The Nature of Eternity

Nevertheless—as we have seen in previous lectures—it is possible for anyone to speak of the ego, not by focusing his attention on this central point to which he is at the moment relating his conceptions, moods of soul and will-impulses, but by considering something quite different. Here the question arises: Do we meet the ego among all the things experienced in the external world from morning till night? Anyone who asks this question without prejudice can say to himself: No, in all the experiences that come to me from the external world and make their impress on my conceptions, feelings and will impulses, no ego can be found. From nothing in the outer world can I derive the idea of the ego, yet it is there from the moment I wake until I fall asleep. What then can it be that lives in the flow of our concepts, states of feeling and impulses of will and is always to be found there, until sleep wipes it out? Since it is not to be found outside in the world, it must be sought in our own inner world. But our inner world is so constituted that we obliterate what we have in normal consciousness as our ego. Among the innumerable concepts a man is able to form, not one will really throw light on a fact of this kind, except the idea that the thought of the ego arising in normal consciousness and not received from any external source, is not a reality; for realities do not vanish as the idea of the ego vanishes in sleep. If, then, it is not a reality, what is it? Well, there is only one way of understanding it—by assuming it to be an image, a picture, but one outside the world of our experience and comprehensible only by comparing it to someone confronted by his own reflection.