Thirteenth Lecture

There is another significant life riddle hidden there; it says: We are, so to speak, tearing this phantasmagorical power out of our organism. If we think that we leave it inside, how would we stand in the world? Imagine that everything you detach from your organism, so to speak, so that you can control it at will with your ego, with your personality, everything would surge in your organism. You would not say: I will – but you would feel the surging of your blood that drives you to your movements; you would not say: I take up the pen – but you would feel the mechanism of your arm muscles. You would feel yourself inside, losing yourself in the world, if you did not tear the world of phantasms away from your organism. Your independence would disappear. What moves within you, what lives within you, would be only a continuation within your skin of what is outside. Man must therefore say to himself: the grass grows out of certain forces outside my skin, within my skin my spleen grows, my liver; but I would not feel any difference if I could not tear my phantasms away from what organizes within me. Out there, I do not tear something away; I take the entity in its totality. Within my skin, I tear away the world of my phantasms. In this way I come to my independence. This is how we can find the bed, the substrate for the 'I'-ness in man. That is the other pole of inner experience.