20. How Does the Soul Find Its True Essence?

If you continue with the exercises, you will come to something else. To express what I want to make clear, I would like to refer to the development of the child. It can be scientifically proven that human beings enter physical life in such a way that they first have to acquire the power of direction and position for external life. Animals enter physical life in a different way; the reasons for this are only apparent. Human beings enter life in such a way that they are initially crawling, helpless creatures and must first acquire the power of orientation. Significant spirits have always pointed out what it means for human beings to stand upright and be able to look up at the heavens. Humans acquire this in childhood. The powers within them awaken, enabling them to become upright beings. They give their whole body its external physiognomy; they put what they are as spirits into their bodies, which are given to them through heredity; the spirit straightens this body through forces that are peculiar to the human spirit — this can also be proven scientifically, but that would go too far today — which are not merely forces of the body, but are contained in the spiritual-soul, permeate the body, and give it its upright direction. What we put into the body in early childhood, what we pour into the body so that we become upright beings, we can also emancipate from the body, just as we emancipate the powers of thought and speech. This is, of course, the most difficult thing to do, but gradually one acquires the ability to truly extract from the body that which gives direction to the human being in childhood, so that one can give oneself any direction outside the body. In particular, one can learn to recognize the great difference between up and down; these are not spatial directions, but the direction up is an inner experience. Once you have emancipated the upward force from the body, something rises up in the soul, outside of the body, which the soul experiences deeply morally, something about which it can say: it is like working against gravity. However, this is not meant in a directional or spatial sense, but rather, what the soul experiences can be expressed as follows: by experiencing this “upward” movement, the soul feels increasingly lonely. And then, by truly experiencing this in the soul, one goes through all those moods that can be experienced under the impression of being more and more alone. Being so alone that one knows: there is a world outside of you, but you now perceive nothing of this world spiritually. You disappear, as it were, from this world and are more and more within yourself. This goes so far that if the soul is not attuned to this loneliness, as you can read in the book “How to Attain Knowledge of Higher Worlds,” this loneliness comes over the person in such a way that they feel a whole world within themselves, that they feel more and more only themselves in the ascent, as it were, and the world sinks away from them. This mood, in which the soul feels a world within itself, can in turn be associated with fear of oneself, that one is now going through all the tragic and all the blissful conflicts, that one becomes aware of everything that lies beneath the surface of the human soul.