We thus see that man accomplishes momentous things during the first years of his life. He is working on himself in the spirit of the highest wisdom. In point of fact, if it were a question of his own cleverness, it is possible that he might not accomplish what he does without that cleverness during the first period of his life. Why is all this accomplished in those depths of the soul which lie outside consciousness? This happens because the human soul and entire being are, during the first years of earthly life, in much closer connection with the spiritual worlds of the higher hierarchies than is afterwards the case. A clairvoyant who has gone through sufficient spiritual development to be able to witness actual spiritual events, sees something exceedingly significant at the moment when the ego acquires consciousness, _i.e._, the earliest point to which the memory of later years goes back. Whereas what we call the child’s aura floats round it in its earliest years like a wonderful human and superhuman power, and, being really the higher part of the child, is everywhere continued on into the spiritual world,--at the moment to which memory goes back, this aura sinks more into the inner being of the child. A human being is able to feel himself a continuous ego as far back as that point of time, because then that which was previously in close connection with the higher worlds, passed into his ego. Henceforward the consciousness is at every point brought into connection with the external world. This is not the case with a very young child, to whom things appear only as a surrounding world of dreams. Man works on himself by means of a wisdom which is not within him. That wisdom is mightier and more comprehensive than any conscious wisdom of later years. The higher wisdom becomes obscured in the human soul, which in exchange receives consciousness. The higher wisdom works from out of the spiritual world deep into the bodily part of man, so that man is able by its means to form his brain out of spirit. It is rightly said that even the wisest may learn from a child, for in the child is working the wisdom which does not pass later into consciousness. Through that wisdom man has something like telephonic connection with the spiritual beings in whose world he lives between death and re-birth. From that world there is something still streaming into the aura of a child, which is, as an individual being, immediately under the guidance of the entire spiritual world to which it belongs. Spiritual forces from that world continue to flow into a child. They cease so to flow at the point of time to which memory goes back. It is these forces which enable a child to bring itself into a definite relation to gravitation. They form the larynx, and so mould the brain that it becomes a living instrument for the expression of thought, feeling and will.