o direct the influx himself.

What, therefore, reaches him from without appears to him to be directed by
authoritative orders issuing from the higher beings who are at work on the
shaping of his body. Man feels himself to be an ego; he has within him, as
part of his astral body, his intellectual-soul, through which he inwardly
perceives, in the form of pictures, what is happening externally, and by
means of which he permeates his delicate nervous system. He feels himself
to be descended from ancestors, by virtue of the life flowing down through
the generations. He breathes, and feels it to be the effect of the higher
beings who have been described as the Lords of Form. He is likewise
subject to their impulses in all that which comes to him from the outside
(as his food). What he finds most obscure is his origin as an individual.
As to that, he only knows that he has been under the influence of the
Lords of Form expressing themselves in earth-forces. In his relations with
the outer world, man was guided and ruled. This finds expression through
the fact that man has a consciousness of the psycho-spiritual activities
operating behind his physical environment. It is true that he does not see
the spiritual beings in their own form, but he is conscious in his soul of
sounds and colors. He knows, however, that it is the actions of spiritual
beings that are realized through that world of images. What those beings
communicate to him, reaches him as sound; their manifestations appear to
him in light-pictures.

The innermost concepts, of which earthly man becomes conscious, are those
conveyed to him by the element of fire or warmth. He can already
distinguish between his own inner heat and the heat currents of the
earth's periphery. In these latter are manifested the Sons of Personality.
But man has only a dim consciousness of what is behind the currents of
external heat. It is in those very currents that he feels the influence of
the Lords of Form. When powerful effects of heat are produced in man's
environment, the soul feels that spiritual beings are now heating the
earth's circumference--beings, from whom a spark has been detached, which
warms his inner being.

In the effect of light, however, man does not yet distinguish in quite the
same manner between the outer and the inner. When light-pictures appear
around him, they do not always produce the same feeling in the soul of the
earth-man. There were times when he felt them a