II. Three Aspects of the Human Being

The spiritual aspect of the human being also exists in three parts. When we want to understand the human being spiritually, we must in the first place take note of waking experience, which we all know as a state of spiritual life and which is a part of us from waking until sleeping. Another spiritual state, sleeping life, exists from the time we fall asleep until we awaken. Finally, we have a third state between those two, which we encounter at the moment of awakening, namely, dream life. Waking, dreaming, and sleeping are the three aspects of spiritual life. But we should not associate trivial ideas about these things with a genuine understanding of spiritual life. Instead we need to acquire a sense of how that sleeping spirit actually exists. We can speak of sleep as a state when a human being becomes motionless, when he or she no longer perceives sense impressions, and so forth. But we can also try to see things from a different perspective.