4. The Human Soul and the Human Spirit

One does not become soulful, but one becomes full of soul. The soul, as it develops, lies in the deepening of inner experience. Those who deepen their soul life do not yet arrive at the clairaudient experience of their inner observer, but this observer works in them in a particularly strong and intense way, so that their inner soul life becomes more real than it would otherwise be. He becomes soulful. As a result, he learns less from life about human nature and about a comprehensive, enlightened view of world affairs and of man's connection to world conditions. But he does become more real in his inner experience. The soul becomes more intense, it is inwardly strengthened. What lives in the will, one might say, vibrates and surges in the will during life, pleasure and suffering, joy and pain, which surge up and down and are basically connected internally with the will nature of the human being – this could be proved strictly psychologically, but there is no time for that – is experienced in a more intense way when the human being grows stronger within himself in this way. Not only what is present in him as pleasure and pain, what inner feelings arise from him, is experienced more intensely, but precisely through this strengthening of the soul, he can extend his pleasure and pain to that which is pleasure and pain, joy and pain, happiness and misery in other beings around him. This is connected with the soul-filled. But this in turn is connected with what passes through the gate of death as the essence of the individual personality, what is taken along through the gate of death by connecting in the way described eight days ago with what is now the spirit and what is achieved through meditation in thinking.