4. The Human Soul and the Human Spirit

If one pursues the development of the soul in this way on one side, one arrives, as I have described, at a certain point that represents a significant, even a shattering inner experience. And I will once again characterize how this experience makes one relate to human nature in a completely different way than one usually does in life. It is completely in agreement with the scientific way of thinking, even taking it to its furthest conclusions, and with the spiritual-scientific view. Within the ordinary thinking that one does as a person embodied in the sense world, one needs an organ for this thinking. And not only that, but every time we think, there must first take place an inner process that cannot be incorporated into thinking, or even into consciousness, but must precede it. Thinking can only take place when it has been prepared internally, by the organs. So that every time one thinks, two things happen: a process of which one is unaware, which first prepares the organism, the outer body, so that those processes take place which then come to consciousness as a thought, as an idea. By meditating, by concentrating all the powers of the soul on a particular idea, as it were, by concentrating them, holding them in the thought, not allowing the flow of thought to flow as it does in ordinary life, but holding the thought in, that is, stopping the thought, and now thinking not to depict something external, but to sense one's inner thinking, to sense the process of thinking — by accomplishing this, one notices inwardly: what one has actually done so far as thinking, how one has engaged in thinking, that ceases. One does not emerge from a clear conception of consciousness, one does not enter into a nebulous state; but this thinking, which is carried forward in its flow by the process of the outer world, ceases as such. One enters into an inner experience that initially brings one much more together with oneself, that leads one into the process that is pre-thought, that first prepares our body so that we can unfold thinking. You come down below the thinking. This cannot be proved in any other way than by direct experience. The thinking that one has in ordinary life seems like a river flowing towards the sea. Now you know: now you are in a deeper layer of being, now you are in the process that you cannot experience in ordinary life because it must precede thinking.