8. The Knowledge of the Spiritual Essence of the World

Now, my dear attendees, by having progressed so far in our realization of the spirit of the world, we also come to – I have already described another side of this realization last Tuesday – not only remembering our existence as we have lived it since our birth or sometime after, but we learn to look back into our pre-earthly existence, how we, as spiritual-soul, which has now been released from the body in its experience, were in a spiritual-soul world. Just as we are here in relation to the external physical sun, so in a pre-earthly existence we were in a purely spiritual environment, but now in connection with that which corresponds spiritually to physical sunlight. Just as the physical sun illuminates us here on earth, so in our pre-earthly existence we were in a relationship to the divine sun beings, who did not illuminate us with physical light, but who connected their own activity with our activity at that time, so that we found ourselves enveloped in the spiritual-soul in the spiritual effect of the sun, just as we feel irradiated by the physical effect of the sun here in our physical existence. And at a certain moment in our germinal life — we learn to recognize this — we descended from our pre-earthly, purely spiritual-soul existence, united with that which comes to us through father and mother as a physical human body. We united that which we have experienced under the influence of the activity of the sun beings with the physical body. We immerse ourselves in this physical body, permeate it with soul, spiritualize it. That which was solar activity in us becomes the etheric body that permeates us, which is within us as a fine body, and this stimulates our ability to now ignite the physical sunlight and to see through it the colors.