12. The Essence of Spiritual Science and the Knowledge of the Transcendental World

By going even further and deepening our will, we come to grasp the astral human being – it is easy to ridicule the word, the 'astral' human being, but this word is justified, as we shall see presently, we come to take hold of the astral man, the human being who develops from life to life and who then becomes aware that he is no longer bound to his body but is connected with the whole world. In this way, the human being comes to recognize himself in his astral body, in that he is dependent on the whole cosmos, in which the laws of the stellar world prevail. Therefore, in a comparative expression, one can call this human being, who is not bound by the laws of what we experience between birth and death, but by the laws of the whole world, the astral human being.