5. Natural Death and Spiritual Life

Thus, anthroposophical research consists in an advance to a knowledge that is experienced with a lightness like a dream, but at the same time it is experienced with a firmness that is only possible if it is logical in the context of knowledge. But one thing is the case with both. When one becomes conscious of the complete context with one's corporeality from one or the other area of consciousness, then one or the other occurs in such a form that the dream is extinguished by the waking day life, can at most remain as a memory, but as a memory it integrates itself into the waking day life , but the content of higher knowledge is not erased, but stands alongside ordinary daytime cognition, but stands in such a way that it clearly stands out from it, so that the person can then experience his own existence as if he had two personalities, one can control the other, can illuminate what he has in ordinary consciousness in the waking state from morning to evening, with the higher knowledge that he has attained, which in turn he can control through his ordinary logical thinking, in order to experience how it relates to what can be experienced in the sensory world. This higher knowledge places us in a purely soul-spiritual experience, one that is full of content and inner reality. Just as in the ordinary life of the senses one can distinguish between something merely fancifully imagined and reality itself in life, just as one can distinguish between the mere idea of a hot iron and the real hot iron that one touches through life itself, so one can distinguish between something merely fancifully imagined and what is really seen in higher knowledge, what is directly experienced.