10. The Supernatural Human Being III

This feeling is a strange and significant realization. One notices that what one has left behind, what one has emerged from, was precisely the foundation of the ordinary self. For the self that human beings call their “I” in ordinary life, the physical organization is the foundation. This self begins with conception, with birth; consciousness of it only begins later. This self, this immediate present self, is bound to the organism; one cannot find it when one leaves the organism. But this is precisely what the full consciousness of this self is based on. Now, however, one experiences this self as self-contained. It would be terrible if human beings experienced as their I what the spiritual researcher experiences as the I in its atomization when he is outside the body. How is this I experienced? It is experienced as having just submerged; for if it has not submerged into the physical body, then the human being is asleep; then the I is outside and he does not experience it. It is experienced in the body, specifically in that part of the human organism that is not the regressive main organism and not the extremities that extend beyond normal development; rather, it is stimulated in the rest of the human organism through the activity of the lungs and heart. It is stimulated by the fact that the human being is inside his organism.