Second Lecture

What otherwise takes place in the time when we illuminate the darkness of sleep with the brightness of wakefulness actually takes place in another field at every moment, as we penetrate the darkness of perception with the light that lives within us, as we are present in active thinking. We continually illuminate dark perception. This is the living thing that takes place between what sleeps in the impression that perception makes on us and what awakens into this sleeping life when we penetrate it with the activity of thinking. Something really comes before the soul, like a kind of alternation between waking and sleeping during the ordinary waking state, when we vividly put ourselves into this relationship between thinking — that is, the activity experienced in the mind — and perception, that is, that which continually takes the mind out of itself, which continually makes the mind such that it can only grasp it in its unconsciousness, just as it can only grasp the processes during sleep in its unconsciousness. By following such a path of knowledge, one gains a true insight into what this process of knowledge actually is, how it really is a real process, how it works inside reality, not in the corner as a mere formality.