17. A Healthy Emotional Life and Spiritual Research

The spiritual researcher takes the following stand on these matters, and stands by it so firmly that what he has to advocate becomes spiritual research practice. He takes this standpoint: the ordinary mental life that makes us familiar with the physical environment in a healthy way, and with much of what can be grasped about the physical environment through the mind that is tied to the brain, this mental life is bound to the whole human body in its thinking, feeling and willing. The normally organized human body is the tool for this outwardly healthy spiritual life. If true enlightenment is to occur, so that one really looks into a spiritual world, then the human being must rise above this normal, ordinary looking at things, which is bound to the body, to a healthy body. He must make his looking more comprehensive. And above all, he must make it more suitable, more subject to the will. He must do it in such a way that, while a large part of what takes place in ordinary mental life remains unconscious precisely because the body serves as an instrument, in spiritual contemplation man cannot be as passive as he is in ordinary contemplation, but must be active in everything he contemplates; he must develop will, inner activity. In short, in true clairvoyance, the human being's experience becomes broader than that which is bound to the body.