II. The Physical World and the Moral-Spiritual Impulses

And so we can make a study of human life. We do not at first see into the depths of the will; we cannot observe what occurs in sleep. Real spiritual vision, however, reveals to us what is at work there as the creative principle, connected with long past earthly lives, counteracting the process of combustion. And we discover how out of their moral, destiny-building impulses the former lives on earth pulsate through our will. We discern how, while we sleep, all that is performed impulsively, emotionally and intentionally by the human will, remaining dormant even during waking hours, weaves itself during the time between falling asleep and awakening into that being which sleep conceals from modern man, but which, pulsing as active will in our blood in the combustion-process of our future body, will unfold in our next earthly life as the creative ‘I.’ This creative ‘I’ will then again have been increased in strength to the extent of what we have developed in our present life between birth and death as a further addition to that which, as described, has come to us from previous earthly lives.