Anthroposophy and the Riddle of the Soul

But if we continue along this path, we move from what I would call the very rarefied, purely pictorial life of ideas to that which is real, which lives and forms in the human being. It is not the physical body, it is not the physical organs, it is a supersensible force, but it is there. One grasps something that lies outside the physical body. And one can penetrate into it by simply pursuing the riddles of the soul on one side; one can penetrate into that which, independently of the human physical body, has a supersensible reality in man. One advances to what, through birth or through conception, let us say, as a human physical body, is prepared by mere hereditary relationships, by mere external natural facts, what is preformed as a human body. One learns to recognize how the inherited traits, which come from parents or ancestors, connect with the whole body, which is formed in the maternal organism, from the spiritual world, and how one finds this again in life when one strengthens one's imaginative life. One arrives – I would say – at one side of the question of immortality. We look at what is immortal, what is eternal in human nature, because it penetrates from a spiritual world through conception and birth into what is humanly physical, and because it continues to have an effect even during earthly life as the inner, plastic formative power with which we connect by strengthening our thought life in the manner indicated.