What is our first memory? Most likely it occurred after we turned three years old. Why don’t we remember anything before that? This same question for parents of children younger than three hits a different way. All this time together and our child won’t remember any of it! Crazy, right?
During the first few years of life, years which are considered all important by people schooled in child development, we are running, playing, crying, laughing, seeing new things, receiving love, learning, growing, and so on. Yet we remember none of it, until, mysteriously, we become aware of ourselves. From this point forward we can remember our experiences. Why all the secrecy of those unremembered years?
Spiritual science shows us that three specific accomplishments during these first years have huge cosmic significance for us. A significance far beyond the obvious acquisition of new skills.
Let’s see what Dr. Steiner has to say:
While we get accustomed to earth-life after our birth, we live in a sort of sleep and dream state. If we, disregarding our dreams, look back in the morning, after being awake for an hour, to the moment of awaking, our consciousness is halted abruptly, and we see behind us the darkness of slumber. It is similar when we look back into our childhood. In our fourth of the fifth year, sometimes earlier, sometimes later, our consciousness comes to a stop. Beyond the last stage that we can still remember lies something which is as deeply immersed in the darkness of the sleep and dream life of early childhood as is the life of the human soul immersed every night in the darkness of sleep. Yet the child is not wholly asleep but is wrapped in a sort of waking dream.
During this waking dream occur the three important phases of human life which I indicated yesterday. As they occur in the sequence characterized by me, we can see in them echoes and after-effects of the life between death and a new birth. First the child learns, out of a life wrapped in dream and sleep, what we call simply: learning how to walk. Something all-encompassing happens when a child learns how to walk, something which appears as a grandiose and overwhelming process to anyone able to perceive how the subtlest parts of the human body are changed at this time. The child, by adapting itself to the relationships of gravity, learns how to attain equilibrium. The child no longer falls down. By unfolding inner forces, he conforms to spatial directions.
What if we had to do all this consciously: overcome the lack of equilibrium that pulled us to the ground, adapt our organism to a firm state of equilibrium with regard to the three spatial directions, and even maintain this state of equilibrium by swinging our legs like pendulums as we learn how to walk? The child, in performing such a grandiose mechanical task, performs it as an echo of what he experienced while dwelling among spirits between death and a new birth. Here we encounter something so comprehensive, so marvelous, that the most eminent engineer, with all his earthly scientific equipment, could not calculate how the child’s human forces adapt themselves to the world’s spatial connections.
What we, as a child, attain unconsciously is the most miraculous unfolding of mathematical-mechanical, physical forces. We call it simply learning how to walk. Yet in this learning how to walk lies an element of the utmost grandeur. Simultaneously, the correct use of arms and hands is attained.
And by placing himself, as physical being, within the three spatial directions, the human being receives the foundation for all that is called: learning to talk. The only thing known to physiology about the connection between man’s dynamics of walking and standing and the faculty of speech is the fact that the speech-center of right-handed persons lies in the left portion of the brain. The gestures of the right hand, vigorously executed by means of man’s willpower, are led, by some mysterious process, into the interior of the brain whence the faculty of speech is brought to the human being. More, however, exists than this connection between the right hand and the third convolution at the left, the so-called Broca Cerebral convolution. The whole mobility of arms and fingers; the human being’s whole ability to move and maintain equilibrium reaches up into the brain, becomes part of the brain, and thence reaches down into the larynx. Language develops out of walking, out of the grasping of objects, out of gestures flowing from the organs of movement.
Anyone viewing these things correctly will know that a child with the tendency to walk on its toes speaks differently from a child walking on its heels; employs different shadings of sound. The organism of speaking develops from the organism of walking and moving. And speech is again a counterpart of that which I described yesterday as the outpouring of revelation upon the human being passing through the stage between death and a new birth.
The child, when learning how to speak, does not grasp the words with its thoughts, but alone with its emotions. He lives in the language as if it were an emotional element; and a child of normal development learns conceptual thinking only after acquiring the faculty of speech. A child’s thoughts actually develop out of the words. Just as walking and the grasping of objects, the gestures of legs and hands, reach up into the speech organism, so all that lives in the speech organism and is gained through adaptation to the language of the surrounding world, reaches up into the thought-organs. In the third stage, the child: learns how to think.
Excerpt from: Man’s Being, His Destiny, and World Evolution. Lecture 3: Our Experiences of Night, Life after Death by Dr. Rudolf Steiner. 18 May1923, Oslo.
We might imagine all the intricacies we could discuss here by rereading Steiner’s second to last paragraph. Could we learn to recognize from a child’s intonation when speaking whether or not it walks on its toes? What can we learn about a child who walks on its toes? How will this child’s needs differ from the needs of the child who walks on its heels? What about our own walking, speaking, and thinking?
These questions are important because the human being is important, and every human being is a spiritual being. Exploring the full nature of being human leads to asking these kinds of questions, the questions that arise from thinking, the roots of which we just discussed. We must protect childhood so that these three abilities can unfold naturally.