Self-Knowledge and God-Knowledge I

GA 90a — 23 August 1904, Berlin

LV. The Structure of Man I

Let us first briefly repeat what has emerged from the consideration of the seven basic parts of man. Man is a citizen of three worlds: the physical, the soul and the spiritual. The physical world is a reflection of the spiritual world, as it were, its opposite pole. Just as we see a mountain landscape reflected in a mirror of water in such a way that the foot of the mountain is first visible in the water, but the summit is lowest down, so it is with the spiritual world. It experiences its inversion in the physical world - the deepest physical corresponds to the highest spiritual. Atma corresponds to the mineral, Budhi to the world of life, Manas to the animal world, whose outer expression is the animal kingdom.

The soul is what connects both worlds. Man is a summary of everything we encounter in the other worlds - the microcosm in the macrocosm. Abbreviated and compressed, we find everything that happens in the cosmos in him. We can follow how the three worlds create an expression in him, in order to look at themselves through him, as it were. Man is the eye that is opened to the cosmos, built by himself.

Let us first see how the mineral forces affect him: they compress the substance - through attraction and repulsion, through number and measure. This creates the physical basis of the human being. It would be rigid and lifeless in itself, like rock crystal, which is formed according to the same laws of material connection.

This is where the life force comes in, that which conditions growth and reproduction, elasticity and going beyond oneself, that which creates the species. This species-forming force is concentrated in the germ, finds its most striking expression in heredity and, through the law of form, dominates the substance, which is subject to dissolution in itself. The inherited form is that which is preserved. We also call this life body the etheric double body because it fills the entire physical body. It is clearly visible to anyone who has the relevant organ to see.

These two bodies are built by the forces of the outside world, which builds organs in them through which it makes itself perceptible. The physical world weaves the skin of the human being and inserts the sense organs into it. The eye is an invagination in the skin. Sensations arise through sensory perceptions. These already bring about something new. Something reacts inside the person. A source of activity opens up, which responds to the sensations with impressions. This is where the person's own life begins.

Here we have the transition to the soul. The soul in man is his most intrinsic, that which arises through the impressions and experiences within him, which is or can be different in each person, for no one can know whether the other 'ro' feels exactly the same way as he does himself. This new element we call 'sentient soul'; it extends beyond the physical body, visible to the one to whom the soul organs are opened. But it is dependent on the physical and life bodies, since it receives its impressions through them and is determined within its boundaries by their strength. We call this boundary the soul body. We are therefore dealing with a sentient soul body, that is, a unit with regard to the human being as a whole. If we consider the body as such, this soul body is its third limb; the sentient soul, on the other hand, is the first limb of the human soul; it is in the soul that the feelings of pleasure and pain, the drives and passions of human beings arise. Through these, it is subject to the body.

But now it comes into contact with the spirit, which has created a physical tool for itself in the organ of thought, the brain. Thought serves it in the first instance; man reflects on his perceptions and passions. In order to satisfy these, he seeks opportunities, acts - through this the power of thought places the soul in a higher conformity to law, to which it does not belong as a mere sentient soul; it grows beyond what it is in the animal or in quite undeveloped man. It becomes the intellectual soul. The clairvoyant beholds this as a special entity within the soul body, as a second link. Through the intellectual soul the human being is led beyond his own life. He opens himself more and more to the spirit. To the extent that he opens himself to the knowledge of truth and goodness, he takes in the eternal within himself, that which exists in itself and does not depend on impressions. That which shines forth as the eternal in the soul may be called the 'conscious soul'. The body has a limiting effect on it, the spirit expands it.