Terrestrial human beings are so-called physical beings and they experience a physical existence, that is to say an existence in which they have the freedom to juggle with physical matter in every possible solid, liquid or gaseous state. These days, ray-formed matter is also playing steadily more and more of a dominant role in the everyday life of human beings in the form of the many different kinds of electro-magnetic forces with which human beings can affect the physical substances and generate particular forms of manifestation of energy that are of great practical significance. By means of technology humans beings can produce light, sound, heat and the power to drive machinery, and they have become so used to these phenomena that they give no thought whatsoever to what it is they are actually working with. It is just electricity. But what is electricity? No professor is able to answer this question. This statement is in no way intended to be disparaging about people who are researching into physical matter; on the contrary it is perfectly natural that physical researchers are unable to say what electricity is. Electricity belongs to the region that forms the boundary between the physical and the spiritual worlds, and of these two worlds physical researchers acknowledge the existence of only the physical world because here they can produce "proof" by weighing and measuring and by estimating speed, volume, wavelength etc., which they cannot do when they are attempting to understand the spiritual world. This is the reason why they say quite simply that the spiritual world does not exist.

Even though physical science has great authority and is one of the main causes of the strongly materialistic attitude characteristic of people in the West today, there are however many people who neither want, nor are able, to let go of the thought that behind the physical world there exists a spiritual world. Can a human being exist and experience without a physical organism? To receive an answer to this question is one of the greatest wishes of the seriously minded human being. In order to understand that this question has to be answered in the affirmative one must first and foremost get to know that form of existence and experience that takes place with the help of the physical organism. When one begins to understand the universal laws and principles that lie behind our physical existence, one also begins to be able to understand the existence that does not make itself known through physical matter.

So what is physical existence? Physical existence is a spiritual experience of the I's conquest of solid matter. But in order that the I can conquer solid matter there must exist another kind of matter with the help of which it is able to bind and control physical matter. Such matter does exist but human beings experience it so much as a habitual function that they completely fail to take account of it as it really is. This of course means that to them it is inevitably a mystery how the living beings' experience of life comes about. The matter that forms the connecting link between the living being's I and outer solid matter is nothing more than such an everyday thing as the matter that makes up the living being's consciousness. It is the individual's thought matter.

Each individual governs its thought matter partly through automatic functioning and partly through an awake, day-conscious exercising of its will. This thought matter constitutes the ordinary matter of the universe in its fourth state, the ray-formed state, and this state corresponds to such phenomena as electricity, radio waves and cosmic radiation. Just as these types of matter are able to pass through solid bodies, the living being's energy of will and thought matter can penetrate the other three of the universe's states of matter, the solid, the liquid and the gaseous. This type of matter is therefore perfectly suited to be the connecting link between the I and the I's juggling with the physical substances. Nowhere in the universe can there be found any example whatsoever of physical matter that is not "permeable" to spiritual or ray-formed matter. Spirit can penetrate all other types of matter; even the most physically dense block of granite or the hardest diamond can be penetrated by thought or consciousness. And on closer consideration, this is not so remarkable. Physical science has long ago demonstrated that even the most solid or the hardest substances are made up of small particles between which there are spaces that are enormous in relation to the size of the particles. In the space between the particles there exists a releasing of positive and negative force or a manifestation of energy. This force or power is not visible, only its effects are visible. It is thought power released by an invisible will, behind which is to be found an invisible I.

From physical research you are already familiar with the small particles that make up physical matter and you have given them names such as atoms, electrons and protons. Physical science is able to recognise these particles only as physical, just as it acknowledges only the physical side of the human being. Seen in a cosmic perspective, however, these so-called particles also have a spiritual or ray-formed aspect. They send out and receive energy, they are living beings each with its own consciousness and will power; in principle they are therefore just like terrestrial human beings. If we turn our thoughts in the opposite direction, not inwards into matter, but outwards into the universe, we meet our own Earth, which, together with other planets, is circling round the centre of power, light and warmth that we call the sun. Is it not a fact that what we are witnessing in the relationship between our Earth and the sun is an invisible force, whose effects are many times stronger than physical forces? Our own Earth has for millions of years been spun forwards in space at a speed that to us is unimaginable. When faced with such a force everything physical on the Earth fades into insignificance. Millions upon millions of tons of granite, metal, water and air are continuously and with immense precision borne through space by invisible forces, and at the same time these forces are the cause of great changes, both inside the Earth and on its surface. And yet our globe is a mere dwarf compared to other physical globes in the universe, and our sun is not particularly impressive in size either compared to many other suns that send out energy towards the cold planets that encircle them that, as a result of the energy that is sent to them, are transformed into habitable worlds where yet more invisible forces set to work binding matter into particular combinations that appear as plant and animal organisms, which are "occupied" by spiritual forces, in other words, which are tools for spiritual beings' experience of physical matter.

Both the Earth globe and the solar system are living beings, that is to say, spiritual power centres that with the help of ray-formed matter attract and build up organisms out of combinations of physical matter. It is not only human beings that have to be taken into consideration regarding the question of whether living beings can exist without a physical organism. The same applies equally to beings in micro- and macro-cosmos, to microbes, stars and galaxies. Everywhere a spiritual force penetrates and "occupies" physical matter, and this force must of course exist before the combination of matter takes place; the ability to build logically must exist before the appearance of the physical organism with all its ingenious details. Who is this genius who has built up the Earth globe? It is the living being that was also a spiritual reality before the physical Earth was condensed out of cosmic stellar mists and that we would call the Earth globe being. This ingenious building up of an organism has only been able to come about through the Earth globe being's cooperation with other living beings that also possessed a burning desire to build up organisms in physical matter in order to thereby experience a physical world. Among these other beings that in relation to the Earth globe being's consciousness made up and still make up a micro-cosmos, were and are the terrestrial human beings, who are the most highly-evolved physical cells in the Earth globe's physical organism. Just as the cells in a terrestrial human being's organism are changed many times in the period between conception and death, the cells in the Earth globe being's organism are also changed a great many times in the course of its present incarnation, which, on a human timescale, stretches over millions upon millions of years.

Just as the Earth globe being, with both its ray-formed thought matter and its ability to build up an organism, existed before the Earth globe came into being, both we and our cells, together with our respective thought matter and abilities to create, existed before our organism was created. The cycle of the cells in our organism and our own birth and death within the Earth globe being's physical organism are in principle exactly the same. Microbes, plant beings, animals, humans and planets as well as solar and galactic systems exist as spiritual beings that juggle with spiritual matter before they incarnate in or "occupy" physical matter with the help of spiritual or ray-formed matter, and they also exist after their so-called death, which is not a death at all but merely the I's withdrawal of its consciousness matter, that is its thought matter, from the physical matter. So which world do the beings live in before they are born and after they die? In a world of thought. And if this world of thought did not exist, no physical world with logical combinations of matter, with shapes and colours, would be able to exist at all. The exquisite beauty of crystals, the wonderful construction of flowers and trees, the ingenious formation of the organisms of both animals and human beings, all these would not exist without first having been planned and thought out in spiritual matter. The giant oak tree is already to be found in the little acorn, and the human being that is about to be born works as an invisible spiritual reality to build up its organism in its mother's womb immediately following conception.

Does this mean that the being that is about to be born thinks: now I am going to make a skeleton, now I am going to make the eyes, the heart or the lungs? No, it does not. As mentioned at the beginning of this lecture, each individual governs its thought matter partly through automatic functioning and partly through an awake, day-conscious exercising of its will. At the time of incarnation it is the automatic functioning that is at work. A terrestrial human being has been born so many times that it has evolved an ability to manifest this process without day-consciously exercising its will. There is nothing unusual in this; on the contrary, in our present physical organism we can experience, side by side with the day-conscious functions of the will, a whole series of automatic functions that are just as useful and logical as they would be if they had been guided by will and reasoning. They are energies associated with occupation that are bound in a process of continuous repetition. In a way they are like a watch that has been wound up and that goes on working as long as it has been wound up. The "mainspring" in these automatic functions is identical to what you, through my cosmic analyses, know as a "talent kernel". These talent kernels occur wherever the individual has to repeat over and over again its manifestations. Everyone knows that such manifestations become habits that can eventually be so strong that there is no need for there to be any awake, day consciousness present for them to find expression. This means that you have gained an independently functioning centre for this talent kernel in the brain and nervous system. But of course it is not only in the physical organism that these centres are to be found, they are "remote controlled" in the sense that behind each and every talent kernel there exists a talent kernel made up of spiritual matter. And this is the reason why the living being does not lose its abilities and talents when it dies; these abilities and talents are not physical but spiritual realities connected with the being's thought world.

All talent kernels are rooted in that organ that lies beyond the senses in the living being's super-consciousness, and that I in my cosmic analyses call the "fate element". From the fate element, which is the individual's "ability storehouse" where abilities and talents that have evolved over millions of years are stored along with budding abilities within new areas of interest, the individual occupies both the spiritual and the physical matter with its will power. It builds up, maintains, breaks down and builds up again spiritual as well as physical organisms in cooperation with other living beings in macro- and micro-cosmos, in such a way that the living beings constitute respectively universes and building materials for each other. The living being does not exist in, but outside matter. It creates and experiences through it. We are all invisible beings and can only experience each other through the effects we create in spiritual and physical matter. If the living being was not outside matter, it would never be able to be "born" or "die", it would not be able to wake up or fall asleep, it would not be able to say "I" or "it".