Fourth Lecture

There is just one thing we must always bear in mind: we must choose our words carefully when we want to describe the spiritual, because the experience in the spiritual world is simply much more intimate than the experience here on the physical plane. When we visualize how a thought, which represents an experience long past, emerges from within us, reminding us of that experience, and when we now now, I might say, imagine the reality of such a shadowy memory experience, then we gradually get an idea of how spiritual reality actually appears to us after we have passed through the gate of death. As a rule, it does not approach us from outside like the experiences of the physical-sensory world. The imaginations come up as they are, only with infinitely greater vividness than the memory images, but in such a way that we do not distinguish our I and the imaginations as we distinguish ourselves from the outside world here. They arise from within us like memory images, but in such a way that we know: what arises on the horizon of our consciousness is reality. An image arises and we know that it is connected to us in the same way that a memory image is connected to us here on the physical plane. It arises with all its vitality. But we know that we are connected to it, our I is within it. In this way the soul arises, and we feel ourselves in union with the souls and soul beings of the higher hierarchies that gradually arise. The spiritual world comes to me, I would say, from the indefinite twilight darkness, approaching my own soul, like memories that arise in our soul. Only that the memories are very dim and depict only an external reality, while the imaginations that arise become speaking imaginations, announcing themselves essentially through their revealing language, which then becomes for us a revelation of the souls, of the spirits, with whom we continue to be in the most varied ways warmer, more intimate, than we can be with a person here on the physical plane.