10. Between Death and Rebirth of the Human Being

So, after a person has passed through the gate of death, they have an experience in relation to what we call their thinking, their thoughts. We have a life of thought in the way we live between birth and death, so that we say: thoughts are in our soul, we think. And these thoughts are, at most, images of an external reality between birth and death. When a person has shed their physical body, their thoughts become an external reality in a peculiar way. This is the first experience that the deceased has in the spiritual world: they feel their thoughts as if detached from themselves, as if they were outside, outside their soul, just as in life between birth and death, sensory objects are outside, outside of us. It is like thoughts wandering out into a spiritual outer world. One could say that thoughts travel a certain path; they travel a path in which they detach themselves from immediate spiritual experience in a similar way to the thoughts that become our memories in ordinary life; only that with our memories we have the feeling that they sink into an unconscious experience from which they can be retrieved at the appropriate moment; they detach themselves from present life, but in such a way that we have the feeling that they are within us. After death, thoughts also detach themselves, but in such a way that the entire world of thoughts that a person has accumulated in life between birth and death becomes an objective world. They do not break away in such a way that we are aware of it: they descend into an indeterminate darkness; rather, they become independent in such a way that they then form a spiritual world of thoughts outside of us. In this world, everything we have gained in the last course of life between birth and death in the form of life experiences is present in the form of thoughts, so that we can say to ourselves: we have lived a life, experienced this or that, and thereby become richer in life experiences. This is, as it were, dissolved, as if it had become a kind of tableau of life, of which we say to ourselves: you experienced this in your last life in such a way that it becomes a mental life experience; it surrounds the soul after death. But it does not remain around us in such a way that it appears like fleeting thoughts, but rather it appears as if, at the moment when the thoughts detach themselves from the soul and gain an independent life, they become denser, more alive, more animated within themselves, and form a world of beings. This world in which we then live is the world of our thoughts that have migrated out of us and have an independent existence.