1. The Human Being and his Relationship to the World

When the human being lives in the physical world alone, and goes to sleep, his Ego and astral body are outside the physical and etheric bodies; his consciousness then is too dull to enable him to see the spiritual world. When he comes down into the physical body which reflects the physical world to him so that he perceives it, this too is a kind of thrust into the abyss; only it is made so easy for us that we do not experience it as a shock. But every morning, if through our exercises we progress to that stage where we can experience something in the spiritual world, if we learn to read in this condition which is like sleep that has become conscious, we also experience what it means to be thrust down, to be divided into three. If we retain our consciousness now, we are also able consciously to penetrate into the things and happenings of the spiritual world that are outside us.