What then is spiritual knowledge? Spiritual knowledge consists of analyses of experiences that are promoted by forces that cannot be sensed by the ordinary physical senses. What sort of forces are these? We here find ourselves at the focal point of the whole religious problem. For the question is identical with the great question that is as yet unanswered for present-day mankind: "What is truth?" Can anything at all be said at the present moment about these forces? No, not through modern science. It is, as previously mentioned, still only at the frontier. But that does not exclude the possibility that accounts of the presence of the above-mentioned forces can nevertheless reach mankind. The point is that all human beings are not at the same level in evolution. Just as there are beings who are behind modern science in evolution, so there are also beings who are ahead of it and have already accumulated, or are now in the process of accumulating, experiences that are based on spiritual forces. They thereby come to possess layers of consciousness that are as yet unexperienced by science as well as by the rest of mankind. And the further ahead of the average consciousness of mankind these new layers of consciousness are, the more alien and fantastic they will appear to this mankind.
      The originators of these new layers of consciousness are termed "occultists". If an occultist is so outstandingly developed that he senses just as well in the spiritual area as in the physical, then he can be a great benefactor and guide for his fellow-beings. For he will then constitute a being who can give individuals not only the great solution of life but also the method of calculating it in such a way that they, by virtue of this, can gradually develop in themselves the ability to "check the calculation", and thereby turn it into their own knowledge. The most outstanding of such occult beings are known by the terms "messiahs" or "world redeemers".
      As ordinary people at an earlier point in time had a very elementary intelligence or faculty for analysing, they did not demand to know the method of calculating the solution of life, but were satisfied with the solution itself, in which they believed blindly. Previous world redeemers had therefore the sole purpose of giving this solution in a form that would appeal to the faculty of these people, not to understand, but to believe. Their words were therefore law for the beings concerned. And it is repercussions of this that have turned the religious narratives into dogmas. A world redeemer in our time must, however, give not only the solution of life in an undisguised form, but must also show a method of calculation through which individuals, as their intelligence and feeling gradually become sufficiently developed, can check the solution and acquire it as their own experience. Such a method of calculation should here be understood simply as a logical, coherent chain of thought through which the highest solution of life can be acquired not as belief, but as knowledge.