13. The Three Realms of the Dead: Life Between Death and a New Birth

In all that plays into waking life as dream or sleep, the dead are living. They live with souls who are incarnated in physical bodies on the earth. They live in them just as we live within the plant world, except that we are not inwardly bound to the plant world as the dead are to our feelings, emotions, and will impulses. They live continually in all of that. This is their second realm. While here we unfold our feelings and sensations in human life, the dead live in this life continually, and indeed in such a way that the fluctuating, which I have just been describing as the strengthening and weakening of the will, as the increasing or declining of the will of the dead, has a certain relation to what here on earth the so-called living are dreaming and sleeping through as feelings and will impulses.