47. The Essence of Man as the Key to the Secrets of the World

The materialistic thinker or even the merely realistic thinker will say: Instinct, desire and so on are produced by the interaction of forces in the human body. What we call the third link would only appear as a result of physical activity, just as the advancing of the hand of a clock appears as a result of the mechanical arrangement of the movement. For someone endowed with clairvoyant consciousness, in the sense mentioned the day before yesterday, this third aspect of the human being is what is called – please do not be put off by the term – the astral body. This is a fact. For while in death the etheric body is clairvoyantly seen to separate from the physical body, thereby leaving the physical body to the physical substances and forces, the developed consciousness of the observer sees the astral body of the evening when the person falls asleep, moving out of the physical body and the etheric body, which remain connected during ordinary sleep, and this astral body, this third link of the human being, this sum of drives, desires, passions, instincts and pleasure and suffering, passes into a world in which the person cannot perceive, but in which he lives between the moment of falling asleep and the moment of waking up.