Back in December, the post entitled “Our Essential Being” spoke about the holiness, the purity, we feel around babies. With wonder, we contemplate how we once were thus. Looking back at our lives since then, we can trace our memories to around the age of 3, but we usually can’t recall our lives before then. Why not? In today’s excerpt, Steiner talks about what we accomplish during this time of grace.
We begin to develop the power to think, to feel, and to will.
These vital capacities, which are forces given to human beings by the spiritual hierarchies, begin to develop while we lack full consciousness of ourselves during our waking hours. It is our higher selves, our souls, who perform these wise deeds. We thereby shape ourselves to become the expression of who we are, to meet the destiny we must meet.
Let’s see what Dr. Steiner has to say:
As we know, we bring the fruits of earlier lives on earth with us into the physical world at birth. For example, at birth our physical brain is still an incomplete and unfinished instrument. The soul must then work on it, adding the finer, detailed structures that make it the medium of all the soul’s faculties. In fact, before the soul is fully conscious, it works on the brain to transform it into an instrument to express all the capacities, aptitudes, characteristics, and so on, that it has as a consequence of earlier lives. This work on our own body is guided from a perspective that is wiser than anything we can achieve later with our full consciousness. Moreover, during this time when the brain is being transformed, we must also acquire the three most important capacities for life on earth.
The first capacity we must learn is to orient our body in space… Animals are destined from the beginning to achieve their equilibrium in a certain way: one is destined to be a climber, another a swimmer, and so on… human beings are not given an innate way to achieve equilibrium in space but must develop it out of their total being… We achieve our vertical position, our position of equilibrium in space, by ourselves. In other words, we establish our own relationship to gravity.
The second capacity we learn out of ourselves from our essential being—which remains the same through successive incarnations—is language. This allows us to relate to our fellow human beings and makes us bearers of the spiritual life that permeates the physical world primarily by means of human beings. It has often been emphasized that someone stranded on a desert island who had had no contact with other human beings before learning to speak would never learn to do so… We must sow the seed for the development of the larynx in the time before our earliest memory—before we attain full I-consciousness—so that the larynx can then become an organ of speech.
There is still a third, even less well known, capacity that we learn on our own through what we bear within us through successive incarnations. I am referring here to our ability to live within the world of thoughts and ideas, the world of thought itself. Our brain is formed and worked on because it is the tool of thinking. At the beginning of life, the brain is still malleable because we must shape it ourselves to make it an instrument for the thinking appropriate to our essential being.
Why must all these things be accomplished from soul depths that lie outside our consciousness? Because in the first years of our lives, our souls, as well as our whole being, are much more closely connected with the spiritual worlds of the higher hierarchies than is the case later.
Excerpt from: The Spiritual Guidance of the Individual and Humanity, Lecture 1 by Rudolf Steiner given June 5, 1911, in Copenhagen.
In our first three years we learn to walk, to talk, and to think. Miraculous!
The grown-ups wait with growing excitement for a child to take its first step, to say its first word, to think something by itself. How much richer are these moments when we understand that these milestones are the beginning of the child’s unique life: walking on its own path, speaking with its own voice, thinking of its own ideas… living its own life.
As Steiner says later in this same lecture: “In the early years of life, we learn out of the spirit, first to walk—that is, we learn under the guidance of the spirit to find our way in earthly life. Then we learn to speak—to formulate the truth—out of the spirit. In other words, we develop the essence of truth out of speech sounds. Finally, we also develop the organ for our life as earthly I-beings.”
And then our work becomes conscious and continues for the rest of our lives. We continually develop these capacities we formed in the first three years so that, to the best of our abilities, we are indeed walking our own paths, speaking our own truths, and thinking our own thoughts.