Our Thought Life in Sleep and Wakefulness and in the Afterlife

But if we now look at the whole range of thoughts that fill us throughout our entire earthly life, from waking up to falling asleep, and if we are honest in this observation, in this looking, then we will say to ourselves: The greatest part of our thoughts in our earthly life is in some way dependent on external influences, on sensory impressions, on experiences connected with the material processes of earthly existence. And our thoughts are intimately connected with earthly life, so that we associate the most valuable aspects of human life during our existence between birth and death with earthly life. But when we look at the whole of human life on earth, as we have done from certain points of view in the last lectures I have been privileged to give here, we cannot fail to notice that at least one third of our earthly existence is spent in a thoughtless state. When we look back on our earthly life with the ordinary aids of our earthly consciousness, we actually always only link the experiences of the day to the experiences of the day, leaving out, of course, the experiences of sleep, which remain in the unconscious. But in doing so, when we look back on our earthly life in the usual way, we leave at least one third of our earthly life out of our consideration. This is obvious, because this third, the third of our earthly life that we spend asleep, remains in the unconscious.