The Essence of Anthroposophy

You see how carefully the anthroposophical path of knowledge must be described. It must be emphasized that this first stage allows one to experience one's own inner being more intensely, but that one must realize that one is not yet experiencing an external world, but only this human inner being. But we do achieve a first result when we explore the inner being through such a more intensive, pictorial, imaginative process of imagining. For we gradually learn to have before our soul, as in a comprehensive tableau of life, everything that has formed us, that has affected us inwardly, spiritually, from birth to the present moment. We normally carry what we have in our soul only in the form of ordinary memory. The stream from which memories of this or that experience arise, whether voluntarily or involuntarily, essentially runs subconsciously. We know how abstract it is, how shadowy it is compared to the real experiences when we are immersed in these memory images. These memory images should not be confused with what now occurs before imaginative knowledge. It is not mere memories that arise, but rather something that suggests how one has become. Yes, right back to the first years of childhood, one sees the inner forces that have developed the ordinary abilities of life in one. One sees how the moral and intellectual faculties have developed, how they have been integrated into the forces of growth and nutrition. One really looks into the human interior.