Rudolf Steiner: "Every momentary mood in man represents a cooperation between what has gone before, what he knows and already has consciously encountered in life, and what is yet to come and is not yet given to his conscious experience. What is still unknown to him lives already, however, in the general mood of feeling. One thus can arrive biographically, I would like to say, at this secret of the mood of soul at any moment. Here one touches the borders of those realms of human observation that are gladly neglected by people who spend their lives without much thought. What the future brings to the human being, he still does not know — or so he imagines. In his life of feeling, however, he knows it.
One can go further and make more investigations, investigating for instance, the mood of soul of some person whom one has known very well and who died, let us say, a few years after one had grasped this mood of soul. Then one can see clearly how the approaching death and all connected with it had already thrown its light back on the mood of soul. If one goes into these things, therefore, one can really see the person's past from the life between birth and death and his future up to death playing into what lives in his soul by way of feeling. Hence man's life of soul [Gemütsleben] is so inexplicable to himself; it appears as something elemental since as feeling it is already colored by what is still to be experienced."
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