8. The Harmony Between Spiritual Science and Natural Science and the Misconceptions about the Former and the Building Dedicated to it in Dornach

Today, I would like to address these various possible and, as you will see, quite understandable objections. The day before yesterday, I tried to show that the spiritual researcher does indeed come to the conclusion that the human soul can be penetrated into the spiritual world, but that this conviction develops in such a way that it is simultaneously connected with the insight that it cannot be the same soul forces, the same cognitive abilities that lead into the spiritual world and those that lead the human soul to penetrate into the sensory world and everything that belongs to it in a sensory way; that it is rather necessary for the spiritual researcher to first develop and develop out of the ordinary thinking, feeling and willing, as they and ordinary science know and control, to first develop and evolve other soul abilities and other soul events through which the soul is then enabled to carry itself alive into the spiritual world and in this way to receive something that can be called spiritual science. I have pointed out that it is first necessary to practise what is called thinking and what is called imagining in a very specific way, so that something arises out of ordinary thinking and out of ordinary imagining that is no longer the same as this ordinary thinking and imagining, but has become something different, which, above all, differs from ordinary thinking and imagining in that it experiences itself, comes to life, in order not just to rise up in images like this ordinary thinking, but to experience itself in reality. This transition of the soul's rising in images, as is the case with ordinary thinking in ordinary life and in ordinary science, this rising in images must be transformed into a living in real being. In this way, when one has attained this, one actually discovers something that the soul could not previously know, of which it could not even form a concept; for it cannot be grasped by any ordinary concepts, but must be directly experienced if it is to come to consciousness, even though it is continually present in every soul. As a result of this - I said the day before yesterday - the soul, through the strengthening of its power, through the intensification of its thinking, on the one hand, manages to lift itself out of the body, to become independent of the body and to experience itself in a reality, so that it knows: You have now stepped out of your body with your thinking.