Our Thought Life in Sleep and Wakefulness and in the Afterlife

When we wake up in the morning and return to our physical and etheric bodies, our ordinary consciousness is very quickly pushed into these bodies, and this ordinary consciousness only becomes aware that external things then begin to make an impression, that we then have sensory perceptions which we process mentally, that we have sensory perceptions of the external objects present. But when a person becomes much more conscious of immersing themselves in their physical and etheric bodies, then upon waking they encounter the thinking that has been going on continuously within them between falling asleep and waking up. They were just not there with their ego and astral body. They think, that is, the physical body and the etheric body are in a continuous thought activity between falling asleep and waking up, but the person with their ego and astral body is outside this thought activity, they do not participate in it and believe that it does not exist. They are in a state of great self-deception about themselves. And since what is beautifully and harmoniously integrated into the whole nature of human beings, indeed into the whole nature of beings, can be recognized particularly well when it is torn out of harmony and appears abnormally, human beings can also come to the conclusion from external experiences, when these arise in the context of the world, that they not only think between falling asleep and waking up, but that they even think more intelligently between falling asleep and waking up when they are not present than when they are present. For when we survey the whole situation, we come to the, I might say, depressing self-admission that our etheric body thinks worse when we, following the ego and the astral body, are stuck in it with our normal consciousness than when we are not stuck in it. We spoil the thoughts that take place in our etheric body by being stuck in it with our ordinary consciousness.