Our Thought Life in Sleep and Wakefulness and in the Afterlife

And what does this equilibrium mean for human beings? If the scales moved independently, they would be able to move around their point of equilibrium without being affected by whether the scales were loaded or not. Since human beings have such a state of equilibrium, they also move as earthly human beings quite independently of what natural science finds to be the causality of the will, the lack of freedom, the causation of the impulses of the will. As true as it is that there is a lawfulness between the right and left beams of the scales, so true is everything that natural science says about the cause of a decision of the will. But the will itself lies in the hypomochlion, in the position of equilibrium. One must therefore first recognize the real essence of man before one can judge whether man is a free being or not. However, this explanation only becomes clear when one understands the relationship of the spirit, on the one hand, to positive matter and, on the other hand, to negative matter, that is, the positive and negative relationships of the human being to matter. Then one finds the region between the two where the human being is realized as a free being. Then one looks into that in which human beings stand out both from causality and from spiritual determination. In ancient times, there was spiritual determination, from which philosophy claimed that human beings must be determined everywhere by the spirit; in more recent times, there has been natural causality. Just as the determinists splashed about in the nervous human being and did not know that something else, something opposite, always brings about a balance, so today's human beings move within natural causality. Both find the lack of freedom in human beings. But freedom lies within.