8. The Knowledge of the Spiritual Essence of the World

We have experienced the sun here in the physical world. In the spiritual world, into which we have found our way in the manner described, we experience something else: spiritual beings, beings that now have inner life, but such a life that, unlike the human being, does not have an outer physical body. We experience spiritual and soul-like divine-spiritual beings that are not embodied in the physical world. And we experience them in such a way that we relate the new experience to an old experience. Just as we relate something in our memory to an experience from eight to ten years ago, we relate what we experience over there in the spiritual world, which we have entered, to the physical solar experience here. Like a memory, the physical solar experience is also among the images that we experience there. And we know through this: The sun is the external image of spiritual divine beings, just as our own body is the image of our own soul. We now see the forces, but the forces that are themselves spiritual beings, behind the sun. This seems grotesque and fantastic to today's man. It is no more fantastic than the results of the science of electricity or magnetism.