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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
Having come thus far in his experience, the aspirant is now able to
make distinction in the surrounding world of soul and spirit between
what is himself and what is outside him. He will now be in a position
to appreciate how necessary it was to study the evolution of the world
as described in this book, in order to arrive at a true understanding
of man and of his life. For we can only understand man's physical body
if we know how it has been built up right through the Saturn, Sun,
Moon and Earth evolutions. So too for the other members of man's
being. To understand the ether-body, we need to follow its development
through Sun, Moon and Earth evolutions. And if we are to understand
all that has to do with the Earth's own evolution at the present time,
we shall need to know how it has gradually unfolded, stage by stage.
One who has undergone spiritual training will be in a position to
recognize the relationship between what is contained in man and the
corresponding facts and beings of the world around him. For it is so
indeed: there is no member or part of man that does not stand in some
relation to the rest of the world the world in its entirety. In
this book it has hardly been possible to do more than give indications
in barest outline of this universal correspondence. But we must not
forget that the physical body, for example, was, during Saturn
evolution, only in its very first beginnings. Its organs heart,
lung, brain and so on developed out of these first beginnings,
during the Sun, Moon and Earth periods. They therefore are connected
with Sun, Moon and Earth evolution. The like must be said of man's
other members the ether-body, the sentient body, the sentient
soul and so on. The whole of the immediately surrounding world has
gone to the forming of man; no single part or feature of him that has
not its corresponding process or being in the world without. And when
he has reached the above-described stage in his development, the pupil
of the Spirit learns to recognize this relationship of his own being
to the great world. Such is the characteristic experience at this
stage: he becomes conscious of the correspondence that exists between
the little world, the Microcosm the world, that is,
of man himself and the great world, the Macrocosm.
When the pupil has worked his way through to this perception, a new
experience awaits him. He begins to feel as though he has grown
together with the whole vast structure of the Universe, retaining,
however, at the same time the consciousness of himself as a fully
independent being. A feeling nevertheless comes over him, as if he
were being merged into the whole vast Universe, were becoming one with
it yet without losing his individuality. This stage of
development may be described as the becoming one with the
Macrocosm. It is essential not to think of it as though implying
that separate consciousness should cease and the human individuality
be poured out into the All. Such an idea could arise only from an
inexact and untrained way of thinking.
We may now set down in order the stages on the way to higher powers of
cognition, attained in the training for Initiation that has here been
described:
Study of spiritual science. To begin with, the pupil applies himself
to this study with the powers of thought and sound judgment acquired
in the physical world.
Attainment of Imaginative Cognition.
Reading of the Hidden Script. (This stage is equivalent to
Inspiration.)
Living one's way into the Spiritual World that is around one
(equivalent to Intuition.)
Knowledge of the relationships between Microcosm and Macrocosm.
Becoming one with the Macrocosm.
A fundamental mood of soul determined by the simultaneous and integral
experience of the foregoing stages.
The reader is not however to imagine that the seven stages necessarily
follow one another in precise order. Much will depend on the
individual character of the pupil. If can be that an earlier stage has
only partially been reached when a pupil begins to undertake exercises
belonging to the next. For example, it may be perfectly right, when he
has had but a few genuine Imaginations, for him already to be doing
exercises designed to bring Inspiration or Intuition, or even
knowledge of the relationship of Microcosm to Macrocosm, within the
reach of his own personal experience.
When the pupil has got so far as to have an experience of Intuition,
then in addition to having knowledge of the pictures that belong to
the world of soul and spirit, and being able to read from the Hidden
Script how these pictures are interrelated, he also comes to know the
Beings through whose co-operation the world to which man belongs has
been called into existence. Then too he learns to know himself in his
own archetypal form as a soul-and-spirit being in the world of soul
and spirit. He has wrestled his way through to a perception of his
Higher Self, and now sees clearly what he has still to achieve in
order to gain control over his Double, the Guardian of the
Threshold who stands there before him, continually calling upon
him to work on further at his development. This Greater Guardian
of the Threshold now becomes for him the Ideal, the Example that
he will do his utmost to follow. Having once come to this resolve, the
pupil will be enabled to recognize who it is that is there before him
as the Greater Guardian of the Threshold. For now this
Greater Guardian changes for the eyes of the pupil into the figure of
Christ, whose nature and whose part in the evolution of Earth have
been explained in the earlier chapters of this book. Through this
experience the pupil is initiated into the sublime Mystery that is
connected with the name of Christ. Christ shows himself to him as the
great human Prototype and Example, united with the Earth's true
evolution.
Having thus come through Intuition to a knowledge of Christ in the
spiritual world, the aspirant will find that he is able also to
understand what took place historically on Earth in the fourth
post-Atlantean period the time of the Greek and Roman
civilization. How the great Sun Being, even the Christ, intervened in
Earth evolution, and how He is still working in it now and on into the
future, the pupil of the Spirit knows henceforth from his own
experience. This then is what he attains through Intuition: the very
meaning and significance of Earth evolution are communicated to him.
The path to knowledge of the supersensible worlds that has here been
described is one that everyone can tread, no matter what his situation
or circumstances in life. When speaking of such a path, we must not
forget that the goal of knowledge and truth has been and is the same
throughout all epochs of Earth evolution, but that the starting-point
has been different in different epochs. Man cannot set out today from
the same starting-point as did, for example, the candidate for
Initiation in ancient Egypt. Neither can the exercises that were given
to a pupil in ancient Egypt be simply taken over by a man of the
present age. Since that epoch men's souls have been through sundry
incarnations, and this moving on from incarnation to incarnation is
not without meaning and purpose. The capabilities and qualities of the
soul change from one incarnation to the next. Even a superficial study
of history will convince us that since the twelfth and thirteenth
centuries of our era the conditions of life have been very different
from what they were before; men's opinions and feelings, even their
capacities, have quite altered from what they were in earlier times.
The path to higher knowledge that has here been described is one that
is adopted for souls who are incarnated in the immediate present. It
takes for its starting-point the situation of a human being of today,
living under any of the typical conditions of the present age. As
evolution progresses, the outer forms of man's life on Earth undergo
change; so too in the paths of higher development every succeeding
epoch calls for new ways and new methods. It is of vital importance
that at every stage harmony should reign between man's life in the
world at large and the Way of Initiation.
Last Modified: 02-Nov-2024
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