4. The Human Soul and the Human Spirit

And yet, the starting points are by no means a secret. The lecture eight days ago was already able to show this, and today I would like to return to the fundamentals with a few words. Every human being thinks in life, develops his thinking further, when he dedicates it to scientific use. Thinking and imagining is an everyday inner activity of the soul. The only thing that matters now is to face this thinking in such a way as one does not face it in ordinary life and in ordinary science, in order to explore the ways of the spiritual. In ordinary life and in ordinary science, people form images, concepts and ideas in order to use them to depict something external. And he is satisfied when he forms something external in his ideas. He rightly calls this the truth for ordinary life and for ordinary science, that he can form ideas that depict an external reality for him, visualize it inwardly, and allow him to relive it inwardly. Now it has been pointed out that where this ordinary thinking of everyday life and also the thinking of ordinary science ends, only that which is necessary for the exploration of the spiritual life of man begins. That is to say, the thinking, the same thinking that is used in everyday life, has to be experienced inwardly and strengthened inwardly in a different way than it is experienced and strengthened in ordinary life and within ordinary science. As I have indicated, it is strengthened by that inner process which, so to speak – the word should not be misunderstood – represents the inner, intimate, purely mental experiment, which at least initiates it through the process that one calls real meditation – if it did not sound pedantic, one could say 'in the technical sense of the word'. In this case, thinking is done in order to strengthen thinking inwardly, to experience the process of thinking. We do not usually experience it. We believe we experience it in ordinary life or in ordinary science. We do not experience it there. We have it, we handle it, we apply this thinking; but the soul is directed towards the outside world, towards something real besides thinking. The point is to be able to pay attention to thinking itself. But to do that, it must be intensified. That is to say, it must be driven in the way it is driven in the sense of meditation, in that one sets thinking in motion, not in order to visualize something external, not to revive something external inwardly, to depict it, but to experience inwardly only this process, this process of thinking, and to look at it in the experience. That is what matters. And for this it is necessary not to abandon oneself to the soul processes of ordinary life, but through inner arbitrariness, out of complete free will (I am here giving the fundamental principles; the details can be found in my book, How to Know Higher Worlds) — easily comprehensible images are introduced into the thinking, images that can be relied upon not to conjure up all manner of inner reminiscences and obscure the clear experience of the process; ideally symbolic images that are not intended to represent anything external, that are not meant to serve to visualize something external but only to set thinking in motion and in motion and thereby to strengthen inwardly, so that one does not merely practice this thinking but experiences it inwardly, that one now really experiences oneself as an inward thinker, just as one otherwise experiences oneself inwardly in one's muscle feeling.