Even though there has been a strong decline among people nowadays in the belief in "purgatory", where the soul after death is roasted and burned in tongues of fire by devils and evil spirits, there does, however, still remain so much of this old superstition in the subconsciousness that it can contribute to the creation in people's minds of a fear and terror of death. It is very important that terrestrial human beings eventually overcome their fear of death, and it is therefore necessary to analyse carefully those states of thought that can bring this fear about, and try to overcome them using one's will and the power of one's thinking.

At a time when human beings had been living for thousands and thousands of years in harmony with their own instinct for self-preservation, the spiritual reality, which would later be given the name purgatory, began to dawn, like a tiny, weak flame, in the minds of terrestrial human beings. Eventually it became a fire that could not be put out. Its flames became stronger and stronger and burned their way into the beings' physical organisms, from where they spread to the whole of human beings' physical world. One culture after another has been devoured by its flames and today it envelops the whole Earth. Today we call the belief in purgatory ancient superstition, but the truth is that humankind, in this century more than ever before, has had to flee from its effects. As refugees on the highways, hunted down by lethal bombing from aircraft and machine gunfire, thousands of people have been forced to flee their homes in bombed-out cities, leaving behind them the corpses of relatives and friends. No image from the Middle Ages of the horror and torment of Hell or Purgatory can surpass the Hell, Purgatory or Doomsday that modern warfare is forcing humankind to undergo. In utter despair wives and mothers are crying out, "Where are our husbands, where are our sons?" And amidst this Armageddon, the cries come back of other wives and mothers, "Your husbands and your sons have been sent out to murder our husbands and our sons, and now they have all been either slaughtered or wounded". Thousands of men have died as unknown soldiers on the battlefields. No one heard their sighs as they lay dying, no loving hand closed their eyelids, no grave marks the final resting place of their organism. Today one need only mention the words, concentration camp, and thoughts of indescribable terror and human suffering arise in our minds. Is this not a hell or a purgatory created by human "devils", practising the most horrific, refined form of sadism? And in the reeking atmosphere left behind by the world conflagration there follow epidemics, inflation, shortages, hunger, unemployment, depression, despair and hopelessness. In truth, here all hope has been abandoned, which is a sentiment that according to ancient tradition is written above the "gates of Hell".

But it is certainly not common practice to treat that part of the fate of humankind that has been described here as Hell or Purgatory. Through religions, human beings have become familiar with the fact that there is something that can be experienced "beyond death", but as human beings have had no knowledge of what death and "the kingdom of the dead" is, they have not been able to gain any real idea of what Hell and Purgatory are either. It is certainly true that a human being, during the first period of time after its I and consciousness have been freed from its physical organism, can experience something that is not particularly pleasant, and it is this experience that is commonly referred to as Purgatory. But this experience does not in fact take place after death since it is based on thoughts that are to do with the physical world and not with the spiritual worlds, which is where life after death occurs.

It can come about in spiritualist circles that one comes into contact with unquiet spirits, and one can even see it as one's mission to help these human beings that certainly no longer have a physical body, but that have still not died from the ideas of the physical world. Losing the physical organism is merely the introduction to the process of dying; thereafter comes the separation from the physical sphere of thought. Physical existence would not be a sphere in which one could experience if there did not exist behind it a sphere of thought, through which creation and experience could take place. Experiences in the physical world pass through the physical organism's sensory tools forming impressions and pictures of our experience in our sphere of thought. As long as we live in the physical world, we can give expression to all of this through language. Language gives expression to the details from the sphere of thought behind the physical organism. Thoughts are internal, whereas the language in which they are clothed is external. If we were to become suddenly dumb, we would have great difficulty in contacting our physical fellow beings, all the more so if we were not able to write to them either. But even though we were suddenly to lose the ability to give our thoughts an outer expression, that would certainly not mean that we would have thereby lost the ability to think. At this moment we can close our eyes and conjure up within ourselves images of green forests, a sky with scudding clouds, streets and houses, people and animals, pleasant as well as unpleasant events.

A person can suddenly be stricken with a guilty conscience when they think about a certain event; another person can be filled with anger or bitterness when they think about someone they cannot forgive. All this can take place in a fraction of a second, without the person having to give expression to it in spoken or written words. The person lives completely in their world of thought, just like they do when they have left their physical organism, the only difference being that when the separation between the body and the soul has taken place, the being is without the possibility of giving expression to its thoughts in the physical world. In the case of the being whose physical organism has become a corpse, it can still think, but the connection to the control panel or substation, which means the physical organism's brain and central nervous system, has been broken. The consciousness that expressed anger and love, bitterness and gratitude, sorrow and joy through a physical organism still exists, and it is made up of electrical wavelengths, but the electric motor or the physical body has broken down. What the being, while it was living in the physical world, perceived as an inner world of thought, now becomes a world of living pictures that surround it. It is therefore of great importance which thoughts a human being has when it leaves its physical body, because that world of thought then becomes its first sphere of experience. One can call this sphere of thought its physical soul, but this physical soul will not always envelop the being. A physical foetus in its mother's womb is enclosed within a foetal membrane, but this is no longer the case once it is born. In the same way one can say that the being that has left its physical body and is about to be born into the spiritual world is, before this birth, enveloped in a spiritual foetal membrane, its own physical world of thoughts, which after a period of time, it will be freed from. Only then will the being have "died" from the physical world.

When one is born into the physical world one normally has two parents that are one's physical guardian angels, one has a midwife and later on one has teachers and helpers who offer advice and assistance through words and deeds in order that one can get to know how things work in the physical world, thus making it easier to look after oneself. The same principles also apply when one is born into the spiritual world. Here there are also midwives, and guardian angels who are like loving parents, and there are teachers and friends who act as guides with respect to many things. In the physical world we have to learn to walk and to maintain our balance in an upright physical body, with our feet pointing towards the centre of the Earth, and we have to learn to find our bearings. When we are born into the spiritual world there is naturally also a process of adaptation that we have to undergo. There we have to learn that we no longer need to walk on firm ground. But this does not mean that we will have angel's wings; that is a terrestrial concept, a product of the physical soul. In the spiritual worlds it is not something under us that is the fixed point, it is something "in us", our own I. Our I with its creative ability and its consciousness is a field of electrical power, and it can – depending on what it is on a wavelength with – experience the spiritual spheres and the beings that live there. In the first period of time after the connection with the physical body is broken, the being does, however, experience the sensation of walking on something solid – similar to the experience we can have in dreams – but it is helped by guardian angels to get used to the far greater freedom of movement that there is on the spiritual plane. There, all one need do is think in order to move the surroundings towards oneself, in contrast to the physical world where one laboriously has to move one's physical body towards the surroundings one wants to be in contact with.

The aforementioned physical soul that surrounds the being in the intermediate state like a kind of foetal membrane is made up of thoughts that are focused on the physical world. If they are bitter and full of hatred or anxious and filled with sorrow or concerned with a very bad conscience, it is quite clear that the being that is surrounded by such thought pictures, which it has created as a result of its experiences in the physical world, is still in the Hell or Purgatory that the physical sphere of thought can constitute. It is actually not "dead" yet. But this foetal being need only concentrate its thoughts towards the Godhead in a prayer for help and straight away the midwives and birth assistants are standing by, ready to help the being out of the mental prison in which it is confined. This they do using suggestion, and it takes place in the very way that would be appropriate for the terrestrial human being in question. This means that it is adapted to the being's environment, evolutionary step and entire way of thinking. The guardian angels appear in the form that is most acceptable to the one who is to be helped. For the birth assistants it is merely a question of adjusting the electrical power of their thought, and the spiritual matter obeys their will and thought.

As long as a human being still does not have cosmic consciousness, it will pass through the aforementioned foetal stage before it is born into the spiritual world. But the fact that it undergoes such a stage does not mean that it will necessarily experience the sort of Purgatory characteristic of terrestrial thinking. For human beings who, while they were living in the physical world, sought to put things in order as their conscience bade them, and who were able to forgive others, and who tried to make the best of every situation without becoming bitter or angry if things did not always go the way they would have wanted, the intermediate state will not be a purgatory. For them it will be a beautiful period of orientation, in which the beings, helped by loving and caring friends who they have known earlier in the physical world, and by guardian angels that are particularly skilled in guiding and helping, become adjusted to experiencing life for a period of time in a radiant world of light. In this world they are permitted to become guardian angels themselves, according to their abilities and qualifications, and later they can investigate, "travel" in and experience the spheres of thought of the spiritual worlds, to the extent that they can with their little child's consciousness, that, it has to be said, they have, compared to the consciousness of the real inhabitants of these spheres. This child's consciousness is the soul that has been freed from the foetal membrane of the physical soul, it is the human aspect of the human being, in other words the feeling, intelligence and intuition that has developed during its life in the physical world.

Of course terrestrial human beings are not meant to go on merely being children from a spiritual point of view. They therefore have to incarnate again in the physical world where they meet resistance and difficulties, which, when overcome by the being, afford spiritual growth and maturity. Every time a terrestrial human being has lived a physical life in which it has used its growing creative ability in order to concentrate on being a benefit and a joy for others, its birth into the spiritual world becomes a happier, brighter and more wonderful experience, and when the being one day here in the physical world experiences what I call "the great birth", it is no longer enveloped in the more or less dark thought clouds of the physical soul. Its human soul will then have become a tool for and a reflection of the sparkling, radiant aura of the higher worlds. Once it has reached such a level of development, the human being introduces God's consciousness onto the physical plane, and death and reincarnation will change in character and will slip smoothly into other and higher forms.