V. The Mystery of the Human Being

In ordinary life one person may be a monist, another a dualist, the third a materialist, the fourth a spiritualist and so on. If we learn to immerse ourselves in the life of our mental images our concepts take on a different aspect in the living inner experience of the world of our mental images so that we come to recognize: Of course, there are concepts of materialism, they can be used for a particular province, for a particular sphere of the world. In fact, they must be available, for one can only get something out of immersing oneself in a particular sphere of the world if one has grasped materialism in all its many aspects. For another sphere of the world spiritualistic concepts are needed, for a third, monistic, for a fourth, the concept of idealism and so on. Monistic, dualistic concepts—they enrich the life of our minds and we know that such concepts mean no more than do different photographs of a tree taken from different points. We learn now to immerse ourselves in an inner element, an inner tolerance, that once again is an outpouring of moral substances over our inner life. It is just like someone receiving a picture of a tree that he has actually seen, who would never say, if he received a picture of the tree taken from a different angle, that it was not the same tree. Just as we can have four or even eight pictures which all portray the same tree, so we learn to look at all sorts of ideas, which singly would represent a one sided picture of reality, and to learn about them, to look into them with great care and immerse ourselves in their manifoldness. This is normally underrated when it comes to doing the exercises which have now to be undertaken. This is something that is not much understood today, even by the best, but it does lead to the further development of the will in a way similar to the development of the mind that I have described. We then experience that the will liberates itself from being bound to the body.