bliged to call up much stronger forces out of its
own depths than it uses in ordinary life or knowledge. Its inner activity
is thereby enhanced. It becomes detached from the body, as it does in
sleep; but instead of passing, as in the latter case, into
unconsciousness, it experiences a world it did not know before. Although
as regards detachment from the body this condition may be compared with
sleep, yet it is such that, compared with ordinary waking consciousness,
it may be characterized as a more intense waking state. By this means the
soul learns to know itself in its true, inner, independent being. But in
ordinary life, owing to the weaker development of its forces, it is only
with the help of the body that the soul arrives at self-consciousness.
Therefore it does not experience itself but merely sees itself in that
image which--like a kind of reflection--is traced, by the physical body (or,
properly speaking, by its processes).

These symbols built up in the manner above described are not as yet
related to anything real in the spiritual world, but they serve to detach
the human soul from sense-observations and from that instrument, the
brain, to which the reason is at first fettered. This detachment is not
effected until man is able to feel: "I am now perceiving something by
means of powers for which neither my senses nor my brain serve as the
instruments"; and the first thing man thus experiences is a liberation
from the organs of sense. He is then able to say to himself: "My
consciousness does not vanish when I cease to take cognizance of
sense-perceptions and ordinary reasoned thought; I can lift myself out of
those conditions and then feel myself as a being alongside of that which I
was before"--and this is the first purely spiritual experience; the
perception of a psycho-spiritual Ego-being. This has arisen as a new self
out of that self which is linked to the physical senses and physical
reason only.

Had this detachment from the world of the senses and from the reason been
effected without meditation, the person would have lapsed into the
nothingness of the unconscious state. This psycho-spiritual being was our
possession prior to meditation also, but it then lacked the organs for
perception of the spirit-world; and it might, indeed, have been compared
to the physical body without the eye to see--the ear to hear. The strength
thus employed in meditation has, in fact, been the creative means by which
these