4. The Spirit, Soul, and Body of Man

But it is precisely then that the spiritual researcher makes an essential distinction between the spiritual and the soul, even in the transition from the human being to the soul-spiritual environment in which the human being lives with that part of his being that goes through birth and death, which is the eternal, immortal in the human being in contrast to the transience of the body. This difference between the soul and the spirit arises from the fact that in the soul, which detaches itself from the human being and is not directly connected to the human being, we learn to recognize something that is, in a sense, only a faded keynote of what we otherwise experience in the life of the soul as thinking, feeling, and willing. I would like to express myself as follows: Let us take a sung song. We can consider the words, we can consider the song first as poetry, and we can continue this consideration while listening to the sung song. But we can also disregard the content of the words, the sentences, while singing, and pay attention to the mere sound, to the mere melody, to that which comes to light when we disregard the content of the words. It is only a comparison that I need, but the comparison has real significance in relation to what I am saying here. The whole experience of the human being in imagining, feeling, and willing can be grasped in such a way that one can also perceive an undertone if one does not go into the content of imagining, feeling, and willing as they appear in ordinary consciousness.