Anthroposophy and Knowledge of the Spirit

Those who are familiar with anthroposophy know that all these outlets are from the pathological realm, from a diseased soul life. The soul life of a medium is diseased because their physical life must be attuned down at the moment when they are acting as a medium. This detuning makes it impossible for the person acting as a medium to grasp what his soul is directly experiencing. It is impossible to verify — even for an external observer, who may have a sound mind when observing the medium — it is impossible to realize what kind of relationship the person, the medium, has to another world if one is not immersed in this experience. The medium is, after all, singled out and, with his healthy human understanding, distracted from what he is experiencing in his mediumistic states. Whenever a person has hallucinations, we can always show how these have their roots in a diseased area of the human body and how what arises in the soul as other experiences can only be there because of this diseased part of the human organization. Thus we have no possibility of finding the transition we are seeking from the healthy human soul life to a knowledge of the supersensible, of the spiritual realm. For wherever we turn to the sick soul life, we lack control at every step. And so most of our contemporaries feel compelled to cling to time-honored, traditional ideas when it comes to the supersensible, to the spiritual, to that which has developed from earlier epochs of humanity into our time as the content of creeds and worldviews.