2. Human beings as Spiritual and Soul Beings

As if compressed into a single point of the I, the human being is recognized as spirit by ordinary consciousness. If one strengthens the inner soul force, as I have described in detail in my books “How to Know Higher Worlds,” “The Secret Science,” and “The Riddle of Man,” then one finds that this I really takes on content, just as one arrives at the content of the physical body for mere inner sensations through methodical scientific research. One arrives at a real exploration of the spirit, just as one learns about the chemical changes that take place in the blood or elsewhere in the body when a person is hungry or thirsty or feels satiated. In this way, one learns to recognize how an idea that lives within us and is initially a mere idea is now filled with pictorial content that is not as abstract as the idea that prevails in ordinary consciousness, content that the spiritual researcher brings into consciousness so that the idea becomes like a perception of this pictorial, imaginative content. Imaginative processes appear before the spiritual researcher's mind's eye, and they change. For example, when an idea becomes warmer, which is what happens in the subconscious in ordinary consciousness, the idea becomes something completely different. It then becomes something that is no longer merely an idea of knowledge, insight, or perception, but an idea that motivates the will. This is a very significant step forward for the spiritual researcher when he is able to ascend to such a realization, through which he understands how the concept of knowledge — under whose influence we do nothing, but only know something about the world — is transformed into a concept of will by the change in its imaginative content, which then passes over into what becomes or can become active within us. Here we see how the spiritual stands behind the soul and is in constant real change. Just as we can describe physical chemical and physical processes in the body, so we can describe spiritually how behind the life of imagination, feeling, and will there are changes that go from the imaginative to the inspired and the intuitive. And just as hunger and thirst subjectively arise from chemical changes in the body, so too does the spiritual subjectively arise, either as a perception or as a feeling, which then transforms into a volition. In this way, one arrives quite concretely at the possibility of a real description of what lives and weaves behind the soul as a spiritual being, just as the physical lives and weaves behind the soul on the other side. One then comes to the point where what can appear before the energized soul life becomes truly concrete in the human being, so that what I have previously called the “formative forces body” is felt by us in the same way as the physical body is usually felt. Then one also learns to recognize what lives outside in the world beyond the sensory as supersensible in a very concrete way.