II. The Physical World and the Moral-Spiritual Impulses

But when he has passed through the gate of death he actually enters that world and there continues with the weaving of the pattern traced by the life he led between birth and death. But now ha weaves in such a way that he has not, on the one side, spirit free of matter, destined at some time to disappear in respect of its spiritual-moral impulses, for instance when the earth reaches the state of entropy (Wärmetod). He enters a world where that which between falling asleep and waking had appeared to him in images, as it were, in a Fata Morgana of soul-and-spirit, is now part of a real world, in which there is no duality between spirit and matter, in which spiritual substantiality perpetually penetrates the substantiality that has a resemblance to the material; where the laws of nature do net operate by themselves but merely form the lowest grade of the spiritual laws; where there are not mere abstract laws of the spirit-realm, but where the processes and laws of the lower spiritual grades already play into the processes—which are like material processes—operating at that level. Into this world man enters, to start on his way along the path between death and a future birth.