“When we study the human astral body, we must necessarily turn our attention to the most prominent aspect of man’s astral body in the way that it manifests itself on the Earth. This is consciousness. In the physical body, form and force are the essential elements; in the ether body, movement and life; in the astral body, consciousness. However, we not not have only one state of consciousness in the human body but two: ordinary waking consciousness and sleep. But the strange thing is that neither of these two states of consciousness is completely natural to us. A natural state of consciousness for us would be one that is between the two, in which we never actually live.
If we were continually awake, we would hardly be able to develop properly as human beings through the various stages of life. Only because there is always something present in us that is less awake than we are during the day are we able to develop. Ask yourselves how much you think you develop as a result of what yo experience and apprehend in ordinary life. For the most part we use these experiences to satisfy our curiosity and need for sensation. It seldom happens that we set out with the intention of placing what we experience in our waking daily life in the service of our development. We are able to undergo development because something within us is continually asleep when we are awake during the day. I am not referring to times when people drop off to sleep but when they are fully awake during the day; for it is then that something within them remains asleep. It is this factor that is responsible for the fact that we do not eternally remain a child but are able to evolve.
What we are conscious of through our astral body is the ordinary state of wakefulness. The effect of this state is, however, that we are too strongly awake. We give ourselves up too strongly to the outer world in our ordinary waking state, we become completely absorbed in it. Why is this? It is because waking consciousness is strongly under the influence and sovereignty of Ahriman. Waking consciousness = Ahriman.
It is quite different in the case of sleep consciousness. Here we are too little awake; and we are over-engaged in our own development, in ourselves. We are totally engrossed in ourselves and to such an extent that all consciousness is extinguished. In sleep consciousness Lucifer has the upper hand. Sleep consciousness = Lucifer.
Thus our relationship with our astral body is such that when we are awake Ahriman has the upper hand over Lucifer, whereas when we are asleep Lucifer has the upper hand over Ahriman. They are in equilibrium only wen we are dreaming; for then they are fighting it out with one another and maintain a balance between their forces. The ideas that are evoked by Ahriman in day consciousness and which he causes to harden and crystallize are then dissolved through Lucifer’s influence and made to disappear. Everything is transformed into pictures when Ahriman is not rigidifying them into fixed notions, and they become flexible and mobile. Thus in the same way that in a pair of scales a state of equilibrium is achieved through the scales having equal weights on either side, with the result that what we have is not a state of rest of a state of balance, so also in human life we arrive in these circumstances not at a state of rest but at one of equilibrium. [note that “rest” doesn’t mean bodily rest experienced by the human being, but rest as in the forces are not each cancelled out, but exerting continual opposing power.] And the two forces that keep the balance, each one of which at any particular time weighs heavier, are Lucifer and Ahriman. In waking consciousness Ahriman’s side sinks lower, in sleep consciousness Lucifer’s side. Only in the intermediate state, when we are dreaming, the scales rock to and fro, not in a state of rest but delicately poised.“
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