375. As the "divine world" differs from the physical world in that all its details are direct manifestations and direct expressions of consciousness for living beings and matter obeys the wish or the desire directly, then the mutual interaction and communication between the living beings there will be almost inconceivably superior compared with interaction between living beings here in the physical world. While all physical communication here on the earthly plane is based upon some indirect means of expression, in the "divine world" it is based exclusively on direct expression. Here in the physical world living beings have to convey their thoughts – that is their wishes or desires – by means of symbols, made up of physical matter. Such symbols collectively make up what we call "language". This, again, appears in two separate categories – the "spoken" and the "written" word. Of these two speech is by far the oldest form of communication. It has developed from animal cries right up to the development of the perfected form of human speech in use today. In itself, language merely consists of a set of phonetic forms, each of which is an expression of one of the nuances of thought or consciousness common to a specific group of people and from which their impression of life is built up. Such a symbolic sound we call a "letter". Letters can be combined into "words" and these, again, into "sentences", and with the sentences one can express every shade of consciousness in physical matter. In this instance the matter consists of air. So an individual's "speech" consists directly of a series of air vibrations but indirectly of a series of characteristic expressions of the individual's impressions of life. These impressions are accessible to fellow beings by means of "hearing". Without the sense of hearing, the individual's private, inner, mental life would be totally inaccessible by means of "speech".
      In the same way it has gradually become possible to render this "speech" accessible to "sight" by providing the phonetic sounds with symbols in visible matter, by letters appearing in contrasted forms which the eye can "see". The written word is thus, in a direct way, also just a physical phenomenon, it is really just a variation of light and shade and is only an indirect expression of an individual's conscious inner impressions of life. Here in the physical world, an individual's inner conscious life is thus hidden behind outer physical phenomena and whatever the situation may be, comes to light only indirectly. It forms an intermediate link between the I and its outer physical manifestation. But in the highest spheres of the spiral, where no kind of outer physical world exists in condensed form, consciousness, as mentioned previously, becomes visible directly and speech, as used in the physical world, is entirely superfluous.