4. The Human Soul and the Human Spirit

Up to the point that one remembers back in life, a process takes place in the human being, and that is first in the prenatal period, before conception, in the purely spiritual world. A process takes place that aims at activities that, so to speak, build up the organism, that lie in the direction of the organism's life. Up to the point in life that we remember, this inner activity of strength, which is the not yet thinking thinking being, thinking power, ceases to build up the human being. From this moment on, it breaks down in man, actually perpetually carrying out destructive processes, which then add up and finally bring about the external physical death of man, which take the body of man away from his soul and his spirit. So that when we examine thinking from a spiritual scientific point of view, we find it bound to a process of disintegration, to a process that, when thinking proceeds as it does in ordinary life, breaks down. The breakdown must then always be replaced by thinking standing still in sleep. But the breakdown process is stronger, more intense, and ultimately slowly causes death, insofar as it is connected with those processes of the organism that are anchored in the organism of thinking. Of course, death is also connected with other processes. Thus, by developing this ordinary everyday thinking, we depend on our organization in such a way that this thinking is actually connected with a destruction of the organism. So what brings us death in the organism is connected with that which is the highest flowering of human inner experience for this world between birth and death.