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

GA 70b/1916-01-08/p063 ·1916-01-08 · 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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[And while the ordinary memory - of which one notices, I said, when the memory images occur like this, how one can then dampen these images] - while this ordinary memory ceases, while one feels, as it were, hollowed out from all memory images at the moment one has dampened the images, the images now occur that let one know: Before your birth, or conception, you were in the spiritual world. You descended from this; as a physical human being you are not a product of only the paternal and maternal elements, but a third element from the spiritual world has joined with this duality, and with the paternal and maternal and with the hereditary current, that which comes from your previous existence on earth. In this way, through inner research, repeated earthly lives become a certainty, as the spiritual researcher can say, even if this certainty is perceived differently from that of the natural scientist. They become a scientific truth, the repeated earthly lives, which in more recent spiritual life have blossomed out again in such a brilliant way, first for Lessing. These repeated earthly lives.

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Cite: GA 70b/1916-01-08/p063 · edition English