VI. The Connection Between the Higher Aspects of the Human Constitution and the Physical Body — The Effects of Opium and Alcohol

People easily say, as you have probably heard, that sleep is sweet. But when we are asleep, we cannot really feel the sweetness of sleep because we are asleep! We cannot feel the sweetness of sleep; we can only experience it in retrospect. And because we experience it in retrospect, it may happen that people say that sleep is sweet. But when a person takes poppy juice or opium, he feels this sweetness, because in his body he is actually as if asleep and yet awake at the same time. This allows him to enjoy the sweetness, and he feels this sweetness and feels tremendously well in it. It is as if his whole body is permeated with sugar, with a very special sugar, with sweetness through and through. But at the same time his astral body is free from the physical body, and so he perceives, even if not clearly, all kinds of things. He does not have ordinary dreams, but perceives the spiritual world. He makes great journeys through the spiritual world. He likes that. It lifts him up, as you say, into the spiritual world. When he drinks alcohol, on the other hand, his physical body is completely taken up, right down to his blood. His astral body is not freed. Everything is taken up even more by the physical body. Therefore, when a person drinks alcohol, his physical body takes up much more of him than usual. That is precisely the difference. With opium, the soul and spirit are freed, firstly enjoying the physical body in its sweetness, but secondly it goes on journeys, whereby it enters the spiritual world, albeit somewhat disorderly, but nevertheless into the spiritual world. And the Orientals have much of what they describe in the wrong way, but still from the spiritual world, from opium, hashish and the like.