This applies in the beyond also to the worldly nobility or to the worldly lowliness. In the ocean slime of the inexorable eternity they will continue for a long time, fancying to be what they once were in the world. There the emperor will fancy to be emperor and the beggar, with the claim for compensation, a beggar. In spite of that, in the great Reality both will share the same fate in the ocean slime of eternity. Only the poor man should go through fermentation sooner, where his nature will be filled sooner with the true, innermost little bubbles of humility, which will then pull him out of the mire, carving him up to eternal light and life, than the emperor or some other great man of the world. – Beyond the Threshold, Introduction, Paragraph 8