I-40 The relationships between thinking, feeling and willing and birth, death and rebirth

Study of Man , Lects. 2, 4 and 5

This chart can barely hint at all that underlies it in the lectures. I debated including it, yielding only to the feeling that it betrays a pearl of great value. Its scope includes the befuddling subject of psychology, upon which the insights of anthroposophy are badly needed (as with most other disciplines).

Steiner says the famous “I think therefore I am” is one of the greatest errors of (then) recent philosophy, for thinking is not the “sum” but the “non-sum” of the “I Am.” Certainly this accords with Paul (1 Cor 13,8- 9). Steiner has so thoroughly elsewhere shown that thinking is circumstantial evidence of the existence of the “I Am,” that his statement could not be pejorative.

Already it has been said that the 3 areas of human activity are thinking, feeling and willing. Steiner here reasonably identifies thinking, or mental picturing, as an image activity. The Eloha (i.e., Spirit of Form, Exusiai) Yahweh identifies itself, of course, to Moses as “the I AM” (Ex 3,14), and in Gen 1,26 the Elohim purport to make the human being in their “image.” We thus have a scriptural basis for seeing in the human being’s thinking something that is brought into its existence from the prenatal aspect. Mental picturing is an image of all the experiences gone through before one’s birth, and the process cannot be understood unless one is clear on this. And just as mirror images (1 Cor 13,12) are spatial, so one’s life between death and rebirth is reflected in time between birth and death, as Steiner’s drawing (the first of three) depicts: ^{(click here to view)}

The wise sage (Eccles 3,11) depicted this so well: “He has put eternity into the human being’s mind, yet so that he cannot find out what God has done from the beginning to the end.” This becomes quite clear when one realizes that the “He” of whom the sage speaks is Yahweh who identified himself as the “I Am.” Thus, the “I Am” has put into our minds what they give us. Human beings today subconsciously fear to face this truth because they conceive of the “I Am” as a monstrous egoism, but they have not recognized its significance, nor will they until the perfection (Mt 5,48) of the great “I Am” in Christ is accepted as their standard. It is this human beings shy away from, while still purporting to proclaim him (Mt 7,21). Not until humanity comes to recognize its own individual and collective responsibility (Mt 5,25-26) imposed by “the law” (Mt 5,17) of karma can it find its way toward what is its ultimate destiny if its salvation is to be attained.

Steiner next investigates the activity of the human being’s will in the same way. Psychologists, he says, always find the content of will as coming from mental picturing, conscious or subconscious. But Steiner says that will has no real content of its own, for it is nothing else but the “Seed” in us of what after death will be reality of spirit and soul (see above diagram). Thus, while mental picturing is an image from prenatal life, will is the “Seed” of something that appears later. A “Seed” is something more than real, and an image is something less than real; a “Seed” does not become real until later, though it carries within it the germ of what will appear later as reality, so that the will is indeed of a very spiritual nature. (One should bear in mind that Steiner elsewhere says that most of the normal person’s will actions are not subject to one’s consciousness, though they are nevertheless one’s own actions.) Thus far, we have divided the human being’s soul life into thinking (mental picturing) and willing, which is in the nature of a “Seed.” Between these lies a boundary, which is the whole life of the physical human being (see above diagram) who reflects back the prenatal as mental pictures, and who does not allow the will to fulfill itself, thereby keeping it continuously as nothing more than “Seed.”

Now we come to feeling, the third area of human activity, and this Steiner divides into antipathy and sympathy (with indifference lying in between as the absence of feeling). If we encounter some person, philosophy, or what not, for the first time, we may respond in one of three ways, namely, with sympathy, antipathy or indifference. Indifference suggests no prenatal connection (though it may entail future consequence). We must be clear that certain forces in the human being reflect back the prenatal reality and hold the after-death reality in “Seed,” namely, antipathy and sympathy. When we incarnate, by entering the physical world we cannot remain in the spiritual world. In being brought down into the physical world we develop an antipathy for everything spiritual so that we radiate back the spiritual, prenatal reality in an antipathy of which we are unconscious. Thereby we transform the prenatal element into a mere mental picture or image (thought). On the contrary, we unite ourselves in sympathy with what radiates out toward our later existence as the reality of will after death. We create the “Seed” of soul life as a rhythm of sympathy and antipathy.

The first diagram can now be brought forward as follows: ^{(click here to view)}

What is rayed back in antipathy is the whole of the prenatal experiences, which has the character of cognition. In coming up against antipathy, cognition is thereby reduced to mental picturing. Our mental picture must, in a measure, correspond to the force that has remained in us from the prenatal experience. If that prenatal experience, and consequent antipathy, is sufficiently strong, a memory image arises. Memory is only heightened antipathy. When, along with memory, the image element is held fast, the concept arises, thus completing the side of the soul’s activity connected with prenatal life.

Now we go over to the Willing/“Seed” side, taking up first the feeling of sympathy. Just as our thinking depends upon antipathy, so our willing depends on sympathy. If sympathy is sufficiently strong, as with the antipathy that becomes not only mental picture but also memory, then out of sympathy arises imagination (a form of picturing). And if imagination is sufficiently strong (which is only unconscious in ordinary life), to permeate the being right down into the senses, then one gets the ordinary picture forms through which mental pictures of outer things arise (such as the whiteness of chalk). All of this starts in the will.

The being of the human being cannot be comprehended unless one understands the difference between sympathy and antipathy in the human being. Everything pertaining to the soul is expressed and revealed in the body, where its antipathy/thinking element is bound up with the nervous system. Antipathy, memory and concept from pre-natal life form the nervous system in this life. Thus, all talk of classifying nerves as sensory and motor is meaningless, which Steiner has also expressed in other contexts. Similarly, the activities of willing, sympathy, imagination and outer picture-forming are all bound to the “Seed” condition, which can never come to completion but must perish at the moment it arises, for it has to remain a “Seed,” losing itself in its bodily nature in the form of “Blood.” “Blood” is a “very special fluid,” which would whirl away as spirit if we were able to remove it from the human body so that it still remained “Blood” and was not destroyed by other physical agencies—an impossibility while bound to earthly conditions. Because of this, “Blood” has to be destroyed to keep it from whirling away as spirit. For this reason we have perpetually within us both formation and destruction of “Blood” through in-breathing and out-breathing. “Blood” wants to become ever more spiritual, nerve ever more material.

Steiner tabulates both sides of these soul and bodily processes as follows: ^{(click here to view)}

He goes on in this Lect. 2 to explain how the processes of antipathy and sympathy find expression in the body, as a reflection of the cosmos, but we will not presently venture further into that.

In Lect. 4, we are told how the will works in the three bodily principles, as follows:

Having now shown the nature of the three soul activities, thinking, feeling and willing, we are told, in Lect. 4, and readily recognize, that they flow into each other, merge and interpenetrate. Between thinking on the one hand and willing on the other, we find the activity of feeling. We can say that from a certain central boundary all that is sympathy/willing and all that is antipathy/thinking stream forth. But then we see that sympathy/ willing works back into thinking, and antipathy/thinking works over into willing. The human being is thus a unity because these principles play over into each other, and between them lies feeling, which is related to both. In soul life, one cannot keep thinking and willing strictly apart, and even less can each be separated from feeling. We come then to the third and last diagram: ^{(click here to view)}