The Connection Between Humans and the Spiritual World

I have tried to evoke in you a feeling of the kind of interaction that exists between the so-called dead and the so-called living. We just need to be clear about how different the conditions are in the spiritual world compared to here. You can find a good part of these conditions and the conditions of experience in the spiritual world in the lecture series “On Life Between Death and a New Birth,” which I gave in Vienna a few years ago. But you can only ever pick out a few things from these things that are important from one side or the other. It must be said that something similar and yet very dissimilar to our physical life exists in the spiritual world. Before we enter the physical world in the full sense, we go through the embryonic period, in which the conditions of life are completely different from those at the moment when we enter the physical world as breathers of the outer air. In a certain sense and style, the time we go through in the first spiritual year—which has so often been called the Kamaloka period—is already similar to the embryonic period. For just as human beings, in a sense, take the help of another human being who carries them into the physical world over ten lunar months, so they allow themselves to be carried into the spiritual world by all that holds them together in the physical world, which they slowly shed, namely their desires and cravings. And consciousness in this first spiritual year — thirty years after death — is still somewhat similar to consciousness here in the physical world, even though skills and the like, which can only be acquired in the physical world, can only be mediated indirectly through the etheric body. But then other conditions of consciousness come into play; a much higher consciousness than we can have here in the physical body then emerges. If you remember some of what was said in the cycle mentioned earlier, you can see how this consciousness has a different character in the spiritual world. You need only consider how much consciousness depends on what can enter into it. And when we go about here in the physical world as ordinary human beings, the phenomena of the mineral, plant, and animal kingdoms and of the physical human kingdom enter into us with other soul experiences, cultural experiences, and so on. After death, we no longer perceive the mineral world as such, but only the general life of the plant world. Read in my “Theosophy” how things are in the ascent into the so-called spiritual world.