The Ego-consciousness of the So-called Dead

Through spiritual science, we consider, to begin with (and that is a good thing) the human being such as he stands before us, here, in the physical world as an expression of his whole being. We must depart first of all from the manner in which the human being presents himself to us in the physical world, and for this reason, I have frequently pointed out that we obtain, as it were, a general view of man's whole being if we contemplate him so that we first take, as a foundation, his physical body, which we learn to know externally in the physical world through our senses and the scientific-dissection of what we perceive through the senses. We then proceed, by studying that form of organisation which we designate as our etheric body: this already possesses a super-sensible character and cannot, therefore, be contemplated with the aid of the ordinary intellect, which is bound to the brain, and is consequently also inaccessible to our ordinary science. The etheric body is an organism having super-sensible character, concerning which we may say that it was already known to men such as Immanuel Hermann Fichte, son of the great thinker Johann Gottlieb Fichte, to Troxler and others. Indeed, man's etheric body can only be grasped through imaginative knowledge owing to its super-sensible character, but as far as imaginative knowledge is concerned, it can be contemplated externally, just as the physical-sensory body can be contemplated externally through our ordinary sensory knowledge.