235. If we are sitting in a train which is moving forward, and side by side with it there runs another train in the same direction but with a somewhat greater speed than the one in which we are sitting, then, provided that we concentrate only on the train running parallel to ours, it will look as if our own train is moving in exactly the opposite direction from the one in which it is actually travelling. If these two trains move at the same speed and the track of the train parallel to ours begins to swing out so that the distance between it and the track of our train becomes greater and greater and we are also keeping our eyes on the other train, then we get the impression of a movement which is going at right angles to the true direction in which we are travelling. Assuming that we are still concentrating only on the train parallel to our own, then, if the other track rises so that it gradually gets higher than our track, we have the impression that the train we are in is sloping straight down, and naturally we have the opposite impression if it is the other track which is sloping downwards. Here we have shown four different movements which were not true facts. The real fact was that we moved neither backwards nor at right angles, neither downwards nor upwards, but only in a forwards direction. And these experiences of alien movements were thus in reality only expressing the relative movements between our train and those of the other train. We can carry the problem still further. For example, we are travelling westwards in an express train with the speed of 100 kilometres per hour; however, at the same time our Globe is revolving eastwards many times faster, so our train speeding westwards is in actual fact not a speed westwards but eastwards. But as the Globe, of course, does not constitute any kind of "fixed point" but rests in the solar system and the latter rests in the milky way system, and that again is borne by other systems and so on continually, and as all of them are in movement at greater and greater speeds in directions to all corners of the universe, then our idea of direction eastwards does not express a true fact either, but is only the expression for the relation between two known forms of individual movements. We arrive here at a zone of consciousness where there is found no east and no west, no north and no south. But as it is not possible for such a zone to be physical because it can be met with only in thought, and this mode of experience is clearly of a mental or spiritual nature and therefore that zone must also be mental or spiritual, we have now reached the boundaries of the material world and stand on the threshold of the spiritual world. Just as in the example above where we saw that the train running parallel to the one we were in neutralized our idea of the direction we were really going and was able to give us the impression of movements forwards and backwards and upwards and downwards which were not really in fact true, so, then, do the movements of everything around us determine all our physical or material impressions and experiences. Thus, all this will be illusory compared with our absolute existence, in the same way as the illusory effect of the train running parallel to ours was compared with the true direction in which we were travelling, and this again was an illusion set against the huge movements we find ourselves in through our connection with the solar system, and so on ad infinitum. Any material impression of any kind or physical experience or manifestation - indeed even the Globe system and milky way system - can thus be neutralized back to a condition which comes to mean simply "nothing". If these realities can in this way be sensed as resembling "nothing", this "nothing" must express the boundaries of the physical world, or of space, for where something becomes nothing there are its limits. Simultaneously we have come to a zone where material details cease, the termination of space, and so to the boundaries of time also, for time is only an expression of the existence of material things, and as these have at this point ceased to exist, no existential time can be created. But in reaching the limits of time and space have we also come to the cessation of life? Yes, for as far as we are able to experience with the physical body alone, meaning that we can only meet with the purely physical experiences of feeling which are solely identical with the reactions of material details' influence on our physical body, "death" would be a genuine fact, considering that all physical details here appear as "nothing", meaning that they do not exist; and if they do not exist, the physical body and its reactions certainly cannot exist either. Our identity would thus dissolve into an absolute "nothing". Yet this is just the opposite of the facts, because there is "something" that experiences this "nothing". It is thus a fact that here in this zone where the physical realities appear as "nothing", there exists a "something" which continues to "experience". That "nothing" indicates, therefore, not a cessation of life, but the cessation of life in the physical world. It indicates the boundary line of what can be experienced with the physical body.