5. Ways of Knowing the Eternal Powers of the Human Soul

Those forces of human nature, of bodily human nature, those forces that are active in this human nature and that are the instrument, so to speak, the tool for the most glorious thing we have in the outer, in the physical life: for thinking - those are not constructive forces, not constructive life forces; the fruiting life forces tend to make man dull, to push his consciousness down under dreaming. That a person's consciousness can become bright enough to think is due to the fact that there are forces of death, of disintegration and destruction within him. What is the physical instrument for our thinking is intimately connected with what works in human nature as the forces that bring death.