Human Knowledge and Its Significance for Man and the Cosmos

And now let us think of a fundamental truth to which reference has been made in recent lectures, namely, that man's being is essentially twofold. Man is a twofold being inasmuch as the structure and nature of his head differs essentially from the structure and nature of the rest of his organism. The head of a human being living at the present time is, in essentials, the product of the metaporphosis of the body of the preceding incarnation. The body of the present incarnation, that is to say, the body with the exclusion of the head, will become the head of the next incarnation, after we have lived through the period stretching from death to a new birth. We can therefore picture man's progress through incarnation as follows: He has his head, and the other part of his organism. After death we may say that the head disappears, and the rest of the body is then transformed into the head of the next incarnation. Once again he will receive the body of the next incarnation from the Earth. The head disappears, but when I say this, you must remember that it is the forces connected with the head that disappear. The substance of the head and of the rest of the body too also disappear, but the physical substance itself is not the essential. The substance is Maya in the real sense. The forces are the reality. The forces contained in the body of man, with the exclusion of those of the head, are transformed during the period between death and a new birth into the forces underlying the head of the new incarnation. In our present incarnation we have, in our head, the forces that were connected with our body in the previous incarnation. It is this basic idea which we have been considering in detail in recent lectures.