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Rudolf Steiner e.Lib
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Occult Science - An Outline
Rudolf Steiner e.Lib Document
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Occult Science - An Outline
Knowledge of the Higher Worlds
The ascent to a supersensible state of consciousness has necessarily
to take its start from ordinary waking consciousness. The pupil is
living in this consciousness before he sets out on the ascent, and the
school of spiritual training holds out to him means whereby he may be
led forth from it. Among the first of the means put forward in the
school which concerns us here, are activities that are already
familiar to the pupil in his everyday consciousness. The most
significant of them are in fact those that consist in still and silent
activities of the soul. The pupil has to give himself up entirely to
certain thought-pictures. These are of such a kind as to have in them
an awakening power; they awaken hidden faculties of the soul. They
differ therefore from the thought-pictures that belong to everyday
life, whose purpose it is to portray some external object. Indeed the
more faithfully these do so, the truer they are; it belongs to their
very nature to be true in this sense. The thought-pictures to which
the soul has to devote itself for the purpose of spiritual training
have no such part to play. Their function is not to depict an external
object; they are formed in such a way as to have in themselves the
property of awakening the soul. The best for the purpose are symbolic
pictures. Others, however, can also be used. For the actual content
is, in fact, of little importance, the main point being that the pupil
shall direct the whole power of his soul upon the thought-picture and
have nothing else whatever in his consciousness. Whereas in everyday
life the soul's powers are distributed among many things, and
thought-pictures are continually coming and going, in spiritual
training everything depends on the entire concentration of the soul
upon one idea of thought-picture, placed, by an act of will, in the
very center of consciousness. It is for this reason that symbolic
thought-pictures do better than those that depict external objects or
activities; for the latter have their point of support in the external
world, so that the soul is not driven to rely upon itself alone, as is
the case with the symbolic thought-pictures which have been built up
by the soul's own exertions. The essential thing is, not what the
picture represents, but that it is formed and imagined in such a way
as to set the soul entirely free from dependence on the physical.
It will help us to form a clear conception of what this absorption in
a thought-picture implies, if we call up before us the concept of
memory. Say we have been looking at a tree and have then turned
away so that we no longer see it. We can call up before our mind's eye
the thought -picture or mental image of the tree. This thought-picture
that we have when the tree is not in view is a memory of the
tree. Suppose we hold on to this memory; we let our soul, as it were,
come to rest in the memory-picture and try to shut out every other
thought. Our soul is now immersed in the memory-picture of the tree.
There you have an instance of absorption in a thought-picture
one that reproduces an outer object perceived by the senses. If we now
do the same with a thought-picture we ourselves have placed into the
field of consciousness, entirely of our will, we shall in time become
able to achieve the desired end.
In order to make this quite clear, let us take an example of
absorption of the soul in a symbolic thought-picture. The first thing
to be done is to build it up, and this we may do in the following way.
We think of a plant, how it has its roots in the soil, how it sends
out leaves one after another, and blossoms at length into flower. Now
we imagine a man standing beside the plant. The thought lights up in
our mind that the man has characteristics and capabilities which can
truthfully be called more perfect than are those of the plant. He can
move about at will, he can go this way or that way as he feels
inclined; whereas the plant is rooted to the spot where it is growing.
We may, however, then go on to think to ourselves: Yes, that is so,
the human being is more perfect than the plant; but I also find
qualities in him, the absence of which in the plant makes it appear to
me more perfect in other respects than the human being. For he is
filled with desires and passions, and these he sometimes follows in
his behavior, with the result that he goes astray, falls into error.
When I look at the plant, I see how it follows the pure laws of growth
from leaf to leaf, how it opens its blossom, calmly and tranquilly, to
the chaste rays of the sun. I perceive therefore that while man is in
some respects more perfect than the plant, he buys this comparative
perfection at the price of letting impulses and desires and passions
have their seat within him, instead of what appear to be the pure
forces at work in the plant. Then we can go on to picture to ourselves
how the green sap flows right through the plant, and how this green
sap is the expression of the pure, unimpassioned laws of growth. And
if we then think of the red blood as it flows through the veins and
arteries of man, we find in this red blood the expression of impulses
and desires and passions.
We then let this whole thought live in our soul. Carrying it a little
farther, we call to mind how man is after all capable of development;
he possesses higher faculties of soul, by means of which he can refine
and purify his impulses and passions. We recognize that thereby the
baser element in them is purged away, and they are re-born on a higher
level. The blood can then be thought of as the expression of these
purified and chastened impulses and passions. And now we turn our
thought, let us say, to a rose. We look in spirit at the rose and say
to ourselves: In the red sap of the rose, I see the green color of the
plant-sap changed to red; and the red rose follows still, no less than
the green leaf, the pure, unimpassioned laws of growth. I can let the
red of the rose be for me a symbol of a blood that is the expression
of chastened impulses and passions which have thrown off their baser
part and resemble in their purity the forces that are at work in the
rose. And then we try, not merely to go on turning such thoughts over
and over in our mind, but to let them come to life in our heart and
feeling. A sensation of bliss can come over us as we contemplate the
pure and dispassionate nature of the growing plant; and we feel
obliged to admit that certain higher perfections have to be purchased
by the acquisition at the same time of impulses and desires. This
thought can change the bliss that we experienced before into a solemn
feeling; and then a sense of liberation can come over us, a feeling of
true happiness when we give ourselves up to the thought of the red
blood that can become the bearer--even as the red sap in the rose
of experiences that are inwardly pure. In pursuing thus a train
of thought that serves to build up such a symbolic picture, it is
important to accompany the thought all the time with feeling. Then,
having entered right into the experience of the thoughts and feelings,
we can re-cast them in the following symbolic picture.
Imagine you see before you a black cross. Let this black cross be for
you a symbol for the baser elements that have been cast out of man's
impulses and passions; and at the point where the beams of the cross
meet, picture to yourself seven resplendent bright red roses arranged
in a circle. Let these roses symbolize for you a blood that is the
expression of passions and impulses that have undergone
purification.1
Some such symbolic thought-picture shall the pupil of spiritual
training call up before his soul, and he can do this in the same way
as was explained above for a memory-picture. Devoting himself to it in
deep, inner contemplation, he will find that the picture has power to
call his soul awake. He must try to banish for the time being
everything else from his mind. The symbol in question, and that alone,
should now hover before him in spirit, as livingly as ever possible.
There is meaning in the fact that the symbolic picture has not simply
been put forward as a picture that has in itself as an awakening
power, but that it was first built up by a sequence of thoughts
concerning plant and man. What such a picture can do for the pupil
depends, before he uses it as an object of meditation. Were he to
picture it without having gone through the construction of it in his
own soul, it would remain cold and would have far less effect, for it
is the preparation that endows it with power to enlighten the soul.
The pupil should however not be recalling the preparatory steps while
engaged in the meditation, but have then merely the symbolic picture
hovering before him in spirit, quick with life letting only the
feelings that were aroused by the preparatory chain of thought
echo on within him. In this way does the symbolic picture come to be a
sign, appropriate to and accompanying the inner experience.
The efficacy if the experience depends upon how long the pupil is able
to continue in it . The longer he can do so, without allowing any
other idea to disturb the meditation, the greater its value for him.
It is, however, also good if, apart from the times that he devotes to
the meditation as such, he will frequently build up the picture all
over again, letting the thoughts and feelings rise up in him in the
way we have described, that the mood of the experience may not pale.
The more ready the pupil is patiently to continue renewing the picture
in this way, the greater significance will it have for his soul. (In
my book Knowledge in the Higher Worlds and its Attainment,
other subjects are suggested for meditations on the coming-into-being
and passing-away of a plant, on the forces of growth that lie dormant
in the seed, on the forms of crystals, etc. In the present book, the
intention has been merely to illustrate, by means of an example, the
nature of meditation.)
A symbolic picture such as we have here described does not represent
some external object that Nature has produced; and to this very fact
it owes its power to awaken capabilities that belong entirely to the
soul. Some persons may beg to differ! They may, for instance, say:
Agreed, the symbolic picture as a whole is not to be found in Nature,
but all its details are borrowed from Nature the black color,
the roses, and so forth; these have every one of them been first
perceived by the senses. If any reader be disturbed in his mind by
such an objection, let him reflect that these component parts of the
picture, which are undoubtedly derived from sense-perception, do not
in themselves lead to the awakening of higher faculties in the soul;
the awakening is brought about solely by the way in which the
single details have been put together to form the picture. For
that, no prototype is to be found in the outer world.
The endeavor has here been made, taking a particular symbolic picture
as an example, to give a clear account of how meditation can take its
course. For the purpose of spiritual training, a great variety of
pictures of this kind can be used, and they can be built up in many
different ways. Sentences, formulae, even single words, may also be
given as subjects for meditation. In every instance the aim will be to
wrest the soul free from sense-perception and rouse it to an activity
for which the outer impressions of the physical senses are without
significance, the whole import and aim of the activity being to unfold
dormant faculties of the soul. Meditations that are directed wholly to
certain feelings or emotions are also possible; they are indeed
particularly valuable for the soul. Take the feeling of joy. In the
ordinary course of life we can rejoice over something we see taking
place. Suppose a man who has a healthily developed life of feeling
observes someone performing an action that is inspired by real
goodness of heart. He will be pleased, he will rejoice in the kind
deed. And it may be, he will then to on to ponder over a deed of this
nature in somewhat the following way. A deed that proceeded from
kindness of heart, he may think to himself, is one in which the doer
follows, not his own interests, but the interests of his fellow-man; I
may therefore call it a good deed. But now he can go
further. He can turn right away form the particular action that he
observed and that gave him such pleasure, and create for himself the
comprehensive idea of loving-kindness, goodness of heart.
He can picture to himself how it arises in the soul, namely through
the person's absorbing, as it were, the interest of his fellow, making
them his own. And he can rejoice in this moral conception of kindness.
The joy that he now has is no longer over this or that event in the
physical world, it is joy in an idea as such. If we try to let
joy of this kind live on in our soul for a considerable time we shall
actually be practicing meditation upon a feeling. It is not the mere
idea that will awaken the inner faculties, but he prolonged surrender
of the soul to a feeling that is not just due to a particular external
impression.
Supersensible cognition being able to penetrate more deeply into the
real nature of things, feelings evoked by spiritual knowledge can be
imparted and used for meditation. These will be all the more
efficacious in unfolding the inner faculties of the soul. Necessary as
this enhanced development will be for the higher stages of the pupil's
training, he should nevertheless understand that meditations upon
simple feelings and emotions such as the one concerning goodness of
heart, if diligently carried out, can take him very far. Since people
differ in nature and character, the means that prove most useful for
individual pupils will naturally vary. As to the length of time that
should be given to meditation, the thing of prime importance is that
while engaged in it, the pupil shall remain calm and collected; its
efficacy indeed depends on this. In the matter of time he should also
be careful not to overshoot the mark. The exercises themselves will
help him to acquire a certain inner tact which will teach him how far
he may rightly go in this respect.
The pupil will as a rule have to carry out such exercises for quite a
long while before he himself is able to notice any result. Patience
and perseverance are absolute essentials in spiritual training. Unless
the pupil evokes these qualities within him, going through his
exercises so quietly and so regularly that patience and perseverance
may be said to constitute the fundamental mood of his soul, he will
make little progress.
It will be clear, from what has been said so far, that deep inner
contemplation meditation is a means for the attainment
of knowledge of higher worlds, and moreover that not just any
thought-picture can be taken for meditation, but only one that has
been built up in the way described.
The path that has been indicated leads in the fist place to what may
be called Imaginative cognition the first stage,
that is, of higher cognition. The cognition that depends upon
sense-perception and upon the elaboration of sense-perceptions by an
intellect that is bound to the senses objective
cognition. Above it are the various stages of higher cognition,
the Imaginative being the first. The word Imagination may well raise
distrust in the minds of those who take it to mean some idea that is
engendered by mere fancy some imaginary idea or
mental picture unrelated to reality. In spiritual science however,
Imaginative cognition is to be understood as a cognition that results
from the soul's having attained to a supersensible state of
consciousness. What is perceived in this condition of consciousness
are spiritual facts and spiritual beings whereto the senses have no
access. Since this first supersensible consciousness is awakened in
the pupil by his giving himself up in meditation to symbolic pictures
or imaginations, it may be termed Imaginative
consciousness and the cognition connected with it
Imaginative cognition meaning by this a cognition
that is able to have knowledge of what is real in another sense than
are the facts and objects perceived with the physical senses. The
content of the thought-picture in the imaginative meditation is
not the important thing; what is important is the faculty of soul that
is thereby developed.
Another very understandable objection may be put forward to the
employment of symbolic mental pictures. The building up of such
pictures, it may be alleged, is carried out by a dreamlike thinking
that makes use of arbitrary fancy, and the result can only be of
questionable value. There is, however, no occasion to harbor any such
misgiving in regard to the thought-pictures which form the basis of a
right and sound spiritual training. Such thought-pictures are
expressly chosen with this end in view namely, that the
relation they may have to external reality can be disregarded and
their value sought purely in the power with which they work upon the
soul when attention has been withdrawn from the outer world, when all
sense-impressions and even all the thoughts the mind can entertain in
response to sense-impressions have been eliminated.
If we want to form a clear and true picture of the process of
meditation, we shall find it helpful to compare it with sleep. On the
one hand it resembles sleep, while on the other hand it is the very
opposite. For it is a sleep which in comparison with ordinary
day-consciousness gives signs of a higher awakeness. The truth of the
matter is that, having to concentrate upon one particular symbolic or
other thought-picture, the soul is obliged to summon up from its
depths much stronger forces than it is accustomed to employ in
ordinary life or for the ordinary process of cognition. Its inner
activity is enhanced thereby. The soul liberates itself from the body,
even as it does in sleep. Only, instead of going over into
unconsciousness, it now has living experience of a world it did not
know before. Thus, the soul is in a condition which, although in its
liberation from the body it may be likened to sleep, has nevertheless
to be described as an enhanced awakeness in comparison with ordinary
consciousness. The soul comes in this way to a living experience of
itself in its inmost, true and independent being, whereas in ordinary
waking life, when its forces are less strongly developed, it is only
with the help of the body that the soul attains consciousness at all.
It does not under these conditions have any conscious experience of
itself, becoming conscious only in the picture which, like a
reflection from a mirror, the body or, one should rather say,
the bodily processes conjure up before it.
The symbolic pictures that are built upon in the way described cannot
of course be said to have relation as yet to anything real in the
spiritual world. Their purpose is to detach the soul from
sense-perception, and from the instrument of the brain with which in
ordinary life the intellect is bound up. This detachment cannot be
effected until man feels; Now I am forming a thought-picture by the
use of forces that need not assistance from the senses or from the
brain. The very first experience that befalls the pupil on his path is
this liberation from the physical organs. He can then say to himself,
My consciousness is not extinguished when I abandon sense-perceptions
and abandon also my ordinary intellectual thinking; I can lift myself
right out of this thinking, and I then feel myself a living spiritual
being, side by side with what I was before. Here then we have the
first purely spiritual experience: the pupil becomes aware of himself
as an I, an Ego, purely in the soul and spirit. A new self has
arisen out of the self that is bound up with the physical senses and
the physical intellect. Had the pupil freed himself from the world of
the senses and the intellect without deep inner meditation, he would
have fallen into the void of unconsciousness. Naturally, he already
had in him this being of pure soul and spirit before he practiced
meditation, but it had then no instruments whereby it could observe in
the spiritual world. It was not unlike a physical body that has no
eyes to see with, no ears to hear with. The force that has been
expended in achieving meditation has created organs of soul and
spirit, has called them forth out of what was hitherto unorganized
soul-and-spirit being.
What the pupil has in this way himself created, is also what he first
perceives. Therefore his first experience is a kind of
self-perception. It is in accord with the whole nature of spiritual
training that, thanks to the self-education that he is undergoing, man
is at this stage fully conscious that he is perceiving himself
in the picture-worlds (Imaginations) which appear as a result of the
exercises. These pictures seem to the pupil to be alive, and in a new
world; yet he must recognize that, to begin with, they are nothing
else than the reflection of his own being, strengthened as this now is
by reason of the exercises he has carried out. Moreover not only has
the pupil to come to a right conclusion on this point; he must in
addition develop such a strong will that he is able at any moment to
wipe out the pictures, to dismiss them altogether from consciousness.
He must have it in his power to exercise authority over them in
perfect freedom and confidence. And he will be able to do this,
provided the training has been on sound lines. Otherwise, the pupil
would be in the same plight in the realm of spiritual experience, as a
man would be in the physical world if, when he turned to look at some
object, his eye were to remain fettered to that object so that he was
quite unable to look away from it. There is however one exception. One
group of inner picture-experiences must not be blotted out at
this stage of spiritual training. It is a group that relates to the
heart and kernel of the pupil's own being; in the Imaginations of this
group he is made acquainted with the very ground of his being, with
that within him which passes through repeated earth lives. At this
moment in his development he begins to feel as a direct
experience the reality of repeated earth lives. In respect of
everything else that he experiences in this realm there must be the
freedom of which we spoke.
Only after the pupil has acquired the faculty of wiping out the
Imaginations, does he approach the real external world of the spirit.
In place of the pictures that have been wiped out, something else
appears, and in this the pupil begins to attain knowledge of spiritual
reality. His feeling of himself, from being dim and vague, reaches a
clarity and definition hitherto unknown. And he has now to go further;
he has to advance from this perception of himself to observation of
the world of soul and spirit that surrounds him. This he will be able
to do when he directs his inner experience in a way that will now be
indicated.
To begin with, the soul is weak over against all that offers itself
for perception in the world of soul and spirit. The pupil will already
have had to expend considerable energy of soul in order to hold fast
in meditation the symbolic or other pictures which he built up out of
the data of the world of sense. But if he wants in addition to attain
to actual observation in a higher world, he will have to do more than
this. He must be able to abide in a condition wherein not only the
stimuli of the external world no longer influence his soul, but even
the Imaginative thought-pictures are completely obliterated from his
consciousness. For the moment has now arrived when that which has been
formed and fashioned within him by dint of deep inner concentration of
soul can come to view. Everything now depends upon the pupil's having
sufficient inner energy of soul to allow it to be actually seen
by him spiritually; it must not escape his notice, as invariably
happens when the forces of the soul are too little developed. The
soul-and-spirit organism that has come to development within him and
that the pupil has now to apprehend in self-perception is frail and
evanescent. Many and serious are the disturbances that come from the
outer world of sense and from memories of the same, and that persist
in the mind even when the pupil does his utmost to shut them out. Nor
is it only the disturbances of which we can be aware that come into
question; still more serious are those of which we are totally unaware
in ordinary life.
The very conditions however under which the life of man takes its
course make possible here a transition stage. What the soul is unable
to achieve when awake on account of these disturbances from the
physical world, it can achieve in sleep. One who devotes himself to
meditation will, if sufficiently attentive, begin to notice something
new about his sleep. He will be aware that he is not always fully
asleep the whole time, but that there are moments when his soul,
although he is asleep, is nevertheless active in some way. At such
times, the natural processes of sleep keep away the influences of the
external world which he is not yet strong enough to keep away by his
own efforts while awake. And now that the exercises in concentration
and meditation have begun to take effect, the soul is released from
complete unconsciousness during sleep and is able to feel the world of
soul and spirit. This can come home to the pupil in either of two
ways. He may be well aware during his sleep: I am now in another
world, or he may have the memory when he wakes up: I have
been in another world. A greater inner energy is of course
required for the first way than for the second, which will accordingly
for a beginner be the more frequent of the two. And it may be that
gradually the point is reached when the pupil, on awakening, has the
impression: During the whole time that I have been asleep I have been
in another world; I emerged from it only when I awoke. Moreover his
memory of the beings and facts of this outer world will grow more and
more definite. This will mean that the pupil has attained in one or
another form what may be called continuity of
consciousness (the persistence of consciousness during sleep.)
There is no implication that he will always retain
consciousness during sleep. He will have made good progress in this
direction if, while in general he sleeps as others do, there are times
when during sleep he can be consciously giving into a world of soul
and spirit; or again if, when awake, he can look back upon short
periods of such consciousness.
It must not be forgotten that this is only a transition state. It is
good for his spiritual training that the pupil should go through this
stage, but he must not imagine that it can afford him conclusive
evidence in regard to the world of soul and spirit. He is, in this
condition, still uncertain and cannot yet rely on his perceptions.
Thanks however to experiences of this nature he does gradually gather
power to attain the like result also in waking life that is, to
hold off the disturbing influences of the physical world upon his
senses and upon his inner life, and so attain that
observing in soul and spirit where no impressions enter by
way of the senses, where the brain-bound intellect is silent, and
where even those thought-pictures are banished from consciousness,
upon which he had been meditating in preparing for seeing in the
spirit. (Things published in the name of spiritual science
should invariably be the outcome of spiritual observations made in a
fully wide-awake condition.)
There are two inner experiences, important in the course of spiritual
training. The one enables the pupil to say to himself: If I now turn
aside from every impression that can reach me from the surrounding
physical world, I do not, when I look within, behold there a being
that is totally inactive, but a being that is conscious of itself in a
world of which I can know nothing as long as I only lay myself open to
impressions that come to me through sense-perception and through
everyday thinking. At this moment, the pupil can have the feeling that
he has himself given birth to a new being that is there within him as
the very heart and kernel of his soul, a being possessed moreover of
entirely different qualities from those that have been his up to now.
The second experience is as follows. The pupil discovers that he can
now have beside him the self he has been hitherto, as if it were
another and distinct self. He is in a sense confronted by the being
within which he has until now been confined. He feels he is
temporarily outside what he has hitherto been accustomed to call his
very own self, his I. It is as if he were living, with perfect
calm and composure, in two selves. The first of them he knew before;
the second self now confronts the first as a new-born entity. Moreover
he feels the first becoming in a way self-subsistent, independent of
the second, rather as man's body has an independent existence of its
own apart from this first self. This is an experience of very great
moment; for the pupil knows now what it means to live in that higher
world which, with the help of his training, he has been endeavoring to
reach.
The second, the new-born self, can now be brought to perceive in the
spiritual world. Within it there can unfold for the spiritual world
what the sense-organs are for the physical. When this development has
reached the required stage, the pupil will be able to do more than
feel himself as a new-born I. Just as he perceives the physical
world by means of his senses, so will he now begin to perceive around
him spiritual facts and spiritual beings. Here we have then a
third significant experience. In order to pass through this
stage successfully, the pupil will have to reckon with the fact that
along with the strengthening of the soul's forces, self-love and
self-conceit begin to assume proportions that are quite unknown in
ordinary life. It would argue a complete lack of understanding, were
we to imagine that this was no more than the ordinary kind of
selfishness and self-love. Self-love grows so strong at this stage of
the pupil's development, that it can actually seem to him like a force
of Nature working within him, and a strenuous disciple of the will is
required to et the better of this prodigious self-conceit. The latter
does not come as a result of spiritual training. This self-conceit is
always there in man, but only when the pupil comes to have real
experience of the Spirit is it raised up into consciousness. Hand in
hand therefore with spiritual training must always go the training of
the will. The pupil is conscious of a tremendous urge to feel
blissfully happy in the world which he has created within him. What he
must now be able to do is to wipe out, as described above, the very
thing he has taken such pains to achieve. Having reached the
Imaginative world, he must there contrive to extinguish self. In
opposition to this self-effacement are ranged within him the
excessively strong impulses of self-opinion and self-conceit. It might
easily be imagined that exercises for spiritual training were
something quite apart and had nothing whatever to do with moral
development. To this one can only reply that the moral force needed to
overcome this self-conceit cannot possibly be acquired unless the
whole ethical tone and disposition of the pupil be raised to a
proportionate level. Progress in spiritual training is out of the
question, unless progress be made at the same time in the ethical
sphere. Lack of moral strength makes conquest of self-conceit
impossible . The allegation that genuine spiritual training is not
ipso facto moral training is entirely mistaken
Only one who has no personal knowledge of such experience could here
interpose the question: How are we to know, when we think we have
spiritual perceptions, that we are facing realities and not the mere
creations of our fancy visions, hallucinations and the like? As
a matter of ace, a pupil who has reached the above stage in proper
spiritual training can distinguish between the figments of his own
fancy and spiritual reality, just as a person of normal intelligence
is able to distinguish between the mental picture of a hot iron and a
real one he touches with his hand; he knows the difference by virtue
of a sound and healthy experience of life. So too in the spiritual
world, life itself provides the touchstone. In the world of the
senses, we know that if we imagine a hot iron, then however hot we
picture it, it will not burn our fingers; so does the pupil of Spirit
know whether he is only imagining that he confronts a spiritual fact
or whether real facts and real beings are making their impressions on
the organs of spiritual perception that have been awakened in him. The
instructions he will need to follow during his training to save him
from falling a victim to illusion in this regard will be set forth in
the following pages.
It is of the utmost importance that by the time the pupil becomes
conscious of a new-born self within him, his whole character and
morale shall have reached a high level. For it is like this. It
belongs to man's I or Ego, to control his sensations and
feelings and ideas, also his impulses, desires and passions.
Perceptions, mental pictures and ideas cannot be simply let loose in
the soul; they must e regulated by the exercise of a thoughtful
discretion. The I, the self, administers the laws of thought, thereby
bringing order into man's thinking and ideation. It is the same with
his desires and impulses, his inclinations and passions. These are
guided and controlled by his moral principles. Thus the self, by the
exercise of ethically sound judgment and discretion, becomes man's
guide in this domain. When now we have succeeded in drawing out of our
ordinary self a higher self, the former will become to some extent
independent. But it will at the same time be deprived of the energies
now devoted to the higher self. Let us see what will happen if a pupil
wants to give birth to his higher self, when he has not yet developed
adequate ability or certainty in his application of the laws of
thought nor in his power of judgment and discretion. He cannot leave
to his ordinary self any more ability in the field of thought than he
has hitherto developed. Should this not suffice, then his everyday
self, continuing on its own, will exhibit a thinking that is
disordered, confused and fantastic. Since for such a person the
new-born self can only be weak, the lower self, confused as it is,
will gain control over his beholding in the supersensible, and he will
fail to show discrimination in regard to what he observes there. Had
he developed sufficiently his faculty for logical thinking, there
would have been no difficulty in allowing his everyday self to assume
independence.
The same applies in the realm of ethics. If a pupil has not acquired
firmness in moral judgment, if he is not sufficiently master of his
inclinations, his impulses and passions, he will be conferring
independence on his everyday self when it is still in a condition of
relative subjection to them. It can happen that such a person will not
recognize in reference to his supersensible experience the same need
to conform to a high standard of truth as he does in respect of what
the outer physical world presents to his consciousness. Should he thus
have a lax regard or truth, he could easily take for spiritual reality
all manner of things that are nothing but figments of his own fancy.
What is needed is that, before the higher self begins to be active in
its quest for knowledge of the supersensible, the pupil's sense of
truth be infused with a firmness of moral judgment and with a
stability of character and of conscience, that have been developed in
the self now left behind. This is not by any means said with intention
to frighten people away from spiritual training; it is nevertheless a
consideration that needs to be taken very seriously.
If the pupil is firmly resolved to leave nothing undone that will help
to make his first self reliable in the strict performance of its
functions, then he has no need to be afraid of this event that comes
as a result of spiritual training the liberation, that is, of a
second self for attainment of knowledge in the supersensible. He must
however not forget that self-deception is apt to be particularly
strong when one is deeming oneself ripe for some new step.
In the school of spiritual training we have here described, the
pupil's life of thought undergoes a development which precludes the
danger, so very often alleged, of being led astray. Thanks to the
development of the life of thought, the pupil is able to undergo all
necessary experiences of the inner life in such a way that there is no
fear of their being accompanied by delusive and mischievous creations
of the fancy. Where adequate development of the life of thought has
been lacking, the experiences can well evoke serious uncertainty in
the soul of the pupil. If the pupil is prepared in the way here
recommended, he will acquire knowledge of the new experiences in much
the same way as a man of healthy mind gets to know the objects he
perceives in the physical world. Development of the life of thought
tends rather to make him an observer of what he himself is
experiencing, whereas without it he is absorbed in the experience
as it were, unreflective and unheeding.
In a proper school of spiritual training certain qualities are set
forth that require to be cultivated by one who desires to find the
path to the higher worlds. First and foremost, the pupil must have
control over his thoughts (in their course and sequence.) over his
will, and over his feelings. The control has to be acquired by means
of exercises , and these are planned with two ends in view. On the one
hand, the soul has to become so firm, so secure and balanced that it
will retain these qualities when a second self is born. And on the
other hand, the pupil has to endow this second self, from the start,
with strength and steadfastness.
The quality that thinking needs above all is objectivity. In the world
of the physical senses life itself is our great teacher in this
respect. Let a man fling his thoughts hither and thither in a purely
arbitrary manner, he will find himself obliged to suffer life to
correct him if he does not want to come into conflict with it. He must
of necessity bring his thinking into correspondence with the facts.
But when he turns his attention away from the physical world, this
compulsory correction fails him; and if his thinking has not then the
ability to be its own corrector, it will inevitably follow
will-o'-the-wisps. The pupil of the spirit must therefore undertake
exercises in thinking in order that his thinking may be able to mark
out its own path and goal. Stability, and the capacity to adhere
firmly to a once chosen subject, are what the pupil's thinking has to
acquire. There is therefore no occasion for the exercises to deal with
remote or complicated objects, much rather should they have reference
to simple objects that are ready to hand. Whoever succeeds in
directing his thought, for at least five minutes daily, and for months
on end, to some quite commonplace object say, for example, a
needle or a pencil and in shutting out during those five
minutes all thoughts that have no connection with the object, will
have made very good progress in this direction. (A fresh object may be
chosen each day, or one may be continued for several days.) Even a
person who considers himself a trained intellectual thinker should not
be too proud to qualify for spiritual training by an exercise of this
simple nature. For when we are riveting our thought for a considerable
time upon something that is entirely familiar, we may be quite sure
that our thinking is in accord with reality. If we ask ourselves: what
is a lead pencil made of? How are the different materials prepared?
How are they put together? When were lead pencils invented? And so on,
we can be more sure of our thoughts being consistent with reality than
if we were to ponder the question of the descent of man or, let
us say, of the meaning of life. Simple exercises in thinking are a far
better preparation for forming commensurate conceptions of Saturn, Sun
and Moon evolution than are complicated and learned ideas. As to our
thinking, what is important at this stage is not the object or event
to which it is directed, but that it should be strong and vigorous and
to the point. If it has been educated to be so in reference so simple
physical realities that lie open to view, it will acquire the tendency
to be so even when it finds itself no longer under the control of the
physical world and its laws. The pupil will find he gets rid in this
way of any tendency he had before to loose and extravagant thinking.
As if in the world of thought, so also in the sphere of the will, the
self has to become master. Here too, as long as we remain in the world
of the physical senses, life itself may be said to be our master. Some
vital need asserts itself and the will feels impelled to satisfy the
need. But one who undergoes a higher training has to acquire the habit
of strict obedience to what he tells himself to do on his own
initiative. In learning this he will be less and less inclined to
cherish pointless desires. Dissatisfaction and instability in the life
of will come from setting one's heart on some aim, of the realization
of which one has formed no clear notion. Dissatisfaction of this kind
can bring the whole inner life into disorder at the moment when a
higher self is ready to come forth from the soul. A good exercise for
the will is, every day for months on end, to give oneself the command:
Today you are to do this, at this particular hour. One will
gradually manage to fix the hour and the nature of the task so as to
render the command perfectly possible to carry out. In this way we
rise above that deplorable state of mind which finds expression in
words such as: I would like to do this, I wish I could do that
when all the time there is no real expectation of fulfillment. A great
poet made a prophetess say: Him I love who craves for the
impossible' (Goethe, Faust, Part II, Act II.) And the same
poet says in his own name: To live in the Idea is to treat the
impossible as thought it were possible. (Goethe: Proverbs in
Prose.) Such words should however not be quoted as refuting the
above recommendation. For the demand that Goethe and his prophetess
(Manto) are making can only be met by one who has first educated
himself in the achievement of desires that are possible of
fulfillment in order then, by dint of his strengthened will, to
be able to treat the impossible in such a way as to change
it by his will into the possible.
Passing on now to the world of feeling, the pupil must succeed in
reaching a certain equanimity of soul. For this he will need to have
under his control all outward expression of pleasure or pain, of joy
or sorrow. Such advice will be certain to meet with prejudice. Surely,
if he is not to rejoice over what is joyful, not to sorrow over what
is sorrowful, the pupil will become utterly indifferent to the life
that is going on around him! But this is not at all what is meant. The
pupil shall by all means rejoice over what if joyful and sorrow over
what is sorrowful. It is the outward expression of joy and sorrow, of
pleasure and pain that he must learn to control. If he honestly tries
to attain this, he will soon discover that he does not grow less, but
actually more sensitive than before to everything in his environment
that can arouse emotions of joy or of pain. If the pupil is really to
succeed in cultivating this control it will undoubtedly involve
keeping close watch upon himself for a long time. He must not be slow
to enter with fullness of feeling into pleasure and pain, but must be
able to do so without losing self-control and giving involuntary
expression to it. What he has to suppress is not the pain that
is justified but the involuntary weeping; not the horror at a
base action, but the outburst of blind fury; not the caution in face
of danger, but the giving way to panic which does no good
whatever.
Only by the practice of an exercise of this kind can the pupil attain
the inner poise and quiet that he will have need of when the time
comes for the higher self to be born in the soul, and more especially
when this higher self becomes active there. Otherwise the soul may
lead an unhealthy lie of its own alongside the higher self like
a kind of double. It is important not to fall a victim to
self-deception in this manner. It may seem to many a pupil that he
already possesses a good measure of equanimity in ordinary life and
will not therefore need this exercise. In point of fact, such a one is
doubly in need of it. A man may remain perfectly calm and composed in
relation to the exigencies of everyday life, and then, when he rises
into a higher world, exhibit a sad lack of poise all the more
so indeed, since the tendency to let himself go was there all the
time, only suppressed. It must be clearly understood that what a pupil
appears to have already of some attribute of the soul is a
little account for spiritual training; what is far more important is
that he should practice regularly and systematically the exercises he
needs. Contradictory as such a statement may sound, it is true
nevertheless. Say that life has endowed us with this or that virtue;
for spiritual training it is the virtues we ourselves have
cultivated that are of value. Are we by nature easily excitable,
it is for us to rid ourselves of this excitability; are we by nature
calm and imperturbable, we must bestir ourselves to bring it about
through our own self-education that the impressions we receive from
without awake in us the right response. A man who cannot laugh has
just as little control over his life as a man who without self-control
is perpetually giving way to laughter.
It will be a further help to the education of his thinking and
feeling, if the pupil acquire a virtue that I will call positiveness.
A lovely legend is related of Christ Jesus. It tells how He is walking
with a few other persons, and they pass by a dead dog. The other turn
away from the revolting sight. Christ Jesus speaks admiringly of the
beautiful teeth of the animal. One can train oneself to meet the world
with the disposition of soul that this legend displays. The spurious,
the bad and the ugly should not hinder us from finding, wherever they
are present, the true, the good and the beautiful. Positiveness must
not be confused lack of discrimination, or with an arbitrary shutting
of one's eyes to what is bad, or false, or good for
nothing. He who admires the beautiful teeth of a
dead animal sees also the decaying body. The unsightly corpse does
not, however, prevent him from seeing the beautiful teeth. We cannot
deem a bad thing good or an error true; but we can take care not to be
put off by the bad from seeing the good, nor by the false from seeing
the true.
The thinking, and together with it the willing, reaches a certain
maturity if one tries never to let past experiences rob one of
open-minded receptivity for new ones. To declare in the face of some
new experience: I never heard of such a thing, I don't believe
it! should make no sense at all to a pupil of the Spirit. Rather
let him make the deliberate resolve, during a certain period of time
to let every thing or being he encounters tell him something new. A
breath of wind, a leaf falling from a tree, the prattle of a little
child, can all teach us something, are we but ready to adopt a point
of view to which we have perhaps not hitherto been accustomed. One
can, it is true, carry this too far. We must not, at whatever age we
have reached, put right out of our minds everything we have
experienced hitherto. We have most decidedly to base our judgment of
what confronts us now upon past experience. That is on the one side of
the balance, but on the other there is the need for the pupil of the
Spirit to be ready all the time for entirely new experiences; above
all, to admit to himself the possibility that the new may contradict
the old.
These then are five qualities of soul the pupil has to acquire n the
coursed of a right and proper training: control over the direction of
his thoughts, control of his impulses of will, equanimity in the face
of pleasure and pain, positiveness in his attitude to the world around
him, readiness to meet life with an open mind. Lastly, when he has
spent consecutive periods of time in training himself for the
acquisition of these five qualities, the pupil will need to bring them
into harmony in his soul. He will have to practice them in manifold
combinations two by two, three and one at a time, and so on, in
order to establish harmony among them.
These exercises have been assigned a place in spiritual training,
because when thoroughly and effectually carried out they have not only
their more immediate result in the cultivation of the desired
qualities, but indirectly a great deal more will follow from them that
is of no less importance for the pupil on his path to the spiritual
worlds. Whoever gives sufficient time and care to their practice will,
while he is doing them, come up against many blemishes and
shortcomings in his soul, and will moreover find in the exercises
themselves the means of strengthening and stabilizing his thought
life, as well as his life of feeling and indeed his whole character.
He will undoubtedly need many more exercises, adapted to his own
individual faculties, to his particular character and temperament.
These will emerge when the above have been practiced in all
thoroughness. One will indeed discover, as time goes on, that these
six exercises give one indirectly more than at first appears to be
contained in them. Suppose the pupil is lacking in self-confidence. He
will after a time begin to notice that, thanks to the exercises, he is
gaining the self-confidence of which he stands in need. And it will be
the same with other qualities of soul wherein he may be deficient.
(Several exercises, described in more detail, will be found in my book
Knowledge of the Higher Worlds and its Attainment.)
It is important that the pupil shall find it possible to go on
developing the said six qualities in ever increasing measure. His
control over this thoughts and sensations must become great enough to
enable him to set aside times of complete inner quiet, when all the
joys and sorrows, all the satisfactions and anxieties of everyday life
nay more, even all its tasks and demands are banished from mind
and heart. In such times that alone which he himself wills to admit
shall be allowed entry to his soul. Here again it is possible that
some reader may feel misgiving. Will not the pupil become estranged
from daily life and its tasks, if he withdraws from it in this way,
banishing it from mind and heart for certain stated times during the
day? In reality, however, this is far from being so. One who devotes
himself in this way to periods of inner quiet, will find that he grows
stronger in many respects for the tasks of daily life, and fulfils
them, not only no less well, but decidedly better than before.
Such periods will have special value for the pupil if during them he
refrains entirely from thinking of his own personal affairs and rises
to the contemplation of the concerns of mankind at large. Should he be
able at such times to fill his soul with communications that come from
higher spiritual worlds, letting these take no less firm hold upon his
interest than do his personal cares and concerns in ordinary life, he
will be richly rewarded.
One who makes serious endeavor to gain this mastery over his life of
soul will also find his way to a self-observation by means of which he
will be able to regard his own concerns as coolly and quietly as if
they had no connection with himself. To be able to look upon all
experiences that come to one in life, all joys and sorrows, in the
very same way as one looks upon those of others is a good preparation
for spiritual training. The pupil will find he can gradually attain
the necessary ability in this direction, if every evening when the
day's work is done, he lets pass before his mind's eye pictures of the
day's experiences, watching himself go through them. This will mean
that he is looking at himself as he is in daily life from
without. To begin with, let him take small sections of the day. That
will give him practice; and he will find that he grows more and more
skilful in this looking backward until at last he is able
to picture the whole day through in quite a short span of time. This
beholding of our experiences in backward direction has a special value
for spiritual training: it helps us disengage our thinking from its
accustomed habit of holding on to the outer, material and
sense-perceptible events. When we think backwards, we picture the
events correctly, but we are no longer sustained by the obvious
external sequence. The pupil needs this liberation if he is to make
his way into the supersensible world. He will find too that by this
freedom his thinking and ideation are strengthened, and in a
thoroughly healthy manner. It is accordingly good also to review other
things in backward order a play, for example, a story, a
melody, and so on.
A pupil of the Spirit will have it increasingly as his ideal to meet
the events of life with inner quiet and confidence, forming his
judgment on them, not as to how they accord with his own particular
disposition but on the basis of their inherent meaning and inner
value. By holding this ideal ever before him, he will be laying in his
soul the foundation for that deep inner contemplation of
symbolic and other thoughts and also of feelings of which we
have been hearing.
It is essential for the pupil to fulfill the above conditions, for
supersensible experience has to be built upon the ground on which he
stands in ordinary life before he enters the supersensible world. His
experience there is dependent in two ways on the point he reached
before setting out. If he has not taken special care to see that an
ability for sound judgment is at the very foundation of his spiritual
training, he will develop supersensible faculties which perceive the
spiritual world inaccurately and falsely. His organs of spiritual
perception will evolve in a wrong way. As in the world of the senses
we cannot see correctly with imperfect or diseased eyes, so in the
spiritual world we cannot perceive correctly with organs lacking the
foundation of sound judgment and discrimination.
Should it happen that a pupil sets out on the path with an immoral
character, his power of vision, when he mounts up into the spiritual
worlds, will be dim and clouded. He will be like a man in the world of
the senses who gazes at it in a condition of stupor. With this
difference, however: whereas the latter will have little of any
consequence to tell, the observer in the spiritual world even
in his stupor is more awake than man is in ordinary
consciousness, and will accordingly give information of what he sees
there. The information will however be erroneous.
Footnotes:
-
It is of no consequence how far the above thoughts can be
justified from the side of Natural Science, the whole point being to
evolve thoughts in regard to plant and man, which can be arrived at
without reference to any theory, by simple and direct observation.
Thoughts of this kind concerning objects in the world around us have
their significance, alongside of the theoretical ideas of science
which are, in their right place, no less significant. Here we are not
putting forward thoughts for the purpose of presenting facts in
scientific terms; what we ant to do is to create a symbolic picture
that shall prove capable of influencing the soul, irrespective of any
criticisms that could be leveled at the composition of the picture.
Last Modified: 02-Nov-2024
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