4. The Spirit, Soul, and Body of Man

To express myself even more clearly, I would like to characterize the matter from another angle. You are all aware that certain Oriental peoples ascend to the spiritual-soul realm through methods which, as I have repeatedly stated in the lectures I have given here and also in my books, are not applicable in the same way to our Western cultural development, but that other methods must be used here for conscious spiritual research. However, some comparisons can be made. You know that Easterners attain a certain knowledge of the soul — which they may not admit, but that is not important now — by repeating mantras over and over again. In the West, people laugh at the repetitions in the Buddha's speeches, not realizing that for Easterners, this repetition of certain phrases is a necessity because it allows them to achieve a certain undertone in their inner reception of the material, disregarding its immediate content. I would say that, in a sense, a music that lives in these sayings is heard or spoken in the soul. The soul transports itself into something like this. In my books you can find how we do this in a more spiritual and soulful way in Western spiritual development, so that we do not fall into such chanting or reciting of mantric sayings or repetitions. But what is achieved in a different way can be explained by drawing attention to how something is experienced in imagining, feeling, and willing, which is a fundamental or underlying tone.