2. The Human Soul, Destiny and Death from the Point of View of Spiritual Science

But now there is one thing that must be taken into account as particularly characteristic when the spiritual researcher goes through the path just characterized. Let us recall once more what this path consists of: it consists in the fact that, with distraction of attention from all external sense world, with the most intense attention, increased to the unlimited, one only lives in perceptions and concepts that one's own soul can awaken in itself. In this way, one gradually enters into an inner life that has been intensified and concentrated in this way. Now the strange thing is: the more one succeeds in driving this inner concentration to a certain point, the more one comes to experience inner tension, in which one says to oneself: “You are now completely absorbed in what you have set out to do, you have forgotten your entire physicality and environment, you live only in your concentrated thoughts, the more you notice from a certain level on - because before this the inner thought life becomes stronger and stronger - you notice that this inner thought life undergoes an extinguishing in itself, it becomes less and less intense. And a peculiar experience occurs, which could be described as follows: It is as if the thought on which one has concentrated takes one with it with all one's soul forces and dissipates into the general ether of the world. This is the result of this tense, heightened, one might say technically conducted, increase in inner concentration and attention.