Our Thought Life in Sleep and Wakefulness and in the Afterlife

Then follows the time between death and a new birth, in which we have, so to speak, laid down our entire earthly existence and, as I have already explained to you, prepare for the next earthly life by forming, in union with the beings of the spiritual world, the spiritual germ of our next earthly life, above all of our next physical body. Then there comes a time when the human being again turns more toward earthly life. After the human being has lived for a long time between death and a new birth among spiritual beings and spiritual facts, it is like—of course on a completely different level, but I would like to make it clear by means of a comparison—the state of a person who feels tired and wants to fall asleep. The human being feels how the consciousness that exists in the spirit becomes weaker, how he can no longer work with the beings of the higher world, and his consciousness again turns to an interest in a new earthly life. Just as we sink into sleep every day, where our consciousness becomes completely unconscious, so we sink, in a sense, into pure spiritual consciousness, which fills most of the time between death and a new birth, but now not into unconsciousness, but into a fulfillment of interest in earthly life, now seen from the other side, from the side of the spiritual world, into an interest in earthly life. This interest in earthly life arises many years, many centuries earlier, before we descend into earthly life. We already gain an interest in our coming earthly life when not only our grandfather lives on earth, but also a distant ancestor who lived many generations before us, from whom we are descended. The interest we have had for so long between death and a new birth in the purely spiritual world is transformed into an interest in a succession of generations. At the end of this succession of generations, we ourselves are born. From the spiritual world, we follow our ancestors through long periods of time, at the end of which stand our own parents. In this way, we grow into our ancestry from the spiritual world.