The Essence of Anthroposophy

This, ladies and gentlemen, can only be realized, I would say, through the experience itself. In the practice of thinking, as I have described it to you, of thinking that has been thoroughly worked through, it becomes apparent how one moves freely in thought and then has the thoughts as something like an external table or some other object. And just as little as one would think of placing an external object in the interior of the soul or the human body, so little would one, when one has penetrated into such a modified imagination, place what then arises in consciousness only in the interior of the organism. It is an experience that one comes to a soul life that takes place outside the body. It is important, my dear audience, that this first stage, the stage of imaginative knowledge, be transcended before moving on to higher stages.