The Invisible Elements of Human Nature and Practical Life

If we continue to follow the human being, we come to another part of his essence, which every human being could already realize if he said to himself: Before me stands a human being, a physical body and an etheric body. Would there be nothing else in this human being than what can be seen from the outside, what physiology and so on reveal to us? Oh, there is something else, something quite different: the sum of feelings, sensations, desires and wishes, pains and sufferings, drives and passions. All this makes up the astral body. Now one might say: one cannot imagine that these things form a complete reality. But the spiritual scientist can ascertain this through the gift of clairvoyance. The astral body is there just as the physical body is there. But common sense could also tell us that something like an astral body must exist. Why might we say that? I will give you an example where you can, so to speak, grasp with your hands how the astral body actually works. There are people who say that when a human being enters the physical world, they are not yet as developed as they will be later. External science can determine that although the senses and the associated nerve organs are present in the brain, everything that connects the individual sense organs in the brain develops relatively late. One can literally follow how the connecting strands from the auditory to the visual sphere first develop, the nerve pathways that make humans thinkers. So, the materialist concludes, we see how the inner parts gradually develop and only then do they allow the world of sensations, mental images, sufferings, joys, thought complexes, and so on to flash into human consciousness. Let us consider this course of development of the human brain. The complicated trains of thought that solve the riddles of the world are gradually formed. Let us consider this. Are we able to call what is developing here a mere mechanism that builds itself? One can admire the miraculous construction just as one admires a clock. But it would be foolish to believe that the clock came into being by itself. Those who can do something can only develop what they are capable of doing. Someone who had the seconds, minutes, and laws of the clock within them first put them together; someone thought ahead what we ultimately think about. Is there nothing that connects these threads in the brain in such a way that you ultimately become a thinker? I believe that healthy thinking must recognize that for what is developing there must be a builder who connects the threads so that you can then become a thinker. We are only true to ourselves and our common sense when we say that an astral body must have built the physical brain. In the first weeks, months, and years of a child's life, the astral body first builds the tool that will later be able to solve the riddles of the world. Those who do not believe this are acting like someone who wants to use a machine but denies that there was a designer who built it. The time will come when sound judgment will prevail again in people, when they will say to themselves that the spiritual builder must be there first if something is to come into being. This builder is already there before the human being is born. The third member of the human being is this astral body, which again underlies the material.