2. Human beings as Spiritual and Soul Beings

When this ego gains strength, when it becomes something else through the exercises I have described, then one also notices what the ego actually is in relation to ordinary consciousness. Today, based on outward appearances, we distinguish between two states in human life: sleeping and waking, and we think that they alternate between day and night. People do not know that something completely different emerges when the soul is truly observed. For we do not only sleep at night, when our consciousness is completely clouded, but part of our being also sleeps during the day, sleeps continuously. The strengthening of the ego is actually, in a certain sense, an awakening, a bringing of oneself to wakefulness in relation to that part of the ego that sleeps continuously. We know nothing about the content of our sleep; we only know that it interrupts our ordinary life. When we look back on our life from birth to death, we actually only look back on our daytime experiences; our nighttime experiences are nothing. They are always something black when we draw in color or white what we experience during the day. When we look at our life in this way, what we are when we are asleep is actually as if it were not there. We see it as excluded from our field of observation. But this is also the case with the ego in ordinary soul life. Basically, it is not there for imaginative and other contemplation; the real ego eludes ordinary soul life because, at its present stage of development, the human being also sleeps during the day with regard to the ego. Basically, we only know our ego negatively in ordinary consciousness; we know it in the same way that the eye sees the dark spot it has inside. We know that there is nothing there. We know about the self in the same way as we know about a black spot on a colored surface. Even though no colors emanate from it, we still see a black spot. In this way, we see that nothingness is surrounded by our ordinary experiences, and thus we have the consciousness of the sleeping self. It is awakened by the soul forces being heightened, as I have described. In this way, what is actually the core of a person's being gradually comes to light, and one learns to recognize the connections of the soul life with the spirit, just as one first learns from natural science, when we are hungry and thirsty, that there is a body in which chemical changes in the blood take place, which are expressed in the soul life as hunger and thirst. Just as the body is connected to the life of the soul through certain processes of which the human being is initially unaware in ordinary life, so, on the other hand, one learns to recognize that the soul is connected to the spirit. While the body is recognized from the outside, the spirit is recognized by becoming aware of the sleeping ego.