Lecture VIII

Thus we have been considering the spiritual in man, the soul element in man, the bodily in man. When we consider the spiritual in man it appears to us today as the determining spirit of the human being. When we as human spirit consider this spirit, it does not seem to us to be very differentiated. This spirit may be said to bear various hues, but it appears to us as a uniformity. To consider this human spirit in its world connections we need spiritual science. If we have not come to spiritual science, then there streams out into the world around us this undifferentiated, uniform, indefinite human spirit, and there arises a washed-out pantheism. When, however, with the help of spiritual science, we wish to learn to know this human spirit, we make our way into the world of those higher spiritual realms that stand in mutual relationship to one another and also in relationship to the human being. What we have in our spirit becomes concrete only when we find it concretely immersed in the world of the higher hierarchies. What we have in a fluctuating way within us as our life of soul, differentiated into thinking, feeling, and willing, we can only really recognize if we seek it in the stages between the various members of the human being. It is there that thinking weaves between the physical body and the etheric body, as mediator in the interaction of these two bodies; feeling weaves between the etheric'body and the astral body, mediating the interbreathing of the etheric and astral bodies. When we wish to know about the life of willing, we must observe the mutual flow of forces between I and astral body, and in the interplay that develops between these two we must study the life of the will. Then we have what constitutes the present for the human being, his soul life.