The Rudolf Steiner Archive

On the "true self" of the human being

[ 1 ] When the soul experiences itself in its astral body and has the thought beings as its environment, it knows itself to be outside the physical and also outside the etheric body. But then it also senses how its thinking, feeling and willing belong to a limited area of the world, while according to its very nature it could encompass even more than is allotted to it in this area. The clairvoyant soul can say to itself within the spiritual world: In the sense world I am limited to that which the physical body allows me to observe; in the elementary world I am limited by the etheric body; in the spiritual world I am limited by the fact that I am, as it were, on an island of the world and only feel my spiritual existence as far as its shores; beyond these shores is a world which I could perceive if I worked my way through the veil which is woven before my spiritual eye by the deeds of the thought beings. The soul can work its way through this veil if it continues to develop the ability of devotion, which is already necessary for life in the elementary world. It needs to strengthen its powers more and more, as they arise through experience in the physical-sensual world, in order to be protected in the supersensible worlds from the dulling, clouding, even destruction of consciousness. In the physical-sensual world the soul only needs the power naturally given to it, without its own spiritual work, in order to be able to experience thoughts within itself. In the elementary world, thoughts diminish to dream-like experiences which, as they arise, are immediately forgotten, that is, they do not become conscious at all if the soul does not work on the strengthening of its inner life before entering this world. To do this it must especially strengthen its willpower, for in the elementary world a thought is no longer just a thought; it has inner activity, its own life. It wants to be held by the will if it is not to escape the sphere of consciousness. In the spiritual world thoughts are completely independent living beings. If they are to remain in consciousness, the soul must be so fortified that it unfolds within itself the power which the physical body unfolds to it in the sense world, and the sympathies and antipathies of the etheric body in the elementary world. In the spiritual world it must do without all this. There the experiences of the sense world and the elementary world are only present to it like memories. And it is itself outside these two worlds. Around it is the spiritual world. At first this makes no impression on the astral body. The soul must learn to live for itself from its memories. At first its content of consciousness is only this: I have been, and I am now facing nothingness. But when the memories come from such soul experiences that are not merely images of sensory or elementary processes, but represent free thought experiences stimulated by them, then a thought conversation begins in the soul between the memories and the supposed "nothingness" of the spiritual environment. And what arises as a result of this conversation becomes the world of imagination in the consciousness of the astral body. The power that the soul needs at this point in its development is such a power that enables it to stand on the shore of the world it has hitherto only known and to endure facing the supposed nothingness. For the life of the soul, this supposed nothingness is at first a true nothingness. However, the soul still has the world of its memories behind it, so to speak. It is able to cling to these memories. It is able to live in them. And the more it lives in them, the more it strengthens the powers of the astral body. With this strengthening, however, the conversation between her past existence and the beings of the spiritual world begins. In this conversation she learns to feel herself as an astral being. With an expression that corresponds to old traditions, one can say: The human soul experiences itself as an astral entity within the world word. The world word refers to the thought acts of the thought beings, which take place in the spiritual world like living spirit conversations. But certainly in such a way that these spirit conversations are the same for the spiritual world as deeds are for the sense world.

[ 2 ] If the soul now wants to pass over into the super-spiritual world, it must eradicate its memories from the physical and elementary world through its own will. It can only do this if it has gained the certainty from the spirit conversation that it will not completely lose its existence if it eradicates everything within itself that has so far given it the consciousness of this existence. The soul must indeed place itself in front of a spiritual abyss and seize the impulse of will to forget its willing, feeling and thinking. It must renounce its past in its consciousness. One could call this decision, which is necessary here, a bringing about of the complete sleep of consciousness through one's own will, not through conditions of the physical or etheric body. But this decision must be thought of in such a way that it does not have the aim of bringing about again, after a pause of unconsciousness, the same consciousness that was there before, but in such a way that through it this consciousness really first plunges into oblivion through its own volitional decision. It must be remembered that this process is possible neither in the physical nor in the elementary world, but only in the spiritual world. In the physical world annihilation is possible, which occurs as death; in the elementary world there is no death. Man, in so far as he belongs to the elementary world, cannot die; he can only transform himself into another entity. In the spiritual world, in the strict sense of the word, no decisive transformation is possible either; for whatever the human being may transform himself into, in the spiritual world the experienced past reveals itself as its own conscious existence. If this memory existence is to disappear within the spiritual world, it must be sunk into oblivion by the soul itself through a willful decision. The supersensible consciousness can come to this decision of will when it has conquered the necessary strength of soul. If it comes to this, then the true essence of the "I" emerges from the self-induced oblivion. The super-spiritual environment gives the human soul the knowledge of this "true self". Just as the supersensible consciousness can experience itself in the etheric and in the astral body, it can also experience itself in the "true I".

[ 3 ] This "true I" is not created by the spiritual view; it is present for every human soul in its depths. The supersensible consciousness merely experiences knowingly what is an unconscious fact for every human soul, but which belongs to its essence.

[ 4 ] After physical death, the human being gradually settles into the spiritual environment. Within it, his being first emerges with the memories from the sensory world. Although he does not have the support of the physical-sensory body, he can still live consciously in these memories, because the thought beings corresponding to them incorporate themselves into them, so that the memories no longer have the mere shadowy existence that is characteristic of them in the physical-sensory world. And at a certain point in time between death and a new birth the thought beings of the spiritual environment have such a strong effect that the described forgetting is then brought about without an impulse of the will. And with this, life emerges in the "true self". The clairvoyant consciousness brings about that as a free act of the spirit through the empowerment of the soul life, which is to a certain extent a natural event for the experience between death and new birth. However, a memory of previous earthly lives can never occur within the physical-sensual experience if the ideas have not been directed towards the spiritual world within these earthly lives. One must always have known about something beforehand if a clearly recognizable memory is to emerge later. Thus one must also acquire knowledge of oneself as a spiritual being in one earthly life if one wants to rightly expect that one can remember a previous one in a next earthly life. But this knowledge need not be acquired through clairvoyance. Whoever acquires a direct knowledge of the spiritual world through clairvoyance, a memory of the previous one can occur in his soul in the earthly lives that follow the one in which he acquires this knowledge, just as the memory of something self-experienced occurs in the senses. For those who penetrate spiritual science with understanding, even without spiritual contemplation, this memory occurs in such a way that it can be compared to that which one retains in the mind of an event of which one has only heard a description.