5. Ways of Knowing the Eternal Powers of the Human Soul

Spiritual science is in complete harmony with natural science - especially with that part of natural science, esteemed attendees, that will, on the whole, gain in popularity. Spiritual science does not take the view that thinking, as it is practiced in ordinary physical life, does not need a physical instrument. It needs a physical instrument. That is to say, wherever it occurs, ordinary thinking needs physical representations that are carried out. But these are destructive representations. And at the moment when, through meditation, one has brought one's thinking to the point that I have described, when one can replace thoughts and develop thinking through thinking itself , one is confronted with full clarity by how ordinary physical thinking is bound to the physical tool - that is, to the destructive power, to the death-bringing power - of ordinary memory. One has an inner experience of standing at the gate of death. One knows now what it means: there are forces within the soul that can separate themselves from the body, but that, in separating, must also look at what is death-bringing in the body.