"Is there such a thing as a spiritual world?" This question is put by thousands of people who are satisfied neither with religion's answer to the question nor with physical science's passive, most often negative, attitude to it. Those who have studied spiritual science know that life itself answers this question in the affirmative in a multitude of ways. One of the most fundamental ways in which life answers this question is through the "word". In order to understand this, we have to understand what lies behind this concept. The word is in fact something much more fundamental than what we in everyday speech understand by this term. The word is, in its cosmic analysis, nothing less than the principle through which all consciousness is created. It is the power or the means with which "God breathed into Adam the breath of life", and still does so. The word covers everything that comes under the concept of creation, manifestation or acknowledgement. Together, words form "language", which constitutes a cataloguing of thoughts. And that which we call our day consciousness is in fact precisely this "thought catalogue".

An awake consciousness is made up of thoughts that can be formulated and arranged in logical chains of thought. But in what way does God breathe into Adam, or the human being, the breath of life? Through Nature and the forces of Nature. Conscious life arose as the result of an interaction with the surroundings or Nature. Is it not in the struggle with the forces of Nature that terrestrial human beings have developed the chains of thought in their consciousness that we today call science and technology, and through which they have to some extent succeeded in "subduing the Earth"? What would science and technology be without the word? Nothing. Human beings have in reality raised themselves out of the actual animal kingdom through their growing ability to formulate thoughts and to manifest them in creation in practical, scientific and artistic fields.

Is the world of the word a physical or a spiritual world? You might say that the word is, in essence, merely physical matter, whether it appears in the form of writing or speech, or as ink, print or sound. Of course, words are also physical matter, but they are a lot more than that. If we look at a book that is written in a language that we do not understand, or if we hear this, to us incomprehensible, language being spoken, the words act only upon our sight or our hearing. We can have certain thoughts about this language, but if its words are not in our thought catalogue, they will remain merely print or sound, that is to say something purely material. If, on the other hand, we do understand the spoken or written words, thoughts are activated in our consciousness, something immaterial or invisible begins to work. This immaterial or invisible something was hidden in the visible word; a world of thought or spirit is materialised through the written or spoken word and in turn dematerialised in the reader's or the listener's consciousness. So a spiritual world exists that can penetrate the physical one and give it meaning and life. The physical spoken and written words are merely artificial phenomena, with the help of which we are able to reveal something about ourselves that is immaterial and inaccessible to physical sensory perception. Each human being has, besides its physical organism, a side of its appearance that is inaccessible to other beings on the physical plane. If this were not the case, human beings would need neither writing nor speech.

Every day we interact with our surroundings on a plane that is not physical. We talk and listen, we write, read and gather knowledge and experiences through which we build up thought combinations that are combined with the store that we already have in our thought catalogue, thereby enlarging the store. Through spoken and written words we provide each other with thought combinations. Our speech can make others angry or sadden them, but it can also gladden, inspire and help them, indeed it can even contribute to creating renewal in their lives. If the words are not enlivened by thoughts and feelings they become dead clichés and mere words. Much conversation between human beings is this kind of "dead speech"; the living word is not incarnated in it and nothing happens in the speaker's consciousness in direct connection with what is being said. However, it is not necessarily always the case that nothing happens. It can be that the person in question is thinking the exact opposite of what he or she is saying. Sometimes the word is dragged down onto such a low plane by terrestrial human beings that it is used, not just to express a thought, but to cover up a thought, a kind of camouflage that belongs to the animal kingdom and not to a human condition. But also this shows that people have their own spiritual world behind the physical one, their world of thoughts and feelings that they have the possibility of giving physical expression to through words and actions, but that they also have the possibility of hiding by being silent or passive or camouflaging by using empty expressions or even untrue words.

In the life after death, however, this kind of camouflage cannot take place. There, organisms are formed, not out of physical matter, but out of thought matter. How one looks is how one thinks. And there is no need to form the words in sound or writing, since thought transference takes place directly from the one being to the other or shows itself in pictures, colours or shapes. But all the same, it is the "word" that is behind as the formulating thought, and without studying and gathering experience in the world of the physical word, terrestrial human beings would never become divine and sovereign co-workers and co-creators in the spiritual worlds.

From other people's speech and writing every person can learn a lot, but life's own speech does not come to us just from other people, but from the whole of Nature. Nature is both writing and speech to the one who can see and hear with an open mind and open senses. We learned at school that "Adam gave the animals names". This is a symbol of the fact that human beings at a certain point in their evolution begin to experience Nature consciously, that is to say, interact with it not just through the instincts, but also through feeling and intelligence and eventually also intuition. The fact that people give the various phenomena in Nature names, does not take place just for the sake of rattling off a long string of names; it is an expression of the fact that people are getting to know Nature and the various natural phenomena and the way they hang together in relation to one another. People create the thought catalogue that constitutes their day consciousness, and that is still being developed through new experiences. People are learning to read in the book of life, which is Nature itself, they are learning to spell and to form words and sentences and find meaning in them. However, people have not yet found their way to the real meaning; they are constantly and with difficulty spelling their way through the language of Nature and are inclined to become bogged down in details and single words or letters, without being able to see the whole that they form. Such is the materialistic attitude to life. The materialistically inclined person is staring blindly at the single letters in the book of Nature or of life. But letters have no meaning at all unless they are put together into words and sentences that form meaning. In the same way, the details of Nature that can be weighed and measured have no other meaning than that which they have in relation to the whole in which they are details. And just as it is a thought world or a spiritual world that makes itself known through letters, words and sentences, so is it also a spiritual world that makes itself known through the details of Nature, regardless of whether these details be electrons and atoms, or whether they be plants, animals and human beings, or whether they be planets, solar systems and galaxies.

As long as the materialistically inclined human being only acknowledges what can be weighed and measured as reality, no matter how scientifically knowledgeable they are, it will be like someone wandering around in an enormous library and not being able to sense anything other than print and paper. A library is a place where spiritual power is stored in physical matter, and through the process we call reading, it can be released to charge the human consciousness. A book that is of interest to a person is exactly like an element that supplies energy to a receiving apparatus. And the book has the advantage over an ordinary electrical battery, in that it does not contain less power whether one person has received impulses by reading it or whether a hundred people have done so. Only when it is worn out and can no longer be read is it no longer of any use as a "charging element". If it is a book of really great value, however, its energy would long ago have been transferred to new editions. Nature is in itself a cosmic library of this sort, but people are illiterate when it comes to this kind of reading. They know the amount of paper of the "books", their size and weight, their place on the shelf and the colour of the cover, but the important part of them, in other words, what they have to tell, whether it is a scientific account or a fantastic adventure, they know nothing about, and will perhaps even deny that they contain anything at all other than print and paper.

In order to progress in their development, terrestrial human beings have to become familiar with the living word and not be content with the dead letter. Naturally, this does not apply only as far as science is concerned, it applies to everything, including religion. Just as Nature is the Godhead's speech to human beings, the same applies to the religions. And human beings will eventually realise that Nature and the religions are in fact saying the same thing. Of course, there cannot exist two forms of truth or reality, one that is scientific and the other that is religious. It is the same reality, and spiritual science will show people that it is the same Godhead that is speaking through the religions and through Nature. People are of the opinion that Nature is something exclusively physical and religion something exclusively spiritual. But it is not so. All of Nature's physical processes, its cycles and its releases of energy, which exhibit the most subtle logic in the ways they relate to each other, all of these could not exist at all if there were not thought – and thereby a world of thought and a thinking being – behind them. Human beings are of course themselves a part of Nature, and human beings' abilities to think and create and be in possession of humane feelings are also processes of Nature. So just by looking at ourselves we can see that the world of Nature is also a spiritual world. There is an old saying that states: "Know yourself and you know the whole universe". And it is so. Human beings know neither themselves nor the universe yet, even though they know a lot about their physical organisms and about planets, suns and galaxies. This physical knowledge is only "print and paper" and in order to really know something, terrestrial human beings have become familiar with the spiritual world that lies behind both their own organisms and the physical universe.

Nature, whether we are talking about human beings or the world that surrounds human beings or the world that constitutes their organisms, is a revelation of spirit. Spirit is consciousness of oneself and of the world, and reveals itself as a conscious interaction with the world. But what is the world? What is Nature? What is the universe? It is the living God in which we live, move and have our being. And Nature's speech is God's speech to us, through which we gain experiences and become wiser and more loving. When we become wiser and more loving it is because, through experiences, we have the "breath of life", or the thought world of the Godhead itself, breathed into us. We "learn the difference between good and evil in order to become like God", we become "man in God's image". But it is through the "word" that we reach this state. The word is the formulated thought that is arranged in our thought catalogue together with other words and thoughts. The thought catalogue or consciousness is developed and expanded until it becomes more and more in accordance with the Godhead's thought world. Human beings are learning to think in keeping with God's thoughts, and can become divine co-workers, tools for God's creation of new variations of life expression and life experience. It is also such a thought that lies behind the words in St. John's gospel: "In the beginning was the word, and the word was with God, and the word was God", and later: "and the word became flesh". This shows that religion is not intended to be a flight of thought away from physical reality. The word shall indeed become "flesh", and not just through Christ incarnating on this Earth, but by human beings following in his footsteps, and through neighbourly love and unselfish creative power, allowing the light of the spiritual world to stream through their physical bodies in their practical way of behaving, so that they little by little change this world into a world of peace. Spiritual science is a help given to human beings of today that enables the "word", in the form of clear, logical chains of thought, to enlighten human beings' minds. But every single human being has itself the responsibility to allow the light to stream out into the darkness, that is to say into the zone of ignorance, through the thoughts and actions that can make this world a better place for all living beings to live in.