Our Thought Life in Sleep and Wakefulness and in the Afterlife

To illustrate this, I would like to say the following. Due to the circumstances I recently described in Dornach, the anthroposophical movement went hand in hand with the so-called theosophical movement for a time. It never adopted the teachings of the theosophical movement, but only found its audience within the Theosophical Society. But there are also teachings that are known as belonging to the theosophical movement. Superficial people confuse theosophy with anthroposophy. But even though the number of these superficial people is very large, the great, profound difference must be clear to you. I would like to characterize this profound difference with a few remarks. Try to follow closely how theosophical teachings actually work. They also speak of the members of human nature, members of the human being, and even use the same names for the lower members: physical body, etheric body, astral body. But then, when you look at the descriptions, you will find that the physical body is the dense body, then comes the etheric body, something thinner, but still a kind of mist, then comes the astral body, even thinner, a thinner mist, and then you have to climb terribly high, but it only becomes a thinner and thinner mist. Look at how little this literature deals with what is expected of even beginners in anthroposophical literature, I would say, not to imagine the etheric body as something thinner, but as something opposite to the physical body. Just as the physical body fills space, the etheric body takes something away. Physical matter fills space, etheric substance sucks space out. There is nothing of the kind that one always enters thinner mists, but rather one really embarks on the path to spiritual contemplation. This even disturbs many people, because they have nice ways of connecting to the physical world in these increasingly thin mists; one can imagine the whole thing through physical images, so that one can form entire systems, entire worldviews in this theosophical way.