IV. The Spirit in the Spiritland After Death

The development of the spirit in “Spiritland” takes place through the man throwing himself completely into the life of the different regions of this land. His own life as it were dissolves into each region successively; he takes on, for the time being, their characteristics. Through this they permeate his being with theirs, in order that his being may be able to work, strengthened by theirs, in his earthly life. In the first region of the “Spiritland,” man is surrounded by the spiritual archetypes of earthly things. During life on earth he learns to know only the shadows of these archetypes which he grasps in his thoughts. What is merely thought on the earth is in this region experienced, lived. Man moves among thoughts; but these thoughts are real beings. What he has perceived with his senses during life on earth works on him now in its thought-form. But the thought does not appear as the shadow which hides itself behind the things; it is on the contrary the life-filled reality producing the things. Man is, as it were, in the thought-workshop in which earthly things are formed and constructed. For in the “Land of Spirit” all is vital activity and mobility. Here, the thought-world is at work as a world of living beings, creative and formative. We see how what we have experienced during the earthly existence is shaped. Just as in the physical body we experience the things of the senses as reality, so now as spirit we experience the spiritual formative forces as real. Among the thought-beings to be found there, is also the thought of our own physical corporality. We feel separated from this. We feel only the spiritual being as belonging to ourselves. And when we perceive the discarded body as if in memory, no longer as physical but as thought-being, then its relation to the external world becomes a matter of direct perception. We learn to look at it as something belonging to the external world, as a member of this external world. Consequently we no longer separate our own corporality from the rest of the external world, as something more nearly related to ourselves. We feel the unity in the whole external world including our own bodily incarnations. Our own embodiments dissolve here into a unity with the rest of the world. Thus here we look upon the archetypes of the physical, corporeal reality as a unity, to which we have ourselves belonged. We learn therefore gradually to know our relationship, our unity, with the surrounding world by observation. We learn to say to it “That which is here spread out around thee, thou wert that.” And that is one of the fundamental thoughts of ancient Indian Vedanta wisdom. The “sage” acquires, even during his earthly life, what others experience after death, namely, ability to grasp the thought that he himself is related to all things, the thought, “Thou art that.” In earthly life this is an ideal to which the thought-life can be devoted; in the “Land of Spirit” it is an immediate reality, one which grows ever clearer to us through spiritual experience. And man himself comes to know more and more clearly in this realm that in his own inner being he belongs to the spirit-world. He is aware of himself as a spirit among spirits, a member of the Primordial Spirits, and he will feel in his own self the word of the Primordial Spirit: “I am the Primal Spirit.” (The Wisdom of the Vedanta says, “I am Brahman,” i.e., I belong to the Primordial Being, in Whom all beings have their origin.) We see that what is grasped during earthly life as a shadowy thought, towards which all wisdom strives, is, in the “Spiritland,” an immediate experience. Indeed, it is only thought during the earth-life because it is a fact in the spiritual existence.