Anyone who possesses the feelings to be able to do art – I will now get back to this – and what people on earth refer to as born talent, will follow the art, but people have to become skilled in it.

If the talent is strongly developed, these people usually feel for art in their childhood, because these characteristics come forward and it can be established if it concerns a child prodigy.

Those children are conscious particularly early of a feeling for art and can achieve something in this field.

There are also people who sense the feeling for art awakening at a later age and then make an effort to achieve in this field.

They soon reach the realisation that they lack the feelings, that others possess, and they search for it or work day and night, and then still have to accept that they can never reach that coveted height.

The height of the child prodigy seems supernatural to them and yet so close by, because they follow the same path; their chalk or pencil is like theirs, but they lack one thing and that is the feeling to draw and paint.

In addition, we are immediately faced with the human grades of feeling.

The inner life of the child prodigy is an own grade, which other artists still have to reach and master.

One person possesses a feeling for art, the other nothing more than the great longing to be able to serve art.

And between these two of the seven grades of feeling lies an enormous gulf, which cannot be bridged by the lower self for art; as a result of which, that person feels called to a spiritual halt.

Even if this human child studies hard and does its best; the height of the child prodigy cannot be reached.

The grades of feeling for art and sciences, for you as a material being, have to do with the occult laws, since they are in connection with them, which is why I am also explaining the state of your artist.

What applies to sculpture, also applies to science, music and other arts.

There are people who, driven by a great talent, become soloists in a short time; other people study just as hard, but remain unknown.

And why can these people not achieve that great height?

For the West the subconscious is a depth in which everything from previous lives lies hidden and that which absorbs everything, which is experienced during the life and serves as lumber, or the nervous system would already succumb early.

And your child prodigies draw from this when they are conscious of their skills at an early age and want to start doing art.

The subconscious possesses both the feeling for it and the longing, because the personality is influenced by these feelings in the day-conscious.

People call this on earth born talent. We tell you, this feeling was experienced in previous lives, or you would not be able to possess it now.

You experience your subconscious anyway in the day-consciousness, or the child prodigy would be one of the living dead like the other children.

The child draws from the past, for you on earth the subconscious.

Everything lays there, and the feeling for your art and science lives there. All your thoughts live there in order to be able to create something.

The third grade for the inner life is the highest, which you can experience as an artist, and it is not possible to go higher.

Now you give the full one hundred percent of your own life.

This grade brought forth these geniuses; the first grades have nothing to bring.

Beethoven, Bach, Mozart, Rembrandt, Van Dyck, Michelangelo, you must know all the masters, they lived in the third grade for the inner life.

All of them have something to give to the earth; they had mastered the feeling for it and represented the highest, therefore, becoming conscious on earth.

Those souls were ready for art and science.

Your Joost van den Vondel and Spinoza and for other peoples their own artists, all lived in the third grade of the inner life and could create because of this.

This is the highest that the third grade can reach.

I already told you in a previous discussion that the third grade can be helped by our world and this is only possible as a result of inspiration.

There were rumours about an infant prodigy.

Somewhere in this country an infant prodigy was born to very simple people.

That child was a child of a carpenter, and though it was not eight years old yet, rumours, a whisper from person to person, spread about this infant prodigy throughout the country.