desires of a worse kind
than those of an animal nature, because they do not expend themselves on
objects of the senses but seize upon the spiritual element and drag it
down to a sensual level. Therefore the forms of such beings are more
hideous, more horrible, to spiritual sight than are the forms of the
fiercest animals, in which after all only passions rooted in the senses
are incarnated. And the destructive forces of these beings immeasurably
surpass any destructive rage existing in the animal world as perceived by
the senses. Occult science must in this way enlarge man's view so as to
include a world of beings standing, in a certain respect, lower than the
visibly destructive animal world.

When man has passed through the world of purification after death, he
finds himself in a world the contents of which are spiritual, and which
also creates in him longings which can be satisfied only by spiritual
things. But even now man distinguishes between that which properly belongs
to his ego and what forms the environment of that ego--one might say, its
spiritual outer world. Only that, of which he becomes sensible in this
environment, pours in upon him in the same way that the perception of his
own ego poured in upon him during his sojourn in the body. Whereas man's
environment in the life between birth and death speaks to him through his
bodily organs, after death when all the bodies are laid aside the language
of his new environment penetrates directly into the innermost sanctuary of
the ego. Man's whole environment is now filled with beings of a like
nature with his ego, for only an ego has access to an ego. 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. First of all, the sum of these experiences appeared, as a
comprehensive memory-picture, immediately after death, while the etheric
body was still united to the ego. The etheric body itself is then, indeed,
laid aside, but something of the memory-picture remains with the ego as an
everlasting possession. Just as though an extract or essence were made out
of all the events and experiences which a man encounters between birth and
death, so might we describe that which is left behind. It is the sp