XVIII. Spiritual Science and the Spiritual Goals of Our Time

Likewise, one can detach the faculty of speech from the tool that otherwise serves language. When we speak, a certain part of the brain is externally active, which we have to use as a tool of our body, the one that specifically leads to the larynx. The one who studies the secrets of human speech knows that, even when one is thinking, finer movements take place internally than the coarser external speech movements. Now, as a spiritual researcher, one must be able to grasp the inner activity of the soul, which one otherwise expresses in speech. The mental researcher must detach it from the sound and the word; he must keep it as an inner activity, not allowing it to become a word, not shaping it into words, and he must keep it so inwardly that not even the parts of the brain that are otherwise active when speaking are used. He detaches the power of speech from speaking. He learns to keep something inwardly in his soul that otherwise vibrates inwardly when speaking. Then he does not speak, but what otherwise floods and pulses through the soul in the word is a strong power, a power through which he not only performs inner facial expressions, but also what can be called inner gestures, inner gesticulation, signs. Then not only intermediate states of the spiritual world, intermediate processes of perception, come to light, but the spiritual world itself is revealed, revealed in us, when we can imitate it in inner gestures. And only through the power of language will it be possible to imitate the processes of the spiritual world.