42. The Spiritual Guidance of Man and Humanity II

If you make this observation often, you can elevate something that is theoretically very easy to understand into a full life practice. Theoretically, it is easy to see that if everything that man has to do in order to live were left to his own intellect, his own intelligence, he would not get very far - really not very far at all. Because we only need to answer this question theoretically in the following way: When does man actually do the most artistic deeds in himself? When does he act most wisely towards himself? He does this approximately up to the point in time up to which he can still remember when he looks back in later life on the years that have passed. If you look back on what happened three, four, five years ago and so on, your memory will take you to a certain point; that's as far as it goes. Then your parents or those who were present in your earlier life can tell you what you accomplished as a child, but your own memory only goes back to a certain point. This is also the point at which a person has learned to feel like a self. For people who remember back in normal life, this is the case at the age of three or three and a half. Before this time, however, the human soul has done the wisest things to man himself, and never later, when he comes to consciousness, can man do such great and mighty things to himself as he accomplishes in the unconscious in the very first years of his childhood. For we know that through our birth we carry into the physical plan what we have brought with us as the fruits of previous incarnations. And when we are born, our external brain, for example, is still a very imperfect instrument. The human soul must now work the finer structures into it. But during these times, not only do we have to work out our brain in fine detail, but we also learn three of the most important things before we become conscious. Firstly, we learn to orientate our own physicality in space. What this means is something that modern man does not pay much attention to, for therein lies one of the most important differences between man and animal, in that the animal is destined from the outset to develop its equilibrium in space. One animal is a climber, the other a swimmer and so on. The animal is organized from the outset in such a way that it places itself correctly in space, and this is the case right up to the most human-like mammals.