Fourth Lecture

The words themselves must be transformed, strictly speaking, because everything is completely different in the spiritual world. And to express it figuratively, yet more than figuratively: when a being from the spiritual world enters into physical embodiment, it must be prepared to gradually learn — as even a child must learn — to look outwards through the physical senses, to receive a world from outside, to become an I that receives the world from outside. When a being enters the spiritual world from the sensory world through the gate of death or in some other way, it must accustom itself to saying to itself: You are an I, but an I that does not live in isolation in the world, that always experiences something inwardly, just as it has experienced the memory images that emerge from the depths of the soul. But now you know: what emerges are the ideas, thoughts, and feelings of other beings who live with you in the spiritual world. Just as impressions from the sensory world and sensory beings enter us from outside, so the ideas and feelings of beings in the spiritual world arise within us. But we know that these ideas and feelings that arise within us from what is then essential to us come from spiritual beings who are with us. There we are in the spiritual world, and an idea arises within us, the idea of a being whom we must love, a being who inspires us to accomplish this or that in the spiritual world. Where does this idea come from, how does it arise within us, like memories here? It comes from this: another being, a being from the spiritual world, has approached us. We do not see it from the outside; we know that it is there because it sends what lives within it into us. We are introduced, we are perceived; that is how we should speak of what lives in the spiritual world. This does not make the experience in the spiritual world more abstract or nebulous; it only makes it all the more vivid. What we experience in the spiritual world becomes as alive as what we have in our immediate surroundings in the physical world. So we must familiarize ourselves with the very different way of living together with the beings who are in the spiritual world.