4. The Spirit, Soul, and Body of Man

In this way, one gradually learns to really pay attention to what is otherwise not noticed at all in conscious life. By penetrating into ordinary soul life in this way, one now also becomes able to contemplate the waking state itself through observation, for which the spiritual eye must first be created, just as the physical eye is created for the sensory world. Then one does not need proof for what one sees, but simply looks at it. One comes to regard a view as the correct one, as the immediate one, given by experience, which is spoken of extremely rarely in previous soul teaching, but once very beautifully, namely by the much too little noticed soul researcher Fortlage. Here we come to one of those points that are so interesting for the development of what today wants to appear as spiritual research. This is not something completely new, but something that only needs to be built up in a systematic summary, for which, however, the beginnings have already become apparent in those who have struggled with knowledge in this field here and there. Fortlage once speaks of this, and Eduard von Hartmann reproaches him for saying that the ordinary consciousness of the human soul is actually a continuous, weakened dying. It is a strange, bold assertion, but one that can be corroborated by natural science, even though natural science misinterprets the relevant facts; read, for example, the investigations of Kassowitz. Fortlage comes to realize that what gives rise to consciousness is not based solely on the emergence of growing, sprouting, thriving life, but that precisely when conscious life appears in the soul, the sprouting, growing, thriving life in the human organism must die, so that we carry death within us in our entire life, insofar as it is a conscious one. When we form ideas, something in our nervous system is destroyed, but it is immediately reformed again. Decay is followed by reconstruction. Conscious soul life is based on processes of decay, not on sprouting, sprouting processes of construction. Fortlage says it very nicely: If what always occurs in one part of the body, in the brain, when consciousness is formed, the partial dying, were to affect the whole body each time, as physical death does, then human beings would have to die continuously. For Fortlage, physical death expresses only once what consciousness is constantly based on. Therefore, Fortlage can conclude, albeit only hypothetically because he does not yet have spiritual insight, that if we are dealing with partial death every time our ordinary consciousness arises, then general death is the merging of consciousness under other conditions, which man then develops for the spiritual world when he has passed through the gate of death.