17. What is Revealed When One Looks Back into Former Lives Between Death and a New Birth I

This was not the case in a preceding period. At that time man had not yet progressed very far in the unfolding of his self-consciousness. The power gained on Earth was insufficient to detach him from the Divine-Spiritual Beings and so give him individual existence between death and new birth. Not that man was then within the Divine-Spiritual Beings, but he was within their sphere of influence, so that his will was essentially their will, not his own.