Things in Past and Present in the Spirit of Man

When a certain impulse wants to be active in us, obviously it must come up in the astral body. If you consider these things in an orderly fashion, they do not contradict each other. Thus when you speak of the presence of drives and instincts in the human being, you must naturally ascribe them to the astral body. However, the form similarity which we have just spoken about in the animal kingdom is at the basis of the situation. And again, when we consider our astral body, if we are able to separate it out imaginatively as I just indicated in the separation of the ether body, then this astral body would fall apart, because it is only held together through the elasticity of the physical and the ether bodies. If you remove that elasticity, the astral body would fall apart and then it would represent something very similar to the whole outspread plant kingdom. Through the fact that we have an astral body, the different forms of the plant kingdom really exist in us as it is spread out in the world in its manifoldness. If you study the whole plant kingdom in the way in which one form is placed beside another, then you have an externally separated picture of that which has been drawn together in the human astral body. This knowledge also belongs to what has been called the Lost Word, because a consciousness of these things was present in the primal wisdom.