Our Thought Life in Sleep and Wakefulness and in the Afterlife

Ultimately, there is nothing special about having anthroposophy as a theory. It must become life. But it can become life especially in this respect, that it makes our souls energetic, resilient, courageous; that in the moment when we stand in concern for physical earthly life, in deepest sorrow and deepest misery, we can be filled with inner joy, inner comfort, inner energy by looking up to a spiritual world. Then anthroposophy becomes like a living being, then it becomes something that walks among us as a living being. But then it has actually become among us what it was meant to be, and then it permeates all our activities. And then it leads us to truly penetrate this world into which we have been placed on earth for the sake of the spirit, not for the sake of physical matter. Above all, anthroposophy then leads to a real knowledge of human beings. For if one simply regards the human being in such a way that, after he has died, one disregards what has now passed through the gate of death and considers only what remains as the physical body, anatomically, by dissecting the corpse, physiologically, one learns very little about the human being. For then everything about the human being becomes more or less indifferent, or rather, equally indifferent: the blood cell becomes strongly equivalent to the nerve cell. Certainly, one distinguishes between them — I do not want to talk nonsense — but one does not distinguish between them in terms of their essence. In terms of essence, one can only distinguish them if one knows the relationship of this elementary cell being to the spiritual. Now, in the case of the nerve cell, and indeed in every nerve particle, what comes from the spirit finds, I would say, its earthly home in the nerve being. When we step out of the spiritual world and become earth citizens again, we enter our physical body through the processes you are familiar with. What serves us as we descend into the physical world is everything that is connected with our nervous system. We sit down, as it were, into our nervous system when we descend from the spiritual world. And the peculiarity of this nervous human being, of every single nerve cell, of every nerve particle, consists in the fact that the spiritual fills this nervous substance in such a way that within the nervous human being, in its essence, there is what one might call spirit condensed into matter. It is not quite like that, but rather that in earthly human beings there is a constant exchange between nerve matter and blood matter. But the exchange is such that within the nerve matter, the actual blood matter is not tolerated, it is always thrown out, so that we have something in the nerve matter that is impermeable to earthly spirituality throughout our entire earthly life.