6. Intuitive Insight in the Happy and Serious Hours of Life

Now there is a remarkable law regarding the relationship between man and his knowledge and perception of the world, a law that, when known, can provide deep insights into many of the mysteries of the human soul. To make this clear in the simplest possible way, I will once more refer to the fact that, through spiritual science, it can be investigated that every time a person falls asleep, his higher being — his I and his astral body — is sent into a spiritual world. In this spiritual world, he is initially unable to perceive anything. But what he sends into this spiritual world really contains at least a large part of what spiritual science wants to draw from the deep sources of existence for daily life from the deep sources of existence. Man is only so constituted in his everyday life that unconsciousness covers what rests in his soul when he is in a dormant state outside his physical and etheric bodies; and when he, upon awakening, carries his ego and his astral body into his physical body and ether body, then this I and this astral body are filled with impressions from external perception, with what the material world transmits to us. The soul is then surrendered to the outer world; and just as during the night unconsciousness dawns on what rests in the depths of the soul, so during the day it is what comes to us in the way of impressions from the material outer world. But does everything that spiritual science wants to bring to human consciousness really rest in the depths of the soul? There is now a law, an important, essential law, which will gradually be recognized as governing all of existence: that which can be beneficial in one state can have a destructive effect when it asserts itself in another state, as it were in another place.