We can understand the meaning of this stay in spirit country only if we are able to interpret properly the purpose of our life’s pilgrimage in an incarnation. While we are incarnated in physical bodies, we human beings work and create in the physical world, but we work and create as spiritual beings. What we imprint on physical forms, materials and forces our spirits think out and develop. Our task as messengers of the spiritual world is to incorporate the spirit into the material world. Only through incarnating in physical bodies can we work in the material world. We must take on physical bodies as our tools so that we have something material through which to work on the material world and through which the material world can work on us. However, what works through our human bodily nature is the spirit. The intentions and directions for our work in the material world come from the spirit.
It is true that one of the tasks of the human spirit, as long as this spirit is proceeding from incarnation to incarnation, is to work in the physical world, but this task could not be completed appropriately if the spirit lived only an embodied existence. The intentions and goals of an earthly task are no more worked out and determined within an earthly incarnation than the blueprint for a building comes about on the site where the builders are already at work. The plan for the building is worked out in the architect’s office, and the goals and intentions of earthly endeavor are developed in the country of spirits, where each human spirit must dwell again and again between incarnations in order to equip itself for work in a physical lifetime. The architect draws up the plan for a house in the office, according to architectural and other standards, and does this without touching actual bricks and mortar. Similarly, the architect of human creativity— the spirit or higher self—develops the necessary goals and capabilities according to the laws of the country of spirit beings, in order to then send them into the earthly world. Only by returning again and again to its own realm will a human spirit be able to bring the spirit into the earthly world by means of its physical-material instrument. In the physical arena, we learn to know the characteristics and forces of the physical world; while working, we gather experience about what the physical world requires of those who want to work in it. We also learn to know the characteristics of the matter we intend to use to embody our thoughts and ideas, although these ideas and thoughts themselves cannot be derived from matter. Thus the physical world is the setting for both work and learning. Afterwards, in spirit country, what has been learned is transformed into the active abilities and capacities of the human spirit.
To make things clearer, the comparison we used above can be taken further. An architect works out a design for a house, and this plan is carried out. In the process, the architect gains experience in a number of ways so that his or her capabilities are enhanced. When the next design has to be drawn up, all these experiences flow into it. The second design is enriched by everything learned in the process of carrying out the first. It is the same with successive human lifetimes. In the intervals between incarnations, the spirit is at home in its own realm and is able to devote itself totally to the requirements of spiritual life. Released from physical existence, it develops in all directions and incorporates the fruits of its experience in previous lifetimes into this process. Its attention is thus always directed to the earthly context of its tasks. To the extent that the earth is the spirit’s field of action, the spirit is constantly working to keep pace with the earth’s evolution, and is working on itself so that in each incarnation the service it performs corresponds to the earth’s situation at that time.
Extract from «Theosophy», by Rudolf Steiner
