The Dead are with Us

When we enter into relationship with the things in our physical environment we know that only a small proportion of the beings around us in the physical world react to our actions, our manifestations of will, in such a way that pleasure or pain is caused by these actions of ours to beings in our environment. Reaction of-this kind takes place in the case of the animal kingdom and the human kingdom; but we are justified in our conviction that the mineral world (including what is in air and water) and also, in essentials, the world of plants are insensitive to what we call pleasure or pain when actions are performed by us. (Spiritually considered, of course, the matter is a little different, but that need not concern us at this point.) In the environment of the dead all this is changed. In the environment of the so-called dead conditions are such that everything—including what is done by the dead themselves—arouses either pleasure or pain in the whole environment.—The dead can do no single thing, he cannot, if I may speak pictorially, move a single one of his limbs without pleasure or pain being caused by what he does. We must try to think our way into these conditions of existence.—We must assimilate the thought that life between death and a new birth is so constituted that everything we do awakens an echo in the environment. During the whole period between death and a new birth we can do nothing, we cannot even move, pictorially speaking, without awakening pleasure or pain in our environment. The mineral kingdom as we have it around us on the physical plane does not exist for the dead, neither does our plant world. As you can gather from the book Theosophy these kingdoms are present in quite a different form. They are not present in the spiritual world in the form in which we know them here, namely, as realms devoid of feeling. The first kingdom of those we know on the physical plane, which has significance for the dead because it can be compared with what the dead has in his environment, is the animal kingdom. I do not of course mean the individual animals that are here on the physical plane, but the whole environment is such that its effect and influence are as if animals were there. The reaction of the environment is such that pleasure or pain proceeds from what is done. On the physical plane we stand upon mineral soil; the dead stands upon a ‘soil’, lives in an environment which may be compared with the animal nature in this sense. The dead, therefore, starts his life two kingdoms higher. On the Earth we get to know the animal kingdom only from the outside. The most external activity of the life between death and a new birth consists in acquiring a more and more intimate and exact knowledge of the animal world. For in this life between death and a new birth we must prepare all those forces which, working in from the Cosmos, organise our own body. In the physical world we know nothing of these forces. Between death and a new birth we know that our body, down to its smallest particles, is formed out of the Cosmos. For we ourselves prepare this physical body, bringing together in it the whole scope of animal nature; we ourselves build it up.