20. How Does the Soul Find Its True Essence?

The spiritual researcher becomes familiar with this mood. And he becomes familiar with another mood, which can be described as “going down,” the mood in which the soul feels as if it were radiating its own soul light, so to speak. Just as in physical life we see and perceive things because the sun shines on them, so in the spiritual world we must let the light of the spirit itself shine on things. And moments of loneliness flow into us when we slacken in letting the inner sun shine. When the light of the inner sun shines, we spread ourselves, as it were, over the world of other beings. What could be called “spiritual companionship,” “spiritual togetherness” with the souls who died before or after us, with those we lived with, or with those who are on earth—for from the spirit world we perceive the souls who are still incarnated on earth—this state of spiritual spiritual perception, living in it, alternates between death and a new birth with the state of loneliness. The two states alternate with the same regularity as day and night alternate in our physical life. In this way, one acquires the ability to feel, as it were, lonely, but with an inner world, to feel poured out over the spiritual world and its beings and processes. But one also learns to know other forces that can be compared to right and left, front and back. But by becoming attuned to these forces, by allowing the soul to develop these forces, which we are unaware of in ordinary life but which arise in the subconscious when the soul gives itself its first physiognomy for the world, by developing all these forces, one of which is the power of uprightness, we acquire the ability to to live further into the spiritual world, into the world of spiritual beings that surround us, then we come completely out of ourselves. We look at our body outside ourselves and we can enter into the other spiritual beings, we can take on their physiognomy. For while we develop our first physiognomy, our upright gait, here, we must take on the inner constitution of spiritual beings in the spiritual world. In this way, the soul connects, as it were, with the world in which its spiritual being is truly rooted.