2. Anthroposophy and Psychology

By developing plastic, vital thinking and then creating an empty consciousness, we reach a view of our own psychic nature, one that embraces in a single image all we have encountered in this life since we entered it. Our past life does not stand before the soul as is usual in the memory, with isolated reminiscences emerging, independently or after some exertion. Instead, all at once our life is surveyed like a mighty tableau, not in space but in time. All at once, with a single glance of the soul, we survey our life; but we see it as it informs our growth and the energies of our physical body. We see ourselves as we have been here on this earth as thinking, feeling, willing beings, but in such a way that thinking, feeling and willing now densify and at the same time take their places organically within the human substance. We can see into our spiritual life in its direct association with the physical. We cease trying to establish by philosophical speculation how the soul affects the body. In seeing the soul, we also see how at every moment our physical life on earth has been informed by what the tableau shows us. This will be described more fully in the next few days.