4. The Eternal Forces of the Human Soul in the Light of Spiritual Science

GA 70b/1915-11-29/p025 ·1915-11-29 · 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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But we no longer learn. We would learn to understand death, but we would not yet be able to grasp the eternal powers of the human soul. These can only be grasped if we carry out the inner, intimate soul experiment in another direction, in the direction of feeling and willing. Just as the results of thinking are not within everyday thinking, so not everything that can be achieved by the everyday volition through which one performs one's actions is within the everyday volition, through which one performs one's actions, if one now also strengthens this will inwardly in such a way that one directs one's attention to what is actually happening in this will, to what it is usually not directed. We want, we carry out our actions in ordinary life. Precisely because we are absorbed in the actions, we do not see what is developing very mysteriously within the will as it develops from our childhood on while we want. We can say: we experience the will, but in ordinary life we do not look at it; we do not turn our attention to it. Yes, one must first train oneself, one must again do the inner soul experiment in order to develop the ability to focus one's attention so intensely on the will that one can recognize what lies within. One achieves this particularly by creating moments in life where one focuses one's attention on that in the will to which it is not usually directed. Let us say: You survey your daily life, you have willed this or that; now you look back on the way you behaved. You visualize yourself; you think from within, look at yourself, visualize how the intention to do this or that arose, and thus look at yourself in your volition.

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Cite: GA 70b/1915-11-29/p025 · edition English