4. The Spirit, Soul, and Body of Man

The other thing is that, precisely in such inner spiritual-soul activity, one learns that one must not try to penetrate the spiritual world with the power of judgment gained on the basis of observation of the sensory world, not even in the negative sense of saying that human cognition cannot go beyond itself at this point. Rather, one must refrain from entering the spiritual world with what one had in one's soul before one prepared oneself through these and similar exercises to truly enter the spiritual world. This requires a certain resignation, it requires renunciation. While people are generally accustomed to using what they have conquered in the outer world to formulate hypotheses and all kinds of logical conclusions about what might or might not be beyond physical experience, the spiritual researcher must make it not only an inner conviction, but — and I say this explicitly — an inner intellectual virtue not to use what comes only from physical-sensory reality for the characterization of the spiritual world, for the contemplation of the spiritual world. This renunciation must first be acquired; it must become a habitual quality of the soul, so that one refrains from making mere hypotheses or mere philosophical discussions about what lies beyond physical-sensory observation. One then struggles to the realization that in order to penetrate the spiritual world, the soul must first make itself ripe for it. What gradually develops through the full establishment of this intellectual virtue, supported by the introduction of the will into the life of imagination, as I have described, leads one to be able to practice the self-observation I spoke of earlier, which really enables one to be, as it were, one's own spectator while thoughts, feelings, and impulses of the will are taking place. Only through such true self-observation does the human being come to develop a spiritual activity which, as he knows from experience, is not performed with the help of the body, but is performed by the human being standing outside the body with his true self.