Fourth Lecture

This is a completely ethereal experience. While we, when we experience physically and sensually, come across the solid and sturdy with our senses and know exactly: what we experience with our senses is out there and we feel ourselves within the boundaries of our skin, the one who has passed through the gate of death experiences his existence and his connection to the world in such a way that he does not distinguish in such a strong way; he feels, so to speak, what he has as a tableau of life, as a piece of his self. Yes, this tableau of life is his world in the first instance. He surveys what he has lived through in a great panorama of life, as his immediate world, in which he is at first. In a sense, earthly existence fades away from him, and from this fading earthly existence he extracts what he has experienced since his birth within this earthly existence. This unfolds like a powerful, vivid panorama of images, not with a dull 'dream consciousness', but with a clear consciousness, in which not only images are seen, but in which everything that we have experienced in life in some other way is revived. Every single conversation we have had with people: we hear it again; everything we have experienced with people, everything we have exchanged with them in terms of feelings: we experience it again. The fact that everything is flooded with life makes possible that abundance of life which, compressed into a few days, gives a complete overview – which is actually always before us at the same time – of what we have gone through in a sometimes long life on earth. And we go through it in such a way that we then know: earlier, on earth, you went through it in such a way that experience followed experience. You had an experience and were in a context of life. It flowed by, remained partly in your memory, was partly forgotten. Then something new occurred, and so the stream of life was composed over the years. Now all of this is standing before the mind's eye at the same time, and now all of this is, one might say, in the self expanded into the world.