How to Know Things About the Supernatural World

If man wants to progress further, then he must add to imagination and to the empty consciousness a third faculty of perception, a faculty of perception that is very often not regarded as a faculty of perception by today's consciousness. It is an ability that plays the greatest conceivable role in human life, but which is not recognized as having any right to be part of knowledge. That is the human power of love: love that brings people together in such a way that they approach the being they love through the physical body or through the embodied soul or embodied spirit. By further developing this love, so that this love can reach into the experience of the etheric body first, but that one can also bring this love over into the experience in the astral body, by further developing this ability to love, we finally not only come to but we gradually develop the ability to increase our love to such an extent that we not only see other beings, but also enter into a relationship with these other spiritual beings – we ourselves then become spirit – in the same way that we have entered into a relationship with physical people on earth. Intuition gives us the opportunity to interact with spiritual beings, just as physical abilities give people the opportunity to interact with physical people on earth. But when we have developed our ability to love to such an extent that the spiritual becomes objective to us, as the sensual is objective to us in the physical world, then we not only look back into our pre-earthly spiritual existence, but we look back into earlier earth lives, and it becomes a fact that we go through the whole human life in forms of existence between birth and death and then between death and a new birth, again from birth to death, again from death to a new birth, that we live through life in successive earthly lives and in successive purely spiritual lives. We learn to look back on our previous earthly lives and see the present, current life as a repetition of these earlier ones.