8. The Knowledge of the Spiritual Essence of the World

But, my dear attendees, this direct experience would leave us standing halfway. We would have images. If we can make the images disappear in the manner described, we would know: there is weaving and life in the spirit outside. But we would only know about this weaving and life in the spirit in very general terms. For the remarkable thing is that we perceive what now appears as weaving and living in the spirit not in the way we perceive sensual things, that we say to ourselves: We stand there and the things are outside, but we feel ourselves now inside the whole world. We have, so to speak, poured out our own existence over the whole world. We feel at one with the world. We have moved outside of our body, have awakened our life, I would say outside of our body as a spiritual-mental being, and feel one with the whole world outside of our body, which we used to look at from the outside, but now we experience inwardly, as we otherwise experience the blood, the activity of our organs within our skin. Our consciousness has become a cosmic consciousness out of a personality consciousness.