4. The Spirit, Soul, and Body of Man

Similarly, however, it is impossible to arrive at any fruitful view of the human being as a spiritual being if one merely wants to remain with what the human being experiences inwardly and psychologically in his or her life of imagination, in his or her life of feeling, in his or her life of will. Imagination, feelings, and impulses of will are, after all, the content of the soul. They ebb and flow in everyday waking life. One sometimes tries to deepen them by moving from mere everyday soul experience in imagining, feeling, and willing to a kind of mystical immersion in one's inner being, to a deepened experience of what the soul can experience in this direction. However, no matter how far one may go with such mystical contemplation, one cannot arrive at a spiritual understanding of the human being through such mysticism, however subtle it may be. Rather, if spiritual understanding is to be sought — admittedly from the other side, but in an equally serious scientific manner — a bridge must be built from mere soul experience to spiritual experience, just as in the field of physical science a bridge is built by serious, rigorous methods from soul experience to physical processes, to the chemical or physical processes that underlie the feeling of hunger, the feeling of satiety, the need to breathe, and the like. Now, of course, one cannot proceed in the same way from the soul to the consideration of the physical organization of the human being as one proceeds to the consideration of the spiritual life of the human being. Other methods are necessary here. I have already pointed to these methods in a general way. Of course, the details cannot be discussed in a short lecture. You will find them in the books I have mentioned several times, How to Know Higher Worlds, in my Occult Science, in the books The Riddle of Man, The Riddle of the Soul, and so on. But today I would like to introduce some remarkable characteristics of those methods that can bridge the gap between ordinary human soul life and the spiritual essence of human beings.