74. The Riddle of Death as a Riddle of Life

Then we know that we carry our etheric body, as we say, with us for days after death, and that during this time we have, so to speak, a life tableau of everything we have experienced in a certain relationship between birth and death. But we must also understand this life tableau correctly, really understand it correctly. ... We can perhaps start from life here between birth and death in order to get a mental image of what actually happens to us immediately after death. Not true, we live here in the physical body between birth and death. We have the most diverse experiences. When we are awake, we have experiences every hour, every minute; whether we hear something, whether we do something, we always have experiences. And these experiences accompany our thoughts. As humans, we are thinking beings. Regardless of whether we hear something or do something: We think. Thoughts, mental images accompany what we experience in our physical body. And with these thoughts we work through our inner soul. And these thoughts are not, as we know, merely of a temporary nature, but we can retrieve these thoughts from our soul again and again. We have a memory, which means that a thought that I have now formed does not pass immediately, but I can perhaps still retrieve it from my soul years later. Imagine for a moment everything that you are carrying inside you: You have this whole world of thoughts that you have formed from experiences in the outside world inside you. Imagine that ... then you have to say: you are constantly weaving in your thoughts. What are you weaving into when you think? In truth, you are weaving in your etheric body. So this weaving, which leads to the thought being able to remain in the memory, actually happens in the etheric body, happens correctly in the etheric body.