4. The Human Soul and the Human Spirit

By developing thinking in the way it has been described, one comes to enter the spiritual world on one side. One encounters the prenatal life, the life of the human soul in the spiritual world, and from there one has a view of the spiritual world itself with its spiritual beings. This comes to one in such a way that one has a vivid picture of it. But one must realize that this vision differs from the perceptions, the sensations, the feelings one has in relation to the external sense world. Anyone who thinks that this beholding can be achieved by him in such a way that it is, as it were, only a foggy repetition of the beholding of the sense world, is completely mistaken. On the contrary, one must be clear about the fact that everything that makes the sense world just that is due to the fact that we behold it with our organs. Such colors as are in the outer sense world can only be perceived by an eye, such tones as are in the outer world can only be heard by a sense-perceptive ear. Nevertheless, one can speak of beholding, of spiritual beholding. One can speak of a soul eye, of a spirit eye, when one approaches the spiritual world from this side, to use Goethe's words, 'spirit eye'. The only difference between this kind of beholding and other forms of seeing is that in true clairvoyance one is always aware that one is evoking the vision oneself. Just as one is aware when writing that one is presenting as reality that which one has seen. But in this self-evocation, one follows an inner reality, a spiritual reality, just as one does not scribble something arbitrary when writing, but expresses an inner reality, albeit an inner reality that belongs to the outer world. This much more active, ever-present inner cooperation with the act of observation is precisely what distinguishes this – I now say: true – inner clairvoyance from the external sense perception that is given to us passively, that approaches us when we hold out the eye to it. But we also only acquire this ability to trace the spiritual world in a spiritual way when we have prepared ourselves so that the spiritual world comes to meet us as a result. Out of this experience the soul then draws the vision, and it has the need to do so because it corresponds to an inner urge to have that which otherwise lives and weaves as an experience, but is not yet reality, as a real picture before it.