Lecture IV

You see, as human beings living in the world between birth and death we continuously receive impressions of the outer world through our sense perceptions. We form mental images about these and permeate our mental images with our feelings. We pass over to our will impulses and permeate all these. This forms in us at first, however, a kind of abstract life, a kind of picture life. If you look from within, as it were, at what the sense organs have formed inwardly as soul experience of the outer world, you find, in fact, the content of your soul. It is the soul content of the human being that in the higher waking consciousness presents what the outer world gives him between birth and death. His inner being receives it, as it were. If I sketch this inner being, in perception the world as it were enters (see next below, red), becomes inwardly penetrated by the forces of feeling and will, and presses itself into the human organism. We actually bear within us a view of the world, but we bear this view of the world through the effects, the impressions, of the world pressing into us. We are not able to understand fully in our ordinary consciousness the destiny of what actually goes on in us with these impressions of the world. What presses into us and—within certain limits—what is a picture of the cosmos is not only permeated by feelings and inner will impulses, which enter us in consciousness, but is pulsed through by all that otherwise,lives within the human being. In this way it acquires a certain tendency. For as long as we live, right up until death, it is held together by the body. In penetrating the portal of death, it takes with it from the body what one can call a wish to continue what it became in the body, a wish to accept the being of man. When we carry our inner soul life through death it acquires the wish to accept the being of man.