Lecture XIV

If you try to visualise this influence over the physical body, you will not need to go much further in order to picture in your minds as the work of the ego an intricate framework extending throughout the bodily organism; a delicate, weblike scaffolding. This scaffolding in the physical body, like a kind of phantom of man, is always present. We human beings carry with us through life, a framework imprinted into us through our ego-organisation; its structure is most delicate, and indeed it is the forces of the etheric body that insert it into the physical. But in the course of our lives, we gradually forfeit the power of consciously contributing to this structure. Only in people with creative imagination we find a half-conscious, dreamlike remnant of such power.