V. The Dissociation of Human Personality During Initiation

During deep sleep the human soul does not register impressions through the medium of the physical senses. In that state the perceptions of the external world do not touch it. It is, in truth, outside the coarser part of human nature, the physical body, and is only connected with the finer bodies—known as the astral and etheric—which escape the observation of the physical senses. The activity of these finer bodies does not cease in sleep. Even as the physical body stands in a certain relation to the things and beings of its own world, even as it is affected by these and affects them, so is it also with the soul in a higher world, but in this latter case, experience continues during sleep. The soul is then veritably in full activity, but we cannot know of these personal activities as long as we have no higher senses, by means of which we may observe, during sleep, what happens around us and what we do ourselves, just as well as we can use our ordinary senses in daily life for the observation of our physical environment. Occult training consists (as has been shown in the foregoing chapters) in the upbuilding of just such higher senses.