12. Spiritual Science as a Life's Work

And then we saw something else that can be said to reinforce and confirm what has just been said even further: that everything that is initially available to human beings in terms of external sensory perceptions or thinking and imagining, which are bound to the brain, cannot provide spiritual research with any powers of knowledge, but that spiritual science must first appeal to the activation of forces that otherwise remain dormant in the soul. I have pointed out that true clairvoyant knowledge, in the genuine sense of the word, is based on the fact that at every moment the spiritual scientist must immerse himself in the processes and things he wants to know, and that what he wants to perceive and know immediately disappears if he does not immerse himself with his whole active soul. We passively surrender ourselves to an external color or an external sound; they have an effect on us. What we want to recognize in the spiritual world can only be recognized in activity. The moment we confront things and beings in the spiritual world with a passive soul, what we have recognized would disappear or turn into hallucinations or illusions, if it is still there. The soul must not rest for a moment in the spiritual realm.