The Essence of Anthroposophy

You learn to recognize what I have called the formative forces of the human being. You really learn to recognize a second body. But if you want to characterize it precisely, you have to say: it is a temporal body. It is something that is constantly developing in a mobile way. You cannot draw it without realizing that you are drawing or painting it like a flash of lightning. That which is mobile in time can only be captured in a moment, and so it is with this human formative forces body. In truth, it is a unified organization in time, and it must be understood in that way. There have always been older intuitions for such higher insights, and what I call the formative forces body has also been called the etheric or life body. If one learns to recognize it in the suggested way, not through logical conclusions or otherwise, but through direct inner vision with the imaginative knowledge that has been acquired, then one knows once and for all: what is human organization is not only played out by the fact that there is a sum of chemical and physical forces constitute the human physical body, but because a spiritual soul has entered the physical organization at birth or conception, and that a second, a spiritual-soul, a supersensible body, which is not only spatial, which is temporal, which is always mobile, works in us. And one learns to recognize the inner relationship that exists between thinking, imagining and the forces of growth. As long as one only looks at the human being from a physiological and biological point of view, one finds the forces of growth on the one hand and, on the other, through inner observation, for example, the abstract powers of thinking. Through the imaginative contemplation of which I have just spoken, one learns to recognize how a gradual transition takes place between the ordinary forces of growth and the forces of thinking, how, by strengthening itself, imagining itself leads to that which at the same time brings about growth, the development of the inner organic power from stage to stage in the growing human being. Thus imaginative knowledge becomes a first result of anthroposophical inner research.