The Rudolf Steiner Archive

Memory and Conscience

[ 1 ] In the sleeping state man is devoted to the cosmos. He carries to the cosmos what he has as a result of previous earthly lives when he descends from the spiritual-soul world into the earthly world. He withdraws this content of his human being from the cosmos during his waking hours.

[ 2 ] In this rhythm: Surrendering to the cosmos and withdrawing from the cosmos, life passes between birth and death.

[ 3 ] The withdrawal from the cosmos is at the same time an absorption of the spiritual-soul man through the sense-nerve organization. What takes place in this as physical and life processes is united with the spiritual-soul of the human being in waking life to form a unified mode of action. This mode of action contains sensory perception, the formation of memory images, and fantasy life. These activities are bound to the physical body. The ideas, the thought-experience, in which the human being becomes conscious of what takes place semi-consciously in perception, imagination and memory, are bound to the thought organization.

[ 4 ] In this actual thought organization also lies the area through which man experiences his self-consciousness. The mental organization is a stellar organization. If it lived out solely as such, then man would not have a self-consciousness within himself, but a god-consciousness. But the organization of thought is a stellar organization, lifted out of the stellar cosmos and transferred to earthly events. By experiencing the starry world in the earthly, man becomes a self-conscious being.

[ 5 ] Thus we have before us the realm of inner human life, in which the divine-spiritual world, which is connected with man, releases him so that he can become fully human.

[ 6 ] But just below the mental organization, where sense perception, imagination and memory formation take place, the divine-spiritual world lives in human life. One can say that in the unfolding of memory the divine-spiritual lives in the waking state of man. For the two other activities, sense perception and imagination, are only modifications of the formation of the memory images. In sense perception, the formation of the content of memory is in its genesis; in the content of imagination, what is preserved of this content in the soul's existence shines forth in the soul.

[ 7 ] The state of sleep carries the spiritual-soul of man over into the cosmic. With the activity of his astral body and his ego, he is immersed in the divine-spiritual cosmos. He is not only outside the physical, but also outside the starry world. But he is within the divine-spiritual beings through whom his existence has its origin.

[ 8 ] In the present moment of cosmic development, these divine-spiritual beings work in such a way that they imprint the moral world content into the astral body and ego during the state of sleep. All world events in the sleeping human being are real moral events, not events that could even be called similar to the effects of nature.

[ 9 ] This event in its after-effect is carried over by the human being from the sleeping to the waking state. This aftereffect remains in the sleeping state. For man only wakes in that life which is inclined towards the sphere of thought. What actually takes place in his sphere of will is also shrouded in the same dullness during waking as the whole life of the soul during sleep. But in this sleeping life of will the divine-spiritual continues to weave in the waking state. Man is morally as good or as bad as he can be, depending on how close he can come to the divine-spiritual beings while asleep. And he comes closer or remains further away depending on the moral direction of his previous earthly lives.

[ 10 ] From the depths of the waking soul being sounds up what has been able to implant itself into this soul being during sleep in communion with the divine-spiritual world. What sounds up is the voice of conscience.

[ 11 ] This shows how that which a materialistic view of the world is most inclined to explain merely in terms of nature is on the moral side for the knowledge of the spirit.

[ 12 ] In memory, the divine-spiritual being acts directly in the awake human being; in consciousness, this divine-spiritual being acts indirectly - as an after-effect - in the awake human being.

[ 13 ] Memory formation takes place in the nervous-sensory organization; conscience formation takes place as a purely soul-spiritual process, but in the metabolic-limb organization.

[ 14 ] The rhythmic organization lies between the two. This is polarized in its effectiveness on two sides. As a respiratory rhythm, it is intimately related to sensory perception and thinking. The process is coarsest in the breathing of the lungs; it becomes more refined and, as refined breathing, becomes sensory perception and thinking. What is still very close to breathing, but is breathing through the sense organs, not through the lungs, is sensory perception. That which is already more distant from lung breathing and is supported by the mental organization is imagination, thinking; and that which is already bounded by the rhythm of blood circulation, which is already an inner breathing that connects with the metabolic organization of the limbs, reveals itself in the activity of the imagination.

[ 15 ] This then extends psychically into the sphere of the will, just as the circulatory rhythm extends into the metabolic organization of the limbs.

[ 16 ] In the activity of the imagination, the organization of thought comes close to the organization of the will. It is a submersion of the human being into the waking sleeping sphere of the will. Therefore, in people who are organized in this way, the contents of the soul appear like dreams in the waking state. Such a human organization lived in Goethe. That is why he says that Schiller had to interpret his poetic dreams for him.

[ 17 ] The other organization was active in Schiller himself. He lived out of what he had brought with him from his previous lives on earth. He had to seek the content of his imagination for a strong will.

[ 18 ] The ahrimanic power counts on people who are inclined towards the fantasy sphere, so that their perception of sensual reality is transformed into fantasy images as if of its own accord. It believes that with the help of such people it can completely cut off the development of humanity from the past in order to bring it in a direction that it wants.

[ 19 ] The Luciferic power counts on people who are organized according to the sphere of will, but who powerfully shape the sensual view into fantasy images out of inner love for the ideal world view. It would like to keep the development of mankind through such people entirely in the impulses of the past. It could then save humanity from submerging into the sphere in which the Ahrimanic power must be overcome.

[ 20 ] In earthly existence, one stands in two polar opposites. At the top, the stars spread out. From there radiate the forces that are connected with all calculable regularities in earthly existence. Regular changes of day and night, seasons, longer periods of the world - they are the earthly reflection of what happens in the stars.

[ 21 ] The other pole radiates from the interior of the earth. Irregular things live in it. Wind and weather, thunder and lightning, earthquakes, volcanic eruptions reflect this inner earth event.

[ 22 ] The human being is a reflection of this starry earth. In his thought organization lives the star order, in his limb-will organization lives the earth chaos. In the rhythmic organization, the earthly human being is experienced in free balance.

Goetheanum, February 1925.
Guiding Principles No. 174 to 176
(March 22, 1925)

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Further guiding principles issued by the Anthroposophical Society at the Goetheanum (with reference to the preceding considerations on memory and conscience)

[ 23 ] 174. Man is organized spiritually and bodily from two sides. Firstly, from the physical-etheric cosmos. What radiates into this organization from the divine-spiritual essence into the human being lives in this being as the power of sensory perception, the ability to remember and the activity of the imagination.

[ 24 ] 175. Secondly, man is organized out of his previous lives on earth. This organization is entirely spiritual-soul and lives in man through the astral body and the ego. Whatever divine-spiritual entities live into this human being, their effect shines forth as the voice of conscience and everything that is related to it in the human being.

[ 25 ] 176. In his rhythmic organization, man has the continuous connection of the two sides of divine-spiritual impulses. In the experience of rhythm, the power of memory is carried into the being of will and the power of conscience into the being of ideas.