Lecture Eleven

Remember what I have said: When our bodily organisation is remodeled in the next incarnation, it not only goes through a change, but is turned inside out; as a glove is turned from a left-hand to a right-hand glove by turning it inside out so too what is now inside—liver, heart, kidneys—becomes the outer sense-organs, eye, ear and so on. It is all turned inside out. This corresponds to another turning inside out: Saturn on the one side, and wholly outside his space, Venus and Mercury. A reversal in itself. If we do not observe this, what happens? It is the same, when we do not observe the turning inside out in the case of the human head, or when we do not observe the Universe under this law of reversal; we do something very peculiar. We do not in that case think with our head at all. And this is something to which the fifth post-Atlantean epoch is tending, in so far as it is descending and not seeking to ascend again by means of Spiritual Science. Man would like to wrest his head free and think only with the rest of the organism; that mode of thought is abstract. He wants to set free the head. He has no desire to lay claim to what has resulted from the foregoing incarnations. He wants to reckon only with the present one. Not only do men wish to deny the theory of successive Earth-lives, but carrying their head as it were with external dignity, they would like to set it as lord over the rest of the organism, they would have it like a man riding in a carriage. And they do not take that rider in the carriage in earnest; they carry him about with them, but make no claim upon his innate capacities. They make no practical use of their repeated Earth-lives.