20. How Does the Soul Find Its True Essence?

Everything I have tried to describe is really – I must express it somewhat trivially – a kind of spiritual chemistry. The soul becomes free from the physical body and enters into a new connection, like hydrogen when it is taken out of water. This new connection is the connection with the world in which the soul is actually rooted as in its true home. Of course, someone might say: Well, then it is only the spiritual researcher who can know something about the spiritual world! So one would have to become a spiritual researcher in order to truly settle into this spiritual world. — That is not the case, dear audience. Just as one does not need to be a painter to understand a picture that a painter has made, one does not need to be a spiritual researcher to find what the spiritual researcher explores comprehensible and understandable. Although, as you can see from my books, it is possible for everyone in our time to become a spiritual researcher to a certain extent, it is not necessary to become one. You have to be a painter if you want to paint pictures; you have to be a spiritual researcher to penetrate the spiritual world; but if what is explored in this spiritual world is described, if the right words for this spiritual world can truly be found in the physical world, then what the spiritual researcher has to say can be understood by every soul. And then what the spiritual researcher has to say is truly not like any other theory, but relates to life in a completely different way. One can say: it is not only true that one must be a chemist oneself in order to investigate chemical processes, but not in order to understand what the chemist has researched; just as one does not need to cultivate the field oneself and yet lives off it, just as one does not need to know everything that has to happen to obtain food, and does not have to do the work oneself, yet still enjoy the food. Similarly, what the spiritual researcher has to say—if it is rooted in truth—penetrates to a mysterious language that is present in every soul, truly present in every soul. This language is present in every soul. And if many people today still believe that what the spiritual researcher says is absurd, that it is insane, it is only because these people have acquired prejudices instead of the ability to judge. Once the significance of external science is truly recognized, these prejudices will disappear, and then these mysterious powers of understanding, which already exist in souls today, will come to the fore, and people will understand spiritual science because it strikes secret chords in the human soul that must sound, just as surely as our taste buds develop taste when food is brought to them.