14. How Can We Know About Supernatural Worlds?

Rudolf Steiner: [This] can certainly occur, but without being truly at home in genuine spiritual research, one can expose oneself to the most serious errors. Only the right methods, as described today, lead to what progresses from incarnation to incarnation, what is conscious and alive, not what peels away, as it were, from spiritual nature; that can produce such things; so that, if one bases oneself on this, [some things] appear to be entirely justified, [such as] what Deinhard reports [in his] “Mystery of Man.” This leads one to believe that one has proof that behind the sensory there is a spiritual realm. But only true spiritual research proves what dissolves. This is where Maeterlinck failed, because he is not familiar with this, easily mistaking what is withering and dying for what is active and becoming. [This is] very easily possible. Here one eliminates the false, [which] is not so easily possible in the spiritual world, where it is quite possible to mistake something for something else; therein lie most errors, not in dealing with hallucinations and delusions.