1688. After this the "Bible" tells us in very few words that "the Lord God caused a deep sleep to fall upon Adam". What kind of sleep does this refer to? That it is not the sleep one has at night as part of an ordinary twenty-four-hour period is made clear by Adam's actual life situation. He was, as will be remembered, not on the physical plane at all, the plane to which sleep belongs. Since Adam was actually a "spirit", which in this case means a being that had not yet begun to incarnate in physical matter, there was no physical body to cause to fall asleep. It can therefore be only a matter of "spiritual" sleep. And since Adam was in his inner world and thus rested solely in his experiences of memories and had no correspondence whatsoever with beings and things in the outer world, indeed, was simply unmanifested here, it goes without saying that the concept of "sleep", viewed from the outer world, is a very precise or correct term. Adam was really at "rest". But "rest" in the spiritual world, like rest on the physical plane, consists of the being's concentration being withdrawn from its waking plane to an inner plane. During physical sleep the consciousness is withdrawn from the physical plane and drawn into a spiritual plane. But during spiritual sleep the consciousness is withdrawn from the outer spiritual plane to the individual's innermost world, its world of memories. And in this state it has no wakingly day-conscious, individual, outward manifestation of consciousness in the outer world. It has of course its superconsciousness containing the talent kernels for all its abilities to manifest itself in the outer worlds, but in the being's culminating state of bliss these do not appear in any outer, visible, individual organism or bodily state. As far as their consciousness and thoughts are concerned they are completely absent from the entire outer world. But this does not of course mean that they are thereby prevented from causing reactions in this world.