CW 170 The Riddle of Humanity: Lecture 11 (Dornach, 26 August 1916) by Rudolf Steiner
Oct 6, 2026 · 36 min · 12 segments
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Oct 6, 2026 · 36 min · 12 segments
Consider the development of the human soul as we can observe it here between birth and death, living in the physical body.
Among other things, we might notice that two properties or complexes of energy are necessary to the soul if it is to lead a fulfilling earthly life between birth and death.
We have frequently directed our attention to such things.
What needs to be acquired on the one hand is memory.
Just imagine that memory was not among our earthly possessions.
You only need to consider how different our soul life would be if we could not look back to days past, all the way back to a certain moment after our birth, and could not retrieve what we have experienced from these more or less unplumbed depths.
Our consciousness of our I, capital, as we now possess it, is dependent on the way our experiences connect.
I have drawn your attention to this frequently.
Now you all know that memory only begins to appear at a certain point in our earthly life.
It is not present before then, and so all our experiences prior to that first remembered point in time are wrapped in forgetfulness.
Therefore we can say, from a certain point in our earthly life onward, our soul life is related to our body in such a way that in greater or lesser detail, our experiences can always be called up in us as memories.
We can remember them.
This faculty of memory can only be developed under the influence of our earthly life, and developing a memory is one of the tasks of our earthly life.
During that long period of our development when we were beings of the moon, we did not have a faculty comparable to our earthly memory.
In order for our organism to be able to develop memory, we have had to become a part of the organism of the earth, with all its forces deriving from the mineral realm.
Memory develops as a result of the interaction between the human soul and the earthly physical body.
It is only during the earth period of evolution that memory, in the form in which we develop it in our physical earthly body, becomes necessary to the spiritual world.
It only became necessary with the arrival of the earth period because until then there were other things that took the place of memory.
During the moon period, for example, man's power of dreamlike clairvoyance took the place of memory.
Just imagine that every time you experienced something, the experience would be written down in some particular place to which you always had access.
As they occurred, all your experiences would be written down there, one after the other.
Then all you would have to do to find an experience would be to look in that place where everything had been written down.
And this is in fact the kind of experience undergone by man on old moon.
Everything he experienced in his old dreamlike clairvoyant consciousness was so to speak engraved in a subtle etheric substance.
Everything that man was able to experience through his dreamlike clairvoyant consciousness was written into the substance of the world.
Consider the development of the human soul as we can observe it here between birth and death, living in the physical body.
Among other things, we might notice that two properties or complexes of energy are necessary to the soul if it is to lead a fulfilling earthly life between birth and death.
We have frequently directed our attention to such things.
What needs to be acquired on the one hand is memory.
Just imagine that memory was not among our earthly possessions.
You only need to consider how different our soul life would be if we could not look back to days past, all the way back to a certain moment after our birth, and could not retrieve what we have experienced from these more or less unplumbed depths.
Our consciousness of our I, capital, as we now possess it, is dependent on the way our experiences connect.
I have drawn your attention to this frequently.
Now you all know that memory only begins to appear at a certain point in our earthly life.
It is not present before then, and so all our experiences prior to that first remembered point in time are wrapped in forgetfulness.
Therefore we can say, from a certain point in our earthly life onward, our soul life is related to our body in such a way that in greater or lesser detail, our experiences can always be called up in us as memories.
We can remember them.
This faculty of memory can only be developed under the influence of our earthly life, and developing a memory is one of the tasks of our earthly life.
During that long period of our development when we were beings of the moon, we did not have a faculty comparable to our earthly memory.
In order for our organism to be able to develop memory, we have had to become a part of the organism of the earth, with all its forces deriving from the mineral realm.
Memory develops as a result of the interaction between the human soul and the earthly physical body.
It is only during the earth period of evolution that memory, in the form in which we develop it in our physical earthly body, becomes necessary to the spiritual world.
It only became necessary with the arrival of the earth period because until then there were other things that took the place of memory.
During the moon period, for example, man's power of dreamlike clairvoyance took the place of memory.
Just imagine that every time you experienced something, the experience would be written down in some particular place to which you always had access.
As they occurred, all your experiences would be written down there, one after the other.
Then all you would have to do to find an experience would be to look in that place where everything had been written down.
And this is in fact the kind of experience undergone by man on old moon.
Everything he experienced in his old dreamlike clairvoyant consciousness was so to speak engraved in a subtle etheric substance.
Everything that man was able to experience through his dreamlike clairvoyant consciousness was written into the substance of the world.
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