IV. The Spirit in the Spiritland After Death

It is evident that the three regions of “Spiritland” just described stand in a certain relation to the worlds below them, to the physical world and the soul-world. For they contain the archetypes, the living thought-beings that take corporeal and soul-existence in those worlds. Only the fourth region is the “pure Spiritland.” But even this region is not that in the fullest sense of the word. It differs from the three lower regions owing to the fact that in them we meet with the archetypes of those physical and soul-relations, which man finds existing in the physical world and soul-world, before he himself begins to take any part in them. The circumstances of everyday life are linked to the things and beings which man finds already present in the world; the transitory things of this world direct his gaze to their eternal, primal foundation: and man's fellow creatures also, to whom he selflessly devotes himself, do not owe their presence there to man. But it is through him that there are in the world all the creations of the arts and sciences, of technology, of the State, and so on; in short all that he has embodied in the world as original works of his spirit. Without his co-operation none of the physical reproductions of all these would be in the world. The archetypes of these purely human creations are in the fourth region of the “Spiritland.” What man develops during his earthly life in the way of scientific discoveries, of artistic ideas and forms, of technology, bears fruit in this fourth region. It is out of this region therefore that artists, scientists, great inventors, draw their impulses and enhance their genius during their sojourn in “Spiritland,” in order during another incarnation to be able to assist in fuller measure the further evolution of human culture. But we must not imagine that this fourth region of the “Spiritland” has importance only for particularly outstanding men. It has importance for all men. Everything that occupies man in his physical life outside the sphere of everyday living, wishing and willing, has its primal source in this region. If a man did not pass through it in the period between death and a new birth, then in his subsequent life he would have no interests leading out beyond the narrow circle of his personal life-conduct to what is common to all humanity.