20. How Does the Soul Find Its True Essence?

Dear attendees, I pointed out that when a person frees their soul from the body through concentration and meditation, they experience something that can be called inner facial expressions, inner gestures, inner physiognomy. By experiencing this, human beings already experience in this life what will then completely surround the soul in the spiritual world after death. Knowledge of the spiritual world enters this world, and the soul recognizes itself by finding itself rooted in its true essence in the spiritual world. It is understandable that there is little understanding for these debates in our present time; when we look at our present, we understand this. Yes, what do people pay most attention to today? I would like to use a trivial comparison: an advertisement on a billboard announces “A lecture with slides.” Next to it is an advertisement for a lecture without slides. Which lecture do people feel most inclined to attend? Well, the one where they can passively indulge themselves, where they don't need to be active, where everything is presented so beautifully in pictures. Spiritual science cannot proceed in this way. Although what is seen in the spirit could also be presented in pictures, I have only tried to work through the mere word, which can affect thinking and feeling. Spiritual science can only count on the active cooperation of the soul. We have had to experience in our time that an article appeared in a significant weekly magazine in which the following was said: When you read Spinoza and Kant, yes, the concepts get mixed up. You can't make sense of it. This is true for many people today. But the philosopher now makes a suggestion: Why shouldn't we also make use of a new technical achievement here? Make a film! Sit down in front of a film and watch Spinoza being presented to you, first how he begins to grind lenses, then how thoughts arise in him, how his philosophy develops, and so on and so forth. All you have to do is passively surrender yourself; thoughts no longer swirl around in your head. That is in keeping with the taste of our time! In a slide show, one would see how Spinoza's “Ethics” and Kant's “Critique of Pure Reason” came into being. People would go to such a lecture.