VII. The Questions of Life and the Riddle of Death I

You have to open yourself to many such images. Then particular experiences appear as pictures, as “imaginations;” they shoot up before us, they face us. With it, you already attain something that you have to treat, however, with caution. Someone who stands on a materialist viewpoint will say rightly, now you have brought it just as far as those who have hallucinations and visions, which are of no value.—Indeed, there is a cliff. People who experience such visions will believe in them like in something real that is much more real than the things that they see with their eyes. There are people who invent the most logical system for their delusions to keep them. There is a term, which explains all that, it is the word “self-love.” Why does the human being believe in these images? Because of self-love; because he himself has developed them; because the person cannot help to identify himself with that which he is internal. A spiritual researcher has to bear this in mind. He has to have such strong will so that he says to himself, what I see is only a reflection of my being.