The Nature of Eternity

When the whole course of life is observed impartially, however, this relationship between feeling and will on the one hand, and thought on the other, can be seen to change. Thus at a certain time of life a man will repress the feelings and impulses connected with his thoughts, whereas at another time he will keep them more together. Youth is the period when we are most apt to yield over our joys, sorrows and impulses of will to our subconscious. It is then that we are most easily inclined to send down to the subconscious the experiences of heart and soul that will eventually work into our whole disposition—even into our bodily condition. But as the body becomes more firmly knit, the elements of our consciousness come to be less and less like what they were, with the result that we are less and less able to work on the subconscious, and our feelings and will impulses come by degrees to remain bound up with our thoughts. When with genuine self-knowledge a man observes life, he feels, as he grows older, how in youth a person sends down most of his moods of feeling, so that they live on in the make-up of his body. But the more rigid and dried-up a man becomes later on, the more do these experiences and the impulses of will not exhausted in action, remain united with his thoughts. Thus we see how, in this respect, the inner life is enriched as we approach death. We see how the bodily organism gradually dries up and becomes less capable of absorbing the soul's experiences, whereas, if we continue to learn from life as though from a school, the soul will become more alive, more mature. For this reason all that in youth is connected with ideals, ideas, even with mere concepts, flashes through our unconscious being, lays hold of our blood, our nervous system, and settles there, in order later to emerge as our capability for living—or the reverse. Later on we feel that our blood will no longer be, is no longer in harmony with our enthusiasm for ideals. Because of our wrong methods of education this feeling is now to some extent repressed, but in future it will belong increasingly to the best things and blessings of life. For when we are approaching the winter of life, the feelings and impulses that in earlier years we gave over to our bodily organism will add to our strength of soul, no longer being able to pass down into the body on account of the resistance they meet with there.