4. The Human Soul and the Human Spirit

It is difficult to talk about these things because one believes one is talking about something imagined, whereas one is talking about something that, when the soul has prepared itself, comes to meet it again. This higher consciousness is now such that one really goes through the most harrowing experience in the soul: one comes out of everything in which one is connected with the ordinary life of the soul, as if by an inner leap, and is able to put oneself in the place of this observer, even if only for a moment, I would say. There are enough of these moments. One feels towards one's whole human being, as he stands in ordinary life, now in the same way as one usually feels with this ordinary human being towards the things, the colored and sounding things of outer nature. If one carries this experience further, then at a certain point in one's inner experience one realizes what it means to unfold inner soul activity that does not make use of the bodily organ, but stands face to face with this outer physicality as the ordinary person stands with the table or the chair or any other external object. To experience one's soul life outside of the body, that is what one can experience. And then one knows what life looks like when one passes through the gate of death, when one lives free of the body, even when the physical body is destroyed. It is an inwardly vibrant soul life that then passes over into the spiritual world in order to live through the spiritual world and to take the forces from the spiritual world from now on. One gets to know these forces in their uniqueness, which are gradually the preparation for the soul being to descend to a new earthly embodiment after passing through the life between death and new birth.