4. The Eternal Forces of the Human Soul in the Light of Spiritual Science

There are two ways of exercising our soul life in our ordinary lives: one is more in line with the way we imagine and feel, with the way we imagine and feel as human beings; the other is more in line with the way we will as human beings. Feeling is, after all, something between thinking and willing. Today we will try to see how, on the one hand, the human being's imaginative nature can be developed and, on the other, the will, so that through this development the human being can come to a knowledge of the eternal powers of the human soul. The one fundamental power that first appears in its outer form in ordinary soul life is thinking. The way thinking reveals itself in this ordinary life of the soul leads only to a kind of overview of what is given to us through the senses. Spiritual science now seeks — and in doing so it acts entirely in the spirit of the real scientific world view — spiritual science now seeks, just as natural science tries to eavesdrop on nature's secrets through external experiments, to find the way into those spheres where the soul life can reveal its secrets through intimate soul experiments. Ordinary thinking, as it occurs in everyday life, is not sufficient for this; but this thinking is capable of development, is capable of becoming stronger - and this inner strengthening of thinking has also been referred to here several times. The technical term is used to describe what the soul has to do as “meditation” and by that is meant the inwardly evoked, particularly strong thought processes, which in ordinary life do not proceed in this sought-after way, but differently. In ordinary life, we use thinking to create images of our sensory environment and of what happens within human life that can be perceived from the outside, which we can take in as imagination. This is important for ordinary life. Now, by taking an intimate look at the inner life of the soul, by making it its business to pursue the soul life as the natural scientist pursues nature in the experiment, spiritual science discovers that thinking has a completely different side. Perhaps I can make this other side of the human mind more understandable by saying, by way of comparison, that when a person works with his hands, he does this or that; the result of the work of the hand is then there, can be seen externally. If a person works with his hand continually, he not only does this, which is visible externally, but we know that when he works in this way, he changes the inner strength of the hand itself; the hand becomes stronger and more skillful, is brought into a certain direction of its activity. Something is achieved by the hand itself. I would say that this runs parallel to the activity of what is externally visible: a perfection of the handling, in addition to the results achieved by the work! It is the same with human thinking. Human thinking, as it unfolds, gives rise to thoughts about what is in the surrounding environment or elsewhere in the course of the world. These thoughts are the main thing at first, just as the external results are for manual labor; but as it is carried out, it strengthens itself within, it is something that undergoes a certain development within itself. Of course, we look at the development in the hand; but we do not really look at the intimate inner development that thinking undergoes in thinking.