8. The Knowledge of the Spiritual Essence of the World

This level of knowledge, ladies and gentlemen, is not attained without progressing to exercises of will, as I also described last Tuesday, for example, to that exercise of will in which one reverses the order of what you used to always think forward, for example, the experiences of a day from the evening towards the morning, so that you tear the thinking away from the outer reality by the willful thinking. Or also to practice strict self-discipline, so that one adds new habits to one's old ones or also breaks away from old habits and imagines habits – this is not meant in a bad way – so that one really makes a different person out of oneself in the course of one's life, which otherwise only life makes out of one, that one takes one's self-education into one's own hands with all one's inner energy, so to speak.