2. The Tree of Life II

As it is now, we meet a person—and we say to ourselves: I know this person. But why do we say, I know this person? Only for the simple reason that we have seen him before in our day's experiences. We combine the one day experience with the other and that is expressed in our saying: We know this man. It would be entirely different if we were to bring in the night experiences in the way I have indicated. Then by day we should know: this or that spiritual being corresponds to him. We should have experienced him in the night, we should be able to identify him with his spiritual background; we should have the physical woven through by the spiritual. And thus would the whole world make itself concrete, woven through with the spirit. By reason of the Luciferic temptation, however, this cannot be, the spirit remains outside, it is not left for us. Ahriman claims it for himself, and so it remains in the etheric body alone (Diagram (b) page 5a). There it remains in the etheric body, it does not come to concrete form, it does not come to the point where one really sees it in the objects. One can only say: I feel in my etheric body that this spiritual element is there as something weaving and living. One feels it in the etheric body but one does not get it out into what one sees.