6. Spiritual Scientific Findings on the Ideas of Freedom and Social-moral Life

If one learns to recognize what the soul is, one also learns to recognize that human beings only know of an I because they are not always immersed in waking life between birth and death. Imagine hypothetically that waking life extended over the entire human life between birth and death; imagine that one could never sleep: then one would never have that counterpoint in which the ego becomes aware of itself in time. Because you can sleep, because you can exchange this consciousness, which lives in the outer sensory world and with the mind that is active in the sensory world, for a consciousness between falling asleep and waking up that does not distinguish anything because it is dull, you have your sense of self. Human beings would not learn to say “I” to themselves if they were not caught up in the rhythm of life between sleeping and waking.