowledge) he possessed more than a mere sum of thoughts reminding him of his life on earth after having passed through the portal of death. From now onwards it will be characteristic of human souls to pass through the portal of death in such a way that they will be connected with the earth only through their memories. They remember as it were, their earthly life, and they are still connected with it because after death this earthly life lives in their memory. This is strictly and radically speaking the case of a modern man who cannot take up ideas concerning the spiritual world from spiritual science. If he takes up these ideas, they will form something after death enabling him, not only to remember his earthly life, but also to have an insight into it. The spiritual ideas we take up before death change into faculties after death. After death windows open, as it were, from the spiritual world into the physical world, and they reveal what exists in the physical world because here upon the earth we have acquired thoughts connected with the spiritual world. Spiritual science, therefore, enables us to take with us certain definite results when we cross [the] threshold of death.