Lecture I

Just picture to yourselves the sleep condition of man. In sleep man emerges, as regards his astral body and ‘I’, out of his physical body and etheric body, he leaves the latter lying on the bed and floats as it were outside them. Now imagine a man in this condition in whom the consciousness awakes: ‘I am an “I”’—that it awakes in this spirit-body, just as it is awake in the everyday state of consciousness. What a remarkable picture would man then present to himself. In one place he would feel, ‘Here am I,’ and perhaps there down below, far removed from the first place, ‘There are my physical and etheric bodies, they are in that place and they belong to me, but I with my other members am hovering outside and above them.’ If at the present day a man becomes conscious in his astral body, outside his physical and etheric bodies, it is then certain, however highly evolved he may be on the earth, that he can do nothing beyond moving freely about here and there in his astral body and being active here and there in the world independently of his physical body, but he cannot as yet do this with his physical and etheric bodies. In a distant future, however, one will be able from outside to guide them, for instance, from a place in the north of Europe to another place and order them to go on further, and then be able from outside to direct their movements. That is not yet possible to-day. Man will, however, be able to do this when he has evolved himself beyond the stage of the earth-evolution on to that of Jupiter, the following stage of evolution of our earth planet, and the following stage of evolution of man. We shall then feel that we can, as it were, direct ourselves from without. That is the essential thing, and that leads to a division of what we have to-day called the human being. Material consciousness can certainly not make much of this. It cannot follow what in a certain respect is already actually working in the external world in a similar way to what in the future will be the case with the human being.