The Connection Between Humans and the Spiritual World

When a person here in the physical world has made their soul receptive by acquiring elementary, imaginative perception, they can also consciously maintain a connection in their ideas — which are then naturally much finer than ordinary ideas — with the dead. This is conscious connection with the dead. But what becomes conscious in this way is actually always present unconsciously if there was a relationship during life between the one who remained here in the physical world and the one who ascended into the spiritual world. Let us assume that we have lost a beloved person through death. Whether we know it or not — those who have developed imaginative perception can know it — the dead person acts as if they were sending their will into the etheric body they have left behind, as if into a mirror, and the mirror in turn sends the rays back to us; the dead person acts back on the living through the elemental and etheric bodies. This is the influence that is, in a sense, indirect.