Piercing the veil of maya

 

The spirit world is ever open,

Dead is thy heart, thy sense-veil closely drawn!

Up, scholar, let thy breast unwearied

Bathe in the roseate hues of dawn!

                            — Goethe, Faust

Rudolf Steiner:

If we want to understand the physical nature of man, we look to the relevant findings of physical research. If we want to understand his inner spiritual being, we look to the realm which the spiritual researcher is able to investigate. Then we see that man does not come into existence at birth or at conception, only to pass out of existence at death, but that besides the physical part of his organism he has supersensible members. If we understand the nature of these members, we penetrate into the realm where faith passes over into knowledge. And when Kant, in the evening of an older period, said that we can recognize the categorical imperative, but that no-one can penetrate with conscious vision into the realm of freedom, of divine being and immortality, he was expressing only the experience natural to his time. Spiritual Science will show that we can penetrate into a spiritual world; that just as the eye equipped with a microscope can penetrate into realms beyond the range of the naked eye, so can the soul equipped with the means of Spiritual Science penetrate into an otherwise inaccessible spiritual world, where love, conscience, freedom, and immortality can be known, even as we know animals, plants, and minerals in the physical world.

Source: October 14, 1909