4. The Spirit, Soul, and Body of Man

This is an idea that, it must be admitted, is quite unfamiliar to worldviews that draw their firm roots from the soil from which, almost exclusively in the present, worldviews want to draw their roots. For everything in these worldviews tends to deny the possibility that human beings can develop a soul life that is independent of the body, and when the results of self-observation are presented in this way, they are criticized with what has been gained from the outer world or what has resulted for the power of judgment from this outer world. This is not acceptable. Misunderstandings upon misunderstandings are created for the simple reason that all spiritual research must be based on the exact opposite of what must underlie the scientific way of thinking, even though spiritual research is structured entirely according to the model of scientific research. Thinking and the methodical development of thinking in experimentation and so on are arranged in such a way that human beings apply the scientific methods developed by their power of judgment and understanding to eavesdrop on the secrets of nature, so that through their understanding they bring things into this or that connection, whereby they express their essence, their secrets. This is quite natural on the basis of scientific thinking. But the same power of thinking and imagining that is used to develop all kinds of scientific methods is used in spiritual science to prepare the soul so that it can then observe what the results of spiritual science are. This serves to prepare the soul so that it can observe the phenomena of soul life in a way that is completely free from the body. In this way, the human being can move out of the soul into the spirit, just as he is moved out of the soul into the body on the other side by scientific methods. So that one can say that the whole nature of demonstrative, judgmental thinking must become different in spiritual science. It must not be omitted, but what is achieved with it is not a consideration of reasons and consequences in the same way as in external science, but rather an ability to observe, because the methods of external science have first been applied to the development of the soul itself.