4. On Death

The other part of how one gets to know thinking is now something that becomes so much a part of spiritual research that, unless one is well prepared, it is impossible to feel sympathy with what is coming. You learn about the inner working, the inner feeling, the inner experience of the soul. You learn to know the soul as something that is internally mobile; you learn about an activity of the soul about which you can say: what does this activity want? It wants to form thoughts. But as it appears, it cannot form thoughts. You learn about a part of the soul's activity that is used to repair the tired brain during sleep; you can be satisfied with that. You learn about another part of the soul's activity, with which you touch the whole physicality of the brain from within, about which you can say: You have it now. And when one goes into it more closely to examine: How did you get it? it becomes clear: You got it through what you have experienced since birth and processed in your soul; but it has become something that, as you are, pushes against your brain; and that does not allow what wants to come about as ordinary thoughts of everyday life to come about. Thus, the spiritual researcher lives in a state where he feels imprisoned in his body, which is his admirable spiritual tool of thought, as if in a chamber, as if in a prison. And he feels so affected by this that he says to himself: now you could form thoughts from your inner activity, if your brain did not lie there like a heavy substance and did not want to be stirred up to what the soul wants.