The Life of Man on Earth and the Essence of Christianity

GA 349 — 4 April 1923, Dornach

VII. The Organization of the Human Being

Gentlemen! Science only wants to accept what can be seen with the eyes and grasped with the hands. It takes a special ability to also research that which cannot be seen with the eyes and grasped with the hands, and one does not want to acquire this ability. Medieval religious science said that there was a science for everything earthly and a doctrine of faith, and that is what is written in the scriptures. And even today people still hold this point of view. People no longer dare to have a science that cannot be grasped with hands, because they have not yet progressed beyond a science that can be grasped with hands. I would like to explain to you a little what I have told you, by means of something that is admittedly old for today's time; but with regard to these things, the decisive event occurred precisely in the last third of the 19th century. I need only read you the last sentences of a book, and you will immediately see how today's science is oriented in this regard. It says: Beyond the limits of our knowledge, there is no path. In the pathless... (space in the transcript) we can only let ourselves be carried by the inexhaustible hope in a mystically sweet half-slumber, on the wings of fantasy - and so on.

So what does the gentleman say? He says: What you can grasp with your hands is science. The rest is a figment of the imagination. Everyone can imagine things and have them imagined, because you can't know anything about all that. And if people take comfort in all kinds of supernatural things, well, you don't have to take that away from them.

It is absolutely terrible to see the confusion in which this matter has ended up. But now I would like to show you that these gentlemen have completely forgotten how to think when it comes to this science. I would like to show you this with another passage from this book. For what does the gentleman do, who pushes everything that cannot be grasped with his hands into the realm of belief? He says: To speak of an ego, which should actually dwell in man as an eternal ego, is actually scientific nonsense, because the ego is, after all, only the sum of all that is otherwise in us. We are accustomed to summarizing everything we imagine, everything we feel, from beginning to end, into a whole. And then, when we have summarized it into a whole, we say “I.” – So says the Lord.

Now, however, he wants to make this clear. He wants to make it clear that the word 'I' really only summarizes everything that one experiences. Because then the 'I' is just a mere word if one only summarizes in this way. So he makes a comparison. He compares everything that a person experiences with a mass of soldiers, with a company of soldiers. So what I experienced as a child, what I played as a child, what I felt in the game, that is one troop of soldiers; what I experienced a little later is the other troop of soldiers, and so on; to this day, I summarize all of this as the individual soldiers are combined into a company, and I say “I.” So he says. So he compares all the individual experiences of the soul with a company of soldiers, and he summarizes them as one summarizes, and does not say, Miller and Lehmann and so on, but says: The company 12 and so on. So he summarizes everything that one experiences in the soul as I, into a company of soldiers. Then he continues: “On the other hand, a word must be said here about the ego, insofar as one can also understand by it the circumstance that from the period of life when consciousness is somewhat developed, man always feels as the same personality, as the same ego.” He says, then: Man must finally be weaned of the idea that he feels as an ego, he must be accustomed to the idea that it is only as if one were a company of soldiers.

"This fact, viewed from our standpoint, should have nothing particularly surprising about it. First of all, if we want to get to the bottom of this matter, we must be clear about what we actually mean by the individual personality in relation to the external world.” So at first he gives a nice admonition that we have to form an idea. He answers: ”It is the result of all kinds of individual ideas, but especially of those that summarize the direct interactions of the organism with the external world into a more or less compact whole. In our view, the idea of the self is nothing more than an abstract idea, and indeed of the highest order, built on the sum of all the ideas, feelings and desires of an individual, but in particular of all the ideas of the interrelations between one's own body and the outside world. The concept encompasses all of this, just as the concept of the plant kingdom encompasses the infinite sum of all plants. The word 'I' – now this is where it gets interesting! “is the representative of all these ideas, much as the military leader is the representative of all the individual soldiers. Just as one can say of the deeds of a military leader that he always forms the more or less obscure unconscious background for the ideas of the individual soldiers and army detachments, in exactly the same way the mass of individual concrete ideas and feelings forms the background of the concept of the ego."

Now, gentlemen, look at how the man thinks. Now, the book is very learned, that must be assumed, it is at the cutting edge of science. The man says: You have a company of soldiers and the commander. But you only summarize the soldiers; the commander is merely their representative. It is the same with the ideas and feelings. You summarize all the ideas and feelings and the ego is merely their representative.

Yes, but if the ego is the representative, just the word, then with the company of soldiers you must also see the army commander only as a word. Have you ever discovered that the army commander leading a company of soldiers is just a word composed of all the individuals? Now, you could imagine that the army commander is not particularly clever. Sometimes the ego is not particularly clever either. But to imagine that the army commander is nothing but a mere word - and that is what he needs as a comparison for how the ego relates to ideas - proves that when the cleverest people start talking about the supernatural, they become very stupid. Because, right, you can prove to them that when they make a comparison, it is without any logic. There is not the slightest logic in it.

After Mr. Erbsmehl has made this fine comparison, he continues: “From this it follows that the respective concept of the self is entirely dependent on the underlying idea. This is most clearly evident in the way it gradually develops in a child. But every adult thinking person can also account for how they feel in every respect as a different self today than ten years ago.

Now I ask Mr. Erbsmehl or Mr. Burle whether they feel like a completely different person than ten years before! Surely you can distinguish whether you are now a completely different person than ten years ago! But you come across passages like that in books at every turn today. The most ordinary facts of life are turned upside down. Of course it is mere nonsense when someone says that he feels he is a completely different person today than he was ten years ago. But that is what these gentlemen say. But the moment you start thinking about the self, whether it is the same today as it was ten years ago, you no longer get the chance to say: the self dies when the corpse dies. — Why is that?

I have already explained to you, gentlemen, that you cut your nails, skin flakes off and so on; all this happens in seven to eight years. You no longer have any of the material that you had ten years ago. Just as your skin flakes off, your insides are constantly moving away from your body. You see, your body is like this: it sheds its upper layer; then the next layer moves forward, then that layer sheds itself; then the next layer moves forward, sheds itself again, and after seven to eight years everything has shed itself. Where is that? Where is the body you had ten years ago? Yes, it has undergone the same process, only in a somewhat more complicated way, that the corpse undergoes when it is placed in the grave. The corpse dissolves into the earth. If you were to break the body down into such small pieces as the scales that are constantly falling off you, or as the nails you cut off when you cut them into such small pieces, you would not even notice that the body is going anywhere. You could blow it away. And so, over a period of seven to eight years, the physical body dissolves into the external world.

But if you still feel like an ego today, and the physical body died two to three years ago, then the ego has nothing to do with the physical body as you have it there. So you could say. But you see, it has so much to do with it that if, for example, you take a piece of chalk, you will say: I took the chalk. Every person says that. I had a schoolmate – I think I have told you this before – who, when he was nineteen or twenty years old, was on the way to becoming a real materialist. We often went for walks together, and he always said: It is quite obvious to me that we have no self, we only have a brain; the brain thinks. I always told him: Yes, look, you say: I walk, you even say: I think; why are you lying? If you really tell the truth, you would have to say: My brain thinks! — You don't even have to say “my” because “my” already points to an ego; there must already be an ego if you say “my”. People never say: My brain thinks, my brain walks, my brain takes the chalk. It doesn't occur to them at all, because in life a person cannot be a materialist. He would immediately say nonsense if he were a materialist.

But in theory, people make materialism their own and do not consider that real science knows that we no longer have the body we had eight to ten years ago, that the ego has remained. And in the same way you can remember back to your early childhood, to the second, third, fourth, fifth year. It would never occur to you to say that it is not the same self that used to run around as a boy back then. But let us assume that you have now reached the age of forty; by the age of thirty-three you have lost one body, by the age of twenty-six you have lost the second body, by the age of nineteen you have lost the third body, by the age of twelve you have lost the fourth body, by the age of five you have lost the fifth body. You have lost five bodies and your self has always remained the same. So this self is preserved throughout your entire life on earth.

But this self can also do something with your body. The body it loses, the ego can direct continuously. You see, when I walk, my legs, although they are old, are in reality only six to seven years old at most. But I direct them with the old ego that was already there when I walked around as a boy. The ego is still walking around. The ego directs the body during life on earth. Gentlemen, I have explained to you how one actually gets the body. You see, science imagines – I already made this clear to you last time –: Well, you just get the body from your mother, your father. It is already prepared. You are already a small person. You inherit that; you inherit the body. Yes, this science, which claims that you inherit the body, is not really worth a shot of powder, but it is the case that if you just look at a bone – you now have to remember some of what I have told you before – if you look at the thigh bone, for example, you will find that it is a wonderful sight. A thigh bone like that has a whole scaffolding. The scaffolding of the Goetheanum was nothing compared to the beautiful scaffolding that this whole thigh bone has when viewed under the microscope, a wonderful scaffolding, beautifully built.

Now I have told you that during the period of time that you no longer remember, the child learns to walk, to speak and to think. Of course, you can no longer remember the time when you could not yet think. So you learn to walk, to move in general, to use your body, to speak and to think. You learn that. And to do that, you have to direct your body as well. You cannot, as a child still crawling on all fours, straighten up the body without your will. When you move your hand, the I says: I move the hand - the I with its will. But in the same way, the will also causes the child to straighten up. The child learns to speak with the will. The child learns to think with the will. So we have to ask: where does it come from that the child learns all this? And here we come to the fact that through the “whole of earthly life, despite the fact that the body is continually being replaced, the I always remains the same, that this I is still the same in the time when we have learned to think, to speak and to walk. This I was already active in the body.

If you cut off the tip of your nose — it only needs to be a small piece, right, because a lot of it is not healthy, but you can cut off so much that it does you no harm — and look at it under the microscope, you will again see such a wonderful body with a structure that is very beautifully built. Yes, gentlemen, you have no idea how beautiful the tiniest part of your nose is! Admirably beautiful! And so it is with every part of the human body. It is beautifully constructed, beautifully arranged. The best sculptor could not do better.

There is only one structure in the human organism where everything must be destroyed and only mere matter must be present – I already drew your attention to this last time – and that is the egg from which a human being develops. And at fertilization, the last act takes place; everything of the matter that has been formed is removed.

So that one can say: the bone is beautiful; everything in the material is beautiful. The tip of the nose is no longer as beautiful as the bone, but it is still beautiful. But the egg, from which a person will later develop, contains only a completely disordered material, because everything is fragmented in it. There is no atom, there is no formation at all. Why?

A human soul cannot simply enter a bone. Superstitious people sometimes believe that there is a little devil sitting somewhere in their bones or limbs. Well, sometimes this is the case in a somewhat figurative sense, but a human being cannot enter such a bone. Nor can a person enter the tip of your nose.

I knew a lady who claimed to have a little ghost in her left index finger, and she would ask it anything she wanted to know. If she should go for a walk, she would ask it, and so on. But of course that is nonsense, a superstition. What we have to say to ourselves is: into such a well-formed bone, or even into the tip of our nose, no human being, no human soul, no human spirit can enter directly. The thing is this: The human soul-spiritual, the actual I, can only enter the egg germ because there the substance is only dust, world dust. There the soul now works the world dust with the powers it has brought with it from the spiritual world.

If people believe that what a person is comes simply through ordinary inheritance from father and mother, then one must assume that the human being is already a little human being. But that is contrary to science. Science says that the protein is completely pulverized. And it is from this pulverized protein that the soul, which comes from the spiritual, from the supersensible world, actually builds the human body.

Now you may ask: But why does the child resemble the mother or the father? Yes, gentlemen, the reason for this is that the child always imitates. The one who says: This child is the spitting image of his father – could actually say something else. You see, if we wait a little while with the child, we have a child that looks very much like, say, its father or mother, although this is not at all how it is expressed. But such things are not the concern of the learned gentlemen. But, you see, let's wait a little, let's not judge already when the child is eight or fourteen days or a month old, let's wait until the child is three or four years old. That's when the child started speaking. Then someone comes along and says: Gosh, the father is German, so the child has also started speaking German. It must have inherited it from the father, because the father is German. That is quite remarkable! Since the child came out of the egg, the language must have been in the egg. It is just wonderful that the child, when it came out of the egg, out of the mother's body, could not yet speak! But, of course, the child did not inherit the ability to speak; the child acquired it through imitation. The language is similar to that of the father and mother. But it would not occur to anyone to say that the child inherited the language.

Likewise, the face is similar. But why is the face similar? Yes, because the soul, when it allows itself to be born through a mother or to be begotten through a father who is Mr. Miller, makes the face similar to the father or mother, just as the child later makes the language similar to the language of the father and mother. You just have to consider that. In speech, the child works out the sounds and words by making itself similar to its parents or educators. But even earlier, the soul unconsciously works on the face or even the gait, like a sculptor. And because the child is born into the family and makes itself similar, when it has no consciousness yet, the similarity arises in the same way as the similarity of speech arises.

You see, gentlemen, in this way one comes to the conclusion that man actually comes from the spiritual, from the supersensible world, and builds his body with all its similarities himself. Now just take a look at the little child. The little child is born. When children are born, sometimes, despite the fact that all mothers find them very beautiful, one cannot easily distinguish them from little animals. Isn't it true that human beings are such little animals when they are born – in relation to later, of course. They really are quite unsightly, these little children. But gradually the soul works inside and makes everything more and more similar to a human being, until the moment comes when the child learns to walk; that is, as I told you last time, it finds itself in the equilibrium position of the earth. Then the child learns to speak. It learns to use the organs in its chest, because these organs are located in the chest. Then the child learns to think, that is, it learns to use the organs in its head.

Now, let us think about this. The child learns to walk, that is, to keep his balance and to move. What does he learn when he walks? Well, he learns to use his limbs while walking. But you cannot use your limbs without using your metabolism at the same time. When you use your limbs, something of us is always burned. Substances are burned. Even when you just move an arm, substances are being burned inside it. Metabolism is connected to the limbs. Walking, keeping one's balance, moving has to do with metabolism and with the limbs.

Then the child learns to speak. What has that got to do with? Speaking has to do with the chest organs, with breathing. The child can already breathe when it is very small. But connecting words with the expelled air is what the child learns with the chest organs. So: keeping balance is connected with the limbs, speaking with the chest, and thinking with the head, the nerves.

But now, we have three parts of the human being. Note that there are only three. First, we have the limbs and metabolism; second, we have the chest; third, we have thinking, the head. We have three parts of the human being.

Now let us take a look at the child. When a child is born, it is not only outwardly dissimilar to an adult human being. The cheeks are dissimilar, the whole shape; it is dissimilar at the forehead; isn't it, the child is dissimilar on the outside. But on the inside it is even more dissimilar. The brain matter of a child is more like a brain pulp. And by the age of seven, by the time the child gets its second teeth, this pulp, this brain pulp, is beautifully formed. From the age of seven, the human brain has a truly wonderful structure. The soul, the spirit within it, has made it, the soul-spiritual within it.

But you see, gentlemen, we as children could not develop this brain so wonderfully up to the age of seven if we were not constantly in contact with the world. If, for example, you have a child who is born blind, you can immediately see that the optic nerves and thus a whole piece of the brain remain a kind of pulp. It is not beautifully developed. If a person is born deaf, the auditory nerves, which go from the ear and cross here (it is drawn), and then go over there, remain a piece of brain mush along the way. So we can only properly develop our brain in the first seven years of life because we have the senses.

But the things you can grasp with your hands outside, the brain does not train that. You could, for all I care, stuff tangible substances through the nostrils into the brain – you would ruin the brain, but it would not be educated. So all tangible matter is of no use to you in building up the brain in the first seven years. Only the finest matter that lives in the light comes into consideration, for example. Only ether comes into consideration.

You see, that is very important. We absorb the ether through all our senses. So what works from our head? It is not the physical body that works from the head into the child, and into the rest of the organism. The physical body does not work in the child while the child is developing its brain so wonderfully, but the etheric body does. The etheric body, which, as I have already mentioned, we continue to possess for two or three days after death, is at work in the child, and it is this that causes the human brain to develop perfectly, thereby making the child a thinking human being. So we can say: the etheric body is at work in the thinking.

There we have found the first supersensible element of the human being: the etheric body. A child could not develop its brain, it could not have a human brain inside it, if it could not work with the ether all around. Later, by straining the muscles, you can make the muscles stronger through the physical. But, let's say, for example, the left parietal lobe in the brain, you can't make it stronger with something physically tangible. If you want to make the muscle stronger, you can do that by attaching a weight to it and lifting it again and again, thus overcoming the heaviness. But you have to make the muscle stronger through the tangible. Just as you have the muscle here, the biceps, and can make it stronger by lifting and lowering weights, so, if you look at your head from the front, you have a lobe of the brain here. It hangs over here like the arm hangs here. You can't attach any weight to it. And yet, what happens in the arm muscle during training cannot be compared to what happens in this lobe of the brain! At the beginning, when we are born, it is a pulp; when we are seven years old, it is wonderfully developed. Just as the arm muscle becomes stronger through lifting and lowering the weight, that is, from something tangible, from something visible, so the brain becomes stronger through what is in the ether. Just as the human being is connected to the environment through his physical body, so he is also connected to the environment through his etheric body. And from that he has the thinking. Through that he forms the inside of his head in the first seven years.

Once the human being has developed thinking, then, I would like to say, he returns to speech. Learning to speak is something completely different than learning to think. Learning to think is precisely what works on the formation of our body. This makes us, so to speak, sculptural, I would say, this thinking. It works in us so that we truly become a complete human being by the age of seven. During this time, we also learn to speak. But you see, it is not possible for us to learn to speak in the same way as we learn to think. For when we speak, what happens then? Yes, gentlemen, you see, when you lift a heavy weight or strike with your arm with terrible force, your arm hurts. To hurt means to have a feeling. We really have a feeling when we exert any limb too much and somehow hurt it. Whenever we feel pain, we have hurt something, even if only very slightly. We have a feeling. But, gentlemen, all language comes from feeling. If you listen to the child, you can hear how language comes from feeling. The child will learn: “Ei, ei” in its language. What does it want to express when it says “Ei, ei”? It nestles up. It likes the person to whom it says “Ei, ei”. It lays its little head down when it says “Ei, ei”. And so it is with all words; it is the same with everything that is spoken: a feeling underlies it. Yes, the feeling does not come from the brain, and the feeling does not come from what the brain develops from.

You see, if there were no sunlight shining through our eyes, the ether around us would not be able to work on us. We could not live properly for the first seven years. During the first seven years, the child also has more feeling. It learns language by imitation. But feeling is at work in this imitation. And we have to say: light cannot evoke feeling. When we learn language through feeling, something else is present in us. That which then works in language, whereby the human being can speak, is not just the etheric body, it is then the human being's astral body. So that we can say: secondly, to learn to speak, we have the astral body – that is just an expression, I could just as easily say differently – we have the astral body, which works primarily in the chest, in breathing, which then transforms into speaking.

You see, it is always the belief that man, with his physical body, has, let us say, hunger and thirst. But that is nonsense. Imagine a machine that is driven by water. You have to give the machine water. All right, then it will work, and if you don't give it water, it will stop working. What does that mean: the machine stops working? It means that you have to give it water again, you have to let it drink. But the machine is not thirsty beforehand. The machine is not thirsty; it may stop working, but it is not thirsty beforehand, otherwise it would cry out. It does not do that. It is not thirsty.

What is the connection in humans? When a child is thirsty, it does not behave like a machine. It does not just stop moving. On the contrary, a child starts screaming when it is thirsty. What is the connection between thirst and screaming? Screaming is not in the substance, but it is also not in the ether. The ether can form the structure; it can thus form that which is our form. But the ether does not cause us to scream. If the ether were to cause us to scream, there would be a terrible, perhaps not a roar, but a continuous hissing in the world. Because if we look, it is the ether that, together with our eye, causes us to see. The ether is constantly entering our eye. That is why we see. Yes, but when the ether enters our eye, it does not start in the eye: s-s-s-e-] —, no, that is not the etheric body of the human being; it does not lisp. Just imagine if, just because we are looking, there were a constant whispering in a room, that would be a nice story! So the etheric body does not scream or whisper. There is something else there. That is the astral body. And when a child is thirsty and cries out, there is a feeling of thirst in the astral body. And this crying out is what brings the child's feeling to our ears.

But all that I have described to you now could not yet lead to my walking. Because, you see, if I form my body from the head through the etheric body, I could remain like a statue my whole life. My body could be formed, I could roar like a lion; my roar could still be formed from the astral body. But when I want to come into balance as a child, when I want to apply the will to walk, to grasp, to come into balance, where I always say: I walk, I grasp, I come into balance - there it is still the I that comes into it, which is something other than the etheric body and the astral body. And this I lives in the limbs and in the metabolism. When you move your limbs, it is the I that moves them. So you have three parts of the human being in addition to the physical body: you have the etheric body, the astral body and the I (diagram on page 138).

And you see, these three parts of the body can also be perceived if one only trains to do so. But modern science does not want this training. And now I will tell you how modern science actually behaves when it does not want this.

You have all dreamt before. While dreaming, you believe that it is all real. Sometimes you wake up with a terrible fear, for example when you are standing at the edge of an abyss and feel dizzy and about to fall. Now you wake up, completely drenched in sweat. Why? Well, because you thought the abyss was real. You are lying quietly in bed, it is not dangerous at all, but you wake up from the danger that you saw in the image. Imagine if you slept your whole life – that would be a nice story for some. There are those who sleep their whole life.

Once upon a time, there was someone who had learned the Copernican theory and was a terribly lazy fellow. Now, he was lying in the ditch. Another one came by and said, “Why are you lying there?” “Because I have so much to do!” “Well, you guy, you're lying there, you're not doing anything.” So he said, “I have to go around the sun with the earth, and I want to stay behind! It's uncomfortable for me, it's too much work!"

Not true, some people would not even want to go around the sun with the earth! But we do our whole waking life with. You see, if we only dreamt our whole life, then we in Europe could lie in bed, someone could take our body, maybe even our bed, so as not to wake us, and take it on a ship to America – of course, angels would have to do it, because people couldn't do it so quietly – but we could be shipped to America. We continued to dream there, all that could be done to us, we don't know anything about ourselves. If we were dreaming, we would never know how the nose touches, how the left hand touches the right hand. And yet, gentlemen, we would have a whole life. If you dreamt your whole life through, it would be something else – we would be able to fly in our dreams, for example. You can't fly on earth; in your dreams you fly. We would think of ourselves as completely different beings, and so on.

But consider, a world would be around us if we were to dream the whole of life. And we wake up. Let us say: I wake up and dreamt that during the night – let me take a very telling example – I was hanged, or beheaded. Let us assume that one dreams that one has been beheaded. Well, gentlemen, if you dreamt your whole life, you would naturally always believe that you had been beheaded. It wouldn't bother you as much as it does here. You would perhaps experience it more often, dreaming that you were being beheaded, and you would believe that it wouldn't bother you. Now you wake up – and lo and behold, you've taken a book with you into bed. While tossing and turning, it came to rest at the back. Now you are lying on it with your head on the edge of the book, and the fact that you are lying uncomfortably seems to you in your dream as if you had been beheaded. When you have woken up, you realize what the dream means; after awakening, you can explain to yourself where the dream came from.

So you have to wake up first. It's waking up that matters. People who dream their whole lives would think that the dream world is their only reality. We only start to think of the dream world as a fantasy world when we wake up.

Now, gentlemen, in bed, a person wakes up of his own accord and through the surrounding world, which shakes him up. But we only wake up from the life in which we are immersed, which we believe is only the tangible, when we make an effort. And how one awakens from it, I have just described in the book: “How to Know Higher Worlds?” Just as one wakes from a dream and knows that the dream is a world brought about by waking, so one wakes from waking through higher knowledge and then knows that our ordinary world comes from what one now perceives of the higher waking. One knows this.

Therefore, the future science must not just dream away in the world, always just trying: How do you do it in the laboratory, in the physics cabinet? but it must guide people to wake up now. Then one will no longer say: Man is only a physical, material body, but then one will say: Man consists of physical matter, of the etheric body, astral body and I. And of these one can then say: One now knows what wakes up from the corpse when one dies. Because the etheric body had to approach the physical body first and shape the physical body through the head. The astral body had to approach first, had to dig itself into the chest a little, then the person learned to speak. And the I had to approach the physical body and had to bring it into balance in the outer world. Through this, he learned to move his limbs and to adapt his metabolism to the movements. So the human being brings his etheric body, his astral body and the ego from the spiritual world, and he shapes the chaotic substance, which is pulverized, into an etheric body, an astral body and an ego. And what he brings with him when he comes into the world, he carries out again through death. I have already indicated to you how that is. It is so that if one really considers this higher science of waking up, one can speak about life after death and before earthly life in the same way as one speaks about this earthly life. We will do that next time. Then the question of how a person looks without a body, namely before fertilization, will be fully answered.

The next lecture will be on Monday at nine o'clock. It is a bit difficult now, of course, but that doesn't matter. The fact that it is difficult is only because people are never prepared for these things in their youth. If they were prepared, it would not be difficult for them at all. Today, I might say, people have to struggle so that they can learn later what is not prepared for people in their youth. But when you see that people today only manage to say: the commander is only the summary of a company of soldiers, then you will also see that today's science already needs to be improved. And that is what really leads to an understanding of the supernatural.