The Essence of Anthroposophy

You enter this imaginative world and from a certain point onwards you experience how you are immersed in reality, I would even say, how you are immersed in the soul. And the first experience one has when one has penetrated to such imaginative vision is that one's life on earth since birth comes to life before the soul as in a great tableau. Otherwise, a person has the stream of memories from this life, from which this or that emerges, either voluntarily or involuntarily. This is not the case with what I am now describing, but what emerges from a certain point of imaginative knowledge is that the human being has before him, as in a broad overview, the workings of his inner being. He overlooks how certain forces have given rise to this or that disposition in him, how he has come to this or that heroic or unheroic decision. He does not so much gain insight into the individual facts of life as into the forces that lie behind them, that have shaped us ourselves, that have given our thoughts their direction and content, that have guided our feelings from within when they have been stimulated by the outside world, that have impulsed our will. All that has been incorporated since birth, one can see.