20. Sleeping and Waking in the Light of Recent Studies

The Macrocosm, as it is today, has indeed become a thing of death. Yet it is through this alone that between death and a new birth man can undergo a life which signifies, compared to the waking life on Earth, a loftier awakening. For it is indeed an awakening, whereby he becomes able fully to control the forces that light up so dimly and fleetingly in dreams. These forces fill the Cosmos, they are all-pervading. From them the human being derives the impulses through which, as he descends on to the Earth, he forms his body—the greatest work-of-art of the Macrocosm.