Lecture V

This is what must first be felt. This does not arise in such a way that it can best be expressed in the words we use in physical life. When you enter the spiritual world, experience is far more intimately bound up with you than anything of the kind in sensory existence. When you have done something that does not satisfy you morally, your entire inner life feels that there is something bitter, that there is something as it were poured out into the world to which you have now accustomed yourself, that fills it with an aroma of bitterness—but aroma should not here be understood in the physical sense. You feel yourself soaked through with this aroma of bitterness. What can be morally justified is filled with a pleasant aroma. One might say that the sphere you enter when you are not satisfied with what you have done, is dark and gloomy, but light and clear is the part of the universe into which you come when you can be at peace with yourself. Therefore, if you are to find your way about, this should be the kind of moral or intellectual valuation to which you should submit yourself, that, like the atmosphere, fills for you the world into which you are entering. So it is best to feel this world with your soul, and after having made yourself familiar with this feeling of the soul for spiritual space, only then should the memory arise that may have the very form and shape of your physical bodily form in sensory life, as long as this form comes before you like an interpenetration into your newly acquired moral atmosphere.