Lecture VII

It is different when human beings partake of the spirit. Then the physical aspects, for instance the inner parts of the head—and the outer part, too, if they are not just looking in a mirror, though even then all they have is an image—remain in the background, whilst the spirit is really experienced, though only in its image. In the conscious mind we inwardly see the spirit, but as an image. Sleeping, and also in waking sleep, we perceive the spirit in its activity, but the essential reality of the perception does not come to conscious awareness; it remains outside.  Fig. 22 So if we see a physical surface somewhere we have to say: the spirit is behind it. We cannot enter into the spirit with the conscious mind. In ordinary consciousness we must look for the spirit inwardly, and we experience it only as image. The great change that happens to human beings is this: At death this reality (left) becomes image, and the images we experience (blue, on the right) become reality. Going through the gate of death, human beings begin to experience as their reality the things they only perceived as images before, and the reality which they slept through until then becomes image—an image, however, in which the next life on earth is in preparation, when everything will be the other way round again.