4. The Human Soul and the Human Spirit

This is an activity that must now be increased in the process, in the inner soul-searching that has been mentioned. Thinking through meditation and also the development of the will through meditation lead the human being to become independent of his body, to lift himself out of his body and carry out a special soul activity in which he maintains himself knowledgeably outside of his body and independently of his body. The “outside” is not meant so much in a spatial sense as in the sense that the person knows himself to be independent of the physical activity of his body. In the case of what in ordinary life is called clairvoyance, clairaudience and so on, which can intensify to the point of hallucination and illusion, there is now the disastrous superstition that one can thereby gain insights into the world that lie beyond birth and death. But through what is called clairvoyance or clairaudience in ordinary life, one cannot get to any processes or events in the spiritual world that lies beyond birth and death. For ordinary, everyday thinking, we have to destroy something that is a totality in our body, so to speak, and we have to destroy it to the extent that it lies in what we might call normal life activity. We place ourselves with our whole being in the environment and let it degrade by practicing and executing the thinking. In what is usually called clairvoyance or clairaudience, the whole human being is not confronted with the world, but only a part of the world is confronted in a morbid way, so that the human being does not go beyond thinking, but down; not rising into the supersensible, but moving down into the subsensible. Because he seizes less of his organ in this ordinary clairvoyance than in ordinary thinking, in this ordinary clairvoyance, thus because he seizes only a part of his organism, he comes to hallucinations, to illusions, which certainly also point to a reality, but to one that is less real than our ordinary sense reality, which we experience between birth and death. This ordinary clairvoyant with his supersensible clairvoyance, which must either be understood as something that must go below ordinary reality or else be misunderstood and lead to dreaming and fantasizing, to a morbid worldview, this supersensible clairvoyance is based on the fact that one sees less of the world than one perceives through the ordinary conception of the sensory world. One also leaves the world, so to speak, but in a morbid way; one limits oneself to something that lies below the reality of ordinary experience. And this hallucinatory, illusionary clairvoyance is more closely connected to physicality, and now to morbid physicality, than ordinary thinking, feeling and willing.