8. What is Mortal in Man?

When we consider ordinary thinking, how it is stimulated by the external-sensual nature, how it proceeds bound to the process of our brain, then for someone who is able to look at the world spiritually in the sense just indicated, it is something that does not belong to our immortality at all, as it presents itself to us in the mortal body. You realize this when you stand outside of the mortal body in your true essence. Because then you realize: everything that this mortal, this physical body actually is – I would like to use a comparison that is not just a comparison, but that points to the truth – you recognize: this physical body is a mirror that is able to reflect that that a person in ordinary life knows nothing about, that he can only know when he, as it were, peels it out of the physical, that he only knows something when he stands in his immortal self opposite the body. He knows that the body is only a mirror and that thoughts have the same relationship to the body as the mirror images have to the observer. Just as if one had a number of mirrors on the wall and passed by the mirrors and saw one's own figure as long as one was there, but no longer saw oneself when one was not there and saw oneself again when one was there again, so man sees that of which he lives, but of which he knows nothing, when he is in the body and the body reflects its own nature back to him. And thoughts are present in the form in which we have them in ordinary life only as long as the mortal body reflects them. But something else is that which thinks; something else is that which exercises the immediate activity that reflects itself as a thought in the mortal body.