1772. In this long path of evolution we do indeed see a multiplicity of different ways of experiencing life.Each of these experiences is thus represented by the specific kind of physical body or organism through which it takes place.Each kind of life experience constitutes a sphere of consciousness, which is in turn the same as a sphere of thought.A sphere of thought is thus the same as a sphere of a picture of life, since every thought is a mental or psychic picture.This mental sphere of thought or sphere of pictures that is experienced through the organism or body is in turn the same as the individual's consciousness.And the resulting mental state that constitutes its psyche is in turn the same as its "spirit".Since these thought pictures can be false ideas as well as pictures of absolutely unshakeable facts, the consciousness can be divided into two forms of psyche.Since a part of the psyche thus contains unreal or false ideas, whose basis is therefore superstition, we must call this form of psyche the individual's illusory experience of life.Its entire mentality, sphere of consciousness or the panorama of its picture of life that is based on this is thus illusory or unreal.An individual with such a psyche is not in contact with the truth.The whole of this side of its mentality or psyche expresses a form of life experience in which its absolute knowledge of itself or the living being's true, eternal or immortal identity, which is thus beyond time and space, is at its most elementary stage.Here the living being's absolutely true consciousness is so weak or of such a small capacity that it is unable to penetrate the individual's waking day-consciousness.The only phenomena that stir in this day-consciousness can therefore be those that have to do with the drive for self-preservation.Other mental images or ideas will, at best, exist only as nebulae or cloud formations.They are just as unstable as the contours and details of the cloud formations in the sky.In this state of consciousness or sphere of thought the living being's experience of life is not actually an experience of life but an "experience of death".Living and existing without knowing anything of this eternal existence or elevated identity with eternity or the Godhead, who appears beyond all time and space and thereby beyond all matter, is, as far as this ignorance extends, the same as being "dead".And we have now arrived at the only phenomenon in the universe and eternity that can be described as "death".What can represent "death" better than complete ignorance of real life and its fundamental answers?And what can represent "life" better than the waking day-conscious, personally experienced, absolute knowledge of one's own highest identity as the master of life and thereby of time and space, one's identity with eternity and thereby one's oneness with the eternal Father or the Godhead of the universe?That the former state of consciousness exists has, as will be remembered, long since been established as fact in that all living beings in the terrestrial sphere of evolution, from the lowest species of animals to the terrestrial human being, are of course representatives of it.Indeed, it culminates in precisely the one hundred per cent materialistic atheist or denier of all spiritual or superphysical and subphysical things or details.
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