4. The Human Soul and the Human Spirit

This process, however, if it is continued with patience, persistence and energy, as indicated eight days ago, leads far; it takes less time for some people, for some people years, although the individual exercise should not be exaggerated. This inner experience leads to experiencing what lies in thinking, not just thinking about it. This means experiencing thinking not as it reflects something external, but as it is formed within the human being, how it first takes hold of the organism and is shaped within the human being. At first, one does not know what this inner experience actually means. One feels, so to speak, as if one were coming down from the ordinary soul life at this or that point into a world that one has not known before. But then one first becomes acquainted with the significant result of what lies as a living force in thinking and what preceded the formation of our physical body, and preceded above all everything in human experience that one remembers back to in later life, all the way to birth, to conception and further back. That is to say, one learns to recognize oneself as a spiritual being who does not live in us in order to use the organism as an organ for perceiving the external world, but as a spiritual being who, before our birth, or, let us say, before conception, shaped that which, from the human spirit, from the human soul, must be shaped on the human body. One learns experientially to recognize what is formed from that trinity, which results from father and mother, but also from what lies beyond the line of inheritance and comes down from the spiritual world to connect with what is given through the line of inheritance. For this, it is only necessary to deepen the process of thinking, to inwardly strengthen the process of thinking. One can be led — of course not by ordinary thinking — to the intuition — for it must be an intuition — of that which has preceded our birth or our conception, which comes down from the spiritual world to connect with the physical body, which is given by the current of inheritance, in the physical world. Anyone who demands proof of this would first have to familiarize themselves with the nature of all ordinary proof. Facts cannot be proved at all. Just imagine that no one had ever seen a whale. No one would ever be able to prove from any zoological knowledge that a whale exists. There is no way to lead from any concepts and ideas to reality if the process of concepts and ideas is meant to be as it happens in ordinary life. And so, on the one hand, it leads us out of the world in which we live between birth and death and into the world from which we came when we entered our physical embodiment and into which we pass when we go through the gate of “death.” Thus the path that leads out of this sensual world into the spiritual world on the one hand, leads through a special inner development, a special inner handling of thought. And here it must be said that although spiritual science in its whole attitude, in its whole position to the world, really works out of the spirit of the natural-scientific attitude, there still arises that difference from ordinary natural science, which is conditioned by the fact that natural science is directed towards the outer world and that spiritual science wants to do the same for the world of the spirit that natural science wants to do for the outer world. In spite of the complete harmony, a difference – not an opposition, but a difference – emerges, which could be characterized from many sides, but for our purposes today it can be characterized in the following way: For ordinary life and ordinary science, what we accomplish in thinking is the final result, that which we want to arrive at. By working in thought in outer reality, we arrive precisely at that which we want from outer reality. All the activities that we apply to the knowledge of the outer world and of life in this outer world, insofar as they are soul activities, are only preparation for the spiritual-scientific path. In outer science, in the outer world, one thinks in order to arrive at the result of thinking. But this thinking, as practised in the outer world, only prepares the soul so that, through this thinking, the soul comes to a point of inner experience where it encounters the spiritual world. So everything that outer life can give us in terms of thinking, thinking power and the results of outer science is used differently in spiritual science than in ordinary life and ordinary science. It is used in such a way that it only forms the thinking, the thinking side of the human spirit and soul to a certain point. What is the result in ordinary life, in ordinary science, is a living preparation for spiritual science. And what then emerges as fact, as I have just described in the most elementary way, does not come during the effort. The inner effort is only to lead the soul to a certain point. There one still remains basically in the area of ordinary life, as long as one makes an inner effort, as long as one is in meditation. Only then, when one has just carried out the effort, when one has now let it have an effect on the soul and then again suppresses and quietly waits, the spiritual scientific results come. They can only appear as spiritual facts, for the vision of which one has prepared oneself by creating the inner spiritual eye. Just as nature produces the eye in the human organism, so that it may look out upon the outer world and receive light and colors, so man, through all his thinking and all the inner efforts of his soul, works toward meeting that which is to and must come to him from the other side. Inner revelation, inner approach to the soul must be what confronts one as a fact of the spiritual world. That is one side.