10. Between Death and Rebirth of the Human Being

But then there comes a time when you feel your inner light diminishing. This happens when you are approaching the middle of the time between death and your next birth. You experience this as a feeling that your inner light is becoming weaker and weaker; you are now able to illuminate less and less of what is around you. It becomes dimmer and dimmer, and the time approaches when those times become more and more significant in which the inner experience becomes more and more intense, when what one has already experienced in inner experience ebbs and flows. The inner experience becomes richer and richer, and in the overview it becomes darker and darker, until it approaches the middle of the time between death and rebirth, where one experiences what I have called spiritual midnight in my mystery drama “The Awakening of the Soul.” For there one experiences a time when one is filled with the spiritual world, when one awakens, but awakens into the “night,” where one experiences oneself as enclosed in the spiritual world. It is a feeling of the most intense inner experience in the middle between death and rebirth. This inner experience brings about a state that must be said to be unbearable for the soul in the long run. It is a knowledge of a knowledge that is unbearable, that one does not want to have, because it is only knowledge. One feels within oneself: you carry a world within you that you only experience knowingly, knowing that you are cut off from it in reality; you have lost the power to illuminate it. Night falls in the spiritual world. But in this state we have experiences that are otherwise only passively felt in the body during earthly life. They now become something active. And as one lives more and more into the twilight and finally into the night of the spiritual world, the longing for an outer world becomes greater and greater; and while the longing, the desire for the world of earthly life is something that must find its satisfaction from outside, what one experiences as longing in spiritual midnight is a force that develops, just as electrical or magnetic force develops in us under the right conditions. It is a longing in the soul that gives birth to a new force, a force that can conjure up an outer world before the soul again. The soul has increasingly lived itself into a spiritual inner world; this has become ever larger and larger, ever more powerful and powerful. But within it lives the longing to have an outer world around it again. This longing is an active force, and what it brings about is an outer world, but one of a very peculiar kind.