14. How Can We Know About Supernatural Worlds?

Well, the very first thing is that through self-knowledge, human beings recognize themselves as supersensible beings and come to understand their own supersensible nature. And there is much in the soul life of human beings that is connected with the cultural achievements of the present and also of humanity as a whole, which stands in the way of true self-knowledge. In their soul life, human beings are, in a sense, never truly alone with their soul, and they must manage to be completely alone with their soul if they want to recognize it in its deepest essence. Namely, knowing [they are] never completely alone. But there is a certain aloneness that occurs when the human being enters a state in which he does not use his outer limbs, but surrenders them to the gravity of the earth, commands the memory and the mind bound to the senses to stand still — this is the case every day when he enters the state of sleep. And the scientific assertion or insight that, in their physicality, when they have fallen asleep, humans offer nothing that can explain what ebbs and flows in the soul until they wake up, that the processes of the sleeping body do not make anything understandable of what goes on in the soul during sleep — this will be unreservedly admitted by scientific knowledge in a relatively short time, [and] that the contents of the soul submerge into the physical body upon awakening [and thus] — as with inhaling the air — become a part of one's own body. The same is true of falling asleep, since the content of the soul leaves the body, so that between falling asleep and waking up one is actually dealing with an entity that is separate from the physical body, which offers no tools for observing it. One can therefore say that the sleeping soul is alone in a certain sense, that is, it is not connected to the outside world through the intellect, the senses, and memory, as the awake person is. But in normal life, the sleeping person loses consciousness when falling asleep; and so it must be said that [where] the person is alone, they are not in a position to observe the soul dwelling in the body. This is also what makes true self-knowledge impossible for the ordinary person.