2. Human beings as Spiritual and Soul Beings

Today, there are two ways out of mere soul life. On the one hand, we can escape and ascend to the spirit by becoming conscious of our true self, by feeling the formative forces body as we otherwise feel the physical body, thereby seeing the supersensible in the outer world. But then we come to an even higher conception of our I, then we come to the realization of why this I is hidden from ordinary consciousness: basically, this I springs from the ordinary soul life as little as the air we breathe comes from the lungs. Anyone who believes that the true I is somehow produced inside the body believes the same thing in this area as someone who believes that breath is somehow produced in the lungs. No, our true I is inside the world that we take in imaginatively. There we find the I on the one hand by awakening it, by bringing it beyond mere sensory perception to the supersensible. In this self we find one side of the eternal, the side that shows us the seed of all that we will become when we pass through the gate of death and live our way into the spiritual world, in order to return to subsequent earthly lives.