Lecture I

When we remember we are conscious that in our inner life we pass over from our present experience to that of our past. We always have the feeling: it is we who stand behind the weaving and movement of our thoughts. This ceases the moment we free the soul and spirit from our head and develop a thinking independent of the body. At that time I used a rather crude simile, saying it is as if we had put our head into ant-heap and then the characteristic confusion had arisen—this indeed is the way the thoughts begin to play into one another. When in ordinary life we combine two of our thoughts, as, for example, the two thoughts "rose" and "red", we know that in our thought-world we are free to combine these concepts—the rose is red. This is not so when we are outside. There we find life in the thoughts—thoughts have life of their own, every thought becomes a being. One thought runs into the other, while some other thought runs away from another.