20. How Does the Soul Find Its True Essence?

So the first thing that can be separated from the physical body is the power of thought, and if one has the perseverance to continue the exercises described for a longer period of time, one can experience this emancipation from the physical organ of thought as one's first supersensible experience. It is only a matter of overcoming certain obstacles in order to have such experiences. People, for example, whose interests are limited to what constitutes physical existence alone, who are unable to develop broad-minded interests, will certainly encounter serious obstacles when they attempt what has just been described. A broad-mindedness of interests, an ability to respond to the beauty and sublimity that every being in the physical world already offers, must be inherent in the soul. Those who are only interested in themselves will notice that to the same extent that they do the exercises — anyone can do them, the important thing is to do them correctly — those who are completely absorbed in their usual egoistic thinking will notice that, as they progress through the exercises described, something comes over their soul that can be called a certain inner fear of the world they are to enter, which they experience outside the body. This fear is basically always present in the soul, only one is not aware of it. In spiritual science, one speaks of the threshold that separates the sensory world from the spiritual, the earthly from the super-earthly. It is said that one must cross this threshold, and it is even said that this threshold is guarded by a guardian, which of course refers to a spiritual force. This means that it is true, and spiritual science confirms this, that, as Fichte says, the spiritual world is always around us and that we can also find our way into it. Why does this spiritual world not always appear before the human soul like the physical world? Because what the budding spiritual researcher can experience through experiences such as those just described causes fear to arise in the soul, because this fear is in the soul; and this fear is a good remedy against an immature intrusion into the spiritual world. This fear is always there in souls, but it does not manifest itself as fear; rather, it manifests itself in the fact that people slacken in the efforts they could make to enter the spiritual world. They become seemingly casual, no longer interested in continuing the exercises; but in truth it is fear that they do not feel because they do not perceive it as fear. One can even say that spiritual research proves with certainty where the materialistic attitude of humanity actually comes from. In our time, there are materialistic souls who say that either one cannot speak of a spiritual world, or that one should not concern oneself with it because human cognition is directed only toward the sensory world. They also say that it is unscientific to speak of a life in the spirit. Yes, such people – today they are elegantly called “monists,” in the past they were called “materialists” – consider themselves particularly scientific when they completely reject the spiritual world, when they say that science has nothing to do with the spiritual world. Certainly, it is not exactly appropriate to find followers among these people, who are, I would say, rigid monists, when one speaks the truth about these facts, but this truth is nevertheless true. It is not logical reasons, not anything that can be proven, that keep the soul captive in materialism or monism, but rather fear, which people do not recognize as fear, which they do not admit to themselves as fear. It conjures up ideas such as that it is unscientific to see the spiritual world. Those who see through things know that souls gather in materialist assemblies because fear of the spiritual world reigns in all of them. It is not pleasant to tell people that they are basically fearful souls, that they clothe this fear in a false logic, as if they could prove that only the facts of the physical world are valid.