14. How Can We Know About Supernatural Worlds?

This makes the spiritual researcher radically different from those who experience hallucinations, visions, and delusions, which they stubbornly want to take as objective things. The spiritual researcher must not allow this to happen. He must know that he has only conjured up shadow images, that he must make them disappear again from his spiritual gaze. It is part of a certain stage to have the ability to erase the [images] again. Yes, erasing them – one can see how greedily the soul clings to its delusions – this erasing is one of the most difficult things of all. Why? Because not only do the forces we have spoken of grow, but also others that are otherwise only weakly present. For one force is strengthened by the strengthening of the other force, which is self-will, self-love, self-love in ordinary life, which grows like a force of nature. In ordinary life, self-love is overcome by moral strength; but lightning and thunder are not. But just like natural elements and forces, the intensified self-love, the self-will, appears in our soul. Therefore, the development of the soul that leads to spiritual research must also bring with it the ability for humans to overcome the intensified self-will within themselves, which is now like a force of nature in humans, [so] that the soul feels helpless. Ordinary strength is not enough for this.