II. The Physical World and the Moral-Spiritual Impulses

In man's earthly life, however, there are two states of consciousness: there is the waking state from the time of awaking until falling asleep, and the sleeping state from the time of falling asleep until waking. During his waking hours man lives entirely in the world where spirit and matter are complete opposites, where spirit cannot touch matter and permeate it, and matter is powerless to raise its processes to the spiritual. But when man has penetrated into that world of which I said that it sounds out of the soul's deep silence, then he perceives that activity which he pursues during sleep, the activity of his astral body. And then he knows that every time he falls asleep he leaves behind the life which belongs to the earth and returns to it on waking, that during the time when sleep interrupts his waking life he lives in that world in which he can begin to prepare for the union of spirit and matter. But in all that is woven during sleep between birth and death in a fine etheric-astral element, so that on waking it enters again into the duality between spirit and matter as that which man experiences and weaves during all the periods of his life passed during sleep between birth and death—in all this there lives what man carries with his being through the gate of death into yonder world where the possibility of matter being powerless to lift its processes to spirituality, or of the spirit being precluded from reaching matter does not arise. With all that he has woven during his sleep, man now enters that world in which the functions of everything akin to matter rise to a spiritual level, while the spirit continually manifests in matter. And man perceives that the duality between spirit and matter exists only in that world in which he lives episodically between birth and death. Furthermore he knows that here he enters an entirely different world which, between falling asleep and waking, appears to him only as a reflection in a mirror, as Fata Morgana, where he prepares himself for the reality of that world.