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Updated: June 10, 2025
Not only does the life of man affect the conditions of the physical world from the spirit-land; but vice versa, activity during physical existence has its effects in the spiritual world. An example may explain what happens in this respect. A bond of love exists between mother and child. This love arises from a mutual attraction caused by the forces of the sense-world.
Forces which before birth the embryo shared in common with its mother’s body, are present independently in the child after birth. But in later life supersensible events, similar to those of the sense-world at physical birth, become perceptible to supersensible observation. The etheric sheath falls away at that period, and then the “birth” of the etheric body occurs.
Just as minerals, plants, and animals surround man in the sense-world, and compose it, so, after death, is he surrounded by a world composed of beings of a spiritual nature. Yet he takes something with him into this world which is not part of his environment there; it is what the ego has experienced in the world of the senses.
For the sense-world is a manifestation of the hidden and spiritual world which lies behind it; and the ego could never attain spiritual happiness through the bodily senses, which are the only form in which the spiritual can be manifested, unless it utilized the senses to seek the spiritual element in sense-experience.
As a plant seed, which is the essence of the whole plant, grows only when buried in another world, the earth, so now that which the ego brings from the sense-world gradually unfolds itself as a seed under the influence of the spiritual environment in which it has been planted.
A plant of the sense-world remains what it is, whatever man’s soul may think or feel about it. This is not the case, however, with the images of the psycho-spiritual world, for these change according to man’s own thoughts and feelings. Man stamps upon them an impression which is the result of his own being. Let us imagine a particular picture presenting itself to man in the imaginative world.
The traditions of the ancient Initiates were not only preserved in special places, but worthy successors to them arose, who attracted disciples capable of rising to lofty levels of spiritual vision. Moreover, these races had within them the impulse to create a domain within the sense-world which expresses the spiritual in perfect form through the physical.
The ego must posit itself as an individual, and can accomplish this only by positing itself in a relation of right to other finite rational beings; without a thou, no I. A finite rational being cannot posit itself without ascribing to itself a free activity in an external sense-world; and it cannot effect this latter unless it ascribes free activity to other beings as well, hence not without assuming other finite rational beings outside itself, and positing itself as standing in the relation of right to them; and unless it ascribes to itself a material body and posits this as standing under the influence of a person outside it.
To this end it is necessary, on the one hand, that the results of spiritual vision should be understood; and on the other, that in the observations and experiences of of the sense-world the revelations of the Spirit be recognized. The sixth civilization-epoch will bring to full development the harmony between the two.
Now if a third kind of wish were not added to these two, death would mean only a transition from desires which may be satisfied through the senses to such as are fulfilled by the revelation of the spiritual world. The third kind of desire is that which is created by the ego during life in the sense-world, because it finds pleasure in that world, even when no spiritual element is revealed in it.
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