Lecture I

As you know, the world bordering upon that known to our ordinary consciousness is the so-called world of Imagination. The world of Imagination is far more inwardly mobile and flexible than our physical world with its clear-cut lines of demarcation and its sharply defined objects. When the veil formed by the physical world is broken through, we enter an ethereal, fluidic world, and when we experience this first spiritual world, the feeling arises that we are outside the physical body. In this spiritual world we are at once conscious of a new and different relationship to the physical body; it is a relationship such as we otherwise feel to our eyes or ears. The physical body in its totality works as if it were a kind of organ of perception; but we very soon realize that, properly speaking, it is not the physical but the ether-body that is the real organ of perception, The physical body merely provides a kind of scaffolding around the ether-body. We begin, gradually, to live consciously in the ether-body, to feel it as a sense-organ which perceives a world of weaving, moving pictures and sounds. And then we are aware of being related to the ether-body within the physical body just as in ordinary life we are related to our ears or eyes.