2. Human beings as Spiritual and Soul Beings

Today, however, there are the most paradoxical prejudices regarding the whole and the details of this spiritual knowledge, which, of course, seem natural and must also be numerous. I will mention only one of them. Two weeks ago, I mentioned that Pastor Rittelmeyer recently wrote a beautiful treatise in Die christliche Welt (The Christian World) from a religious perspective on what spiritual science aims to achieve and how it can become a truly deeper foundation of religious life. From a side that is widely recognized in many circles, objections have now been raised against Pastor Rittelmeyer's remarks, among other things that I do not want to mention here: If the human soul is to rise to a spiritual world, this should in no way happen in such a way that the human being arbitrarily carries his soul into the spiritual world through exercises, but rather it must come about of its own accord. From the point of view of spiritual science, nothing could be more incomprehensible than this. For precisely when this living into the spiritual world comes of its own accord, when it occurs without the human being doing anything to bring it about, the human being does not enter the real spiritual world, but only into the delusion of some ideas that are not spiritual, because the human being is not active but passive in this process. He enters a life that is again dependent on the body, on some organic processes in the body, and then it is pathological, or dependent on mere mental processes, and then it is a delusion, autosuggestion, or the like. Real penetration into the spirit is based precisely on becoming aware that this can only be achieved through activity, through the exercise of one's own innermost human will. It is this alone that carries us into the real spiritual world. So anyone who says it is questionable to require exercises through which human beings are supposed to achieve arbitrarily what can only be given to them as a gift of grace understands nothing of the real essence, of the real meaning of this spiritual science, but also knows nothing of the real spirit, only of that dreamt-up spirit that lives as autosuggestion in the human soul. But today, quite a lot of people know nothing about the real spirit. Therefore, they cannot come to a real contemplation of the eternal, the immortal, and the free in the human soul.