Third Lecture

This is the more exact process. Here we have another example of how materialism fails to explain everything. The materialist believes that he must look for the cause of thinking in what goes on inside, in the process of putting corpses into the ground. But what actually takes place are processes of secretion of thought, processes of the dead body. And the nervous system is there so that the process of secretion can be produced through the activity of thought. What thought leaves over, what it cannot use, what it expels, is examined by physical physiology. But during the waking hours of the day something takes shape that can be called the dying away of thinking in the physical body. The powers of thought that one develops are used to produce, as it were, casts or imprints of oneself. The forces go into these casts. During the night they do not go into such casts, for then we live, as it were, in the general ocean of spiritual existence. But because we cannot form such impressions in normal life without initiation, our thoughts also dissolve in this general sea. When we want to grasp them in the morning, they have simply dissolved; not even memory can hold on to them.