20. How Does the Soul Find Its True Essence?

Spiritual chemistry! Well, if we want to use the expression as one that is supposed to make the matter understandable to us: When you look at water, you cannot see that the chemist can separate hydrogen from it, because hydrogen cannot be seen in water. Water extinguishes fire, hydrogen burns. Just as little as the essence of hydrogen can be seen when you have water in front of you, so little can the essence of the soul be seen in the human being standing before us in the body. But just as the chemist separates hydrogen from water as something that has completely different properties from water, so the spiritual researcher, using his own soul as a tool for his research, separates his soul from his body through concentration; he separates his spiritual-soul from his physical-bodily. If an abstract, monistic natural science or worldview that does not take facts into account calls this dualism, one can calmly bear such a reproach. One might just as well say that there is dualism in water; water is not merely a unity, a monos, but in order to get to know it, one must extract the hydrogen. Just as hydrogen can be extracted from water by physical chemistry, so the spiritual-soul aspect is separated from the physical-bodily aspect by processes such as the one described above—other such processes can be found in the books mentioned. And the spiritual researcher then experiences the significant, the great moment when he can really connect meaning with words that, if one knows nothing about the facts of spiritual experience, one cannot connect with meaning: I experience myself as a soul-spiritual being independent of my body, outside my body. And since I do not want to speak in abstractions, but rather about the facts of spiritual experience, about the facts of discovering the true nature of the soul, I will not refrain from describing individual experiences that the spiritual researcher goes through.