6. The ego-nature and the human form. Dionysos and his band of followers.

From this ego, as the innermost, as the youngest, but also the highest member of the human being, let us now turn to the outermost member, to the physical body. As you know from things I have written or said on various occasions in recent years, the physical body can only be known in its true inner being to clairvoyant consciousness. To ordinary consciousness, to the physically based powers of physical knowledge, the physical body manifests itself only as maya or illusion. When we meet a man, what we see as his physical body is maya, illusion. But there are as many instances of this illusion of a physical body as there are men to be met with on Earth. And in this respect—as maya—our own body is just like that of other men. Thus there is a great difference between the perception of our own ego, of which only one example is given, and the perception of human physical bodies, of which we have as many examples as the people we know on Earth. We only learn to know the ego when we direct our physical faculty of knowledge upon ourselves. We have to look into ourselves with the power of knowledge which we have acquired upon the physical plane if we wish to learn to know our ego.