Anthroposophy: carrying spirit out as living reality into the world through the human soul

Rudolf Steiner:

Spiritual Science does not talk endlessly, in a pantheistic way, about “spirit” underlying everything. No, Spiritual Science does not only talk about spiritual reality; its aim is to let the reality of the spirit flow directly into all it says. It strives to speak in such a way that everyone for whom Spiritual Science is a living experience knows that, whenever his thinking touches the spirit, the spirit itself lives and weaves in his thought. Whoever is breathed upon by the impulse of Spiritual Science — if I may put it so — will not merely think about the spirit: he will allow the spirit itself to speak through his thoughts. The immediate presence of the spirit, the active power of the spirit — these are what Spiritual Science leads us to seek.

And now take the feelings which Spiritual Science calls to life in the depth of the human soul and compare them with the social demand of which I spoke yesterday — the social demand which in a certain sense lives in the proletarian consciousness of the present time. Consider: all that lives today in the consciousness of the workers, as the foundation of their knowledge, is an ideology, nothing but a web of abstract thoughts! Yes, this is said to be the essential characteristic of spiritual experience, that it is merely an ideology: economic happenings are the only reality. From these happenings, as they run their course, the conflicts of human life derive; everything that man thinks and learns and creates artistically arises from them like a smoke, a mist. Everything that he regards as custom, morality, law, and so on — all merely an ideological shadow-show! And now compare this shadow-show with the spiritual life which penetrates the soul from the impulse of Spiritual Science. The aim of our Anthroposophical Spiritual Science is to carry spirit out as living reality into the world through the soul of man.