2. Human beings as Spiritual and Soul Beings

Even without being a spiritual researcher, one can convince oneself of the truth of what has just been said through ordinary, more intimate observation of the soul life, albeit in a field that is only superficially considered today, and is particularly misrepresented by the fact that a certain branch of science, which is very much oriented toward the material, has taken hold of this field, namely, so-called analytical psychology or psychoanalysis. But I do not want to go into that. I would like to point out, however, that anyone who can truly observe the dream life knows that the involuntary emergence of dreams is always somehow connected with the impressions of the last few days, actually only the last two or three days. But don't misunderstand me! Of course, long-past events come up in dreams as reminiscences. But it is something else that evokes these long-past events. If you can observe the dream closely, you will always see that there must be some evoking idea from the last two or three days. This is what evokes long-past events. For two or three days, impressions from the outside world have the power to produce dreams. Everything else then structures itself around them. If no such idea from the last two or three days can generate the dream, then it cannot arise. Now, of course, one must be able to really observe what I have just indicated, because ordinary consciousness cannot observe it. It is precisely because it takes place in the unconscious that it is so unknown in the widest circles today. As a rule, people today do not acquire any knowledge of how they relate differently to an idea that has not been present in their soul for two or three days and to one that has been present for so long. All these things can only be observed accurately and correctly by a spiritual researcher. However, in order to observe them properly, the spiritual researcher needs a certain strengthening, an invigoration of the ordinary soul life. For ordinary soul life, imagination actually only extends to repeating and elaborating in a certain way what the senses perceive and grasp from the outside. This soul life can now be strengthened, even though ordinary science knows little about it, so that this pale, indefinite life of imagination in everyday life today can appear in the soul in a completely different way, so that it can appear as powerful as imagination, so that its power is equal to external, sensory perception. But this must happen if one really wants to do research in the spiritual realm. This research cannot be done with the ordinary powers of the soul of knowledge. Now, in my book How to Attain Knowledge of Higher Worlds and in my Secret Science, I have described in detail the method by which one can elevate imagination — to use a technical term that can easily be misunderstood — and by which one can turn it into imaginative cognition, into seeing perception.