Anthroposophy and Knowledge of the Spirit

When we speak as human beings of the difficulties we face when enigmatic questions arise about the spiritual world, when we speak of such difficulties, these difficulties cannot relate to the existence of a spiritual world as such, to which the human being feels connected in his earthly existence. For man needs only to reflect on himself, and he lives in a spiritual world. Through his spirit, he is cognitively related to the things around him, to the actions he performs himself. And even the most ardent materialist does not deny this relationship of man to the spiritual world, insofar as man is always aware of his spirit in the waking state. The difficulty only begins when man looks at the nature of this spirit, in that he can actually see his human dignity, his true human value, only through it. Man must indeed say to himself: I have the spirit. As I said, even the worst materialist does not deny that. At most, he believes that what man experiences as spirit within himself is a product, a creature of material existence. And precisely because man feels himself to be a spirit, because he senses his value and dignity in this spiritual realm, he must ask: What is this essence of the spirit, how is it grounded perhaps in an all-encompassing spiritual world that does not belong to the transitory, but which is permanent in the face of the transitory? With this, I would like to point out to you, dear listeners, the inner soul difficulties that man feels himself confronted with every day and every hour when he looks at the essence of his own spirituality. These difficulties, people do not always bring them to their full awareness in the full sense of the word. But they live in the depths of the soul, whether one explores them or not, they live in these depths of the soul, flow up into the conscious soul existence, make up the happiness and suffering of the innermost human being, make up the innermost destiny of the human being, form the soul mood and soul condition. In this way, the human being finds his way into the world and becomes useful to his fellow human beings and the world to the extent that he can educate himself, even if unconsciously and naively, about the nature of the spirit. And from many subsoils, the riddle questions in this regard arise, and I could cite many things that live in the soul consciously or more or less unconsciously.