IX. Errors of Spiritual Research

Someone who rejects everything spiritual, who is a strict materialist, will not apply any method to his soul as described yesterday; all of this is nonsense and folly to him. From his materialistic point of view, he is right. But the one who, as a spiritual researcher, not only sees the material effect in life, but can look into the whole mechanism of life, into the spiritual forces that stand behind the sensual, knows that it is not the material opinion that prevents this person, who rejects all methods of spiritual research, from coming to it. Man can deny the spiritual world if he wants. But this spiritual world does not only exist in a separate spiritual realm; this spiritual world is also present everywhere in the sensual, material world. Even in the matter that the materialist alone observes, spirit is present everywhere. But this spirit, which only lives in the material, is the spirit, the power that, when it works through man – and it does so when he has the thinking habits of moving only in the material – causes him to be incapable of directing his soul's reflection, his soul's direction, to the spirit at all. There is something in all material existence that has such an effect on us that it draws us away from the spirit, distracts us. There we see how error works.