10. The Supernatural Human Being III

Externally, apart from everything physiological, something occurs that can, in a sense, be taken as historical evidence for what has just been said. You know that certain ascetics, who, admittedly, take a false path rather than a spiritual one in order to attain spiritual life, also starve themselves. This “starvation,” which is brought about not by a normal but by an abnormal life, is what leads people to be more aware of what is going on inside them. This is what, in an abnormal way that is not useful for spiritual research, brings about a stronger self-awareness and thus a stronger spiritual experience. This instinct to have spiritual experiences through experiences of hunger is based on an exaggeration of the true basic facts, namely that normal conscious life in imagination and thinking is actually based on a feeling of hunger, on a process of hunger in the head. And as I said, when one discovers this in inner contemplation, one realizes that this regressive process is present, that it is actually based on degradation, and that thinking does not occur as a fact based on further development, but precisely on the suppression of organic life, which it replaces. And once you see through this, once you contemplate this marvel of the human organism, once you don't just proceed as the abstract mystics do, who repeatedly declaim: To attain knowledge of God, one must become one with the higher self, and so on, which are all just figures of speech, but when one really advances to self-knowledge and grasps the human essence in such a way that one can say: what occurs in this essence is due to what occurs as the feeling of hunger in the human organism, — when one penetrates to the concrete in this way, one realizes that what lives as thinking in the human being is, curiously enough, an unconscious inspiration. This thinking reaches the human being in its effects in such a way that he can judge mere associations of ideas as something external, because an inspiration approaches him, but remains unconscious. The spiritual researcher penetrates into the activity of thinking, into that activity which occurs when the organism regresses, and he recognizes that he is dealing with inspiration. And if one investigates, from the point of view developed earlier, as I have described, what lies at the basis of this inspiration, that is, if one dives into the inspiration and then emerges again, then this is the way to discover the spiritual-soul being of the human being before birth or conception, to discover what is actually connected with what comes down in the stream of heredity from father and mother, grandfather and grandmother, and so on. One comes to what is embodied through conception; one comes to what is the spiritual-soul past of the human being in relation to their present in the body. One comes to a direct perception of the eternal in the human being.