Lecture IV

This is what goes with us through death. All that rules as will in the depths of our being bears in its deepest inner being the longings to become man. One can perceive this with Imaginative consciousness if one observes the sleeping human being, whose will is outside him, whose will with the I is outside him. In what is to be found outside the human body, the longing is already clearly expressed to return, to awake again, in order to take human shape within the extension of the human physical body itself. This longing, however, remains beyond death. Whatever is of a will nature desires to become man, whereas whatever is of a thought nature and must unite with the thoughts that are so near to the physical life, with the thoughts that actually form our human tissue and bear our human configuration between birth and death—that acquires the longing to be dispersed again, to disintegrate, to become world. This lasts until approximately the middle of the time that we spend between death and a new birth.