244 Intuitive Thinking as a Spiritual Path
be quick to make accusations of dilettantism and the like.
And the opinion would gain ground that I have not suffi-
ciently come to terms with viewpoints I have not dis-
cussed in the book itself.
The problem to which I refer is this: there are thinkers
who believe that a special difficulty arises when one
seeks to understand how the soul life of another human
being can affect one’s own (that of the observer). They
say, “My conscious world is sealed off within me, just as
any another conscious world is sealed off within itself. I
cannot see into another person’s world of consciousness.
How, then, can I come to know that we both inhabit the
same world?” Those who hold the worldview that it is
possible to infer, from the conscious world, the existence
of an unconscious world that can never become con-
scious, try to solve this difficulty by saying, “The world
that I have in my consciousness is the representation in
me of a real world that I cannot consciously reach. In this
real world, unknown to me, lie the causes of my con-
scious world. My own real being, of which I have like-
wise only a representation in my consciousness, also lies
there. But this real world also contains the essential being
of my fellow human beings. Now, what another person
experiences in consciousness corresponds to a reality in
that person’s essential being which is independent of this
consciousness. The person’s being is active in a realm
that cannot become conscious, the realm of my own nec-
essarily unconscious being. It is through that realm that a
representation is created in my consciousness of what is
present in a consciousness altogether independent of my
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