6. Theosophy and Contemporary Intellectual Life

In this way man also learns to recognize that he, as a soul-spiritual being, is descended from soul-spiritual beings just as he, as a physical being, is descended from his physical ancestors. He must only feel that the soul-spiritual being from which he descends is himself, while he distinguishes his physical ancestors from himself. This opens up the prospect of repeated earthly lives. Through actual observation, he comes to understand that human life truly consists of the life of the soul in the physical body between birth and death, and that this is followed by a spiritual existence, which is usually considerably longer than the physical one. After this spiritual existence, a physical embodiment must follow again, and so on until the cycle of physical embodiments is fulfilled with the goal of the earth itself.