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Life Without Consciousness Soul

Rudolf Steiner described how, over the past millennia, human beings have developed capacities of thinking in a series of stages he calls Sentient Soul, Intellectual Soul, and Consciousness Soul. Sentient Soul corresponds with the way people in civilizations like Ancient Egypt tended to think, Intellectual Soul to the Greco-Roman and Medieval periods (in both Easter and Western civilizations, though Steiner focused only on Western history). Consciousness Soul corresponds to the posst-medieval mindset. That brings up an interesting question about how a person today would present if they had only the older modes, and not developed the newer ones.

One of the best illustrations of Intellectual Soul I’ve come across is the Autobiography of Benvenuto Cellini. How he thinks about himself and the world is without any trace of consciousness soul (to be fair, he was living in the 1400s). There are still many today who live at least partly in that mode. People living purely in Sentient Soul would be harder to run into, especially in the developed world. They would likely present as very low IQ, as well as being incapable of sophisticated self-reflection.

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