XXII. Men's Freedom and the Michael Age

One must look at this power of Remembrance in the proper light. When Man to-day, in the present age of cosmic evolution, perceives through his senses, this ‘perceiving’ is a momentary lighting-up in consciousness of world-images. The lighting-up comes when the sense is directed upon the outer world; it illumines the field of consciousness, and disappears when the sense ceases to be turned upon the outer world. But what here lights up in the human soul, can have no duration. For unless Man could dismiss it promptly from his consciousness, he would become merged in this content of his consciousness, and lose himself. He would no longer be himself. Only for a brief time—in the so-called after-images, which so much interested Goethe—may this lighting-up from a sense-perception have life in the consciousness. Neither must this content of consciousness become set, or harden into real existence; it must remain image. It must no more become real than the image in the looking-glass can become real.