5. The Beyond of the Senses and the Beyond of the Soul

What one achieves – whereby, in a sense, a substantial element is connected with what otherwise only lives in us as thought – that is what should really be called ether. For the ether is nothing other than a finer substantiality, but one that is so permeated everywhere that thought is at work in it, that in reality thoughts outside fill the ether itself. Only in this way, through the development of consciousness, does one arrive at what should really be called ether. But then one also arrives at a more intimate relationship between one's own soul and the environment. In sensory observation, one can never enter into such an intimate relationship with one's surroundings as in this experience of the observing consciousness, which now really has no boundaries between inside and outside, but flows in and out - into and out of one's own soul life - that which is ether filled with thoughts and thoughts of the soul.