10. Between Death and Rebirth of the Human Being

When we see objects in the outside world through our eyes, we say we see them when light from some source falls on them; we are aware of them because they are illuminated by this light when we see them. Now, as we live our way into the objective state of the spiritual world from the state of feeling back into our last earthly life, we have the experience: You have allowed something from the time of your last earthly life to mature within you, like an inner light, like an inner soul force, and this now gives you more and more the opportunity to see and perceive the outer world of spiritual beings and processes, to live within them. If one can perceive the time of that described state of soul as a kind of weaning away from the connection with the earthly life one has lived through, as a tearing oneself away from it, as a freeing oneself from it, one now experiences that in the deepest interior of this feeling will and willing feeling, that inner world, which is basically the inner world of many years, has matured within oneself — just as the blossom of a plant has matured the seed within itself — this inner light, which one spreads out from oneself like a force and through which the processes and beings of the outer spiritual world become visible. One then knows that if one had not developed this inner light within oneself, it would be dark around one in the spiritual world, and one would perceive nothing. The power that one must apply to overcome the connection with the last earthly life is at the same time the power that must be applied and that is like an inner luminosity. A soul power awakens for which there are no words in the ordinary world, because such a thing exists in ordinary sensory life only for those who penetrate the spiritual world through spiritual research. If I want to use a word for what a person experiences as a power of illumination of the spiritual environment coming from within themselves, I would say: It is something like a creative unfolding of the will, which is at the same time permeated by intense feeling. There is something creative in there; one feels like a part of the universe, but one that is creative in this part just discussed, which overflows into the spiritual world. And one has the feeling: this awareness of oneself as part of the universe makes the spiritual world tangible, knowable, experiential, by experiencing what can be called the “soulfulness” after death and an immersion into what is becoming more and more visible and experiential.