Fourth Lecture

Now the soul must also collide with something in the life between death and a new birth. Here in the physical life, it collides with the physical body, which is given from the physical forces and substances of the outer nature, in order to come to the I-consciousness. After death, between death and a new birth, the soul, in order to come to its now spiritual self-awareness, collides with its own life, which it has just seen in the days after passing through the gate of death and which it keeps looking back on. First, life presents itself in a way that allows us to see it, then it becomes a constant looking back. As spiritual beings, after we have passed through the gate of death and continue to live in the stream of time, looking back on what we have directly experienced in and with death, the soul, as it continues to progress, always encounters this panorama of life in retrospect, which one has had, but which now remains as a spiritual memory. And just as the I is ignited to its I-consciousness here through its collision with the physical body, so after death the I-consciousness is ignited by the look back at our own life, which encounters the last life on earth. As we look back on it, we experience this I-consciousness between death and a new birth. It is different, this sense of self after death, but it is by no means weaker.