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

When this inner meditation bears fruit, then something very special occurs in the mind of the spiritual researcher. Namely, the spiritual researcher can notice when he has gone through this path of concentrated thinking, through the dying away of thinking, the feeling into higher, supersensible entities - which, as it were, absorb him, as we absorb a thought. When the spiritual researcher has gone through all this, then he experiences within himself, or rather observes within himself, something like an inner protest, like an inner opposition to what he himself has done with his entire spiritual research journey. And this protest can be expressed in such a way that one says: the spiritual researcher, through his concentrated thinking, arrives at a point where he feels that he has dissolved with his soul life. And he struggles against this dissolving. This inner protest, which is again a harrowing experience, lessens, stops, is overcome when the exercise of taking hold of fate is done, when one becomes immersed in fate. And just as one can say that the thought dies in concentrated thinking when it has reached its highest energy, so one can say: one perceives by entering into the stream of fate, one perceives how the will itself, which is otherwise within the human being, is grasped by the stream of fate. While we usually see the external world of fate as something standing opposite us and our will as something within us, we experience our own will in what we encounter as fate. We learn to see in our will that through which we shape ourselves in life. Our will is awakened and gradually pours over our entire destiny. When one has undergone such an exercise for a long time, one experiences to the full what the second element of spiritual research development is. The second element is the awakening of the sleeping will in our destiny. We wake up ourselves outside of us in the stream of our destiny, we enter with what we are into what we otherwise call the external.