Lecture VI

Today we want to follow human beings from their death to a new birth and see how what comes from their past life is transplanted into the next. After death, human beings leave their physical bodies behind as corpses and surrender them to the earth. The etheric body, astral body, and ego withdraw from them. At this moment immediately after death, the entire past life from birth to death appears before the soul as if in a long series of images. However, this tableau of memories does not quite resemble the experiences themselves that one had here. For there, the experiences were linked to feelings and emotional impressions, and the soul was inwardly interested in them. Now, however, all these experiences appear before the soul as a sum of external, objective experiences. All the suffering and joy that were once associated with them are now silent. This picture of life stands before the soul like something foreign. The moods are missing. I then see myself and my relatives in an objective panorama of images. This image remains before the soul until the etheric body separates from the astral body. The etheric body then becomes the second corpse that the human being leaves behind. This etheric body gradually dissolves into the general world ether. If, as a clairvoyant, one observes a person with a crude emotional life in this state, one will notice that it takes a long time for their etheric body to dissolve. With an idealist, on the other hand, it happens quickly. However, one will see almost no dissolution at all when observing a secret student or even an initiate after death.