4. The Spirit, Soul, and Body of Man

Spiritual science cannot simply take any word or any hypothetically assumed force as a basis where a phenomenon occurs, but must observe. It observes what the human soul experiences when it is in the waking state that everyone can experience. It observes the steady flow of conscious daily life from waking up to falling asleep. What does spiritual science find? It finds its way in particular when it uses its methods of observation to observe the intrusion of thoughts and ideas into this simple waking state. What does the spiritual researcher observe when he follows the calm stream of waking life and then the intrusion of ideas? The spiritual researcher finds that the ordinary bright waking state, which otherwise flows like a calm stream, is interrupted by a partial falling asleep in the grasping of thoughts, in the experiencing of thoughts. We wake up in such a way that we continually dampen the waking state to a partial sleep by bringing ideas into the waking state. We only learn about the soul's behavior in relation to the life of ideas by observing how the otherwise intense waking state is not dampened as strongly as in dreamless sleep, but is nevertheless dampened, and how every time this dampening occurs, thoughts that can be evoked by a perception fall into it. So we do not experience the normal waking state with a uniform intensity, but it is constantly dampened and dimmed as we form thoughts. Thus, what is otherwise present in sleep in a stronger or complete state of dullness continues into waking life in the form of imagination and thought life. This leads us to differentiate what we otherwise experience as a colorful succession of images in the waking state. What we otherwise know as waking and sleeping with a uniform degree of intensity must be learned to imagine with other degrees of intensity. We must be able to observe complete wakefulness, diminished wakefulness, complete sleep, diminished sleep, and so on.