Eighth Lecture

Perhaps it will become most clear to us through the following discussion. If we look at the human being schematically and have any organ, lung or liver in him, we have forces in such an organ. These forces are not merely inner human forces, these forces are world forces. And when everything that is the external physical world and appears to us as the physical world, when all this has once disappeared with the end of the earth, what now exists as the inner forces of our organs will continue to work. One might be tempted to say that everything our eyes can see and our ears can hear, the whole external world, will fade away with the end of the earth. What covers our skin, what we carry within us, what is enclosed by our organization, is what spiritually contains that which will continue to exist when the external world that our senses see will no longer be there. In essence, something works within the human skin that lives beyond the earth; within the human skin lie the centers, the forces of that which works beyond earthly existence. We do not stand as human beings in the world merely to enclose our organs for ourselves; we stand in the world as human beings so that the cosmos itself is formed within our skin. In that which our ordinary consciousness does not reach, we enclose something that does not merely belong to us, that belongs to the world. Is what belongs to the world built out of the chaotic processes of waking dreaming?