12. The Essence of Spiritual Science and the Knowledge of the Transcendental World

GA 70a/1915-04-09/p018 ·1915-04-09 · English MediumMedium alignmentSome paragraph re-numbering between this translation and the German original — the locus may slip by a paragraph or two.
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Ordinary thinking, it is carried out in such a way that, in our everyday lives, we perceive things through our senses and connect our thoughts to this perception. What we do, especially in spiritual science, must be admitted in the most serious sense that all of this is bound to the material processes of the nervous system. The actual soul does not come at all in everyday life, not even to the thinking consciousness. This soul life, as we shall see in a moment, also lies behind ordinary thoughts and ideas and it is this soul life that brings about the material processes. And because the material processes take place in the nervous system, images are created by the true soul life. These images are our thoughts. These images are, so to speak, no different from the mirror image that we see when we stand in front of a mirror.

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Cite: GA 70a/1915-04-09/p018 · edition English