The Connection Between Humans and the Spiritual World

All of this is also connected with a completely different experience in the spiritual world. Now, as you can understand, there are really no words for all of this. Our language is basically created for the physical world, so it is always difficult to describe these different conditions correctly. That is why it is so easy to be misunderstood. Above all, one can only express oneself in comparative terms. Here in the physical world, you stand, I would say, at one point in the entire structure of the world; you look out with your eyes in all directions around you. In the spiritual world, it is not like that. There you are in the periphery and look in from the periphery, as it were, into the interior of a hollow sphere, only that this is comparative, because it is not a hollow sphere, since time has a much greater significance than space. So you look at everything from the periphery; there are completely different conditions of imagination, completely different conditions of perception! And within the realm of imagination itself, there are yet again completely different conditions. Let us assume that a person has passed through the gates of death at the age of sixty, seventy, eighty, or even earlier: now they clearly feel an inner experience. When you feel hunger or pain here in physical life, in one place or another of your body, you do not say: the hunger is there or there, but rather the hunger is within you. You feel this by looking in from the whole environment, at some point you know that there is something that wants to do something with you. Now you must begin the effort to remove what has manifested itself, what has revealed itself! And only when you have removed it will the truth that wants to manifest itself here appear. So we can say: As spiritual beings, we have an idea within us; but this idea does not tell us anything yet; it must first be removed, and only when we have removed it will we find within ourselves—yes, as paradoxical as it sounds, it is so—an angel or archangel who reveals himself to us! We must first earn this presence by allowing it to announce itself to us in our imagination. Thus, understanding the spiritual world requires decisive effort and decisive work. Only then can souls that have remained here in the physical body, more or less, manifest themselves to the dead without going through this effort, if they truly unfold their thoughts here toward the dead or present something to the dead, through reading aloud or the like.