Our Thought Life in Sleep and Wakefulness and in the Afterlife

Before we enter a world that is purely spiritual, we must first live through everything that we have unconsciously experienced on earth in our sleep states. In this way, we train our consciousness for the actual spiritual experience between death and a new birth. And at the same time, this backward experience of earthly life is a liberation from earthly life. We do not become free in our consciousness until we have freed ourselves through this backward experience, so that this consciousness can move among the spirits of the higher worlds in a manner entirely appropriate to it. Then we have arrived back at the starting point of our life for the higher world. And then the rest of our life between death and a new birth proceeds in such a way that it is a purely spiritual experience. Just as we live here among physical beings and physical events, we then live in the spiritual world among spiritual beings and spiritual events, among those spiritual beings and their deeds who never descend to earth, among those beings who descend to earth as human beings, who have passed through the gate of death before us, or who follow us. We meet again with all the people with whom we had fellowship during our earthly life. And this fellowship is indeed a very extensive one. For by living through the life of sleep, everything that we only touched upon with people during our earthly life is also included in this fellowship. The fact that we are already in the spiritual world in every state of sleep, but still experience earthly events in reverse as earthly human beings, is precisely what distinguishes this nightly earthly experience of human beings from what they go through when they have passed through the gate of death.