4. The Human Soul and the Human Spirit

On the other hand, one can say that it is just as intimate an inner experience of the will as that which I have described was an inner experience of thinking. In ordinary life, one performs actions that arise from impulses of will, from wishes and desires. But one does not pay attention to the fact that there is something special in this will. That there is something special in the will of man comes to one when one withdraws from life, even if only for minutes, in meditation, and looks at how one has willed; when one inwardly directs the soul not to a willing that passes into the outer action, but to an inward beholding of the willing. Incidentally, anyone who performs their thought meditation in the right way will automatically come to this inner contemplation of the will. For meditation, in so far as it is also just a placing-in-the-middle-of-consciousness of a thought, is at the same time an intimate summoning of an inner volitional process. One experiences the volition in such a way that one is inwardly together with it. Through the intensification, through the strengthening of that which has already been called meditation for the previous soul experience, it follows quite naturally that one learns to direct one's attention to the inner process of willing in such a way as one never directs it when the willing simply passes over into outer action, because there one directs one's attention to what one wills in the outer sense world. But one must direct one's attention to a volitional process, insofar as the essence of this volitional process takes place within the soul. It must again be a very intimate process. And it is precisely this volition that one recognizes best of all in the meditation process itself, if one really experiences the meditation process only inwardly. And then it turns out that by doing this again and again with inner perseverance and energy, one finally comes to a point where one discovers an inner observer within oneself. It is difficult to express this, because it is so far removed from ordinary thought habits that it seems as if one is speaking of something terribly fantastic, whereas one is speaking of a reality that one really comes upon. Thus one discovers an inner man in oneself, who continually looks at what is going on in our volitions, in our whole volition, an observer of whom one is unaware in ordinary life because one does not direct one's attention to him. Not a thought, but a real being is constantly watching us and is in our will. Just as we relate to the things of external perception with our thoughts, so something in us relates to our will. What color and sound are for the senses and for the consciousness that perceives the external world, that is our will for an inner observer. There is an inner observer in us, for whom we provide the material for observation in our decisions of will and in our executions of will, just as colors and sounds provide the material for observation for us in the outer world.