20. How Does the Soul Find Its True Essence?

We have spoken of an increase in attention. There is something else that is also present between the lines of life, which we can increase indefinitely; that is what we call devotion — devotion as we experience it when we are so completely absorbed by something that we forget everything else around us and live solely with that which demands our devotion. We must devote ourselves passively, while we must be active in our attention. But this devotion must become universal, so to speak, if we want to become spiritual researchers. This must take place in such a way that we develop a mood of the soul that resembles sleep, but is nevertheless opposite to it. All will rests, even that will which expresses itself in the slightest movement of the limbs. All arbitrary thinking rests — perception rests — but the soul is awake, and it is awake in such a way that it is completely devoted to the stream of existence, that it develops that mood of absolute tranquility which the religious person perhaps knows when he is truly devout in prayer, but even the content of a prayer is not indulged in spiritual research — it would put the soul in a certain mood — but, I would say, merely be devoted with one's whole being to the eternal power of existence, which causes forces other than the mere powers of thought to be carried up from the soul. So I will now characterize a second force that we can draw from the realm of soul experience. When I speak to you in this way, I develop my words by directing my thoughts in my brain, so that they take hold of the speech organ. I express what I want to say to you with physical organs. Just as one can emancipate the power of thought from the physical brain organ through concentration, so one can detach the power that in ordinary life pours into the speech organs from the speech organ, and also from the brain, and develop it purely spiritually in complete external, I would say, silence. If one keeps what otherwise flows out into speech within the soul, developing it only inwardly, the unspoken inner word becomes lively, the word that cannot be heard with a physical organ, the word that one hears inwardly, through inner listening to one's own self. And this word, this silent but all the more clearly spiritually speaking word, which is attained through the emancipation of the power of speech from the physical speech organ — this inner word is what one might call the “spiritual outer world.” Just as one is surrounded in the physical world by beings from the mineral, plant, animal, and human kingdoms, so, when one detaches the power of thought and speech from the body, one enters, through inner soul-spiritual experience, a world in which one is surrounded by spiritual beings, spiritual forces, and spiritual processes.