4. The Human Organism Through the Incarnations

There is still another relationship that is very important although we don't notice it much in our everyday life. Our I and physical body interact in building up and depletion, and a similar relationship exists between our astral body and etheric body. The only difference is that the building up, insofar as it comes from the astral body, is completed earlier in life, and the breaking down thus begins earlier. What our astral body breaks down in our etheric body is connected essentially with the fact that we become weaker in the course of life and die when we have become totally decrepit. The relationship between our astral body and etheric body is fundamentally connected with our death. It is only because our astral body gradually consumes the forces of our etheric body; which in turn depletes, consumes, our physical body, that we can die. In a sense, then, we can observe a building up and breaking down in the interaction between our etheric and our astral body in the course of life—although this is not as rapid a succession as the alternation between sleeping and waking, it nevertheless has a certain rhythm.