8. The Knowledge of the Spiritual Essence of the World

In this way, one comes to recognize in that in which one actually finds oneself unconsciously every night from falling asleep to waking up, the germ of that which emerges through the gate of death when one actually steps through that gate of death. And because our physical body is incorporated into the amoral nature, one learns to recognize what one is when one is outside of the body during sleep, as – I cannot say now, embodiment, but I must say: realization — as the spiritualization of what we are worth as moral beings in the world, and of what lives in us as a religious sense of the divine-spiritual that permeates the world. In the physical body, our soul and spirit are enclosed in the natural world, as if in darkness. When we become transparent to what we experience when we are outside our body as spiritual beings, from falling asleep to waking up, everything we have morally engaged in is there, our moral value is there, and it passes through the gate of death. And by getting to know the spirit of the world as I have described it, one also learns to recognize that everything we see physically – physics even says so today – will one day disappear in the heat of death, that everything external and material is transitory. But that which man acquires as a spirit-germ, which is unconscious in sleep and becomes conscious in exact clairvoyance, that is what outlasts everything we see around us in the form of minerals, plants, animals, stars, clouds and so on. That is what lays the germ for a future world.