Chapter II: The Nature of Humanity

If the astral body were left to itself, pleasure and pain, feelings of hunger or of thirst would come and go in it, but one thing would never come about—namely, the sense of something permanent in all these things. Not the permanent itself, but that which has conscious experience of the permanent, is here called the *I. (We must form our concepts with great precision if misunderstandings are not to arise in this domain.) With the awareness of something permanent and lasting in the changing flow of inner experiences, the feeling of ‘I’ of inner selfhood begins to dawn. The mere fact that a creature experiences hunger, for example, cannot give it the feeling of ‘I.’ On every new occasion when the causes of hunger make themselves felt, hunger arises. The creature falls upon its food simply because the causes of hunger are there anew. The feeling of ‘I’ comes in when the creature is not merely impelled to take food by the renewed causes of hunger, but when a previous satisfaction gave rise to a sense of pleasure and the consciousness of the pleasure has remained. Here it is not only the present experience of hunger but the past* experience of satisfaction which provides the impulse.