10. Between Death and Rebirth of the Human Being

In a different way from the world of thoughts, what we might call the world of will and the world of feelings changes after death. Actually, after death, one cannot speak of such a separation between the life of feeling and the life of will as one can in life between birth and death; therefore, I must use the expressions: After death, there is something in the soul like a willing or desiring feeling, or like a will completely permeated by feeling. The terms we have for feeling and will do not fit for the time after death. For this time, feeling is much more similar to what one experiences in the will; and the will is much more permeated by feeling than in life between birth and death. While thoughts after death become, as it were, a world outside the soul, it must be said of the willed feeling and the felt will that they are much more closely and intimately connected with the soul. And now, in addition to the indicated part of self-consciousness, the soul begins to experience itself in a strengthened and empowered, felt will and a willed feeling. This forms an infinitely more intense inner life than the inner life of the soul when it lives in the body. When thoughts have receded, the human being initially feels, for a long time, a time that can last for decades, that his inner life is his main world. This inner life becomes so powerful that, if I may use the word, even though it does not really fit for post-mortem life, they must focus their attention on what is striving upward within them as felt will and willed feeling. And after years, this felt will or willed feeling looks back, as it were, on their past earthly life. After death, the human soul feels something like a longing, like a leaning toward the felt will and the willed feeling, and thus toward what the last life had to offer. Every life is such that one can say: it offers us many things, but the possibilities of experience are far greater than what human beings actually take in. When human beings pass through the gate of death, they feel a desire, or they want to feel, to experience everything that they, I cannot say, know, but rather feel: you could still have experienced it. All the undefined emotions, all the possible experiences that life could have brought us but did not, all of this enters into the context of the previous life, into what the soul goes through. In particular, what the soul feels it should have done appears as strong, intense inner experiences. What the soul has done wrong to other people, what it has done against others, all this appears as a feeling of lack of love, of which we are not at all aware in life between birth and death; this is felt intensely.