8. What is the Purpose of Spiritual Science and How is it Treated by Its Opponents?

Spiritual science is the true successor of natural science research in that it strives to recognize the realm of the spirit with the means that are suitable for this realm. As a continuation of natural science, it cannot itself be mere natural science. For the methods that have brought this science such tremendous triumphs were able to do so precisely because they were highly adapted to the study of nature and because this research was not compromised by others that were not suitable for the natural field. In order to accomplish something similar in the realm of the spirit as natural science has accomplished in the realm of nature, spiritual science must develop other cognitive abilities than those applicable in natural science. In doing so, it must, of course, assert a point of view that, understandably, can meet with many doubts in the present day. Just look impartially at what is said about these “other cognitive abilities”. They are abilities that lie entirely within the developmental line of the ordinary human soul powers. How must spiritual science understand its difference from natural science? The study of nature can only be cultivated with the powers of cognition that man acquires in the natural course of his life and that are supported for the purpose of this research by regulated observation and scientific experimental tools. In order to penetrate into the spiritual world, man must develop it further through spiritual and soul exercises beyond the point to which it develops by itself, so to speak, without such exercises. In this way, something similar happens to the human being at a different level to what happens to the child, which develops the abilities of its later years from those of its early years. Just as the child learns to use its soul abilities in such a way that the body becomes a good tool for experiencing the world of the senses, so the human being can develop his powers of cognition further so that he can perceive and experience in a state free of the body – purely as a soul. This happens when the soul intensifies to an unlimited degree certain activities which it already employs to a small extent in ordinary life, and thus brings about a state in which it draws out of the body, as it were, everything that is soul and spiritual in it. She can then experience her body as being outside of her, but for short, limited periods of time. She can know herself to be transported into a world in which she lives with spiritual beings and spiritual processes, just as she is surrounded by sensual processes and beings in the sensual world. The kind of spiritual-mental exercises by which this is achieved is described in my books: “How to Know Higher Worlds?” and “Occult Science”. What the soul experiences as a change in itself through such exercises is described in my book: “The Threshold of the Spiritual World”. Anyone who does not want to engage with the description of such actual processes as described in these books will be able to deny the possibility of a soul life free of the physical body, just as someone could say: I do not believe that hydrogen, as something quite different from water, can be developed out of water. He can say this if he does not want to concern himself with the fact that water is broken down into hydrogen and oxygen by means of chemistry. But man can — through a kind of spiritual chemistry — break himself down into physical corporeality and into soul-spirituality. The mode of thinking in spiritual science is the same as that in natural science; only this mode of thinking must be further developed in order to go beyond nature. But the following must always be emphasized: to investigate the beings and processes in the spiritual world, the development of the characterized soul powers is necessary; but to understand and grasp what the spiritual researcher finds through these soul powers, all that is needed is an unbiased, unprejudiced consideration of the results of spiritual research with the ordinary soul abilities. And it may be said that the reason why so many people reject these results is not because they do not prove convincing to the ordinary understanding, but solely because these people allow their understanding to be clouded by prejudice and bias. Indeed, it takes a certain impartiality to admit: Man, as he is in ordinary life, is not yet so perfect; he can still develop slumbering soul powers within him, indeed, these powers must even be developed if the spiritual world is to reveal itself. But spiritual science shows that only the sensual world, subject to death, is perceptible to the senses and the ordinary powers of the soul, and that another world, not subject to death, can only reveal itself to the soul forces that have first been opened up to it.