Rudolf Steiner Audio CW 206: Human Beings as Spiritual Being: Lecture 8: Thoughts and memories and the world of the Hierarchies (Dornach, 13 August 1921) by Rudolf Steiner
Feb 25, 2026
Explores how self-awareness appears through sense perception and mirror-like illusions. Discusses memory arising from etheric and physical layers and its inward, willful nature. Describes imaginative pictorial cognition as a path to spiritual realities and the higher hierarchies shaping childhood, culture, and freedom.
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I Consciousness Is Breathed In Through The Senses
- Rudolf Steiner argues the I-consciousness enters us through sense perception and thus lives partly in the outer world rather than solely inside our skin.
- He likens breathing in the I with our senses: the I fills us from outside and extends inward into thought and the astral body.
Memory Reveals The I Inside The Body
- Steiner contrasts sense-based consciousness (eye) with memory arising from within, showing the I also dwells in the physical body where memories originate.
- He compares our perception to mistaking a mirror image for ourselves: thoughts and senses are reflections of an I outside and within.
Memory Is An Inner Reversal Driven By Will
- Memory involves an inner reversal of attention: the soul turns inward, making will the dominant force and producing a dreamlike, partly unconscious state.
- Steiner emphasizes this mobility and continual inversion prevents static schematics of eye, astral, etheric, and physical bodies.
