XVIII. Spiritual Science and the Spiritual Goals of Our Time

This experience can only be made in a spiritual way, not through external experiments. Those who demand that the spiritual be established through external experiments should also demand that some experience they had fifty years ago be extracted with some kind of powder so that it can be prepared and made visible externally. Spiritual facts are not established externally. That which spiritual researchers of all times have called “approaching the gate of death”, that is, experiencing death in the image, that is, what a person experiences in real death when his eternal core detaches itself from the physical body, is experienced in the image in the serious experience, which so absorbs the soul of the person who has already had it once, imprinting on the soul that seriousness that can be expressed and felt with the words: You were connected to the deepest core of your being, to that which, as the eternal, spiritually permeates, lives through and interweaves the world. However, this seriousness is to be lived through painfully and not without making the greatest efforts to which man is unaccustomed. Not without surrendering what is otherwise considered pleasure and joy; what one otherwise likes in life, not without giving up what one otherwise strives for in life for certain moments, one attains this purest experience, which has been spoken of and points to light in the spiritual world. Then one attains something further when one adds the following to what has just been said: One must also give up everything that one perceives as desirable in everyday life, and one must give it up in such a way that one completely renounces everything that one otherwise desires, everything that one otherwise likes, that one gives up everything that gives one pleasure, and one must not give it up in such a way that one has only a very specific self-awareness in the devotion, but in such a way that one really renounces during this devotion all such activity that we otherwise call our complete devotion to the world, which one otherwise does not really know, that one gives up no compulsion and nothing that otherwise calls us to devotion in life. This must be added, and the spiritual world, into which we have entered, senses this with what we call the spiritual state.