The Human Being's Journey Through the World of the Senses, Soul and Spirit

Thus we see how the human being passes through the spiritual world, in which he can plastically develop his physical body even before the new birth. And now we also see how that which we have woven into our archetype is only gradually united with our life after birth. For he does not know life who believes that everything that develops in life in the way of abilities and soul powers already lies within the child. He who can truly observe life sees the human being entering existence through birth and sees how the human being only gradually finds himself in life, how in the early years the human being by no means already has within him what he can become. We can understand life much better if we say: Man only gradually unites with what he has woven as a spiritual archetype in the time between death and a new birth. Those who look at life without prejudice can see how, as a child, the human being is still surrounded by the spiritual atmosphere that he has woven for himself between death and a new birth, and how he gradually adapts to his own archetype, which he has not yet interwoven with the physicality that he brings with him at birth. While the animal is interwoven with its archetypal image from birth, we see the individual human being only gradually growing into the archetypal image that he has woven for himself through the repeated lives on earth up to this last one. And we understand the physical-sensual side of human life best when we grasp it in this way: we see it as the shell of an animal, an oyster, which we find by the wayside. As long as we want to understand it as merely assembled, out of mud, for example, we will not be able to understand this shell. But if we assume that what is shown layer by layer on the shell is secreted from the interior of an animal that has left this shell, then we understand the structure.