The Human Experience in the Ethereal Cosmos
I have now described this descent of the human being until he enters the planetary sphere. Then there comes a time, after the influence of the moon has already begun, when the human being loses the spirit germ of his physical body, which has already shrunk very much. The expressions are of course rough, but you will not misunderstand them. This spirit-germ of the physical body descends earlier than the human being himself. It is handed over to a pair of fallopian tubes, sinks into a fertilized human germ, and forms the element of growth there before the human being himself has descended. So there comes a time when the human being has already handed over this physical germ to earthly life, when he looks down on the earth, as it were: This is what he will become, the person to whom I will belong. But for a short time the human being still lives freely in the cosmos. Then the human being draws the forces for his etheric body from the ethereal world of the cosmos, so that he then consists of I-being, astral body and etheric body. And after he has acquired his etheric body in this way, he now unites with what has become his physical germ, which he himself first sent down.