20. How Does the Soul Find Its True Essence?

If you stand in ordinary life, where, like hydrogen to oxygen, the soul-spiritual is bound to the physical, then, dear audience, you see the world in such a way that you know: you develop the power of your soul through the tools of your body; you use your senses, your brain; you live in this body of yours. — The first thing you know, after doing the exercises I mentioned, is that you live with your soul and spirit outside your body. This is what you might call the power of thought. In ordinary life, you know about this power of thought: you can use it because your thinking is connected to your brain. But now you experience yourself weaving thoughts and existing outside your brain. What I am telling you is not a fairy tale or a hypothesis, but something that anyone who does the relevant exercises can experience; they come to know: now you live in your thought life as if hovering around your own brain; the power of your thinking develops outside your body. This moment is experienced as particularly striking, one might say particularly shocking. If you make an effort to do the exercises for a while, there comes a time when you cannot yet really experience thinking outside the brain. It is something that spreads like a dreamlike twilight, as a result of concentration; but the moment when you submerge yourself back into the brain, when the thinking that takes place outside the body merges into the thinking inside the body, is actually the first thing you notice very clearly. You feel how you submerge again with the being you experienced outside your body, like something you penetrate with difficulty, and how, in pleasant currents, you feel your thinking being draw into your body and permeate your brain in order to use it again for external thinking. These facts are such that it is understandable that many people today must say: “He who says this is talking nonsense; these are the fantasies of a half-madman.” But these are the facts through which people will recognize how to learn to recognize the true nature of the soul. These are facts that will spread in the culture of the future, for souls thirst for them, even if they are not yet conscious of it. These facts will spread just as the Copernican worldview once spread, that the earth moves through space at great speed.