II. The Physical World and the Moral-Spiritual Impulses

In living thinking one is active in the Etheric. At the second stage we live in a process not initiated by us but illumined by the Logos, a process which otherwise manifests only in the physical air through the spoken word. At the third stage one must become aware of a process which corresponds to what in the physical life of the earth is a process of destruction. What is needed to reach the third stage is not only intensified thinking and an intensified faculty of speech projected into the stillness, but an inwardness of purpose in our activities as human beings on the earth. Only one must bear in mind that ‘activity’ is not to be understood as applying merely to external physical action. We are also active when occupied only mentally in thoughts, for there too the will operates.