Consciousness (or Spiritual) Soul

I am what I am firstly because I am the soul, not because of the faculty which does recognize such, without which I would still be and still are - in slumber, in wakefulness, I, my soul, endures.

The sense of I, id - individuality in relation to the worlds - becomes distinct because I have a soul; without which I should not come to know that I know, but should gravitate to and around that which I am most sympathetic to.

And it is to the ego that we attribute experience and also that which follows experience - and it is the egg-shaped ego which encloses the soul, with essences of: fiery activity (cognition), fiery ethers (form and the plans thereof), divine impulses (characterizing streams of being, planetary rays etc.), vitality fluids (of which there are many), memory (akashic recall), sympathy ('bonded to' influences, signature keys etc.), substance (particles of quality, that which is of elements known or to be known - e.g. copper and its corresponding planet etc.), metabolism (related to sympathy, access to Pneu of Man at present), Desire (subtle body which makes sense of sense, sensitive to fiery activity also), Greater Desire (sensitive to the impulse of greater cognition, motivation, and exclamation) and last but not least, Joy, Love, Laughter, Compassion and Happiness: which are natural to the soul and the ego, and characteristic to the expression of being, as being.

-B.Hive

What does living "in the consciousness soul" mean?
We could start by reading chapter one of Rudolf Steiner's, Theosophy part four - although that is very basic.

An aspect of the Consciousness (or Spiritual) soul, is the importance of individuals making free decisions, being "true to oneself". Steiner was careful when giving advice to present facts and let people decide for themselves. This is a theme in Steiner's "Philosophy of Spiritual Activity", but really a theme for the whole of anthroposophy.

We are capable of making our own good decisions out of the Consciousness Soul, because through it we attain to the Eternal Spirit, the True and the Good - see "Theosophy". That gives us the power to make our own "moral imaginations".

This ability is a fairly new one bestowed upon Man, and still, as they used to say on a lot of websites, "under construction".

Another aspect is the direct spiritual intuitions a student may have, which are not just a result of intellectualizing or study. Here one must talk of Manas or Spirit Self as well as Consciousness Soul:

"The "I" lives in the soul. Although the highest manifestation of the "I" belongs to the Consciousness Soul, one must, nevertheless, say that this "I" raying out from it fills the whole soul, and through it exerts its action upon the body."

(Quotes from "Theosophy")
The highest expression of our holiest of holies, the 'I', is the Consciousness Soul- it could be called an "over-ego". (BTW my old copy of "Theosophy" refers to the Intellectual Soul as "Kama Manas".)

 Continuing:

"The spirit forming and living as "I" will be called spirit self because it manifests as the "I," or ego, or self of man. The difference between the spirit self and the consciousness soul can be made clear in the following way. The consciousness soul is in touch with the self-existent truth that is independent of all antipathy and sympathy. The spirit self bears within it the same truth, but taken up into and enclosed by the "I," individualized by it, and absorbed into the independent being of the individual. It is through the eternal truth becoming thus individualized and bound up into one being with the "I" that the "I" itself attains to the eternal."

"The spirit self is a revelation of the spiritual world within the "I", just as from the other side sensations are a revelation of the physical world within the "I". In what is red, green, light, dark, hard, soft, warm, cold one recognizes the revelations of the corporeal world. In what is true and good are to be found the revelations of the spiritual world. In the same sense in which the revelation of the corporeal world is called sensation, let the revelation of the spiritual be called intuition."

In order to understand anything of an esoteric character it is essential to be adept in both intellect and imagination. Reasoning alone, will not bring to life the spiritual realities in the soul. Not everyone is so gifted as to be able to imagine and reason well at the same time, but the numbers will grow in time.

Thinking & the Human Being

Folk pull apart the butterfly to see how it works. Divisions of the human being are made for the purposes of scientific study. There are always flaws in this approach to study, in that each part works in with the other as an organic whole.

When do we ever purely think, purely feel or purely will? It is always a matter of cooperation between faculties.

Viewing the human being as a lot of fragmented parts is fundamentally wrong to begin with- an unhealthy soul conception. We are (or should be) after all, a functioning whole.

Rudolf Steiner uses the word "thinking" in a specific way. What is spoken of colloquially as "thinking" is not thinking but a parade of ideas.
 
The statement by Dr. Steiner that animals don't think is considered controversial by some. Steiner did admit that animals deliberate. A wasp deliberates, or a beetle which really doesn't have much that you could call a brain, deliberates. The great wisdom that a beaver displays in constructing dams, lodges and canals to transport logs, is something that the beast "sucks in" from outside of itself- from the Cosmos according to Steiner. But still this must also require some deliberation by the animal itself.

The difference between the animal and the human being is that the human reasons in full waking consciousness. The conditions of driving a manual car and "automatically" changing gears, or "automatically" touch typing as you read a text don't really come under the heading of "thinking". In fact if you become conscious of your fingers moving to each key one by one, you slow right down- so thinking about the process doesn't help. The human being is not stuck in one area of reasoned thought that goes around and around- like a beaver building dams season after season. Of course, some are stuck on this merry-go-round. 

There are other ways of knowing besides thinking. In fact human beings in the ancient past had an instinctual knowing that enabled them to build civilizations that rivaled our own in technological marvels.

In the realm of thinking we can become conscious (that is why we have the capacity for freedom in thinking), in the feeling life we live in a dream and in willing we are in a deep sleep. 

Soul Life & the Worthlessness of Mere Thinking

In 1911 and 1912, Dr. Steiner gave the lecture series "World of the Senses and World of the Spirit". There,  he says the basis of good thinking is grounded in :

(a) Wonder
(b) Veneration/reverence
(c) Feeling oneself in wisdom-filled harmony with the laws of the world
(d) Devotion/self-surrender

"As long ago as in ancient Greece it was known what the healthy human mind must take for its starting point if it hopes one day to reach reality. And the same statement that was uttered in ancient Greece still holds good. It was said: All human enquiry must proceed from wonder! That statement must be received in a perfectly positive way, my dear friends.

 In actual fact, in the soul that wants to penetrate to truth, this condition must first be present: the soul must stand before the universe in a mood of wonder and marveling. And anyone who is able to comprehend the whole force of this expression of the Greeks comes to perceive that when a man, irrespective of all the other conditions by which he arrives at the study and investigation of truth, takes his start from this mood of wonder, from nothing else than a feeling of wonder in face of the facts of the world, then it is in very truth as when you drop a seed in the ground and a plant grows up out of it. In a sense we may say that all knowledge must have wonder for its seed......

  For all real knowledge, that hopes to have a chance of coming to grips with the riddles of the world, must grow out of the seed of wonder. A man may be ever so clever a thinker, he may even suffer from a superabundance of intelligence; if he has never passed through the stage of wonder nothing will come of it. He will give you a cleverly thought-out concatenation of ideas, containing nothing that is not correct — but correctness does not necessarily lead to reality. It is absolutely essential that before we begin to think, before we so much as begin to set our thinking in motion, we experience the condition of wonder. A thinking which is set in motion without the condition of wonder remains nothing but a mere play of thought. All true thinking must originate in the mood of wonder.

Nor is that enough. We must go a step further. Even when thinking originates in the mood of wonder, then if a man is predisposed by his karma to grow sharp-witted and clever, and quickly begins to be proud and take pleasure in his cleverness and then perhaps gives all his energy to developing that alone, the wonder he felt in the beginning will no longer help him at all. For if, after wonder has taken hold in the soul, then in the further course of his thinking a man does no more than merely “think,” he cannot penetrate to reality.

 Please let me emphasize here that I am not saying a man ought to become thoughtless and that thinking is harmful. This opinion is often widespread in our circles. Just because it has been said that one must proceed from wonder, people are apt to regard thinking as wrong and harmful.....

 After the mood of wonder must follow the mood of veneration, of reverence. And any thinking that is divorced from reverence, that does not behold in a reverent manner what is proffered to its view, will not be able to penetrate to reality. Thinking must never, so to say, go dancing through the world in a careless, light-footed way. It must, when it has passed the moment of wonder, take firm root in the feeling of reverence for the universe.....

 You are bound to appear foolish in the eyes of present-day scientists if you venture to say that research into the nature of objects, and even thought about objects, ought never to be divorced from reverence, and that one ought not to take a step forward in thought without being filled with the feeling of reverence for the object of one's enquiry. Reverence is, however, the second requisite on the path of knowledge.

But now a man who had attained to a certain feeling of reverence, and then, having experienced this feeling of reverence, wanted to press forward with mere thought — such a man would again come to a nothingness, he would not be able to get any farther. He would, it is true, make some discoveries that were quite correct, and because he had gone through these first two stages, he would with his correct knowledge have also acquired many clearly and firmly established points of view. But he would inevitably, for all that, soon fall into uncertainty. For a third condition must take hold in the soul after we have experienced wonder and reverence, and this third mood we may describe as feeling oneself in wisdom-filled harmony with the laws of the world. And this feeling can be attained in no other way than by having insight into the worthlessness of mere thinking.

These things are explained in "Knowledge of the Higher Worlds":
"It is not easy, at first, to believe that feelings like reverence and respect have anything to do with cognition. This is due to the fact that we are inclined to set cognition aside as a faculty by itself — one that stands in no relation to what otherwise occurs in the soul. In so thinking we do not bear in mind that it is the soul which exercises the faculty of cognition; and feelings are for the soul what food is for the body. If we give the body stones in place of bread, its activity will cease. It is the same with the soul."

Living thinking is dependent on a living soul firstly. Thinking is not cognition but a tool of cognition.

More:
The Mission of Reverence

More still:

Conscience and Wonder as Indications of Spiritual Vision in the Past and in the Future

Appearance of the Anti-Christ

A tale we shouldn't forget:

From "Three Conversations"

by Vladimir Soloviev

Pan-Mongolism! The name is wild,
Yet it pleases my ear greatly,
As if it were full of forebodings
Of the glorious providence of God.

Europe in the twenty-first century represented an alliance of more or less democratic nations—the United States of Europe. The progress of material culture, somewhat interrupted by the Mongolian yoke and the war of liberation, now burst forth with a greater force. The problems of inner consciousness, however, such as the questions of life and death, the ultimate destiny of the world and mankind, made more complicated and involved by the latest researches and discoveries in the fields of psychology and physiology—these as before remained unsolved.

Only one important, though negative, result made itself apparent: it was the final bankruptcy of the materialistic theory. The notion of the universe as a system of dancing atoms, and of life as the result of mechanical accumulation of the slightest changes in materia, no longer satisfied a single reasoning intellect. Mankind had outgrown that stage of philosophical infancy. On the other side, it became equally evident that it had also outgrown the infantile capacity for a naive, unconscious faith. Such ideas as God, creating the universe out of nothing, were no longer taught even at elementary schools. A certain high level of ideas concerning such subjects had been evolved, and no dogmatism could risk a descent below it. And though the majority of thinking people had remained faithless, the few believers had of necessity become thinking, thus fulfilling the commandment of the Apostle: “Be infants in your hearts, but not in your reason.”.......

At that time, there was among the few believing spiritualists a remarkable person - many called him a superman - who was equally far from both, intellect and childlike heart. He was still young, but owing to his great genius, by the age of thirty-three he had already become famous as a great thinker, writer, and public figure.

Conscious of the great power of spirit in himself, he was always a confirmed spiritualist, and his clear intellect always showed him the truth of what one should believe in: the good, God, and the Messiah.
 
In these he believed, but he loved only himself. He believed in God, but in the depths of his soul he involuntarily and unconsciously preferred himself. He believed in Good, but the All Seeing Eye of the Eternal knew that this man would bow down before the power of Evil as soon as it would offer him a bribe - not by deception of the senses and the lower passions, not even by the superior bait of power, but only by his own immeasurable self-love.

Thinking thus, the superman of the twenty-first century applied to himself everything that was said in the Gospels about the second coming, explaining the latter not as a return of the same Christ, but as a replacing of the preliminary Christ by the final one - that is, by himself.

At this stage, the coming man presented few original characteristics or features. His attitude toward Christ resembled, for instance, that of Mohammed, a truthful man, against whom no charge of harboring evil designs can be brought.

This man justified his selfish preference of himself before Christ in yet another way. 'Christ,' he said, 'who preached and practiced moral good in life, was a reformer of humanity, whereas I am called to be the benefactor of that same humanity, partly reformed and partly incapable of being reformed. I will give everyone what they require........

Thus this just but proud man waited for the sanction of the Most High to begin his saving of mankind, but he could see no signs of it. He had passed the age of thirty. Three more years passed. A thought suddenly flickers into his mind and a heated trembling pierces him to the core. “What,” thought he, “what if it is not I, but that other … the Galilean. If He is not my forerunner but the true one, the First and the Last? But then indeed He must be living….Where is He? What if He suddenly comes to me … here, now? What will I tell Him? I would have to kneel down before Him like the basest foolish Christian, like some Russian peasant who mutters without understanding, ‘Lord, Jesus Christ, have mercy on me, a sinner!’ or grovel like a Polish countrywoman! I, the shining genius, the superman! Never!”

And then, instead of his former rational and cold reverence to God and Christ, a sudden terror was born and grew in his heart, followed by a burning envy consuming all his being, and by a burning, breath-taking hatred. “I, I, and not He! He is not among the living, and never will be! He did not rise, not rise, not rise! He rotted, rotted in the tomb, He rotted like the lowest….” And, his mouth foaming, he rushed in convulsive movements out of the house, through the garden, and ran along a rocky path covered by the dark gloomy night.

His rage calmed down and gave place to a despair, dry and heavy as the rocks, gloomy as the night. He stopped in front of a sharp precipice, from the bottom of which he could hear the faint sounds of a stream running over the stones far below. An unbearable anguish pressed upon his heart. Suddenly something stirred within him. “Shall I call Him? Ask Him what I am to do?” And in the midst of the darkness a pale and grief-stricken image appeared to him. “He pities me! No, never! He did not rise, not rise!” And he leapt from the precipice. But something firm like a column of water held him up in the air. He felt a shock as if of electricity, and some unknown force hurled him back. For a moment he lost consciousness and came to kneeling a few paces from the edge of the precipice. Before him was a being outlined with a misty phosphorescent light, and its two eyes pierced his soul with their unbearably sharp brightness.

He saw these two piercing eyes and heard some unfamiliar voice coming from inside or outside him—he could not tell which—a toneless, constrained voice, yet distinct, metallic and completely heartless as from a gramophone. And the voice said to him: “You are my beloved son, in whom I am well pleased! Why did you not seek me? Why did you revere that bad one, and his father? I am your god and father. But that other, the beggar, the crucified one—he is a stranger both to me and to you. I have no other son but you. You are the only one, the only begotten, the equal of myself. I love you, and ask nothing from you. You are already beautiful, great, and mighty. Do your work in your own name, not mine. I harbour no envy of you. I love you. I require nothing of you. He whom you regarded as God demanded from His son the ultimate obedience—even to death on a cross—and He did not help Him there. I demand from you nothing, and I will help you. I will help you for your own sake, for the sake of your own dignity and excellency, and for the sake of my own disinterested love of you! Receive my spirit! Just as my spirit gave birth to you in beauty, so now it gives birth to you in power.”

With these words of the stranger, the mouth of the superman involuntarily opened, the two piercing eyes came very close to his face, and he felt a sharp, icy stream enter into him and fill the whole of his being. At the same time he felt in himself unprecedented strength, vigour, lightness, and joy. At the same instant the luminous image and the two eyes suddenly disappeared, something lifted him up in the air, and brought him down in his own garden, before the doors of his own house.

The next day not only the visitors of the great man but even his servants were startled by his strange, inspired appearance. They would have been even more startled could they have seen with what supernatural speed and ease he was writing, locked up in his study, his famous work entitled, The Open Way to Universal Peace and Prosperity.

The previous books and the public activity of the superman had always met with severe criticisms, though these came chiefly from men of exceptionally deep religious convictions, who for that very reason possessed no authority, and were hardly listened to when they tried to point out in everything that the Coming Man wrote or said the signs of quite an exceptional and excessive pride and conceit, and a complete absence of true simplicity, frankness, and sincerity.

But now with his new book he brought over to his side even some of his former critics and adversaries. This book, composed after the incident at the precipice, evinced a greater power of genius than he had ever shown before. It was a work that embraced everything and solved every problem. Here were combined a noble respect of the ancient traditions and symbols with a bold and thorough radicalism in the sphere of social and political problems, an unlimited freedom of thought with the most profound appreciation of everything mystical, an absolute individualism with an ardent fidelity to the common good, the most lofty idealism of guiding principles with a perfect definiteness in practical necessities of life. And all this was blended and cemented with such artistic genius that every thinker and every man of action, however one-sided he may have been, could easily view and accept the whole from his particular individual standpoint without sacrificing anything to the truth itself, without actually rising above his ego, without in reality renouncing his one-sidedness, without correcting the inadequacy of his views and wishes, and without making up their deficiencies. 

This wonderful book was immediately translated into the languages of all the civilised nations, and many of the uncivilised ones as well. During the whole year thousands of papers in all parts of the world were filled with the publishers’ advertisements and the delight of the critics. Inexpensive editions with portraits of the author were sold in the millions of copies, and all the civilized world—which by now meant nearly all the globe—resounded with the glory of the incomparable, the great, the only one! Not only did nobody raise his voice against the book, but on every side it was accepted as the revelation of the entirely complete truth. In it all the past was given its full and due justice, all the present was appraised so impartially and thoroughly, and the happiest future was brought near in such a convincing and practical manner that everybody could not help saying: ” Here at last we have what we need. Here is the ideal which is not an Utopia. Here is a scheme which is not a chimera.” And the wonderful author not only impressed all, but he was agreeable to everybody, so that the word of Christ was fulfilled: “I have come in the name of the Father, and you accept me not. Another will come in his own name—him you will accept.” For it is necessary to be agreeable to be accepted.

True, some pious men, warmly praising the book, had been asking why the name of Christ was never mentioned in it. But other Christians had rejoined: “Glory to God! In the past ages everything sacred has already been tainted enough by uncalled zealots so as now to make a deeply religious author extremely careful in these matters. Since the book is imbued with the true Christian spirit of active love and all-embracing goodwill, what more do you want?” And everybody agreed with this.

What is an Anthroposophist?

One thing's for sure, it's not a person who says "I believe everything Rudolf Steiner said". That is the kind of Guru-worshiping complex he wanted to avoid. His desire would be that students think for themselves. 

To define an anthroposophist you'd have to define anthroposophy- it's not the kind of word a marketer would choose is it? 

There are many definitions of anthroposophy I've seen over the years- things like "Christian yoga after the coming of Michael", "the Wisdom in Man" or as it was termed during Steiner's theosophical days, "Rosicrucian Spiritual Science". But perhaps the best one is to be found in the Awakening to Community lectures.
In Dr. Steiner's own words:

The term "Anthroposophy" is really to be understood as synonymous with "Sophia", meaning the content of consciousness, the soul-attitude and experience that makes a man a fully fledged human being. The right interpretation of "Anthroposophy" is not "the wisdom of man" but rather "the consciousness of one's humanity". In other words, the reversing of the will, the experiencing of knowledge, and one's participation in the time's destiny, should all aim at giving the soul a certain direction of consciousness, a "Sophia".

Anthroposophy is a path of cognition from the spiritual in man to the Spiritual in the Cosmos:

Anthroposophy is a path of knowledge which would lead the spiritual in man to the spiritual in the Universe. It appears in men as a need of the heart and feeling. It must find its justification in that it can afford satisfaction to this need. Only he can acknowledge Anthroposophy who finds in it what he must seek out of his Gemut [a mind warmed by the heart].

Hence only those men can be called Anthroposophists who feel certain questions as to the nature of man and the world as life necessities in the same way as one feels hunger and thirst.

- Alfred Meebold's translation of Dr. Steiner's Leading Thoughts

Anthroposophy could only appear in the Consciousness or Spiritual Soul Age:

But such a coming together of human beings could take place only in our age, the age of the consciousness soul, and those who do not as yet rightly conceive the nature of the consciousness soul cannot understand this development..... It corresponds exactly to the developmental level of the consciousness soul period.

-Rudolf Steiner, Awakening to Community

"Anthroposophy is therefore the knowledge of the spiritual human being, or spirit-man, and that knowledge is not confined to man, but is a knowledge of everything which the spirit-man can perceive in the spiritual world, just as physical man observes physical things in the world. Because this second human being, the inner one, is the spiritual human being, the knowledge which he acquires may be called “Spiritual Science.” And this name is even less new than the name Anthroposophy. That is to say, it is not even unusual, and it would be a complete misunderstanding if anyone were to think that I, as has been said, or anyone closely connected with me, had coined the name “Spiritual Science.” The name is used everywhere where it is thought possible to attain knowledge which is not merely physical science, but knowledge of something spiritual. Numbers of our contemporaries call history a spiritual science, call sociology, political economy, aesthetics, and the philosophy of religion spiritual sciences. We use the name, only in a somewhat different sense, that is, in the sense that spirit is to us something real and actual, whereas most of those who nowadays speak of history, political economy, etc., as spiritual sciences, resolve the spirit into abstract ideas."

-Mission of Spiritual Science and of Its Building at Dornach, Switzerland