The Human Being: Bodies, Souls & Senses

The bearer of sensation, desire, and consciousness that gives an organism inner experience, separable during sleep.

In Steiner's reading, what science calls chance is the hidden field where spiritual law works unrecognised, awaiting the courage to perceive it.

The fire-element temperament in Steiner's anthropology, in which the I (Ich) gains the upper hand and the will breaks outward through the blood.

Steiner's view that human dress arises to protect and to adorn, and that adornment makes the colours and forms of the astral body visible outwardly.

The consciousness soul (Bewusstseinsseele) is the third soul member; it is the inner stage in which the I awakens to itself as a free, individually responsible knower, and is the formative task of the present cultural epoch from 1413 to 3573.

The field of organising life forces that holds a living organism together against the dissolving tendency of physical matter.

The formative life-forces that shape living organisms and preserve them against dissolution into mere matter.

Steiner's reconciliation of karmic law with human freedom: karma is the self-created field of conditions within which free deeds become possible.

Steiner's reading of Shakespeare's prince as the dramatic self-portrait of the dawning consciousness-soul age, the doubter suspended between thought and deed.

Steiner's teaching that in the fifth post-Atlantean epoch all mankind, not only the lone initiate, passes the Guardian of the Threshold as a collective historical event.

The fourth and highest member of the human being, the eternal individuality that says I to itself.

Steiner's name in GA 218 for the schooled, fully conscious transformation of the will, the inner counterpart of exact clairvoyance.

The intellectual soul (also "mind soul" or "Verstandsseele") is the second of three soul members; it is the inner faculty in which the I begins to detach thinking from feeling and grasps the world conceptually.

Steiner's teaching that so-called chance accidents are karmic events, arranged by a deeper consciousness that seeks the very experiences our waking self would refuse.

Steiner's teaching that animals bear group-karma but no individual karma, and that the animal kingdom is the cast-off residue of humanity's own ascent.

Life-Spirit is the sixth member of the human being; it is the etheric body transformed by the I into a permanent organ of spiritual life, between Spirit-Self and Spirit-Man.

The earth-pole temperament, where the physical body presses heaviest on the soul and produces depth, brooding, and lasting attention.

The will-pole of Steiner's threefold human: digestion, metabolism, and voluntary limb-movement, carrying willing through sleep-dim consciousness.

Steiner's warning that unpurified sexual force can secretly fuel mystical vision, producing a false clairvoyance that the schooling path must recognize and exclude.

The head pole of Steiner threefold body, the cool quiet bodily basis for ideation, perception, and waking thought.

The water-element constitution in which the etheric or life-body predominates, producing the calm, steadily-digesting, inwardly-rhythmic child.

The mineral material body shared with all matter, foundation on which the etheric, astral, and I are built.

In Steiner's work, providence is the future-facing pole of world events, the guidance of spiritual beings that completes the triad of necessity (past) and chance (present).

The cardio-respiratory middle of Steiner's threefold human, where breath and heartbeat mediate feeling between thinking and willing.

Steiner's air-mobility temperament: the astral body works on the nerve-sense system, impressions enter and leave quickly, focus arrives through love for one trusted personality.

The Mystery experience in which the initiate, outside the body, beholds his own ego as a sun and meets the spiritual beings of the Sun.

The sentient soul is the first of the three soul members; it is the inner experience that arises when the I begins to work upon the astral body, transforming sensation into felt meaning.

Spirit-Self is the fifth member of the human being; it is the astral body transformed by the I into a vessel for spiritual revelation, the first stage of higher development.

The collective karmic debt a whole civilization incurs when its thinking mirrors only the physical world, returning as war, social chaos, and a hollowed religious life.

A supreme clairvoyant vision in which the student, standing outside the body, beholds the physical body expanded as the lost Paradise of early humanity.

Steiner's outward initiation path that consciously follows the soul's nightly expansion into the cosmos, the polar opposite of the mystic's inward path.

Three monstrous forms the Guardian of the Threshold shows the student, mirroring fear, mockery, and doubt as the enemies of knowledge in will, feeling, and thinking.

Three thresholds of imaginative cognition, the Portals of Death, the Elements, and the Sun, each guarded by a being the seeker must face and master.

The Twelve Senses are Steiner's expansion of the human sensorium into bodily, soul, and spiritual sense-groups, mapped to body regions and zodiac correspondences.

The differentiated heat-body within the human being that the I directly inhabits, named by Steiner as the fourth member of human anatomy beside the solid, fluid, and aeriform organisms.