5. Nature and Its Mysteries in the Light of Spiritual Research

This is initially only one of the paths that the spiritual researcher must follow; others are similar. What matters is that human soul activity is strengthened to such an extent that it truly detaches itself from the physical. This must be experienced, and it can be experienced precisely by detaching oneself from the physical and becoming imbued with the spiritual. If one goes through the exercises that consist of such a strengthening of the soul life, then one gradually comes to be able to say — of course, this can only be achieved on the basis of the spiritual scientific method — what the spiritual actually is that works in the soul element of the human being. One makes the meaningful inner discovery that gives one's whole life a new direction, the shocking discovery — as simple as it may be to describe, it is shocking when experienced — that by training one's thinking more and more as pure thinking — not through the exertion of any physical functions — one comes to a point where one realizes: you can no longer get by with your habitual way of thinking. Thinking is just like when you have a weight lying there and at first mistakenly believe that you can lift it, and then realize that your hands and arms are too weak to lift it. Outwardly, it becomes apparent that the physical organ is too weak for the task at hand. Something very similar, transferred to the spiritual-soul realm, can happen to the spiritual researcher when he has brought his thinking so far through meditation that it is imbued with spirit. He then feels that he cannot go any further, he feels that the tool of the brain is not ready to really grasp a thought that he now wants to grasp, which is imbued with spirit. One must have experienced the resistance that the brain or the physical body can offer in order to appreciate, on the one hand, the dependence of ordinary consciousness on this physicality and, on the other hand, to experience that the physicality can also be too weak to sustain a thought that is grasped in the spirit. When one has such an experience — that physicality can be too weak and thought too strong — one knows that there is an immediately experiential, visible spirituality that is independent of the body, into which one can enter through appropriate methods. In fact, one gradually comes to a direct perception of a spiritual world by — it must be said again and again, although it is a paradox for today's world — placing one's soul activity outside the physical body. There one learns to recognize what it means to be filled with spirit in the same way that one is otherwise filled with the ordinary conception of physical activity. One learns to distinguish between the soul life based on the body and the soul life based on the spirit.