The Connection Between Humans and the Spiritual World

Finally, one more remark. Consider what it means that human beings must carry within themselves the feeling, namely during a certain period between death and a new birth, that they carry the hierarchies within themselves as their inner experience! That is how it is! This could lead human beings into the most terrible arrogance, which could live as a dark feeling in their souls when they are reborn. In ancient times, a barrier against this arrogance was created by the fact that when people passed through the gate of death and entered the spiritual world, they knew, in a sense, that they were not seeing for themselves, but that the highest beings of the highest hierarchies were living within them and enabling them to see. But human beings have lost this connection in the spiritual world just as they have lost the old atavistic clairvoyance in the physical world here. In its place must come what Paul expressed with the words, “Not I, but Christ in me,” and what a true spiritual feeling attains through the words, “We are born of God; we die into Christ.” When we learn this in all its depth through the feeling that can come to us from spiritual science, that Christ is for the earth, we will place ourselves in the right way in this viewing from the circle. And when we pass through the gate of death with the right feelings of “In Christ we die,” , we will find, looking from the circle, among the beings we see, those who belong to the higher hierarchies, who are also elemental beings, but also beings who are human souls incarnated here or human souls who have already left the body, and among all these we will also find our own I-being. And we look at the relationship of this I-being of ours to the other beings I have just described from the outside. To be able to have these feelings after passing through the gate of death is something tremendously important. For only then can we find our way back into the embodiment of the flesh if we can have these feelings toward our own I. But we can only have them if we owe them to having passed through the gate of death with the feeling: “We have died into Christ.” This connection with Christ gives us the opportunity to see our relationship in the spiritual world with the soul's eye of Christ, so to speak, to see ourselves as an I-being among other spirit beings.