This book combines three sets of four lectures, each set given in the successive years of 1909, 1910, and 1911 on the three subjects of the subtitle: anthroposophy, psychosophy, and pneumatosophy. The suffix sophy stands for knowledge, so anthroposophy refers to the knowledge of the anthropos or full human being, psychosophy refers to the knowledge of the psyche or soul, and pneumatosophy refers to the knowledge of the pneuma or spirit. Taken together the 12 lectures are a guided tour into the depths of the knowledge of the "Body, Soul, and Spirit". Fasten your seat belts, it will be a bumpy ride, and the unbuckled are likely to be thrown before we glide to a halt.

This review webpage covers the second set of 4 lectures given in 1910 on the subject of A Psychology of the Soul, or Psychosophy.

Lectures 5 to 8: Psychosophy – A Psychology of the Soul

The lectures began with a recitation of Goethe's early "The Eternal Jew", but I was unable to turn up a copy of the poem and it's not included in the text. Here's Steiner description of what he means by "psychosophy":

[page 77] Psychosophy is to be a deliberation on the human soul, beginning with the soul's experiences here in the physical world. It then rises to higher realms to demonstrate that whatever we encounter in the physical world as the manifest soul life leads to the perspective where the light of theosophy comes to meet us.

[page 79] If we meet someone and form a mental picture of that person — hair, face, expression — we do not include that in our soul life. But if we feel an interest in a person through sympathy or antipathy, or if we think of that person with love, all of these feelings must be considered soul experiences. You know that I don't like definitions: I prefer to characterize instead. I don't want to define soul life for you, since definitions accomplish little. I prefer to characterize what belongs to soul life.

He gives us the two essential characteristics of soul life: judging and love/hate. When we are judging we are making some rational calculation using our thinking, and when we are loving or hating we are making a rational calculation using our feelings.

[page 80, 81] Every aspect of the soul is either a making of judgments or a life in love or hate. Basically, these are the only concepts that pertain to the soul; all others refer to a vehicle for something coming into the soul, either from without through the body or (due to causes we will learn later) from the spirit within. Thus, on the one hand, we have judgment, and, on the other, love and hate.

In Carl Jung's attempt to describe the same soul processes above, he distinguished between the rational and irrational soul functions. See Typology Diagram: the rational functions are the two horizontal functions, activities or processes and the two irrational the two vertical ones. The rational processes are those that Steiner says, "pertain to the soul", namely 1) judging and 2) feelings of love and hate. The two vertical processes come directly from outside the soul, either from the sensory physical world or the super-sensible spiritual world. [Note: Intuition to Jung refers to direct super-sensible perception of the spiritual world, whereas to Steiner Intuition is one of three processes for direct perception of the spiritual world, namely, Imagination, Inspiration, and Intuition.]

In the section on Psychosophy Steiner will be describing the processes that Jung called the rational functions. Later on, in the next section on Pneumatosophy, he will be describing what Jung called the irrational processes, by which term Jung meant those processes not mediated by the rational processes of thinking or feeling, but directly experienced, either from the physical world below or from the spiritual world above.

Another distinction we must make is that in talking about judging, Steiner is dealing with the soul activity of judging, and he specifically excludes the logical aspects of judgment from consideration. Those aspects of thinking having to do with logic, he excludes from his process of judging.

[page 81] My characterization is not about logic but about the psychosophic nature — strictly from the perspective of inner activity, or soul processes — of judging. Everything you can learn about judgment through logic is ruled out. I am not speaking of "judgment" but of judging, the activity of judging, using the word as a verb.

When you say "the rose is red" you are in the activity called judging. If you are walking through a beautiful landscape and feel delight, you are experiencing the process of loving or attraction. If you are walking down a street and see some activity that disgusts you, you are experiencing the process of hating or aversion. This goes on all the time: "You are continually judging and continually experiencing love and hate every moment of your waking soul life." (Page 81)

Another aspect of judging that is very important is that it "always culminates in mental images." Two tendencies coming from different directions merge into a mental image in our soul experience. Steiner gives the simple example of the "red rose".

[page 82] The judgment consists of what we might call two tendencies converging from two directions — one the rose, the other "red." These two then become one: the red rose. They converge into a single image that you carry through life.

This might seem too simple to be important, but it is essential if one is too understand what Steiner means by the process of judging and to distinguish it from the process of desiring which includes the polarities of loving and hating (attraction and aversion). With loving and hating we can ask where is it coming from and with judging, where it is going to, but not vice versa. Thus judging leads to a mental presentation and loving and hating come from a desiring in our soul.

[page 82] The phenomena of love and hate require that we ask . . . not, "Where are we going," but rather, "Where do they come from?" With judging, it is a matter of where to, of where is it going; whereas for love and hate, it is a question of where from, of where it comes from. As the soul gives birth to love and hate, we will always discover something there that enters the soul life as though from another side. As soul experiences, loving and hating can always be traced back to what could be called desiring. If we put desiring on the other side of soul life, we can say that behind the love and hate that appears in our soul, there always stands desire, which radiates into our soul life.

People commonly think that desire arises from something that they observe in the external world, but when pushed to explain why the same object of their desire will evoke no desire in another person or in themselves at another time, they have no coherent answer. Steiner says that we are likely to be unaware of the cause of the desire that arises within our soul — that would lead us to attribute the desire to some external cause, simply out of the scientific habit we have been immersed in since the 1500s. Judging, he says, also originates in our soul, "in the wellsprings of its own being, sharpening judgments to mental images and aware that if judging is being done in a certain way, the image can be valid." In other words, the "image must have an outer validity and significance to be of any value to us." (Page 83)

Physiology labels some of the nerves between the brain and the sensory organs as sensory (afferent) and motor (efferent) neurons. The existence of such "motor neurons" is shown to be an error by Steiner. He does not deny there are such neurons, but avers that they are afferent, that their function is only proprioceptive, or allowing us to be aware of body position and movements.

[page 84] To a spiritual scientific perspective . . . what natural science refers to as "motor nerves" do in fact exist as physical structures, but their purpose is not to stimulate movement but to perceive it, to verify it, to become aware of self-movement. Just as we have nerves for receiving color impressions, so we also have nerves that allow us to check on what we are doing and convey it to our awareness. The prevailing view is a gross error that does widespread damage; it has ruinous to the whole field of physiology and to psychology as well.

The next subject that Steiner describes in his lecture of 1910 (pages 85, 86) foreshadows an insight that came to me years before I first heard of Rudolf Steiner or anthroposophy, his spiritual science. It evolved out of my study of the brain and perception. It began as cryptic formulas I sketched in the margins of various books and it finally ended up in this review of Jerome Bruner's book, Actual Minds, Possible Worlds. Bruner said it in his own words, "it means that perception is to some unspecifiable degree an instrument of the world as we have structured it by our expectancies." My formula states, in effect, that our Perception (Now) is a function F of the combination of our perceptual Inputs(Now) and of a function G of our accumulated perceptual Inputs(Past), summarized in a formula:

P(Now) = F[ I(Now), G( I(Past) ) ].

If you consider that G( I(Past) ) accumulates at every instant the P(Now) into itself, you can see the recursive nature of our perception at work. The recursion can be made visible in the formula by substitution of the function G with P thusly: P(Now) = F[ I(Now), P(Now) ] — which means that the Perception at this moment is a function of the Inputs coming in at this moment and a function of the Perception experienced during the immediately previous moment. Perception is constantly updated and modified by new information coming in. In other words, our perceptions at any moment are conditioned by the sum of our previous perceptions. Thus, it can be understood why two people can look at the same event in the external world and create two completely different perceptions.

My favorite story which illustrates this process involves the crew of Charles Darwin's ship the Beagle when it anchored offshore South America. It was a large ship, larger than the natives had ever experienced before. A sailor asked a native what he thought about his ship and the native replied through the interpreter, "What ship? All I see is a large bird out on the water." Same sensory stimulus, different accumulated perceptions, different perception in the now. [For more details, see The Remembered Present.]

[page 85, 86] Now, how does what sense experience gives us behave within the soul life? For soul life, what is the significance of our perceptions and what we then continue to live with — the sounds our ears hear, the colors our eyes see, and so on? What does all this mean for the soul? These experiences are usually studied in a truly one-sided way, without realizing that a combination of two factors, or elements, is encountered at the boundaries of soul life. One is perception, the direct experience we necessarily have of the outer world. We can have an impression of colors or sounds only when the sense organs that convey those impressions are exposed to them. Such impressions last only as long as we are exposed to external , objects. An outer impression, or interchange between the outer and the inner, stops as soon as the eyes no longer look at an object or the ears no longer hear it making sounds. What does this prove?

Consider this along with the other fact — that we carry something of these experiences of the outer world with us. You know the sound you heard or the color you saw, although you no longer hear or see them: What happened there? There is something that takes place completely within, something that belongs totally to your soul life and must absolutely occur within. If it belonged to the external world, you couldn't carry it with you. Sense impressions of a color that you have received by looking at the color may be carried within you afterward only if they dwell in your soul, if they become an inner experience of the soul so that they remain in the soul.
       Thus, we must distinguish between sense perception [RJM: the I(now)], which happens between the soul and the outer world, and that which we separate from our interaction with the external world and continue to carry within us [RJM: the I(Past)]. We must sharply distinguish between these two things; this is vital in such matters. Please do not think that I am being pedantic by saying these things; a foundation must be created for what follows.

It should give readers confidence that Steiner's insights about the world of perception are right on point when that which he talked about almost a hundred years ago is substantiated by independently by modern researchers into perception, such as Gerald Edelman, Jerome Bruner, etal.

Now we are better prepared to understand the distinction that Steiner makes between a perception and the sensation it produces. His term perception refers to the Inputs (Now) and his term sensation to the Inputs (Past) in my equation above.

[page 86] You can clearly distinguish (for future reference) between the experience you have as long as you have an object before you and that which you carry with you in the soul afterward, if you call the first experience a sense perception and the latter a sensation. In this way you distinguish between the perception of a color and the sensation of it. Color perception is finished when you look away, but you continue to carry the sensation of color within you. Usually such distinctions are not made in daily life, nor are they necessary. We need them to prepare for coming lectures, however, and they will prove very useful to us.

There is another distinction to make which is crucial. What originates in your soul is the activity that your body underwent in the process of perception, and that activity will include stored physical body states or doyles which are triggered during the act of perception.

[page 86, 87] Our souls carry within them, then, sensations acquired through exposure to external scenes and objects. Should we consider them to be a completely new element of soul life in addition to the elements of judging and love and hate? If that were the situation, you would have to say, "Well, you have forgotten something that is also an element of the soul's life — you failed to mention the sensations derived from the senses, which are found there." That is not the situation, however; such sensations are not a distinct aspect of the soul life. We must distinguish between the subject matter of the sensation and something else. For instance, when sensing the color red, we must separate out the red. If "red" were an inner soul experience, the whole color perception of it as "red" would be meaningless. The subject matter, or color, of the perception is in no way an inner experience of the soul. The object that stood before you is red, but its redness is not produced by your soul. What originates in your soul is something very different — that is, what you did, or your activity while the red object stood before you, so that you could carry the impression with you. This activity is the inner soul experience, and it is actually nothing other than the converging of the two fundamental elements of the soul life to which we have been referring.

This activity is collectively called sensation by Steiner and it "is the convergence of judging and desiring within the life of the soul." (Page 89)

[page 89] Sensations are nothing more than what flows tegether out of inner unconscious judging and the unconscious phenomena of love and hate, which strive outward but are hindered and retained. Whatever the soul carries as a sensation arises in this way.

Sensations arise from perceptions in the physical world, and even in the case of concept of a triangle, we will attach the immaterial concept to a material triangle in the physical world. But there is one mental image that arises within most of us that is independent of the physical world, even though it can be connected with it — the "I- image" or "I". That is the name that no one can call us but ourselves, our "I". It is this "I" that we push against the sensations of desiring and judging and one can see in the Currents Figure the pushing up from the Soul (Astral Body) and pushing down by "I-being" from above. What is the origin of the uniqueness of the I-image and how does it relate to judging and desiring, the basic soul elements? (Page 92)

Steiner leads us to see that the external world acts a master over us because we are only able to see of the external world what comes in through our perceptions and sensations. "The outer world controls our sense perceptions." but he adds that when we look at "the dramatic contradictions of our soul life" we "recognize that we are subject to a master there" as well, an “inner master”, if you will. (Page 97) The master he is referring to is our "I-being" or "I" — it is a master in the sense of the famous poem "Invictus" by William Ernest Henley (1849-1903) — it is the "master of my fate", the "captain of my soul."

Invictus

Out of the night that covers me,
Black as the pit from pole to pole,
I thank whatever gods may be
For my unconquerable soul.

In the fell clutch of circumstance
I have not winced nor cried aloud.
Under the bludgeonings of chance
My head is bloody, but unbowed.

Beyond this place of wrath and tears
Looms but the Horror of the shade,
And yet the menace of the years
Finds, and shall find, me unafraid.

It matters not how strait the gate,
How charged with punishments the scroll,
I am the master of my fate:
I am the captain of my soul.

One should note that "captain of my soul" presupposes something that exists outside of the soul and directs it — and that is a fitting metaphor for the "I" — the immortal spirit that lives in each human being as a legacy to the spirits who raised its body into a vertical position to readily receive that immortal I. The I enters from above and opposes the Astral body rising from below as shown in the Currents Figure above.

An interesting thing about our mental images is that they possess a life of their own. Steiner proves this by calling to mind in us a rather commonplace example that anyone over 30 or so can relate to: something we know we know we cannot bring into our thoughts at some moment when we earnestly desire to, then a few minutes, hours, or days later, there it is. If this were a child of ours acting this way when we called it into our presence, we would likely say, "It has a mind of its own," would we not?

[page 97, 98] The soul is really subject to the independent mental images and to longings and desires. You can easily see that mental images live a life of their own in our souls when you consider, for example, that the soul is powerless to easily call a previously formed mental image back into memory. A mental image formed only yesterday may sometimes refuse strongly to allow itself to be recaptured. In ordinary life we then say that we have "forgotten," that it simply will not rise to the surface and resists recall. A battle takes place between something that lives in us as an undeniable soul power wanting to force an image to the surface and something else that is also present in the soul. A battle is waged in our souls with the mental image, thought it will eventually return without any external cause. It was present all the time, but refused to reveal itself at the desired moment. You know further that this battle between our own soul forces and the mental image to be called up is different with different human individualities. The mental images indeed live in the soul, but as opponents, so to speak, of our own soul forces. The difference between the two is frighteningly great.

Surely you've been in a conversation with someone and been interrupted while they attempt to recover some incidental person's name to mind. They can go on for a minute or two, and the smooth conversation almost gets completely derailed by their insistence on recovering a name which is not at all important to the subject of the conversation. Carl Jung did a long experimental study of the time delays involved when a patient of his tried to come up with a word by free-association. Invariably the slightest delay by the patient in response to a word indicated some psychological load or energy bound up with the word. Steiner may have had access to such experimental evidence when he spoke these words in 1910:

[page 98] Some people, for example, never seem to suffer the embarrassment of being unable to recall what lives in their souls when needed. Such people can summon in an instant all their memories and knowledge. On the other hand, there are those so incapacitated by forgetfulness that they have absolutely no power over their reservoir of images, and they cannot recall them to consciousness.
       A true psychologist finds it very important to know how quickly a person can remember — the speed with which the images of past experiences assert themselves against the forces trying to recall them. Psychologists use this as a measure of a deeper element in the being of the human. They see evidence of inner health or illness in the degree that we are removed from our mental images. Since the nuances of health and illness blend into one another at their extremes, we may say that, from a psychologist's viewpoint, we have subtle indications right into the physical nature of the human constitution in these intimate details. We can even assess just where an individual has a problem by the way a soul must battle with mental images in order to remember them. We look, as it were, right through the soul into something that is other than soul when we understand the soul's experience in battling with the realm of mental images.

I have mentioned on many occasions how little I understand of Rudolf Steiner's works when I first began reading them. Most of my reviews of those early books were very short, especially the Steiner ones, about half a typical webpage in size, as you may confirm for yourself by looking at my Steiner reviews in my first book of reviews, "A Reader's Journal".

[page 98, 99] Another way of picturing the way mental images lead a life of their own in our souls is through the fact that we cannot completely control the mental images we have at any given moment; we are at their mercy. Certain experiences can convince us of this. It depends on us, on the nature of our soul life, whether or not we understand someone who is speaking with us, for example. You understand me when I am lecturing to you. If, however, you were to bring a person who is unfamiliar with such matters to hear my lectures, such a person would probably get nothing from them, regardless of how well educated that individual might be. Why is this? It is because you have been acquiring the needed mental images over a period of time. You have built up mental images in your souls that now come to meet the new ones in today's talk.

When this happens, you are amused, entertained, comfortable, and you are not bored. You get along swimmingly with the person's talk, you lose yourself in what the speaker is saying and the thoughts which arise in you during the talk. You lose your "I", in other words, in times like that. One might also add, you don't learn anything much that is new.

[page 99] Here you have an example of how we really have very little control over our soul life. There is no point in trying to understand something for which we lack a store of background images. In this case, image comes to meet image. If you observe your soul life, you will be able to notice that your I plays an extremely minimal role in it. You have the best opportunity to forget your I while you are listening to something that fascinates you. The more intently you listen, the more you forget your I. Try, after the lecture, to recall such a moment when you were absorbed in something you understood. You will discover that you must confirm that something was happening in you, with which your I was not very involved, whereby it had indeed forgotten itself. At such times, we say that we were as if given over to it, as if we had lost ourselves. We always lose ourselves when we understand something particularly well. We shut out our I and hold our reservoir of images up to meet those entering the soul. A sort of battle ensues between the old and the new, and we ourselves become the battleground for their confrontation.

Newness creates a sense of discomfort because of this battleground within us between the old and the new. The old is already there and doesn't like being supplanted by the new one little bit.

[page 99] In relation to our soul life, something very important depends on whether or not we already have the mental images needed to understand something. Imagine listening to some matter without already having the mental images needed to understand it. We listen "unprepared," as they say. Then something peculiar appears. At the moment we listen unprepared, when the state of the soul life makes it impossible to understand, something demon-like approaches us from behind. What is it? It is the I dwelling in our soul life. It appears to attack as if from behind. As long as we are absorbed, are lost to ourselves, it doesn't show itself, but it arises whenever we lack understanding.

Here Steiner is discussing the process known by modern scientists as "cognitive dissonance", which is defined as "a psychological phenomenon which refers to the discomfort felt at a discrepancy between what you already know or believe, and new information or interpretation." He gives us a beautiful metaphor with which to understand cognitive dissonance, our I is attacking us from behind. The methods we use to avoid cognitive dissonance are amazingly deceptive, but Samuel Hoffenstein reveals them a few of those ways in this next quatrain:

Little by little we subtract
Faith and fallacy from fact,
The illusory from the true
And starve upon the residue.

The starving of our soul life appears as boredom, does it not? It is the very subject, boredom, to which Steiner is leading us in the course of the next several passages. Given the prevalence of boredom in the world today, and its concomitant symptoms, depression, let's follow his line of thought carefully and see where it leads us. He asks us how does the presence of our I reveal itself in actual operation within us — within, in other words, our soul life:

[page 99, 100] How does it announce itself there? Those who pay close attention to soul life soon notice that what plays into it brings it discomfort — the soul fills itself with some element that brings it discomfort. With this as a background, we may say that this discomfort shows that, in the soul life, the mental images already present affect new mental images trying to enter. Their way of acting is not a matter of indifference. It either brings a sense of comfort and satisfaction into soul life or it brings exactly the opposite. Again, we see the degree to which we are given over to our mental images. Although it is not obvious, this is of vital importance to psychologists. This discomfort is a force created in the soul when confronted with the unfamiliar. It continues to act in the soul's life in such a way that it goes beyond that life and takes hold of an even deeper element of human nature. The results of this misunderstanding and discomfort can have a damaging consequence, even affecting the body's constitution. In diagnosing the finer degrees of sickness or health (those connected with the soul life), it is very important to notice whether or not patients understand the matters they must frequently contend with in life. Such considerations are far more important than is generally believed.

— Especially by 21st Century doctors who spend very little time questioning patients about what's going on currently in their lives and are content to prescribe a medication first and ask questions later, if the patient survives. Those doctors of the past century who made house calls would find out answers to questions about what their patients had to "contend with in life" the moment they arrived at the house. What was the condition of the house and yard? What did the persons opening the door look like, their clothes, their facial expressions, their tone of voice? What did the rooms the doctors walked through look like: disheveled or overly neat and orderly? What were the conditions of the patient's room: signs of caring or neglect? Add to this the actual content of what the person greeting the doctor said about what was the problem, and you have an jam-packed description of what was going on in the patient's lives — all of this before the doctor actually arrived at the patient's bedside! Those who look at house calls and see "inefficiency" are succumbing to the patient as a thing syndrome which infects so much of what passes for modern medicine. In some ways, modern medicine is worse than mediaeval medicine. Its drugs may be more efficacious in many cases, but they are often administered for bodily healing when soul-healing is called for instead.

If your body is experiencing problems, you need physical therapy, and you would look for a physical therapist, someone guides you through the proper movements to get your body's muscles operating smoothly again. If your soul is sick, you need someone who is an expert in healing in your soul or psyche, and then you would look for a psyche-iatrist, a soul-doctor, or psychiatrist. If your soul is experiencing problems in operating, even though it is not sick, you would look for a psyche-therapeutis, or psychotherapist. Since psyche problems have usually assorted body problems, you have the choice of where to start, and if you're not sure which one to choose, any one of the three disciplines should be capable of directing you to the proper discipline. One of the three will resonate with you — the term resonate means, rightly understood, it fits with your soul's wishes — which makes it easy to know without having to ask someone else, who might have their own axe to grind and lead you astray. A malpractice settlement is little compensation for the life-disasters which can result from advice which is contrary to your soul's desires.

[page 100] Let us move on now. It was stated that our mental images have an independent life, that they are like beings within us. Further consideration will convince you of this. You will remember moments in your soul life when the external world seemed to have nothing at all to offer you, despite a desire on your part to be stimulated by it, to receive impressions, to experience something. It simply had nothing to offer. It passed you by without leaving any impressions. You then experience something as a result — boredom. Boredom causes desire in the soul. It gives birth to a longing for impressions, and the soul life is surrendered to it; yet there is nothing to satisfy that desire. Where does boredom originate?

If you answer the question, "Where does boredom originate?", by saying, "A lack of things to do." you have clearly not read nor understood what Steiner said above, so let's re-state it or rather let's allow you to do a little introspection. Think of times when there were sources of stimulation going on all around you, but you were uninterested in pursuing or getting involved in them. You declined invitations, you left the television turned off, books and magazines unopened, left the phone off the hook, phone messages unanswered, and you retreated from going out. If you ever did that, even once, then you must admit that boredom does not originate from a lack of things to do. Look at your household pets. Do they ever appear bored? By that I don't mean what you feel when you project your own "no-things-to-do" criterion of boredom. When they're hungry, they eat. When they're tired they sleep. Animals are not subject to cultural conditioning; only humans are. The reason for this is that animals are not capable of "time-binding" as Korzybski explained in his master work, "Science and Sanity", and laid the foundations for a science of sanity called "General Semantics" during the last century.

[page 100, 101] If you are truly a good observer of nature, you might have observed something not often noticed — that only a human being can become bored. Animals never become bored. Only superficial observers believe that such a thing is possible. You can even become aware of a strange aspect of human boredom. If you investigate the soul life of a simple, primitive people, you will find that they suffer far less boredom than is found among the more cultured people with their more complicated soul life. Those who go about the world and tend to be observant will notice that country people are much less prone to boredom than city dwellers. Of course, you should not think here of studying how bored city people become in the country, but only the degree of boredom country people experience in the country. Your attention should be on the more complex cultural conditioning of soul life. Thus, there is a real difference in the degree to which human beings are prone to boredom.
       . . . Why are animals never bored? When the gates of their senses are open to their environment, animals continually receive impressions. Now picture those impressions. The soul life of an animal flows out to the environment and is stimulated. What goes on outside as a continuous external process keeps pace with the inner flow of animal experience. Animals are done with the one impression when a new one is presented, to which they surrender themselves. Outer events and inner experience coincide.
       The advantage we have over animals is that we can establish within ourselves a different measure of time. The sequence of mental images that surfaces in our soul life can be based on a time element other than the one in our environment. [RJM: what Korzybski called, "time-binding"]

When you came into this lifetime, you set the banquet table for your life, rightly understood. If you then enter this lifetime, become an adult, and ignore the banquet table you set for yourself, then out of your soul life will arise a desire to sit down at the banquet table, and until you do, nothing else you do will satisfy you — as a consequence, you will feel bored. People who set for themselves a country table for this lifetime are content with simple table fare and the stimulation of the natural environment. They have fewer mental images carried over from their previous lifetime — they feel over-stimulated in a city environment and long to return to the country. Some who leave the country for the city and vice-versa will acclimate very well, and some may choose a seasonal switching of country-city life. All these choices are a consequence of the banquet table they have laid for themselves for this lifetime.

Boredom, when it arises, indicates something simmering on the back-burner, a succulent dish which is ready to be served on that banquet table, a dish which requires some action immediately. That "succulent dish" I conjured up is a metaphor for what Steiner calls "the independent life of our mental images".

[page 101] Then, too, boredom does not emerge from soul life without cause. Why are we bored? It is produced by the independent life of our mental images! The old mental images in us are the source of our desire for new impressions; they want to be re-enlivened and refreshed, to have new impressions. People have little control over boredom, because mental images received in a previous life develop their own life in the soul and seek re-enlivenment. They develop desires. If they remain unsatisfied, their unsatisfied longing — an attribute that we must study in the soul life itself — is expressed as boredom. Therefore, people who have fewer mental images also have fewer desiring images. The fewer desires for new impressions they develop, the less bored they are. We should not conclude, however, that a lasting state of boredom characterizes a highly developed human being. Those who constantly yawn are not among the most highly developed in terms of soul life, though they are more developed than those who can never become bored because they have few mental images. Boredom can be cured, and when the soul has developed sufficiently, boredom is no longer possible.

Thus, if you experience boredom, it is a sign that your soul needs development. If your soul were an automobile (in a real sense, it is auto-mobile), and it started shaking when you pushed down the acceleration pedal, you'd know it was time to do something different. Perhaps you need to downshift to a lower gear. You try it, and the shaking stops, and you speed up. What you want is an "automatic transmission" which automatically senses the need for a lower gear and does it before you are aware of the need. But soul-development is different from buying an automobile: you start off as a child with standard shift, and you must learn to develop an automatic transmission. When that development occurs in one's life is different for any individual — all we can say in general is this: when things start getting shaky in your life, it's time to shift to a new gear, and later to work on developing an automatic transmission for yourself.

[page 103] This is the difference between those who can cure their boredom and those who cannot. Such an inability indicates the independent life of one's mental images, a life that cannot be controlled and to which one is subject. If we do not make certain that our mental representations have meaning, we become bored. Only through meaningful mental images can we protect ourselves from boredom.

We each have an I, a Soul Captain inside of us to assist us with making the proper decisions when a soul-filled desire arises in us. The I assists, the I cannot compel. If we choose the right decision, our soul lightens up immediately. If we endlessly vacillate, pondering decisions over and over again, our Soul Captain hovers over us like the buzzard who told his fellow buzzard who was circling over a couple of near death humans crawling on the desert floor below, "Patience, Hell! I say, 'Let's kill one!'" Your I knows you'll get it in this lifetime or the next — it is immortal and doesn't have infinite patience, only infinite resolve for your well-being as a soul. It is the Captain of your Soul, not Captain of your Body. One's motto should be, to avoid soul stagnation, "Do something. Even if it's wrong!" If it's right, you'll know soon enough. If it's wrong, you'll learn from your mistake, and do something else. It's called learning by doing, try-and-error leads to try-and-success, rightly understood. Steiner offers us this encouragement about the efficacy of our I or spirit:

[page 107, 108] We will see in the coming days how this self-contained life of mental images, enclosed within the boundaries of the soul, is the source of both our greatest bliss and our deepest suffering, to the extent that they originate in the soul. We will see, too, how the spirit is the greatest healer of the pain and suffering mental images cause in our souls. We may also say that just as hunger must be stilled in external bodily life, and that such stilling is healthy, the same must be done for the inner life of the soul; mental images require, in a certain way, inner nourishment through other mental images. When we overburden ourselves by eating too much, our health is undermined. Thus, the destiny of the soul plays out in such a way that new mental images may promote health or illness. We will see how the spirit functions not only as a health-giver in terms of our hunger for new mental images but also as healer when we suffer from an excess of them.

If we have desires which arise from our souls which are fulfilled, they will exert a healthy influence on us, but any unfulfilled desires will exert an unhealthy influence and lead to disease and sickness.

[page 120, 121] Imagine a soul approaching an object; desire for it is generated, but the object is unable to gratify the desire. The desire then remains in the soul and is ungratified.
       Let us investigate the situation very precisely and compare it with the one where a desire achieves its goal in the soul's life. There is a considerable difference between the situation where a desire attains its goal within the soul and one where it does not. A desire that has attained satisfaction and is then neutralized has an effect on the life of the soul in such a way that it has a healthy influence on it. When desires continue to live in the soul without satisfaction, because the objects cannot provide it, after the object is removed, the soul retains a living connection to a void, so to speak. Consequently, the soul lives on in unsatisfied desiring, as though in an inner fact without any basis in reality. This fact alone is enough so that the soul life has an unfavorable, illness-causing influence upon that connected to it, namely, the spirit and body, owing to the unsatisfied desires. Feelings based on satisfied desires are, therefore, very different for direct observation from those built upon frustrated desiring. In a flagrant case, it is a simple matter to discern this; in subtler cases, people do not always realize what they are confronting.

Thus a person with an unsatisfied desire who has waited way too long will have developed an illness and now has need of a physician because they have passed the point where a psychiatrist or a psychotherapist might have helped. A psychology of body, soul, and spirit allows you to heal problems long before they reach the body, which they are being addressed at the soul and spirit level.

One excellent example of as satisfied desire which Steiner develops in detail and we will summarize briefly here is when one encounters beauty — when "desire coincides with judging" — then one experiences "an endlessly warm satisfaction throughout the soul." Steiner cautions that he is not recommending that human beings "wallow continuously in the enjoyment of beauty" or "thinking is unhealthy". Instead he says, "the following should occur in the soul.

[page 125] Since seeking truth is a duty that furthers the progress of culture in general as well as that of the individual, we are forced to suppress our desiring in favor of truth. Since the decision concerning the truth does not lie with the life of desire, truth forces us to suppress it. We must do this without hesitation in striving for truth. Consequently it is essentially striving for truth that restrains our self-love to the appropriate degree. When we consider the matter objectively, we can gain a certain satisfaction from our inner experiences of how our search for truth continually encounters the boundary of our capacity for judging.

[page 125, 126] This is where the activity of aesthetic judgment comes in. The life of aesthetic judging is such that we bring back what we have taken to the soul's border. . . . It is the peculiar attribute of aesthetic judgment that it encompasses the moment of selflessness just as it does the truth, while asserting the sense of selfhood that, in the two previous lectures was referred to as "the inner master." We are given back to ourselves like a free gift in the aesthetic judgment.

If I may paraphrase what Steiner is saying: When we pour out our love for a work of art, we are given back the gift of ourselves. And we do well when we consider this to ponder the famous ars langa, vita brevis saying of Goethe:

Art is long, life short;
judgment difficult,
opportunity transient.

The eighth lecture in this series begins with a recitation of Goethe’s poem “Thoughts about the Descent into Hell of Jesus Christ” which was written in 1765 when he was only sixteen years old. The poem was omitted from the text because “it is quite long and adds little to the lecture itself,” but for completeness this review makes it available to read at this time if you wish at Thoughts on Jesus Christ's Descent into Hell.

[page 131] Where ever we look in Goethe, we encounter something that may be described as a flow of intensely vivid images. And how full of images is this poem of the young Goethe that we have just heard! The flow of that vivid life of images was an aspect of him, we can see that a powerful soul life living itself out in vivid imagery overcame the problems that still disturbed him in his earlier poem.

Do you know anyone who seems to be bored all the time? Garfield the comic strip comes to mind. It stars a cat who is bored most of the time. He is simply not interested in the outside world very much. Steiner tells us on page 132, “A soul is interested in the outer world according to how the experiences of love and hate are working.” It is easy to see in people who are bored all the time that there is a paucity of love and hate working into their lives. Love and hate comprise the two polarities of desiring which we will examine now.

Recall now that perception is instantaneous — it comes in from the outside world in the now. Mental images are complex combinations of previous perceptions, so they come into the soul on a stream of time from the past into the future as shown by line AB in the Page 135 Diagram. In order to recall a mental image, some attention must be paid to it. As Steiner puts it, "Consciousness must illuminate it." And he asks and answers, "How does it happen that this continuous stream of mental images in the soul can be illuminated so that parts of it become visible to memory or in some other way?"

[page 134] Human beings possess a tremendous variety of feelings. I will point to just a few, some of which were mentioned yesterday, and a few others — feelings, for example, that express themselves in longing, impatience, hope, doubt, anxiety, and fear. What do all of these various feelings tell? If we examine them closely, we find that they all share a peculiar element. They are all related to the future — something that may happen or something that we hope will happen. In our souls, we live in such a way that our feelings are interested not only in the present but also in the future. In fact, they have a very lively interest in the future.

If you look at the CD line, you'll find that there is a time stream from the future which enters our soul.

[page 135] All desires, wishes, and interests, the phenomena of love and hate, represent a current in the soul life that flows not from past to future, but toward us from the future. It flows from the future into the past.

Now we can answer the question we asked above about what becomes visible to memory or conscious to us at any moment. Given that we have two streams of memory going through us, one of memory or mental concepts flowing from the past, and the other of desires involving love and hate flowing through us from the future — where they meet when they pass through our souls, in the place where they overlap, consciousness exists. In studies of consciousness in the works of Ornstein, Tart, Pribram, Edelmann, Dennett, Searle, and others, no where have I seen a simpler or more elegant statement of what conscious is than here in Steiner's words. Consciousness exists when a stream of memories from the past meet a stream of desires from the future. Is this true? Ask yourself. You are a human being. Ask if it is true of you. This is how Steiner describes consciousness, not defining it, but describing what its effects are within a human being.

[page 135] You can say, wherever you look into your soul life, that you are involved with an interpenetration of those two streams — what flows from the past into the future and the opposite flow of desires, interests, wishes, and so on. The two streams interpenetrate each other.

These are experiences we all have if we examine our lives. What Steiner does next is to name the stream of memories from the past the "etheric body" and the stream of desires from the future the "astral body." How does adding these name prove useful? Because they allow us to grasp other aspects of human lives that we may have encountered before for which we had no explanation. For example in the immediate period after death we have been told that we enter a time of moving backward through the memories of our lives, a process the Orientals call kamaloca. Plus we know that the astral body has completely separated from the physical and etheric body after death. With the absence of the pressure of the time stream flowing from the past into the future from the etheric body, the only stream in action is the time stream from the future into the past from the astral body which creates the condition we have known as kamaloca, in other words, the unhindered flow of time backwards through our previous lifetime.

[page 136] You see, then, that we rediscover in psychosophy what we have learned from spiritual science. I hope, though, that you will notice one thing. There can sometimes be a long road to travel from knowledge of spiritual scientific truths gleaned from clairvoyant research to confirming experiences on the physical plane, for that must first be put in order. When that is achieved, you will see everywhere you look, clairvoyant research is always confirmed by findings made on the physical plane.

To use a metaphor I like: a clairvoyant is using the most delicate instrument known to humankind, the human being itself. But it is only an instrument, who dials and responses can be misinterpreted due to certain desires, wishes, interests, and so on of the human being using the instrument. That is what I suggest Steiner means "must first be put in order" — the human being using the instrument of clairvoyance must be calibrated or "put in order" or the results will seem to be confusing or contradictory to the results of other instruments. Put in order, however, two instruments will produce results that are mutually confirmatory.

Ever try to give a surprise birthday party to someone? Was it easy to pre-arrange everything without the loved one finding out what you were doing? No, it's hardly ever easy, is it? That's why really good surprise parties are such a rarity — they seem to depend upon good luck mostly as much as advance preparation. If we examine the phenomenon of surprise or spontaneous activity of any kind, we are led to an understanding of the process of judging which shows us that it is orthogonal to the two currents from the past and the future, that is, it is in a different direction from either one.

[page 137] When are we surprised? It is only when something confronts us that we are not immediately able to judge as it makes an impression on the soul life. In that moment when we able to judge, surprise or wonder vanishes. At times when we are immediately able to judge, we feel no surprise, no wonder.

No wonder - we feel no surprise. From my studies of spontaneous activities, I have confirmed that it is impossible to perform a spontaneous activity by conscious command or will. It was Paul Watzlawick who first called this phenomenon to my attention in what he called "The Be Spontaneous Paradox" or BSP for short. Sneezing is a spontaneous activity. Try sneezing at this moment if you doubt it. You can't do anything but feign a sneeze upon command. No matter how hard you try, you know what you have done is not a real sneeze. Going to sleep is another one: no matter how hard you try, you cannot make yourself go to sleep. Smile! How many times have you heard some amateur photographer say that? It puts you immediately into a BSP, doesn't it? If they act cute, or smile at you genuinely, you may smile because smiling back at someone is a spontaneous activity. But try to smile on command, and you get an artificial smile of the kind you see in so many amateur photographs. You plan a surprise party and the person discovers your plan. So what happens when the big moment comes? They cannot be genuinely surprised, but may feign being surprised which will likely fool none of their close friends. The person is immediately able to judge what's happening when you all yell, "Surprise!" and thus they are not really surprised. Doing any spontaneous activity on command allows you to judge it and that prevents you from doing it spontaneously.

[page 137] Judging occurs in consciousness but cannot assume control of the ongoing flow of soul life. We do not always have all of our mental images at our beck and call. Judging, therefore, cannot coincide with the soul's onward-flowing current, neither can it coincide with the current coursing from the future into the past. Otherwise, that would render it impossible to experience such feelings as fear, surprise, and astonishment. So we must conclude that judging coincides with neither of these directions.

In the mid-1960s I brought home from the public library on loan a copy of Fragonard's famous painting, "Young Girl Reading". I later purchased a copy of the painting on canvas and it was my favorite. One day in the 1990s I was in the National Gallery and turned a corner and there in full, living color was the original painting. I was surprised, delighted, and filled a flow of all the mental images I had ever made of that painting, none of which rose to the beauty that filled my eyes in that moment.

[page 138]Consider a moment when mental images that have escaped us become conscious in a very unusual way. I will suggest such a moment. Assume, for example, that you are touring a picture gallery. You notice a picture and look at it. At that moment the same picture surfaces in your consciousness. Let us assume that you have already seen it. What has evoked that memory? It is the impression of the new picture; the impression of the new picture conjured into visibility within your soul the old mental image of the picture that had continued to live within you. If you had not seen the picture, the old mental image would not have surfaced.

That is fairly straight-forward - you see something it calls to mind a mental image of something you'd seen earlier. But let's follow Steiner as he leads us into the process of connections we make internally.

[page 138] What happened when you saw that new picture? Your I-being wanted to approach the picture, and it used the senses as a medium. Because your I received a new impression and absorbed a new element, which had a curious effect on something in the ongoing flow of your soul life, your soul life became visible.

If you ponder these words and concepts you will begin to understand why you think of the things you do, and will have new power in your life to sort out the wheat from the chaff of your soul experiences.

We know through the science of doyletics that the onset of cognitive memory (mental image) capability is about five years old. Before that what experiences we have are stored as doylic memories or physical body states which can be recapitulated for the rest of one's life given the appropriate stimulus or until the original event of storage has been uncovered through a conscious or unconscious speed trace. Steiner says explains the onset of cognitive memory as the present of I-awareness. It is clear that the development of the neocortex to it full capacity coincides with the presence of I-awareness and its concomitant cognitive memory or mental image capability.

[page 139] I have said before that memory goes back to the moment a child gains the capacity to conceive of the self as "I," when a child develops I-awareness. Ordinarily, we are able to recall only those mental images with which the I was actively engaged, in which the active power of a self-aware I-being was involved.

What happens to the impressions a child receives before five years old during the various experiences it encounters? In doyletics we postulate that these impressions are stored as physical body states or (doyles). Thus events before five go into doylic memory and post-five go into cognitive memory. As the child begins to form these cognitive or mental images at the age of three for the first time, these images may be transient and ephemeral, eluding permanent storage, but they provide a background of mental images with which the child can begin to form an I-awareness.

[page 139] What happens in an I-being in the process of being "born" during a child's second or third year? Before that, children unconsciously absorb impressions without the I being truly present in them. They then begin really to develop I-consciousness, relating to it all the mental images that they absorb from the outer world. That is the point when the human I situates itself in front of its mental images, placing them behind it. It is an almost physically perceptible event. First, the I was within its life of mental images; it then steps out, free and armed to accept everything coming to meet it from the future, while placing past mental images behind it.

The I-being steps out of the flow of the mental image currents from the past via the etheric body and the flow of the desires from the future via the astral body. To understand this is to begin to understand the essence of the I-being as it operates independently of the etheric and astral bodies. In the Time Current Diagram, the I-being is shown coming down into the soul, perpendicular to the mental images from the past and to the desires coming from the future. We can easily understand now that the process of judging we spoke of before is directly related to the I-being.

Steiner tells us that the etheric body has a "mirror coating" for the purpose of reflecting back to us our stored mental images. Our sense organs in our physical body also have such mirror coating for the reflection of our sense impressions. (Page 143) He tells us how to picture the function of these mirror coatings.

[page 142] Imagine standing before a mirror and gazing into it. If the back of the mirror isn't coated, you see nothing reflected back at all. You would be staring into the unending distance. Our perception of the future is like that. This is indeed how we look into the current that approaches us from the future. It flows toward us but we don't see anything. When do we see something there? We see only what is there from the past. We do not see the future, of course, but we do see the past. You don't see objects in front of you as you look into a mirror; you see only what is behind you.

If you study Steiner's works, one particular item recurs as a pattern. It is a pattern that Arthur Young calls his theory of process. Every process takes a certain number of steps downward, reaches a minimum and begins moving upward. If you look at the Great Epochs of Old Saturn, Old Sun, Old Moon, Earth, you'll find downward trend into materialism culminating in the fourth Epoch of Earth followed by a rise back into spiritual realities progressing futher upward through Jupiter, Venus, and Vulcan. A similar V-shape diagram happens during the Cultural Epochs of Old India, Old Persian, Egypto-Chaldean, Greco-Roman with the downward thrust coming to an end in the middle of the fourth Epoch again, followed by a rising into spirit in the fifth, sixth and seventh Cultural Epochs. If imagine an image of a seven candled Menorah before and numbered them from left to right as 1 through 7, you would see that 4 stands alone, with 1 matching 7, 2 paired with 6, and 3 with 5. These pairings show up in the traits of the various Great Epochs and Cultural Epochs, with our current fifth cultural epoch having some of the traits of the third or Egypto-Chaldean Cultural Epoch.

In developing one's memory it is useful to use this mirrored sevens pattern and Steiner explains how one might design an elementary curriculum based on this pattern.

[page 144, 145] These things can thus show that if the I really wants to improve memory, it must strengthen itself out of the astral time current flowing opposite to the etheric current. These things are all extraordinarily important for practical life. If educators paid more attention to them, it would result in tremendous blessings. If, for example, schools with seven grades were to arrange studies so that the fourth grade existed by itself, after which the fifth grade reviewed on a different level the material taken up in the third grade, the sixth grade reviewed the studies of the second grade, and the seventh grade reviewed the content of the first grade, great benefits could result. There would be a definite strengthening of memory, and people would see how beneficial such practices are, simply because they come from the laws of real life.

One of the reasons I bought this book was because of a reference Robert Sardello made to it in his Introduction to Gerhard Wehr's book, Jung & Steiner, "In his most profound work on the soul, A Psychology of Body, Soul, and Spirit, he describes how soul functions. Among the most significant aspects is the soul's apprehension of a time current from the future." Here again is the operant passage with which Steiner introduces the concept of a time current from the future:

[page 135] All desires, wishes, and interests, the phenomena of love and hate, represent a current in the soul life that flows not from past to future, but toward us from the future. It flows from the future into the past.

In my review of Jung & Steiner I discussed in detail how useful such a concept is to interpreting otherwise inexplicable feelings one has at times, feelings which may be described as "love at first sight", a "weird attraction", etc. Let's see what other understandings we can bring out of Steiner's time current from the future concept. I have adapted what I call the Time Current Diagram from the diagrams on page 133 to 148. Note how similar this diagram is to the Typology Diagram from above, which is included here for easy reference. By inspecting the two diagrams, it should be easy to see why the time current future from the future shows up in us as a feeling. It is this feeling, I call the "Remember the Future" feeling, also known as Matherne's Rule #36, which I discovered many years before I encountered this "time current from the future" of Steiner's. I say "Remember the future. It hums in the present." Why "hums"? Because a hum is something you can feel directly in your body when you or something around you is humming.

The various arrows and their meanings are contained in the book on page 133-148. It should be clear that the astral and etheric body oppose each other on the horizontal. Steiner sums up the Time Current Diagram this way:

[page 147, 148] I can assure you that innumerable riddles of the soul will be solved for you if you refer to this diagram. You will see that this cross, cut by a circle, provides an excellent picture of the life of the soul, showing how it borders on the spiritual world above and on the physical world below, on the etheric to the left and the astral to the right. This requires rising to a concept of time as a current that does not just flow quietly along but that meets with something. The life of the I and the senses, on the other hand, can be understood only when they are seen coming into contact with the stream of time at a right angle. If you keep this in mind, you will understand that very different forces really meet in our souls, which is the scene of an encounter of forces moving in the most varied directions.

Rudolf Steiner apparently developed his understanding of the Time Currents Diagram from studying himself experientially and reporting what he found. Since his understanding matches so well with the Typology Diagram of Carl Jung who developed his understanding from studying many individuals experientially, we have evidence that the works of both men support each other and report on the situation of currents flowing in every individual. In the next passage Steiner develops the Thinker and Feeler distinctions in a way that follows Jung's description of the two modes of rational types in operation.

[page 148] Let us assume that we are dealing with an individual (since these forces manifest themselves in a great variety of ways in the great variety of human beings) in whom the judging I prevails. Such a person will find it extremely difficult to fill abstract thoughts with enough lifeblood so that they appeal directly to the feelings. Thus, we can expect that it will not be easy to get something life-filled to engage our feelings out of what a person says whose primary soul activity is judging [RJM: the Thinker].
       On the other hand, the kind of individual whose soul life tends toward a flow rich in interests and astral abundance, which encounters the opposite ongoing stream of physical life, brings a disposition for vivid concepts into life. Such individuals will not turn up on the physical plane as thought people, but they may be characterized by the ease with which they express inner experiences in ways that capture our interest [RJM: the Feeler].

We get another indication of the independent life of mental images and the deleterious effects which can show up if these remain completely unconscious. It is the goal of Jungian analysts to assist their clients to bring these free floating images to consciousness as part of their maturation and healing process. Left unchecked, they pour all their power into the physical body, which then manifests it as illness and disease.

[page 149] Much will become clear if you keep in the background the fact that the stream of soul life flowing from the past into the future — that of the etheric body — contains the unconscious mental images, which are present despite their unconscious state. If you know from spiritual science that the etheric body is the architect of the physical body, you will be able to see that these mental images are indeed present, even if unconsciously, for the etheric body carries them along. And the mental images present there are capable of developing a lively activity toward the other side, especially if they are unconscious. Anyone versed in physiology and psychology is aware how profoundly disturbing mental images can be when they cannot be summoned from the soul's depths into consciousness, but instead continue to swim along with the etheric current in those unconscious depths of the soul life. They then generate all their strength into the physical body.

Many discomforts of adult life are due to stored physical body states or doyles which were stored before the age of five years old according to the tenets of the science of doyletics. These doyles can be triggered by various events in one's adult life and without knowing why, suddenly our heart will start racing, or our breathing will stop, or we feel nauseated, or experience vertigo, or feel like we're going to fly off into the sky, or our mouth will go into a grimace, etc. If we have the first one, a doctor will call it an anxiety attack. The second one may require us to yell an obscenity before we can breath normally again. The third may cause us to think we're getting the flu. The fourth to think we have acrophobia. And the last one to think we can never eat a certain food — how could we eat it if our mouth were in a perpetual grimace?

What's happening is that certain mental images are active below the surface of our consciousness. These mental images were not stored in our neocortex because before five years old, our neocortex is not fully operational. As a result the primitive mental images were stored in our limbic region which also mediates the homeostasis of the conditions of internal organs and muscles of our body. The states associated with the mental images are activated in our body and cause the effects mentioned above, among many other effects not mentioned.

And like Steiner mentions below, there is a help for it. The speed trace is a powerful way of taking away the power of such images. What it does is allow you to convert the unconscious doylic memory into a conscious memory (what doyletics calls a "cognitive" or "conceptual" memory to distinguish memories in the neocortex from memories in the limbic system). During a speed trace, the images of the original event during which the doyle was stored rises to the surface as soon as a cognitive memory is formed from the previous doylic memory. Thereafter only the cognitive memory will arise when the triggering event occurs. The heart race, yelling, vertigo, acrophobia, nausea, food dislike, etc, will never recur.

To assist yourself by bringing to consciousness these mental image over which you were previously powerless can truly have a curative effect in your life.

[page 149] Here is a relevant fact in life. Let us consider, for example, someone between the ages of ten and twelve who has experienced an event that has been totally forgotten and simply cannot be recalled. This experience nevertheless continues to work in the etheric body and can make the person sick. Below the surface of consciousness, many mental images are active that can cause illness. Those who are aware of this fact also know that there is, in a certain way, help for it. It consists of taking away the power of such images. This means leading them in another direction by trying to provide to the sufferer who is not strong enough to do this alone reference points that allow those images to surface. This is of tremendous help. To assist a person in bringing to consciousness mental images over which the individual is powerless, images that continue to work in, the etheric body, can have a truly curative effect.

When I was studying the phenomena which led me to formulate the science of doyletics back in 1996, I was unaware that I was doing spiritual science research in what Steiner calls psychosophy, but it is clear to me now that is exactly what I was doing.

[page 150] Thus, the basic feeling — that of certainty in relation to spiritual scientific research — can also give you confidence in the research of psychosophy. This is why I occasionally try to give you a dry, dispassionate account of supersensible matters in such a way that it meets the criteria of objective scientific investigation of the physical plane. As a result, we are obligated to note that human beings are put on the physical plane for the purpose of understanding it. Our time has two tasks; one is to study, in selfless objective thinking, this physical plane on which the great cosmic laws have placed us for a purpose.

We have now reached the end of the four 1910 lectures Steiner gave on Psychosophy, and we would do well to close with this quote, "you have learned much for life if you have absorbed the concept of how the astral stream from the future plays its role." Remember the future — it hums in your present.

To Proceed to Final Four Lectures given in 1911, 9 to 12, on "A Psychology of the Spirit", Click Here: Pneumatosophy.