The Development and Education of the Human Being in the Light of Anthroposophy

I described it in detail in my Urania lecture and discussed it in my books: how, through a special activity of thinking, we can go below the memory level and look more deeply into our being. One might assume that we would then see what our physical organization is. For there is no doubt that, for ordinary consciousness, we only penetrate to the memory mirror in our soul, and in doing so, the processes of the physical organization change the image from the outside, which we see in the soul mirror, into a distorted image. But if we create an ever more activated thinking, with which we live inwardly as with our blood and our breath, so that our whole being participates in this inwardly living thinking, we penetrate deeper into our human nature, then not a physical human being is revealed to us, but a spiritual-soul being, which can only be revealed to us through this strengthened thinking. Then that in man reveals itself to us which is entirely of a spiritual-soul nature, which remains unconscious to consciousness, but which, by its own nature, shows that it was present before man, through birth, even through conception, entered upon his earthly existence.