And it consists only in the fact that the soul can admit to itself: you are attached to your body, the latter is subject to the laws of nature, which have the same relation to you as other laws of nature. That part of the outer world that has a part in you shows itself most clearly when you reflect on what this world does with your body after death. For life, he gives you external feelings and reason, which make it impossible for you to see what happens to your spiritual experience beyond death. This recognition can lead to only two results. Or all further research into the riddle of the soul will be suppressed, and any knowledge in this field will have to be abandoned. Or else efforts will be made to achieve through inner spiritual experience what the outer world refuses to achieve. These efforts can lead to making the inner experience stronger and more energetic than it is in ordinary existence.
In ordinary life, a person has a certain power of his inner experiences and the life of his sensations and thoughts. He is occupied, for example, with some thought, only insofar as there is some external or internal reason for it. But one can choose one thought from a series of thoughts and, without further reason, think it over again and again, experience it inwardly intensely. Can you make this thought the only object of his inner experience is repeated. And while you are doing this, you can not allow yourself any external impressions or memories that are ready to arise in the soul. Such a complete, excluding everything else surrender of oneself to certain thoughts or also sensations can be made by correct inner activity. In order for such an inner experience to lead to truly significant consequences, it must in any case be undertaken on the basis of known, tested laws. Such laws are indicated by the science of spiritual life. Many of them are given in my work "How Knowledge of the Higher Worlds Is Achieved". In this way, the strengthening of the forces of inner experience is achieved. The latter is condensed to a certain extent. What happens as a result of this can be learned from self-observations that occur if the aforementioned inner activity is continued for a sufficiently long time. In most cases, of course, a lot of patience will be required until convincing results appear. And whoever does not agree to apply this patience for many years will not achieve anything special.
Here we can only give an example of such results. They are heterogeneous. And what will be given here is suitable for continuing the meditative path with the description of which we began.
A person can practice for a long time in this inner strengthening of his spiritual life. It is possible that he will not experience anything in himself that could make him think about the world differently than he has hitherto been accustomed to. Naturally, what will be described here will not happen to two people in exactly the same way. But whoever wants to get an idea of ​​one of these experiences will understand
itself and the entire area that is being discussed here.
A moment may come when the soul will experience itself inwardly in a completely different way than usual. In most cases, the soul from sleep, as it were, comes to life for a dream. But it immediately turns out that this experience cannot be compared with what one usually means by a dream. One is then completely fascinated by the world of external senses and reason, and yet one experiences everything just as in ordinary life when one confronts the external world in the waking state. You feel compelled to imagine this experience. For this representation, you take those concepts which exist in ordinary life, but you know very well that you are experiencing something other than what these concepts normally refer to. You look at the latter only as a means for expressing an experience that you have not experienced before and about which you know that in ordinary existence it is impossible. You feel as if surrounded on all sides by thunderstorms. You hear thunder and see lightning. You know you're in a room at home. You feel imbued with a power that you knew nothing about before. Then it seems that you see cracks in the walls around you. To yourself or to the person who, as you think, is standing next to you, you want to say: things are bad; lightning struck the house, it covers me; I feel captured by her; she destroys me. And when a whole series of such representations has passed, the inner experience passes from dreams into an ordinary state of mind. You find yourself in yourself along with the memory of what you just experienced. If this memory is as vivid and accurate as any other, it makes it possible to form a judgment about what was experienced. Then you immediately know that something has been experienced that cannot be experienced by any bodily sense, nor even by ordinary reason. For one feels that the description just made, which one can give to oneself or to others, is only a means of expressing this experience. Although this expression is a means of explaining this subject, it itself has nothing in common with it. You know that for such an experience you do not need any external sense. Whoever here speaks of the hidden activity of the outer senses or the brain is ignorant of the true character of this experience. He clings to the description, which speaks of lightning, thunder, cracks in the wall, and therefore thinks that the soul has experienced only echoes of everyday life. He is forced to regard the experience as a mere vision in the ordinary sense of the word. He cannot think otherwise. One thing he leaves unnoticed here is that he who depicts such an experience takes the words: lightning, thunder, cracks in the wall, as images for the experience, but that he does not confuse it with the images. True, the matter appears to him as if he actually perceived these images. But in this case, he does not relate to the phenomenon of lightning as much as when he sees it with his own eyes. The vision of lightning appears to him as something covering only partly real experience; through lightning he looks at something quite different, which cannot be experienced in the sensible external world.
In order to pronounce a correct judgment, it is necessary that the soul experiencing such a state should have a completely healthy attitude towards the external world when this experience is over. She must be able to correctly compare what she has experienced as a special experience with that of the ordinary external world. He who, even in ordinary life, is inclined to indulge in all sorts of dreams about things, he is little suited for such a judgment. The more a person has a sound, I would like to say, a sober sense of reality, the better it is when it comes to a truthful and weighty discussion of such things. One can treat supersensible experiences with confidence only when one has the right to say to oneself in relation to the external world that one accepts things and events distinctly as they are.
If all the necessary conditions are thus fulfilled, and you have reason to admit that you have not fallen victim to a mere vision, then you know that you have experienced something for which the body did not serve as a medium for observation. The observation was made in addition to the body, the soul directly becoming stronger in itself. You have gained an idea of ​​the experience outside of your body.
It is clear that in this area the regular distinctions between daydreaming or illusion and genuine observation made outside the body cannot be given in any other sense than in the area of ​​perceptions of the external senses. It happens that a person has a vivid taste imagination and even at the mere idea of ​​lemonade feels almost as if he really drank it. But the difference between the one and the other will nevertheless become clear from the totality of life relations. The same can be said about experiences outside the body. In order to come to completely convincing ideas in this area, one must get used to it soundly, acquire the ability to observe the mutual connection of experiences and thus correct one by the other.
Through experiences such as those just described, one gains the opportunity not only with external senses or reason, that is, bodily instruments, to observe that which is part of ourselves. Now you not only know something different about the world than these tools give us knowledge about it, but you also know something about it differently. And this is especially important. Soul passing through the inner transformation, more and more comes to the view that the oppressive questions of being cannot be resolved in the world of external senses because the external senses and reason cannot penetrate deeply enough into the world. Deeper souls penetrate, which are so changed that they can experience out of the body. In the messages that they can give about their experiences, is that they are able to solve spiritual riddles.
But the experience that takes place outside the body is of a completely different kind than the experience in the body. Precisely this is clarified by the judgment that can be formed about