100. On Spiritual Development
In union with death, love is created by the soul; in union with unconscious life, memory is created by the soul: and in memory [only] is self-awareness created. In the realm of love, the objective spiritual world comes into being; in the realm of memory, the subjective spiritual world comes into being. Memory is imagination set in physical life; love is intuition set in physical experience.
In the consciousness of the self, memory creates the image of the self; in the experience of death, love creates the substance of the eternal world.
The knower of the supersensible is not born into the normal life of the human being before the age of 35: He should not be obscured by the dying body. Before the age of 35, the human being has the eternal within him as an “object”. He only becomes the “subject” at the age of 35. In our time, the so-called initiation can take place at the age of 35 if the conditions have been established beforehand. Before that, people could perceive the spirit in the descending life, but they had to learn to understand it through the mysteries.
Today, at the age of 29, the human being enters the age when he can begin to look back in order to perceive something objective within himself.
Sensory perception: seeing death in the field of the external world.
Inner, spiritual experience: sensing life in the field of the inner world.
We are separated from life by memory; we draw the power of love from death.
We should not seek the “I” within. It is there no more than air is in the lungs. The “I” comes with perceptions and thoughts. In the course of life, it passes over into feeling and will.
When you look at youth from an older perspective, the eternal is revealed in the young person. In old age you become a “father”; before that you were a “cosmic knower”; with the “young person” you still see the “world of the spirit”; before that you see “humanity in yourself”
Before: “the human being” Before: the soul still turns against humanity: 21st-28th year.
Before: the soul turns against “cosmic lawfulness”.
Do not just ask: Is the soul immortal? Instead, ask yourself: What is initially experienced in consciousness is there because of the mortal body? You must first get to know what is immortal within the soul. The soul is in the realm that it leaves with death – its body is removed from this realm. In it, between birth and death, it reflects what is not in the spiritual world; through it it cannot reflect what it itself is. This would be reflected if what is newly developing in the body were to look at what has entered the body. In this, the soul is intuitively united with the universe: hence no capacity for love.
In the soul that is in the body, the ability to remember is preparing itself so that the self can become conscious.
The right questions only arise for a person in the second half of life. In the first half, one only feels these questions. The questions are received from the “elders” - in the second half of life, a life of perception and imagination arises in the life of feelings and will.
The spiritual being of the human being closes in on itself.
As a result, the other, material world enters the vacuum; in this vacuum the spiritual world is only reflected. The “I” has no positive reflection, but is merely a mirror image.
From the universal Saturn sun are the reflections: in the bone-muscle system.
From the telluric Saturn-Sun beings: sense system, apparatus of representation.
From the universal Moon: nervous system.
From the telluric Moon: vascular system.
From the Earth: circulatory system.
Spiritually: I
Spiritual: I
> turned towards the “I”: nervous system > turned towards the “etheric body”: vascular system
Physical:
> The reflections of the pre-earthly systems have been filled.
As the human being develops physically, his ego descends into the body; it reappears when the body organization recedes; but it comes up empty if it does not draw from the spiritual world, because the withering away of the body no longer yields spiritual substance.