II. The Physical World and the Moral-Spiritual Impulses

And there we learn to recognise our own being, which cannot now be here, but which, having passed through the etheric world in pre-earthly existence, lived in a former life on earth. Now we perceive how the destroying combustion-process is connected with the moral impulses emanating from our last or several previous lives on earth, how there lives in us this Fourth Man who at the same time is the creator of our destiny. Behind the seething combustion in our body we discover the creative power of the content of our previous life on earth, which has now been able to rise to this region where, as creative force, it counteracts the destructive force of combustion. It can do so because it is not of the nature of present existence but of life on earth long past, which has divested itself of all that is connected with the duality of spirit and matter and having passed through the spiritual world, has there assumed its spiritually creative character. And we discover in the impulses which rise and surge up in our own being out of the depths of our otherwise obscure will-forces, something which once was more or less the equivalent of what now constitutes part of our experience in the present earthly life, but which has undergone changes by first having been etherealised, then having lived in an astral world and finally having risen in this astral world to a thrice higher stage. And this we now find contained in our shadowy ‘I’ of the present as the sustaining reality-bearing force of the creative will-power of our previous earthly lives.