2. Human beings as Spiritual and Soul Beings

Now that I have developed the essence of true self-knowledge in this way, I must return to what I have asserted so far and say: What actually happens when the ideas of the state they have for two or three days transition to the other state they have later can only be truly understood with such an intensified soul life. For then one learns to recognize that, in fact, after two or three days, the human being becomes as free inwardly as he is otherwise free from his ordinary body in relation to the ideas that subjectively bubble up from within and tyrannically determine him. Human beings learn to recognize what they are inside, what directs their ideas in the same way that we direct our hands and legs when we grasp or walk, through our ordinary ego. Human beings learn to know the higher self, which otherwise remains unconscious, which moves within the world of ideas as the ordinary self moves in physical life, that is, after two or three days we emerge from what is subjective into the objective of soul life. We enter into that which is not dominated by external impressions, and which we then learn to recognize as that which carries the external impressions through the whole life between birth and death. We learn to recognize something second in the human being, towards which we then feel as we do towards our body in ordinary life. We learn to recognize what I called in one of the last issues of the magazine Das Reich the image-forming body of the human being, a supersensible body that is there just as the ordinary physical body is there. Only it remains unconscious to ordinary soul life. Just as the hand of the physical body is moved by the ordinary ego, so human beings learn to recognize how they act within that which now carries imagination, which lives in imagination, and that is the spirit. It is not imagination that is the spirit, but that which lives in imagination as the ordinary soul lives in the body. But since ordinary psychology basically considers the whole life of the soul only as it actually functions for two or three days, counting from the impressions, it does not come at all from the soul to the spirit; it excludes the spirit. In a certain sense, it is excluded from ordinary soul life.