Today, in the era of the consciousness soul, we can achieve understanding of the psyche (for example, of thinking and willing) only through experience -- this is Steiner's theme at the beginning of his second lecture. Such experiential knowledge contrasts with the reigning tendency to seek understanding through theoretical concepts abstracted from experience. We need to touch reality directly, thereby coming to understand how the human being is connected to the world. Only this can make a new pedagogy possible. Through inner development the teacher must gain an experience of her own relation to, and participation in, the cosmos.

In this lecture Steiner looks at the relation between human being and cosmos from two directions, having to do first with our cognition and the mental pictures associated with it, and then with our acts of will. He points out, to begin with, the obvious fact that all our mental pictures lack reality -- lack the kind of reality we can experience, for example, in our body and its various organs. We can touch the body and feel its aches and pains, which remind us that it is there and it is real. Through the body we gain experience of our own existence. It tells us that we are. Soul and spirit, being connected with the body, learn about themselves first of all through the body. Physical sickness, pain, and suffering strongly influence our soul state. Death of the body threatens, for normal physical consciousness, to destroy us. Being immersed in and identified with the body, we feel that its dissolution would be a dissolution of our selves.

We are not connected to our mental pictures in the same way. We cannot physically touch them. Certainly we can experience pain or joy from some images, but they don't penetrate our bodies in any direct sense. They are shadow-like, reflections. So we have a contrast between body and consciousness -- or, you might say, between being and mental pictures. It's true that we can be very active in our mental picturing -- the images can be alive and dynamic, and we can experience our creativity in them -- but this is not a creativity that can bring its productions all the way down into substantial, material existence. We don't create things through our mental activity, but only images. We don't descend into life or being or reality with them. With our mental pictures we are active in a realm that reflects real being, but is not itself real being.

In every mental picture we have an element of light. In knowing "this is a tree," "this is a rock," "this is a river," we can experience the light of cognition. But we also have elements of form in all mental pictures. Picturing is a forming activity. This becomes especially clear in artistic exercises when, through concentration, we bring our will into mental images. In picturing anything -- clouds, eyes, colors, even darkness -- we gain a feeling that we are touching, gesturing, or sculpting them. But this gesturing goes no further than a forming movement; it doesn't condense into substance. In their form -- and because they do not condense into substance -- mental pictures are transparent to the light of consciousness.

If we ask ourselves, "What is it that is being reflected in our mental pictures?", and meditate on this question, we can find ourselves immersed in formative light. In fact, the process of meditation leads us to what Goethe called the forming, creating forces of nature. These forces, full of wisdom, beauty, and light, created what we know as nature. The source of mental pictures is light; it lies in the periphery -- in the surroundings of the earth, in the forces of the cosmos. The light itself, pure light, precedes nature, is above nature, beyond nature. All nature has been created out of the forming activity of light. Novalis described it wonderfully in his first "Hymn to the Night":

Like a king over earthly nature, [light] rouses every force to countless transformations, binds and unbinds innumerable alliances, hangs its heavenly form around every earthly substance. Its presence alone reveals the marvelous splendor of the kingdoms of the world.

This realm of light, according to Steiner, is where the human being dwells before his descent into earthly existence. It's the same light spoken of in the gospel: "the true light, which lighteth every man that cometh into the world" (John 1:9). If we look at the newborn child, we will see that his soul and spirit still reside mostly in the periphery. Having only partly descended "out of the everywhere and into here" (George Macdonald), he lives not so much in his body as in his perceptions of the world. He lives, that is, in the pure light of perception, and he imbibes the creative forces of light with his entire being. And this was the case even more so before birth, when his soul was interwoven with the heavenly tapestry of light raying forth as the source of the world.

In the adult today, these light-revelations are "reflected" from the body. That is, we receive them by means of our bodily instrument, and this reflected light no longer possesses the power to create nature. However, the reflected, creative forces still work, for example, in art and in culture generally. Goethe emphasized strongly that culture and art are a continuation of the creative forces of nature.

Our will works very differently from our cognition of the world through mental pictures. In approaching the will we need to distinguish between our conscious idea of the act we intend to perform -- our idea of its content -- and the "force of will" that actually moves our legs and hands. Usually we are not aware of this force, because our will is "hidden" in our body; it is inseparable from our physical being. When we are tired and lack the physical strength to move, and yet must move nevertheless, we can, in "forcing" ourselves to move, experience in this effort something of the nature of will itself. On stage, the actor practices how to create conscious impulses of will (inner action), and tries to let these impulses take hold of his body. He has to try to become aware of the impulses themselves. But in our normal life we usually cannot do this -- we cannot apprehend the willful impulse itself because it is immediately absorbed by the body, finding its realization in an action.

Meditating on this, we can come to understand that the impulse of will as such has the character of a seed that "sprouts" in the action. The will, like the seed, always has a potential greater than the particular sprout (action) to which it gives rise; no action can fully realize all the possibilities of an impulse of will -- as we can observe both in our own life and in the history of humanity. And, again like the seed or bud, our will possesses a certain warmth. Just as we can perceive a gesture of nurturing warmth in the seed or bud out of which an entire plant will grow, so, too, our actions result from the warmth of will. By attending to our movement, we can experience this element of warmth -- an element we experience "outwardly" in the heat associated with muscular exertion. The actual expression of the will occurs in our giving ourselves to the action, in our "disappearing" into the action, just as a seed disappears (dies) into the plant.

The highest expression of will is the moral deed -- an act of love produced by a moral warmth of will. We can also experience something of this moral warmth when, in suffering the blows of fate, we come to an act of acceptance. In this way we feel our connection with the moral will of the universe -- the will behind our own earthly existence. And so, whereas our consciousness is connected with light, our spiritual-moral will is connected with existence, with being, with substance. In moral deeds our spiritual being expresses itself as in a seed. After death, when we are no longer linked to our bodies, our moral actions will be realized in more than deeds -- in the processes of life itself -- just as, at the beginning of the world, life was created out of the fire of love.

So we have two spiritual archetypes for the two poles of our being: light (wisdom), and love. We come from a world of light preceding birth, and we go into a world of love after death. We receive our life and fate from the wisdom of the past; and we deliver to the future a seed that will be evaluated in moral-spiritual terms. Between the past and future we have our present existence: on the one hand it is less real than our life before birth (our past, which has become a mere shadow or reflection for us), and, on the other hand, it is not yet as real as our future life after death will become. It is in the state of a seed. So in our normal, common consciousness between birth and death we are living in a kind of non-reality, which the ancient Indian called Maya. And in this non-reality we develop our freedom -- something that would not be possible if we were too firmly connected to, and bound by, the moral-spiritual laws of the universe.

In sum: our normal consciousness connected with the physical body reflects and deadens the reality of the world before birth, and at the same time it holds back the reality we will enter after death. What forces are at work in this reflection and holding back? In our soul we have two forces -- sympathy and antipathy -- which are present in all our feelings. In us they have a subjective, egotistical character, with the result that we like one thing and dislike some other thing. But we can also think of these forces in an objective way, as complementary tendencies at work in the universe. We can imagine them as defining gestures of evolution. In one direction: a tendency toward separation, differentiation, individualization (antipathy). In the other direction: a tendency toward attachment, merger, unity (sympathy). At one pole the gesture is to form, fix, and make cold; at the other, it is to dissolve, unify without distinction, and make warm.

We see these gestural powers at work in nature, in the cycle of the year, or in the full growing cycle of a plant: seed, leaf, petal, fruit, and seed. But they work objectively in the human being as well. One of them separates us from the spiritual world and individualizes us, bringing us into the world of discrete bodily and material things. It cools down or freezes the living, creative, enlightening powers of the world until they become shadows, mere images. The spirit is reflected from the body, pushed back, just as objects in a room are reflected from a mirror, which offers us only an image of the things but not the things themselves. This gesture of attenuation, which rejects the full reality of things, is that of antipathy; it works in our pole of consciousness.

In the other direction, connecting us again with God and spirit, is the gesture of love, or sympathy. Active in our soul-spiritual seed, it expresses itself in our moral deeds and sounds in the voice of conscience. If given full reign, it would destroy our egotistic personality, our separate being. But under the influence of the body and its instincts, we convert the gesture of loving connection to one of grasping and possessing, so that it becomes a fire of desire. Because of this, its true nature cannot be fully realized until after death, when the body can no longer distort it.

Soul-wise, we experience antipathy in a certain cold indifference toward the outer world of people, and in the fact that the world does not touch us directly. We experience it again in the habit of cold, critical judgment. In our pole of consciousness we have an excess of coldness; we are cool to our surroundings. At the other pole we have an excess of warmth overflowing into an unhealthy self-interest -- interest in our own personality, our own life, our own fate. When love is replaced by desire, the gesture of giving oneself is replaced by the egotistic gesture of grasping and possessing. In this domain our moral being is always fighting against everything that comes from the flesh. The words of Christ -- "Man shall not live by bread alone, but by every word that proceedeth out of the mouth of God" (Matthew 4:4) -- articulate the essence of the fight.

In all this we find two educational tasks for ourselves and children: first, to bring warmth and will into the pole of cognition (mental pictures); and second, to bring quiet, objective observation to bear upon our personal life.

In fairy tales we have wonderful images expressing the poles of antipathy and sympathy. The world is frequently pictured as a frozen kingdom or as a crystal mountain -- images showing how the living forces of nature have cooled down. Or again we see the disappearing of the wise mother, reflecting the loss of the wisdom available to us from before birth. At the opposite pole we find images of ugliness -- for example, an ugly frog or a monster that in reality is a prince or princess who can be redeemed only through love. So the ugliness of our instincts [frog] must be transformed into love. In all times people have looked for ways to overcome these distortions of antipathy and sympathy, and so to step over the boundaries of birth and death -- they have looked, that is, for ways to return to the world before birth or to attain the world after death. For the first goal, they brought the power of concentration (will) and breathing (feeling) into cognition (thinking) so as to make it more alive. For the second goal they used ascetic exercises to still their instincts and desires. In our time these two ways should be replaced by pure soul-spiritual activity.

Sympathy (working from the pole of feeling and willing) and antipathy (working from the pole of consciousness and cognition) are expressed in all our natural affections and also in our spiritual activity. These two poles -- whereby we either unite ourselves with the world or separate ourselves from it -- are always in interconnection, although they are present in our various activities in different strengths. (In a similar way, there are people who live more in contemplation, in consciousness, and there are others who live more in impulses of will and feeling.)

When we extract memory images from our past experience, we are acting out of antipathy. Antipathy gives definite form to our past experiences and feelings -- form without which the feelings would simply possess us. Antipathy objectivizes our experience by creating a picture of it. It detaches us from our past experience, and therefore from ourselves, and puts us in an objective relation to the world. If we continue this process, exercising only a forming gesture unleavened by qualitative sense content, then our images become concepts. Concepts are pure forming gestures -- cognitive "rays" or movements of light.

On the other hand, if we intensify our feelings to the point where they express themselves in our consciousness, then we will have images of fantasy -- the work of sympathy. Sadness might express itself in the image of rain, in the image of being left alone, of being lost in an unknown place -- or again in a lonely tree, a faded leaf, a broken twig. Likewise joy could express itself in the image of the rising sun, in the eyes of a friend, in a flower, in the morning dew. This imaginal process starts beneath, in the realm of our will and feelings, and then rises up into consciousness. If we continue the process further and let it permeate the organs of our senses (seeing/hearing), then we can experience the world of perception with a much fuller consciousness than we normally bring to it. We will touch them (perceptions), we will unite ourselves with them -- with colors, sounds, smells. We become the blue of the sky, the sound of the waterfall, the smell of the rose.

In theater we employ many and varied exercises to develop and discipline the working of antipathy and sympathy. On the one hand, we practice remembering our own experiences, but we objectivize them, as if we were contemplating ourselves from outside. Or we practice finding the objective gesture of a tree, rock, or man. This is a training of our forming activity. On the other hand, actors work to recognize an inner, feeling-character in so-called "inanimate" objects: flower, door, rain, or ray of the sun can be seen as joyful or sad, light or ponderous. Or we imagine an absent object as if it were present in space near us (cave, ocean, sword), and we let this imagination affect our will as we respond to the objects. In this way we practice our connection with the world through the sympathetic elements of feeling and will. Generally speaking, the two poles are at work in all acting exercises.

Antipathy and sympathy work also in our body, creating a foundation for our soul activity. Forming, differentiating, cooling -- at the extreme, destroying living substance -- this is how antipathy creates the nervous system. The nervous system is the result of the freezing of life, the darkening of the light of the world, which allows the appearance of our personal light of consciousness, but only like shadowy frost-images on the window pane. On the other hand sympathy and warmth, streaming through our body, create a super-alive (because ultimately spiritual) substance. This substance always wants to be in the process of becoming. Actually, it wants to be the substance of pure fire, but because it is connected with the flesh, this substance is densified and thickened by desire, and so becomes our blood. In the nervous system we have the extreme of crystallization, which is the expression of light, quietness, and clarity. In the blood we have fire as an expression of love.

These two gestures of antipathy and sympathy are never separate. They are always together (in their activity), like all activities in the universe. On the physical level, in our physiology, we can see that nerves and blood vessels interweave throughout the entire body, being present together in all its parts. In the same way, the task for the educator is to bring together and harmonize the two gestures in the soul:

On one side the need is to permeate the elements of consciousness (thoughts and images) with sensation, warmth, and movement, thereby enlivening the cold and dead pole of reflection and transforming thoughts into reality again. We have to learn how, in our consciousness, to receive the living light of lost wisdom. We have to learn to play with images as a child does, in full openness, trusting in their reality. This is to continue the creative work of the universe.

On the other side the task is to bring the forming power of the light of consciousness to the impulsive, unconscious, fiery will, thereby transforming it into moral will and spiritualizing the egotistic instincts of the flesh. Instead of feeling ourselves, we should develop feelings of compassion for others.

Then we would be able to experience sympathy and antipathy as they work in the spiritual world, in the rhythm of evolution, in cycles of birth and death -- we would experience them in their unity, through which all things are born from God and return to Him again.