43. Consciousness – Life – Form

When dreamless sleep sets in, the world of images disappears. The physical body appears to lie there completely unconscious; in reality, however, its state of consciousness is only one that is even duller than in dream-filled sleep. The power that generates images has also left the physical body. Therefore, only the insights of the awakened can provide enlightenment about this state. The unawakened lack the perceptions about it. For the awakened, however, the image-generating body, which was previously loosely connected to the physical body, appears to be lifted out of it. And it is now not inactive, but has the task of restoring the physical body's energies, which are showing signs of exhaustion due to fatigue, to their proper strength. This explains the refreshing effect of healthy sleep. The physical body sinks into sleep exhausted. In this moment it surrenders its self-awareness to higher beings. In the intermediate state of dream sleep, the soul still remains in a loose connection with the physical body. The characteristic of this soul is its creativity. With the moment of waking up, it begins to apply its creative power to processing the perceptions mediated by the senses into the human inner life. At the moment of falling asleep, external sensory perceptions cease. In the intermediate state of dreaming, the creative process is still shaping itself into the symbols described; then these symbols also fall away; the soul applies its entire creative power to the body, which it now works on from the outside. - Anyone who wants to disregard the communications of esoteric science could, from the fact of refreshing himself in the morning upon awakening, see what characterizes the soul's nocturnal activity. The life of the day has something disharmonious and chaotic about it. The things of the physical environment affect people from all sides. Sometimes this, sometimes that, finds its way into their inner being. This disrupts the inner formative forces, which are accorded by their original nature. During the night, this is balanced out again. The soul restores order and harmony. During the waking life, the physical body gradually looks like an air mass, which is permeated on all sides by wind currents, and whose parts move in an irregular manner. When we awaken, however, it can be compared to an air mass that is set into regular vibrations by the rhythm and harmony of a piece of music. And in fact, for the initiate, the soul's work on the body during sleep appears as a resounding of the two. During sleep, the human being immerses himself in the harmony of the soul's life. And this is the same harmony from which he was formed. Before the physical body first opened itself up to the outer world through the sense organs, it was completely under the influence of this harmony, which structured it. This harmony permeates the whole world as the harmony of the soul. Man is surrounded by its sounds just as he is surrounded by the images described above. Just as this world of images becomes perceptible to the awakened one through schooling as his real environment, so too, on a still higher level, this third world. It begins to resound and resound around him. And in these tones, the meaning of the world reveals itself to him. Just as the form of the physical world arose out of the images, so these forms received their inner meaning and essence from the sounds described. From this point of view, all things are sounds that have become form.