4. The Spirit, Soul, and Body of Man

If one sets out to achieve full self-observation while maintaining the content of imagination, feeling, and will as one has it in ordinary waking consciousness, one usually discovers the workings of the spirit most easily. The soul, on the other hand, is more intimate and often elusive. One must undertake difficult and lengthy exercises if one wants to arrive at this. While it is relatively easier to discover how the mind deteriorates in the flowing waking state, one must use more subtle, more intimate exercises to observe how the ideas that arise are partial states of sleep. But when one arrives at this more intimate experience of the soul through methods such as those I have described in my books, one also moves beyond the merely subjective life of the soul into the objective life of the soul. One then pursues not only the spiritual-soul life as such, as one pursues the air from the lungs into the airspace, into that spiritual space which the human being experiences between death and a new birth, in a purely spiritual experience, but one can then pursue the soul life in its state before birth and in its state after death. As strange as this may sound to people today, these things can be experienced. And on the basis of this experience, which Easterners develop in a way that is so close to their intimate soul life, they realized earlier than Westerners how the entire human soul life unfolds in repeated earthly lives, how repeated earthly lives really result from observation. It is a result of observing soul experience. Experiencing the eternal, imperishable, which passes through births and deaths, in its spirituality is now something different from this soul experience as it occurs in repeated earthly lives. It is like a specialization, a differentiation of spiritual experience.