10. Soul Nature And Moral Human Value In The Light Of Spiritual Science (Anthroposophy)

This is what I have already pointed out here in other contexts. Our thinking consists in the fact that, in the continuous process of time, we carry out through our own inner activity that which the animal is predisposed to from the beginning: the process of sclerotization, ossification, death, which we carry within our organism. One looks at this perpetual dying, without which man's ordinary thinking cannot take place, from the point of view of body-free thinking, which one has acquired through meditation. And this dying is only continually compensated for by the fact that, in turn, the invigorating forces shoot up from the rest of the organization, from the blood and heart organization, into the head, which tends towards continual dying. In man, precisely because he is a thinker, there is a continual struggle between dying and life. And what occurs at the end of physical life, the unique moment of dying, is just the synthetic summary of what always happens on a small scale. We continually die from our sensory-nervous organization; only this dying is continually suspended. Only when the rest of the organism, not just the head, no longer has the ability to suspend dying, only then do we really die. Death is not something that happens to man only once; death is an ongoing process. And it is to this death that we owe thinking. It is only because we integrate death into ourselves through thinking that, firstly, this thinking is present in us at all, but secondly, we learn to recognize what the dead actually is.