II. The Physical World and the Moral-Spiritual Impulses

But that sense of being firmly rooted in the spiritual world is experienced when by earnest striving man attains what I have called the “deep silence of the soul.” As regards the force which normally serves him as modified breathing-power, man must learn not to spend this power in the breathing-process for forming words of vocal speech but, as indicated in “Knowledge of Higher Worlds and its Attainment,” to hold back what wants to pour itself into words. At the same time, however, he must strive inwardly to maintain that activity which otherwise finds its outlet in the spoken word. This is how he must achieve the inner silence. And when the soul does not stop at point ‘nought’ of this silence, but descends still more deeply into the negative region of silence, to the level below experienced silence, when by the strength of the spirit we hold in check the forces which want to press on into our breathing and our speech, and when at the same time we inwardly foster the impulse to speak but hold back the words before they take possession of the larynx—to put it differently, if we practise silence while developing the inner potentiality of speech—then we not only gain an inner stillness but the deep silence of the soul. In its relationship to speech, to the spoken word Which sounds in the outer, physical world, this deep silence corresponds not merely to the degree of ‘nought,’ but to the negative potency. Then out of this deep silence there sounds what the spiritual world has to say to us, what—to use an ancient word—the Logos wants to reveal from out [of] the universe. Then we no longer speak, but have become the instrument through which the Logos speaks. And then we become aware of our own astral body within us and of the astral world of which I have spoken. This astral world is very different from the world which ordinary consciousness experiences through the senses and the reasoning intellect.