20. How Does the Soul Find Its True Essence?

Talking about this world is still not really forgiven today, so to speak; individual philosophers already allow us to speak of a spiritual world in general, because they already recognize the absurdity of denying such a world, but they say: Behind the sensory world there is a spiritual world. - And certain spirits already consider themselves to be highly elevated when they pay homage to so-called “pantheism.” For those who see through things, this is no more valuable than the pannaturalist who, walking across a meadow, would say: What do I care about yellow or red flowers, these forests, those mountains and valleys and rivers—it's all nature, nature, nature. I am not interested in the fact that there are individual physical processes that can be observed. Just as such a person in pan-naturalism wanted to call everything nature, so the person who only wants to allow one to speak of spirit in a pantheistic sense, in a pantheistic way, stands in opposition to the spiritual world. This is opposed by true spiritual research, which really separates the soul-spiritual from the physical-bodily, just as hydrogen is different from water. This spiritual science enters the spiritual world in such a way that it distinguishes the individual concrete processes and beings of the spiritual world, of which we must say: Just as we stand here in the physical world as human beings and look at beings of the mineral, plant, animal, and human kingdoms, so we stand opposite the spiritual world through spiritual research; but now we are no longer on the highest level, but on the lowest, and above us, as our soul itself lives into the spiritual world as a spiritual being, the hierarchy of higher spirits begins. We ascend to the sequence of stages of spiritual beings to which we belong with our soul and spirit, just as we belong to the physical-mineral kingdom through our physical body.