4. The Spirit, Soul, and Body of Man

All this must be brought to the point where it is nothing more than a preparation for what is actually to come into being for the soul and spiritual life. For although this must be carefully prepared in this way, at a certain point in development it becomes something objective, a reality coming from the spiritual world outside. Only those who devote themselves carefully to such inner exercises for a time — how much time is needed varies from person to person — through which they introduce the will into the world of ideas, through which they come to say to themselves: I do not allow the ideas to follow one another according to their own laws or according to laws taken from outside, but I bring that regularity into my life of ideas through my own will, whereby one idea is linked to another — gradually brings it to the point , once they have introduced arbitrariness into the sequence of ideas and overcome it again, to discover something within themselves that, just as necessarily, links one idea or thought to another from the spiritual realm, thus evoking an inner soul life dominated by a spiritual reality. Just as external observation regulates the life of imagination and, by basing ideas on the sequence of external events and the characteristic properties of external entities, introduces necessity into the ideas so that they become mediators of external reality, so the life of imagination gradually becomes a mediator of spiritual reality. One must simply recognize what is meant here in the same sense as something seriously scientific, like natural science, and not succumb to the prejudice that one thereby falls into some kind of fantasy, because one does indeed enter into an inner arbitrariness, and realize that in this way one can grasp something spiritually alive, something spiritually real, which approaches our imagination from the other side, as the side that corresponds to external physical reality. For those who have not dealt much with such things, it is indeed difficult at first to imagine what is actually meant by these things. But these things, which are to form the basis of a future spiritual science, which are to provide a future spiritual scientific method of research, are, just like the scientific work done in the laboratory and so on, nothing more than more refined forms of the activities that otherwise take place in the outer world. These inner activities, if I may use the expression, of the spiritual researcher are nothing other than the continuation of what the soul life otherwise accomplishes in order to establish the relationship between human soul life and spiritual life, which is actually always there, but which is brought more or less into consciousness through these exercises.