Lecture VIII

I have told you that from birth until the change of teeth a soul-spiritual entity is at work structuring the human being and that this then emancipates itself to an extent. Later, between the change of teeth and puberty, another such soul-spiritual entity, which dips down in a way into the physical body, awakens the erotic drives and much else as well. All this occurs unconsciously. If, however, we use fully consciously such measures of soul as I have described to observe this permeation of the physical organism by the soul-spiritual, one sees how such processes work within man and how man is actually given over to the external world continually, from birth onward. Nowadays this giving-over of oneself to the external world is held to be nothing but abstract perception or abstract cognition. This is not so. We are surrounded by a world of color, sound, and warmth and by all kinds of sense impressions, By elaborating these with our concepts we create yet further impressions that have an effect on us. By experiencing all this consciously we come to see that in the unconscious experience of color- and sound-impressions that we have from childhood onward there is something spiritual that suffuses our organization. And when, for example, we take up the sense of love between the change of teeth and puberty, this is not something originating in the physical body but rather something that the cosmos gives us through the colors, sounds, and streaming warmth that reach us. Warmth is something other than warmth; light something other than light in the physical sense; sound is something other than physical sound. Through our sense impressions we are conscious only of what I would term external sound and external color. And when we surrender ourselves to nature, we do not encounter the ether-waves, atoms, and so on of which modern physics and physiology dream; rather, it is spiritual forces that are at work, forces that fashion us between birth and death into what we are as human beings. Once we tread the path of knowledge I have described, we become aware that it is the external world that forms us. We become best able to observe consciously what lives and embodies itself within us when we acquire above all a clear sense that spirit is at work in the external world. lt is of all things phenomenology that enables us to perceive how spirit works within the external world. It is through phenomenology, and not abstract metaphysics, that we attain knowledge of the spirit by consciously observing, by raising to consciousness, what otherwise we would do unconsciously, by observing how, through the sense world, spiritual forces enter our being and work formatively upon it.