V. Processes in the Human Interior

In the areas corresponding to sensory experiences, something was given that could be visualized as a perimeter along which the individual forces were distributed, which manifest themselves in the sense organs as their effects. In the regions corresponding to the life processes, the picture could be chosen so that the individual corresponding forces run over each other. One must say “run over each other”; for the individual processes do not interpenetrate. Respiration, for example, comes close to the process of maintenance because the latter must continually rebuild the organ of respiration. But the respiratory process itself is not changed by the influence of the process of conservation. The two processes – breathing and the process of conservation – thus work past each other. This is different for the processes of movement, desire and “image sensation”. These three processes work in the following way. Image sensations are effectively generated in desires; desires live on in the impulses of movement. It is therefore justified to say that when an image sensation meets desire, the former permeates the latter, and the content of the image sensation lives on in the desire. Likewise, the desire lives on in the movement - together with the image sensation. Thus the forces of the world out of which the astral body is formed can be visualized in such a way that one thinks of them as three force-structures: that structure which corresponds to the image-sensations acts on that which pours out the longings, and in the structure for the movements the effects of the first two structures then live on.