IV. Rhythm in the Bodies of Man

When a man lies asleep, the physical and etheric bodies lie in bed and the astral body and the ego are to a certain extent outside these. But this is only roughly speaking. A rough idea is sufficient for a number of things, but we want to understand this situation a little more accurately today. The astral body and the ego are not active in the physical body now. But the physical body with its nerves and blood system and the etheric body cannot exist unless they are interpenetrated by an astral body and something resembling an ego. Nor could the etheric body exist without being interpenetrated by higher entities. When the human being's own astral body and ego depart, the activities of these two members have to be replaced. The human body cannot remain without there being an ego and an astral body active within it, so there also has to be an ego and an astral body active when the human being is asleep. To be exact, we would have to say that the ego and the astral body that are active in the human being's sleeping physical body are also within the human being during the day, but their activity is completely overpowered by the activity of the human being's own astral body and ego. If we want to imagine the ego as it is nowadays, in the waking state, we have to tell ourselves that this human ego is within the human body when man is awake, and because of its activity during this time it deprives a larger ego of its sphere of influence. What does our own limited ego actually do during sleep? We can in truth say fairly accurately that this ego that has freed itself in the daytime from the large cosmic ego and that has a free hand in the human body, descends into the cosmic ego during the night and foregoes its own activity. And because the day ego descends into the cosmic ego, the cosmic ego can work unhindered and get rid of all the exhaustion that has accumulated during the day. Because the day ego sinks down into the cosmic ego it is possible for the night ego to be active in an all-embracing way. If you want to imagine it pictorially, you can visualise the relationship of the day ego to the night ego as though the day ego described a circle, passing through the greater part of this circle outside the realm of the great ego and descending into the great ego at night. For sixteen hours on average it is outside the night ego and for eight hours it is within it.