Eighth Lecture

Where are we then? This is the first question we must ask ourselves. We are outside our physical and etheric bodies with our ego and our astral body. A simple consideration, which one cannot escape from if one simply devotes oneself to life without prejudice, must tell us: in that which appears to us when we direct our senses to the external world, as the sensory veil of the world, as everything that sensory qualities present to us, in that we are when we are outside ourselves. Only then, in ordinary life, does consciousness fade away. And we feel why consciousness fades when we wake up from this state in the morning. We then feel weak in our body, too weak to hold on to what we have experienced from falling asleep to waking up. Our ego and our astral body cannot hold on to what they have experienced by immersing themselves in the physical and etheric bodies. And by then participating in the experiences that are made through the body, what is experienced from falling asleep to waking up is erased for them. And as I said, only when we have ideas that relate to the external world, or when we have moral intuitions, do we experience something like what must appear to us in an immediate contemplation of what we live in between falling asleep and waking up.