Third Lecture

We go through the world as beings of the physical plane and never have anything of ourselves but a mirror image. We live in the world; but insofar as we are conscious, we have before us, not the living fact, but the reflection of this living fact. We live as mirror images among mirror images; and what we learn to recognize through spiritual science – that we live as mirror images among mirror images, as Maja among the components of the great Maja – is what man feels when he feels the powerlessness of all spiritual experience in the face of the fully-fledged reality. In everyday life, a person does not say to himself, “I am a reflection among reflections,” but he does feel it, and he feels it most keenly when he asks himself, “How can I, with this reflection, attain the real, fully-substantial existence?”