Lecture XVII

Now bring all this together with the views of spiritual science with which you are already familiar. We know that we descend from the soul-spiritual world into the physical world through conception or birth. We know, on the other hand, that with our astral body and ego we enter a spiritual world every time we go to sleep. The spiritual world, which gives us our soul, works upon the shaping of our form until the seventh year, but after that it becomes our intelligence. Now this intelligence is confronted by the will element—actually, from birth onward, but especially so at puberty, because the interchange between them takes place then. This struggle between the external will element and the inner element of intelligence; between that spirituality we sleep through—passing through it from the moment we fall asleep until we awaken—and the particular realm of the spiritual world that we went through before our birth and conception respectively; the struggle between what we have brought along and what we sleep through each night expresses itself in the development of the larynx, in the development of what occurs in the organism during puberty. A spiritual element works with another spiritual element. We go through a spiritual world between falling asleep and waking up. Concealed in this spiritual world is the will that is communicated to us; concealed in our organism is the intelligence that we bring through birth into physical existence. We can understand the human body when we experience it as an outer revelation of something taking place out of the spiritual domain.