4. The Human Soul and the Human Spirit

If we now look at ordinary life, at the ordinary inner experiences of the soul, we must say that these inner experiences of man are such that, without his knowing it, the objects of clairvoyance and clairaudience are continually within him, that these objects are continually active in his ordinary mental life. What enters from the spiritual world remains active in us by going through conception and birth. This is what man, when he notices it, calls more the spiritual in his soul life. But that which passes through the gate of death, which lies in the will, so that it is like an inner spectator, that is what man, when he has it not in connection with the whole macrocosm but in the ordinary experience of the soul, calls more the soul in him. And the spiritual and soul aspects in all their diversity and variety ultimately lead back to these two aspects of human nature. The spirit always lies in what we develop on the side of thinking. One becomes ingenious — if the word may now be used only in a technical sense — without going the paths of the spiritual researcher, which may still remain in the unconscious, by developing one's thinking to ever greater inner mobility, to ever greater inventiveness, so that thoughts flow more abundantly and are more related to what belongs together in the sequence of ideas that one can have. Through this spiritualization, in which that lives which can be found in its true essence through the above-mentioned path of thinking and meditation, through this spiritual life in the human soul, one learns in life – but now practically, not theoretically – that which can be called knowledge of human nature. One learns what guides one to place the human being in the right way into the world. One learns what reveals the connections of the world before one's own soul. One thereby distances oneself in a certain way, by developing the spirit, from what expresses itself as a physical human being. Through the development of one's spiritual self, one approaches that which was primarily active when we entered the world of the senses. In a sense, then, by becoming spiritual, one distances oneself from what is directly experienced in the world of the senses. This is why, by becoming spiritual, one enters into a certain cool atmosphere. But by surveying the wise connections of the world, which reveal themselves to the inner soul, one can go far in this direction. One can gather a lot in the world, feel what the other does not feel, be able to express a lot about world connections, also invent things that are then translated into reality from the world connections. One can go far in this way. The whole process is such that the world, I would say, becomes more luminous, that it becomes transparent to us. It is the process of becoming spiritual, of the spirit rising within the human being like a preliminary stage, like a preliminary stage not yet imbued with true clairvoyance, of entering into the world from which we have come through conception or through birth.