10. Between Death and Rebirth of the Human Being

The soul feels itself as it settles into the world of spiritual processes and spiritual beings. And it must be expressly stated that these spiritual processes and spiritual beings, into which the soul lives itself through its own luminous power, also include those human souls with whom one has established a connection in life — but only these, and not those with whom one has not established a connection. So we can say that while up to now, through the years, we have experienced our inner life more in terms of willing desire and feeling will, we now begin more and more to experience the spiritual world outside ourselves objectively; we begin to be able to work in it, just as we work in the sensory world according to our corresponding tasks and experiences. Only one thing needs to be mentioned: what one experiences as an inner luminous power develops gradually, little by little, and, as one might say using an expression familiar to spiritual researchers, cyclically, in life cycles. It develops in such a way that one feels: the luminous power has awakened within you; it enables you to experience certain other beings and processes of the spiritual world; but in a certain respect it wanes again, fades away. When you have used it for a while, it fades away. Just as, to use a comparison from ordinary sensory life, when evening approaches, you feel the sun setting externally, so in the life between death and rebirth you feel more and more how the inner light force wanes. But then, when this has waned, another state sets in. In this state, the soul feels all the stronger in its inner being, which it now experiences repeatedly; but again, if I may use the expression, how inwardly it experiences what it has brought over from the other state, where it had developed its power of light. So it must be said that the states in which we are devoted to all spiritual processes and beings alternate with those in which the inner light dims again and finally goes out completely, but in which our felt will and willed feeling awaken again, but now awakens in such a way that everything we have experienced in the spiritual world, everything that comes from outside, lives on within us as if in remembrance. In this way, we have states that alternate, as if we had once lived in the outer world, then taken the outer world completely into ourselves, so that it appeared as if in the form of inner experiences, living, as it were, completely within us — as if what we had previously experienced externally now lived within us, enclosed by the shell of our soul. There is an alternation between these two states. We can also describe it by saying: at one moment we experience ourselves as if in extended sociability with the whole spiritual world; then this state alternates with inner solitude, with a knowing of oneself in the soul, with having the whole experienced spiritual cosmos within oneself. But at the same time we know: now you live within yourself; what is experienced there is what your soul has retained, and you are now in no connection with anything else. — With the regularity with which sleeping and waking alternate in life, these states alternate in the spiritual world between death and new birth: the state of the soul spreading out into a spiritual outer world — with the state of inner self-enjoyment and self-knowledge, where one feels: now you are alone within yourself, with all external processes and beings shut out; now you experience within yourself. These two states must alternate, for only in this way is the inner light preserved, as the human being is repeatedly referred back to himself. — These processes are explained in more detail in my book “The Threshold of the Spiritual World.” This experience of oneself in cycles, in solitary life and then again in social life, is necessary, for it is through this that the power of light is maintained. And this continues in such a way that one becomes accustomed to ever richer and richer spiritual worlds, for which one needs more and more inner power of light. This goes on for a long time. Then one senses how, by settling into these spiritual worlds, one is subject to a certain limitation that is connected with the abilities one has acquired in life. One soul creates a smaller horizon for itself, another a larger one, a horizon over a larger or smaller spiritual world.