Second Lecture

The process of waking has its stages, its degrees. If we want to grasp it in its most original form for our ordinary consciousness, we can only do so by experiencing ourselves with the full activity of the soul in thinking. And then we will experience how we are actually present in perception. If we have managed, in the sense of Richard Wahle or Johannes Volkelt, to place perception in its true form before our soul, and if we then examine how the soul lives by living only in perception, we will find no difference between this experience of the soul and the perception in the actual state of sleep, which is still completely unpermeated by thinking. And just as our daily life alternates between waking and sleeping, so the weaving, undulating life of the soul continually alternates, as it enters into communication with the outside world, between that in which it can actually only sleep, perception, and that in which it is completely awake, active thinking.