14. How Can We Know About Supernatural Worlds?

But now the question arises: Can the human being nevertheless attain this self-knowledge? It will help us if we consider another state of the soul, not in order to draw an analogy, but to visualize the reality of the state of the soul between sleeping and waking. So [the following] is not meant as an analogy, but as a means of communication [to] point to the actual fact: this is the “state of mind” of the current year. In spring, the uplifting, joyful natural world, the plant world, sprouts forth. We see it sprouting in spring, flourishing in summer, dying in autumn, with the exception of perennial plants; during the winter season, it is taken into its bosom, so that it remains imperceptible as plant growth. Let us now assume that human beings were such that, when spring arrives, they would be able to attain a different kind of consciousness, that their consciousness would be dampened and they would be more unconscious towards summer, only to awaken again when nature has withered and died; that on the side of the earth where it is summer, human consciousness would fall asleep, then they would never be able to have any knowledge of the sprouting and budding plant world. What covers the earth in summer would be an unknown world for humans or for a being endowed with their characteristics, a world that would have no effect on their senses — a supersensible world.