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

When you imagine something and hold the image in your mind, and later you recall this image, you say you are remembering. But as I have just explained, this is based on something that is happening in the physical organism. It is just that we cannot follow it with our ordinary consciousness. But if we ascend into the consciousness of vision, then we come, as it were, to see what happens behind the memory, what happens in man in the time that elapses from the moment when he conceived a thought that has now disappeared as it were, and lives only down in the physical organism until it is brought up again. All that lives beyond the thought that is remembered is not perceived if one cannot lift oneself out of oneself through the seeing consciousness and, as it were, look at oneself from the other side. So that one not only sees a thought going down and sensing it coming back up, but perceiving everything that happens in between while the thought is going down and coming back up. This is only possible for the inspired consciousness; it is possible for the beholder who has made it possible for himself not only to look outward while living in the physical body, but to look even within the body of man himself while living in the spirit. Thus man reaches, on the one hand, a beyond of the soul, which assures him that he lives in the spirit. But man also reaches the beyond of the soul, which works in what lives unconsciously from the disappearance of a thought until the reappearance of the same, what lives down there as what Eduard von Hartmann calls the “unconscious”, and which he believes can never be reached by consciousness. It cannot be reached by ordinary consciousness because the thought is reflected in the organism beforehand; but if one gets behind this reflection, if one goes beyond oneself and lives in the observing consciousness, then one experiences what really happens in a person between the moment of conceiving the thought and the moment of remembering it. And this we will now hold fast, what man can perceive, as it were, beyond that stream through the seeing consciousness, which is usually limited to him by memory. For we see well: there we enter through the seeing consciousness into a beyond of the soul.