2. Human beings as Spiritual and Soul Beings

It is in the nature of lectures such as I am giving here that I anticipate in an earlier lecture some things that will be explained in more detail in later lectures. This will also be the case with what I am about to say now. But I would like to draw your attention to it today. The plant, which is a living being, is not only composed of what physics and chemistry, or biology or physiology, which are in turn composed of them, can investigate, but it also contains something else entirely. If we have progressed so far within ourselves that we feel ourselves in a formative body, as we otherwise do with our ordinary ego in a physical body, then we can, just as we use our eyes and ears for sensory perceptions in the physical body, perceive through this formative body, which we have differentiated from the soul's sense of touch, then we can also perceive what is supersensible in the rest of the world, what permeates and interweaves nature as supersensible. Then we see in everything plant, animal, and also physically human outside ourselves the spiritual, which is then not visionary in a trivial sense, but stands before the empowered soul just as the content of sensory perceptions stands before the unempowered soul. Only we must be able to replace the concepts of space with concepts of time everywhere. How do we actually perceive what is supersensible in plants? By perceiving our own supersensible nature in the formative body as it moves and weaves, we now also perceive the supersensible in the plant world, similar to how one tone in a musical context would perceive another. The perception of the supersensible in the plant world is based entirely on the fact that our own formative body, in its life and weaving, proceeds at a much slower “tempo” than the life and weaving of the plant formative body. I have explained this in more detail in a small book entitled “Human Life from the Point of View of Spiritual Science.” There you will find how everything depends on this different tempo in the time measurement of the human and plant formative forces bodies. Because our formative forces body can interact like a higher, malleable organ with the much faster life of the plant, we truly perceive the other kind of life in the plant world. This brings something completely different before our soul than the old, speculated life force. In other words, we truly perceive the supersensible in the sensible.