Lecture Four

That part of us which in our last incarnation was a result of forces of the sense world, namely the limb man, has become what it now is, the head man, through a metamorphosis which takes place between death and a new birth—not in relation, of course, to the outer form, but in regard to the forces of formation. What is now the limb man becomes entirely transformed in its forces—transmuted in its super-sensible constitution between death and a new birth, and appears in our new Earth-life incorporated out of the Universe into our constitution. On to this is suspended, as it were, the rest of man—formed out of the world of sense. This fact we can find already proved clearly from Embryology, if we would only think rationally about embryonic facts. And thereby we have in our head organisation a system of laws not belonging to this world at all, save only at its origin—that is, in so far as it was present in a previous incarnation. But all that which has caused the transformation of limb man to head man is active in an entirely different world—the world wherein we live, in the interval between death and a new birth. Here, then, another world penetrates the world of the senses. Another world is manifested in the head organism of Man. In a certain sense the external world is brought into correspondence with this other world, in that the head projects the principal sense-organs outwards. The world that is extended in space and that runs its course in time, is perceived by man through his senses; it penetrates into man through his senses, and so it too belongs in a certain sense to the head organism. In relation to our limb man on the other hand, we are in a state of sleep. I have often spoken of this sleep-state of man in relation to his Will nature, in relation to all that exists in the limb man. We do not know how we move our limbs, how the will causes the movement; we only examine the movement afterwards as an outer phenomenon through our senses. We are asleep in our limb organisation, in the same sense as we are asleep in the Universe between going to sleep and awaking.