The Rudolf Steiner Archive

First Lecture

[ 1 ] The aim of this series of lectures will be to describe the inner life of the human being in connection with the period between death and a new birth, in order to show how intimately these two aspects of existence are linked. It will also aim to develop guidelines based on the insights outlined here, which can truly guide people through certain difficult life situations—guidelines that, in a sense, provide a firm foundation for the life of the soul through a thorough understanding of that life. To this end, it will be necessary for you, my dear anthroposophical friends, to work your way through the first lectures, which are intended to lay a foundation; they will lead into esoteric-scientific realms that may at first seem remote to some, far removed from what the human mind would like to grasp immediately. But when we reach what these lectures actually aim for, you will see that this goal can only be achieved in a secure way if one first works through the seemingly remote esoteric insights that are to be presented.

[ 2 ] If one first considers the human inner life in abstract terms, it presents itself in three forms, to which we have often drawn attention: the forms of thinking, feeling, and willing; but in order to fully consider this inner life, one must add a fourth. In fact, it is not only these three areas that belong to human inner life, but also what a person makes of mere sensory perception. After all, we do not merely let colors and sounds, impressions of warmth, and the like flit past our consciousness; rather, we take in these impressions, we make them our perceptions. And the fact that we can remember these impressions, that we can retain them, that we do not merely know: a rose is red when we stand directly in front of the rose, but that we can, so to speak, carry the redness of the rose with us, that we can preserve the colors as a mental image—this testifies to us that the life of sensation, the life of perception, through which we bring ourselves into contact with the external world, already belongs to our inner life. So that we can say: We must count the perception of the external world among our inner life, insofar as we internalize it precisely in the act of perceiving itself. Furthermore, we must include the world of thought, through which we first gain knowledge of what is immediately at hand and, in science, of what lies further afield, through which we make the external world part of our inner world in a much broader sense than through perception alone. After all, we do not merely live in our perceptions; we reflect upon them and are conscious that through our reflection we can learn something about the mysteries of what is perceived.

[ 3 ] We must then include our feelings in our inner life, and with these feelings we immediately enter that realm of human inner life which, so to speak, encompasses everything that brings us, as human beings, into contact with the world in a way that is consistent with human dignity. The fact that we can feel about things, that we can take joy in our surroundings—this is, after all, the very foundation of our true human existence, and in a certain sense also everything that constitutes our happiness and our suffering. All of this unfolds in feelings that ebb and flow: feelings that elevate our lives, in which we find ourselves happy and content, surge up or draw near to us, growing stronger. Other feelings press upon us through the events of life, through our fate, and also through our inner life—feelings that signify our suffering and our pain. And by uttering the word “feeling,” one points to the realm that indeed encompasses the happiness and suffering of human life.

[ 4 ] When we point to the fourth element—the will—we are referring to something that, in turn, makes us valuable to the world; something that places us in the world in such a way that we do not merely live for ourselves through cognition or inner feeling, but that we can have a reciprocal effect on the world. What a person wills, is capable of willing, and what flows from the will into actions—this constitutes their value to the world. We can therefore say to ourselves: By pointing to the realm of the will, we are dealing with that element that reveals the human being as a member of the world, and it is our inner life that flows into the world as a member of it. Whether it is the selfish, socially hostile emotions and passions of criminal natures that flow into the will and from there become a part of the world to the world’s ruin, or whether it is the high, pure ideals that the idealist draws down from his contact with a spiritual world order and allows to flow into his actions, perhaps allowing them to flow only into words which, whether inspiring or demonstrating human dignity, have an effect on people—in the realm of the will we are always dealing with that which gives human beings their value. So that the entire wealth that human beings can actually possess as soul beings is expressed when one names these four realms: perception, thinking, feeling, and willing.

[ 5 ] For those who now delve a little deeper into a consideration of these four—one might say inner—spheres of the human soul, a significant difference becomes apparent between two and two of the four members of the human being. But in ordinary life, people are not really very aware of this difference; at most, it comes to their awareness when we reflect on these four spheres of human nature in the following way.

[ 6 ] When we speak of perception and reflect on it, we may have the feeling that, through perception, we stand in a direct relationship with the external world. Through perception, we internalize the external world; it provides something that then becomes part of our inner life as we process that sensation. But we have the feeling that we must have arranged our perception in such a way that it provides us with faithful images of the external world in a certain sense. And every disorder of the life of perception and sensation, every disorder of the senses, points out to us that such a disorder impoverishes our inner life—impoverishes it in that we become poorer in what we can take in from the external world.

[ 7 ] If we move from perception to thought, we can realize that we also have a feeling regarding thought: it is not enough for us if this thinking merely rummages within itself and indulges in itself. After all, thoughts have value only if they bring to mind something objective, something existing outside of us, if they are capable of shedding light on something that is outside of us. Our reflection could not satisfy us if, through this reflection, we could not learn something about the external world.

[ 8 ] But if we turn our attention to our feelings and reflect on them a little, we will find that these feelings—or, rather, our emotional life—are much more intimately connected with our immediate inner being than are thought and perception. We have a mental image that we must first develop ourselves, initially in a purely external way, on the physical plane, if we are to perceive and feel certain subtleties of the external world in the right way. If we have a thought and call that thought true, then we say of such a true thought: it must actually apply to all our fellow human beings, and it must, if we only find the right words to express the thought, offer the possibility of convincing others of this thought as well. When we are confronted with a natural phenomenon or, say, a human work of art, and we develop our sense of it, we know that, fundamentally speaking, our human nature, as it is, does not help us to fully grasp, so to speak, what stands before us. It could be that we remain completely unmoved by a musical or pictorial creation, simply because we have not cultivated our sensibility to the point where we can perceive the subtleties. And if we follow this line of thought, we find that this emotional life is something very intimate, that even as we experience it inwardly, we cannot immediately convey it in thought to other people. In our emotional life, we are, in a certain sense, alone under all circumstances; yet we know at the same time that this emotional life is the source of a very special inner richness, a fact of inner development, precisely because it is something so subjective that it cannot flow directly out into the object as it lives within us.

[ 9 ] We must say the same with regard to the will. How different we humans are in terms of what we are capable of wanting, of what can flow out into our actions through the will! It is precisely because one person can want this and another that—that the diversity of human action comes about. When it comes to feeling, we can rejoice in finding a companion in life who, purely inwardly and subjectively, has arrived at the same perspective of feeling as we ourselves have, who can internalize certain subtleties of the external world through his or her feeling in such a way that a understanding exists that is independent of us and yet connected to us; then we feel our life elevated in such fellowship. We must each develop our own feeling within ourselves, but we can find people with whom this feeling can resonate. For although the life of feeling is internal, it is nevertheless possible for people to resonate in their feeling. There cannot be two wills directed toward one and the same object—that is, two people who want to do one and the same thing at the same moment. The wills cannot converge on a single object. The crank itself, which we turn to operate a machine, can only be turned by one of us alone. And even if the other helps us in this, the part of the work we accomplish through our will is precisely half of the total work; we do our half, the other does the other half. Two impulses of will cannot coexist in a single object. Although we place ourselves within shared worlds through our will, it is precisely through this will that we are situated in the world in such a way that each of us is a distinct individuality unto ourselves through the will. Thus, we are thereby shown how the will constitutes the entire individual value of the human being, how the will is, so to speak, the innermost core from this perspective. We can infer from this that perception and thought are more external in the inner life of the human being, while feeling and will constitute the deepest, the truly inner core. But yet another difference arises from a wholly external, exoteric perspective on these four spheres of human soul life.

[ 10 ] When we confront the world through our perception, we certainly tell ourselves: This perception does indeed convey the world to us, but always from a single perspective. How small is the fragment of the world that we can bring into our inner life through our perception! We are dependent on place and time in this perception; we must say that the very least of what we sense in the world enters our inner life through our perception. — And with regard to our thoughts, we have the feeling: no matter how hard we try, there can always be further steps; we can always penetrate further through our thoughts. — In short, we have the sensation that the world lies out there and you take possession of only a small piece of this world through your perception, through your thinking.

[ 11 ] It is quite different with feeling. With feeling, one says to oneself: Oh, what a wealth of possibilities for feeling, for happiness and suffering, lies within me! What could I bring up from the depths of my soul! And if I were to bring it up, how much more finely, how much more deeply would I feel about the things of the world! Whereas with regard to perception and thinking one has the sense that there is much out there in the world and one can experience only a small part of it through perception and thinking, with regard to feeling one must have the sense that there are infinite depths down there; if I were to bring them up, my feeling would become richer and ever richer. I can bring up only the smallest part and transform it into my real feeling. So while through my perception and thinking I can make only a small part of the world into my inner world, through feeling I can bring into the spheres of real experience only a part of what lies within me as possibilities.

[ 12 ] And this is true to an even greater extent when it comes to the will. I just want to point this out. How keenly must we feel that what we accomplish falls short of what we could do, of what lies within us.

[ 13 ] Thus we feel that through our perception and thinking we bring only a part of the external world into our inner life, and we feel that through our feeling and willing we can bring up only a part of what lies in the deep well of the soul. Thus, the four spheres of our soul life are, so to speak, divided into two parts: perception and thinking on the one hand, feeling and willing on the other.

[ 14 ] A completely different light is shed on these four spheres of our inner life when we attempt to shed esoteric light on what human beings can clarify exoterically through reflection.

[ 15 ] You know, my dear friends, that at night, when a person is asleep, the connection between their I, their astral body on the one hand, and their physical body, their etheric body on the other, is in a certain sense different from what it is during waking hours. During waking hours, one might say, the physical body, the etheric body, the astral body, and the ego are normally interconnected. This connection is loosened during sleep, so loosened that the astral body and the I have stepped out of the sphere of the senses and the sphere of thought—that is, out of the entire sphere of the instruments of consciousness—and thus the darkness of the night first spreads over normal consciousness: unconsciousness. When a person, through their esoteric exercises, strengthens their soul to such an extent that they become cognitively and perceptually active that is, to perceive and recognize spiritually, when he truly experiences the spiritual-soul aspect as his human self outside the body, then a new world opens up for him, a spiritual environment, just as a physical environment exists for a person when he makes use of his senses and his brain, which, after all, serves thinking. This spiritual environment, which one can then observe, is by no means always the same. A person can, so to speak, place themselves in the position of a spiritual researcher at various times, in various ways. And what a person sees spiritually is actually always influenced by their intention—but not the intention that is strictly intellectual, rather the intention that lies more unconsciously and instinctively within their entire soul life—namely, what they actually wish to perceive. When a person, for example, steps out of their body to establish a connection with a deceased person, this intention influences their entire field of spiritual consciousness. They overlook, as it were, everything that does not pertain to this intention. If they succeed at all, they direct themselves toward the deceased and their fate in order to perceive precisely what they wish to behold in the deceased. The rest of the spiritual world remains, so to speak—the expression is clumsy—unnoticed, remains unilluminated, and the person then experiences only the connection with the deceased. Thus, what a person sees in the spiritual world depends on their intentions. It is therefore understandable that what the clairvoyant consciousness describes of what it has seen in the spiritual world can differ infinitely among different clairvoyant individuals. Each person may have seen quite correctly what they had to see, according to the tendency that lay within them when they had lifted themselves out of the physical-bodily realm with their soul-spiritual being.

[ 16 ] Today, and in these lectures in general, I wish to describe what the clairvoyant consciousness perceives when it enters the spiritual world with the intention of understanding the inner life of human beings, these four spheres of the soul—perception, thinking, feeling, and willing—in order to discover what actually surges within the human soul and brings about its happiness and suffering.

[ 17 ] Let us suppose, then, that a clairvoyant consciousness had managed to truly step out of the physical-bodily realm into the spiritual-soul realm, just as a person normally does only in the unconscious state of sleep, and if, in carrying out this process of detachment with the determined intention, with the impulse, to come to know the human inner life, he were to feel confronted by that very inner life, then what I am about to describe would unfold before him.

[ 18 ] The next thing that confronts the clairvoyant consciousness is, in fact, a complete reversal of one’s entire worldview. As long as we are in the body, we look around us with our senses and think with our intellect. We see a world of mountains, rivers, clouds, stars, and so on around us, and at one point in this world we then see ourselves—one might say as something minuscule in comparison to this vast world. As the clairvoyant consciousness begins to operate outside the body, this relationship is virtually reversed. The world that otherwise spreads out before our senses, about which we reflect with our intellect bound to the brain—this world vanishes from our view, from our perception. It also gives rise to no thoughts, so to speak. But one feels as if poured out into this world; one truly feels, once one has stepped out of one’s body, in such a way that this feeling is expressed correctly when one says: The world you used to look at—you are now poured out into it; you are within it. You fill the entire space to a certain extent, and you yourself weave through time.

[ 19 ] It is a sensation one must first get used to. It is a sensation that can also be expressed by saying: What used to be the external world has now become the inner world. Not as if one now carried this former external world within oneself, but the feeling, the sensation is there: it has become an inner world. You live in the space where your sensory perceptions used to be spread out, about whose objects and events you used to think—you now live within it. — And the small being that stood, as it were, at the center of the sensory horizon—the human being—actually becomes the world now, when one develops clairvoyant consciousness in a certain way. We look upon it just as we used to look upon the entire external world spread out in space and unfolding in time. We have, so to speak, become the world.

[ 20 ] Just think, my dear friends, what a reversal this is of the human perception of the world: what used to be considered not the world at all—what we called the “I”—is now, in fact, the world out there toward which everything tends. It is as if one were looking from all points in space toward a single center—and there one sees oneself. It is as if one were swimming forward and backward in time—and at a point in a wave of this stream of time, one finds oneself. One has become the world to oneself.

[ 21 ] That is the first impression one has when—and I say this again explicitly—one develops clairvoyant consciousness with the intention of getting to know the inner life of human beings. That is the first impression. Strange: One steps out of the body with the intention of getting to know the human inner life, and the first thing one encounters is the human form itself. But how transformed this human form is! One cannot say this often enough: One must step out of the body with the intention of getting to know the human inner life. Then everything I am about to say comes to pass. Therefore, it does not necessarily always have to occur when one becomes clairvoyant.

[ 22 ] This human form—how different it appears! One knows that what one is looking at, what one sees there, is you. Yes, it is you, you who once felt yourself from within, in your skin, in your blood—you stand outside. — But at first, all one actually sees of what stands there is, one might say, the outer form—though transformed. The eyes, what used to be eyes, shine, as it were, like two suns—but inner suns, vibrating in a radiance of light, sparkling, flaring up, and fading away in their sparkle, spreading radiant light. This is how the eyes appear on the transformed human form. The ears begin to sound in a certain way; what one sees of the ears in the physical world, one does not see, but one feels a certain sound. The entire skin glows with a kind of radiance that one feels more than one can see. In short, the human form appears to one as a luminous, ‘resonant, magneto-electric, radiation-emitting’ entity. But the expressions are, of course, clumsy, because they are taken from the physical world.

[ 23 ] This is how the world appears before us. And this is our world at the beginning of the clairvoyant experience described: the human being radiant with light, the entire skin glowing visibly, the eyes visible, the ears audible! And now, when one has this impression, one knows: You have seen your body, your physical body, from outside the body. One knows: seen from the perspective of the spirit, the physical body is like this.

[ 24 ] When one then attempts to engage in an inner activity out there, but outside the body—an activity comparable to reflection—yet it is something other than ordinary thinking; it is the unfolding of an inner, creative power of the soul—when one develops this, one sees more in this luminous being within: one sees moving forces within it that, one might say, permeate this luminous form like a kind of circulation of energy. And now one knows: What you perceive there within as a kind of inclusion in your luminous body is your life of thought viewed from the outside. One can now recognize it as a part of the etheric body that one is seeing. One sees the etheric body as the weaving life of thought. It is like a circulation of dark waves—a spiritual blood circulation, one might say—dark waves within the luminous body that give the whole a peculiar appearance and that force upon you the realization: There, within your physical body, the etheric body is undulating and surging, which you are now observing from the outside, which is now becoming visible to you:

[ 25 ] You see, by standing outside one’s own body, one comes to realize that the physical body and the etheric body truly exist, and what they look like when viewed from the outside.

[ 26 ] However, this inner strengthening can go even further. For if one were to perceive only what I have just described, one would feel out of place in the spiritual world. One would then feel like a being who, on the physical plane, can indeed receive impressions from the external world, but who is inwardly completely devoid of feeling, unable to feel anything at all. But even that which corresponds to this feeling on the physical plane can now be awakened inwardly, out there beyond the body. This is not feeling itself, for this feeling has its justification only within the physical body; but it is that which corresponds to feeling within the spiritual world. Before, one merely sensed: You are in that space within and drifting through time. You are in the space where you used to see the events and beings, and in the time in which you perceived them; there you are within it. But when the inner soul life corresponding to feeling is now awakened out there beyond the body, then this soul life begins to unfold a knowledge through which all manner of things are illuminated out there, through which one not only feels oneself spread out over space, but through which one perceives something that is within this space, that surges as a being within this stream of time. And one now finds not what one used to see in the outer world by looking through the body and its organs, but one finds oneself experiencing the innermost depths of this outer world, in the spiritual that surges and undulates through this outer world. It is as if the space in which one would previously have merely felt oneself were now filled with countless stars, all of which are moving and to which one belongs oneself. And now one knows: You are experiencing yourself in your astral body. One experiences oneself in one’s astral body outside the physical body in such a way that what one previously only felt comes to life in substance.

[ 27 ] When one now looks back at what one used to see of oneself—what was just described, so to speak, as the outer world—at this luminous body with the dark circulation of thoughts of the etheric body within it, then, at the very moment one concentrates, outside the body, on the astral, on the stellar life of the astral body, what one has left behind—the abandoned body—appears different. And one can now clearly perceive the difference, which can be expressed as follows: You can concentrate back on yourself, and then you see your luminous body and your etheric body of thought. But if you can concentrate on yourself in such a way that an inner world of stars—which you know you are filling out—unfolds within you, and you now look back at your physical body, which you have left behind, then the radiance may cease, and the circulation of thought stops. It is, in a certain sense, a matter of will, but in its place an image of our own being appears to us—yes, it cannot be put any other way—as our personified karma. That which we carry within us as human beings, the reason we bring this or that fate upon ourselves, is as if rolled up. Our karma, our destiny, personified, stands before us. And we know, when we now look at this: This is you, but as you actually are in your moral inner being. This is you, just as you stand in the world as an individual; this is you in your very essence.

[ 28 ] Yet another kind of consciousness arises. This consciousness, which is added to the others, has something very oppressive about it. For one perceives this fully personified destiny in such a way that one feels it in the innermost connection with one’s physicality, with one’s earthly human being. And indeed in such a way that one has the immediate realization: Just as your muscles are structured within your earthly body, just as your entire muscular system is, so is it a creation of this destiny of yours, of your karma. Now comes the time when one says to oneself: How different maya is from the truth at times. We believe, as long as we stand on the physical plane, that this muscular human being consists precisely of fleshy muscles; in truth, these fleshy muscles are crystallized karma. And they are so formed in the human being, so crystallized, that the human being carries his crystallized karma right down to the finest chemical composition within his muscular system. He carries it so completely that the spiritual seeker now becomes fully aware of this: If, for example, a person has moved his muscles in such a way that he has gone to a place where misfortune befell him, this has happened for the reason that within the muscles lay the spiritual force that drove him of its own accord to the place where the misfortune occurred. The world order has crystallized our destiny within our muscular system. And within our muscular system lives the spirit, crystallized for the outer physical plan, which, without our obvious knowledge, leads us everywhere we must go, must arrive, in accordance with our karma.

[ 29 ] When this inner strengthening goes even further, when a person, so to speak, continues to experience their inner self outside of their body, then what arises within them corresponds to the impulse of will that otherwise exists in physical life, on the physical plane. As soon as this life of the will emerges inwardly—but outside the body—the human being not only feels as if they are within a star system, but they feel as if they are within the sun of that star system; they know themselves to be one with the sun of their planetary system. One might say that when one experiences one’s astral body inwardly, one knows oneself to be one with the planets of one’s planetary system; when one experiences oneself with one’s I outside the body, one knows oneself to be one with the sun of one’s star system, toward which everything is directed, toward which everything tends.

[ 30 ] If one now looks back at what is no longer inside but outside—for what is outside while one is in the physical body is, when one is out of the body, inside, and what is within when one is in the physical body is, when one is outside the body, without—so when one now looks back upon oneself, then something else confronts one; then the necessity confronts one, in regard to oneself, that what is out there in the physical world as one’s own physicality had to come into being and must pass away: The coming into being and passing away of the physical body confronts you. One becomes aware, as it were, of how spiritual powers and beings exist that direct and guide the formation of this physical body, and how others are there who break it down, this physical body. And one becomes conscious of how this very coming into being and passing away crystallizes in the physical world. For one knows: this coming into being and passing away is, in essence, bound to the human skeletal system. With the incorporation of the skeletal system into the human physical body, judgment is passed, so to speak, on the form in which the human being experiences birth and death in the physical world. Just as the skeletal system is crystallized within the human being, so is the way the human being comes into being and passes away as a being determined by this formation. We know: You could not be the being that you are in physical existence if the whole world had not worked together to harden your physical nature within your physical existence in such a way that it confronts you as a skeletal system. And one learns to revere in the skeletal system—as strange as that may sound—the ruling universal world powers that find their spiritual expression in all those beings concentrated in the life of the Sun. One learns, as it were, to recognize how the fundamental plan of the human being—this skeletal system—has been inscribed into the world order, and how the other aspects, namely the physical organs, have been, as it were, suspended from it.

[ 31 ] Thus the clairvoyant contemplation of what is now becoming the external world ends with the vision of the symbol of death; one might say, with the vision of the skeletal human being from the outside. For through these clairvoyant processes one ultimately arrives at the realization of how the spiritual worlds have, as it were, formed a physical outer symbol—these spiritual worlds to which one truly belongs with one’s inner being, and into which one has placed oneself by stepping outside one’s body. One comes to know oneself with one’s being outside one’s body. And now one also learns to recognize, precisely at this fourth stage: When we carry out our actions in the world, when we unfold our will, then that is the power within us that unconsciously acts on the physical plane, which we actually only now come to know: When we simply walk forward and make use of the mechanical movement of our skeletal system, universal, cosmic forces are at work in this process of walking—forces in which we are truly present only when we experience ourselves outside our body on the fourth stage.

[ 32 ] Just think about it, my dear friends: a person goes for a walk and moves his limbs forward with the help of skeletal mechanics; he thinks he is doing this for his own pleasure. For this to be possible—for there to be forces through which we can move forward using our skeletal mechanics—the entire world had to exist, and the entire world had to be permeated by divine-spiritual forces, forces of which we only gain knowledge once we have reached this fourth stage. The divine-spiritual cosmos lives within each of our steps, and while we believe that it is we who move our feet forward, we could not do so if we did not live within the spiritual cosmos, within the divine world.

[ 33 ] As long as we are in our physical bodies, we cast our gaze all around us. There we see the beings of the mineral, plant, and animal kingdoms; we see mountains, rivers, seas, lakes, clouds; we see stars, the sun, the moon; what we see externally has an inner life, and we ourselves enter into this inner life when we live outside our bodies in the manner described. When we live within them, we know: what is spiritual within them, what lies hidden behind the radiant sun, behind the shining stars, behind the mountains, rivers, seas, lakes, and clouds—that lives in the mechanics of our bones when we move them, and all of that must be there. Then we also gain a deeper understanding of what has gone before. Just as our will is intimately connected with our skeletal mechanics, our feelings are intimately connected with our muscular system; this muscular system is a symbolic expression of our emotional system. Just as our muscles are constructed, just as our muscles allow us to contract and extend, thereby in turn bringing about the mechanics of the bones, so the planetary system is necessary for this, which we explore when we are in our astral body. The entire planetary system lives within our muscular system, just as the entire cosmos lives within our skeletal mechanics. What can be said in a corresponding way about thoughts and sensory perceptions will be addressed in the following lectures.

[ 34 ] Such insights are provided by spiritual knowledge. We see from this that spiritual knowledge is truly not merely something that gives us thoughts and ideas, but something that can permeate our entire soul, so that through it we truly come to know ourselves, becoming a different person in all our feeling and thinking. For if one allows what has now been expounded as the experience of clairvoyant consciousness to take effect on one’s mind and to coalesce into a fundamental feeling of life within the soul, how then can this fundamental feeling of life within the soul be expressed? How must one speak if one wishes to describe in a few words what is kindled within us as an inner sense of life through such knowledge gained from clairvoyant research?

[ 35 ] One looks at what appears to be the most mundane, at what is the expression of our most everyday whims, and one gets something of an impression of what you find described in the opening sentences of The Trial of the Soul through the words of Capesius and Benedictus: how, as it were, the goals that the divine-spiritual beings have set for themselves converge within the human being, how that which divine-spiritual beings have conceived throughout the worlds flows into what human nature is. And now one wishes to summarize this in a sense of life: one looks upon the whole of human nature differently than before; one now knows that this human nature is permeated by the divine cosmos in a way entirely different from before. And the awareness of this is kindled, strengthened, and invigorated, and speaks with an inner understanding of mood and feeling: If one wishes to understand the human being, one can do so only by learning to know that this entire human being springs from the divine-spiritual!

[ 36 ] When we observe how his feelings flow into his muscular activity, how the divine-spiritual and the cosmic flow into his bones, how the whole world lives in the movement of his bones, how the entire planetary system lives in the contraction, expansion, and relaxation of his muscles—when we think this through and feel it deeply—then we say with full understanding: Yes, this human being is born of the Divine.

[ 37 ] Ex deo nascimur.