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Rudolf Steiner e.Lib
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Philosophy, Cosmology and Religion
Rudolf Steiner e.Lib Document
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Philosophy, Cosmology and Religion
Schmidt Number: S-4975
On-line since: 15th June, 2009
EXERCISES OF COGNITION AND WILL
WE said that for the development of inspired cognition one
of the basic exercises is to banish from the consciousness pictures
which have arisen in it in meditation or in the sequel to the process
of meditation. But this exercise is really only a preliminary one to
another. By the banishing we get to the point of visualizing the
course of our life in the way our last survey demonstrated. We attain
also to a view of the spiritual Cosmos in so far as this can express
itself in etheric life. We receive a picture of the living etheric
Cosmos projected on to the human being. We see how everything which we
can call heredity passes on in a continuous process from the physical
organisms of the ancestors to the physical organisms of posterity. But
we see also how a repeatedly new effect of the etheric cosmos occurs
for the facts of the etheric organism. This fresh effect from the
etheric cosmos works in opposition to heredity. It is of a kind which
affects only the individual man. It is specially important for the
teacher to have an insight into these things.
To progress in supernatural knowledge it is necessary to perfect the
exercise of banishing the imaginative pictures more and more. Through
it the energy of the soul for this banishing is continually
strengthened. For at first we attain only to a review of the course of
our life since birth. What we have there before us is indeed something
psychic and spiritual, but at the same time it is not something which
can be said to have an existence beyond the physical life of man.
In continuing these exercises of inspiration it becomes clear that the
power of obliterating the imaginative pictures grows ever greater, and
later becomes so great that the whole picture of one's life's
course can be banished from the consciousness. We then have a
consciousness that is freed also from the content of our own physical
and etheric human nature.
Into this in a higher sense empty consciousness there then enters
through a higher inspiration a picture of the psychic-spiritual nature
as it was before man left the psychic-spiritual world for the
physical, and there formed union with the body which exists through
conception and the development of the embryo. We get a vision of how
the astral and Ego-organization covers itself with an etheric
organization which comes from the etheric Cosmos, and with a physical
one which arises from the sequence of heredity.
Only in this way do we acquire knowledge of the eternal inner being of
man, which during his life on earth exists in the reflection of the
soul's imagination, feeling and will. But we acquire also through it
the idea of the true nature of this imaginative presentation; for in
point of fact this is not present in its true shape within the limits
of the earth-life.
Look at a human corpse. It has the shape and the limbs of a man, but
life has gone out of it. If we understand the nature of the corpse, we
do not regard it as an end in itself, but as the remains of a living
physical man. The external forces of Nature, to which the corpse is
surrendered, can destroy it well enough; but they cannot construct it.
In the same way, from a higher stage of vision, one recognizes earthly
human thought to be the dead remains of that living thought
which belonged to man before he was transplanted from his existence in
the spiritual, psychic world into his life on earth. The nature of
earthly thought is as little comprehensible from itself as the form of
the human organism is from the forces which work in the corpse. We
must recognize earthly thought as dead thought, if we want to
recognize it rightly.
If we are on the way to such a recognition, we can then also
completely see the nature of earthly will. This is recognized in a
certain sense as a more recent part of the soul. That which is
hidden behind the will stands to thought in the same relationship as,
in the physical organism, the baby does to the old man on his
deathbed. Only with the soul, babyhood and old age do not develop in
sequence after one another, but exist side by side. We see, however,
from what has been explained, certain results for a Philosophy which
intends to form its ideas only on the experience of life on earth. It
receives as contents only dead, or at least, expiring ideas. Its duty
therefore can be only to recognize the dead character of the
thought-world and to draw conclusions from what is dead on the basis
of something which was once living. Just so far as one keeps to the
method of intelligible proof, one can have no other aim. This purely
intellectual Philosophy therefore, can lead to the true
nature of the soul only indirectly. It can examine the nature of human
thought and recognize its transitoriness, and so it can indirectly
show that something dead points to something living, as the corpse
points to a living man.
Only inspired cognition can arrive at a real vision of
what is the true soul. The corpse of thought is again animated in a
certain sense through exercises for this inspiration. We are not, it
is true, transferred back completely into the condition that existed
before life on earth began; but we bring to life in us a true picture
of this condition, from the nature of which we can realize that it is
projected out of a pre-terrestrial existence into a terrestrial one.
By means of developing intuition by exercises of the will it comes
about that the pre-terrestrial existence which had in thought died out
during the earth-life is brought to life again in the subconscious
mind. Through these exercises man is brought into a condition by means
of which he enters upon the world of the spiritual, apart from his
physical and etheric organism. He experiences what existence is after
the dissolution from the body; he is given a pre-vision of what really
happens after death. He can speak of the continuity of the spiritual
part of the soul after going through the gates of death.
Again the purely intellectual conceptual Philosophy can attain to the
recognition of the immortality of the soul only by an indirect way. As
it recognizes in thought something that can be compared with a dead
body, so in the will it can establish something comparable with a
seed. Something that has life in itself, which points beyond the
dissolution of the body, because its nature shows itself, even during
life on earth, independent of it. So, since we do not stand still at
thought, but use all soul-life as experience of self, we can reach an
indirect realization of the everlasting nucleus of the human being.
Further we must not limit our contemplation to thought, but subject
the interchange of thought with the other forces of the soul to
philosophical methods of proof. But still with all this we come only
to experience the everlasting human nucleus as it is in the
earth-life, and not to a vision of the condition of the human spirit
and the human soul before and after it. This is the case, for
instance, with Bergson's Philosophy, which rests on a comprehensive
self-experience of what is evident in the earth-life, but which
refuses to step into the region of real super-sensible knowledge.
Every Philosophy which remains within the sphere of the
ordinary consciousness can reach only an indirect knowledge of the
true nature of the human soul.
Cosmology if it is to be of a kind that the total human being is
influenced through it, can be acquired only through the imaginative,
inspired and intuitive knowledge. Within ordinary consciousness it has
only the testimony for the human soul-life that dies out and re-awakens
like seed. From this fact it can formulate ideas based on unprejudiced
observations which point to something Cosmic, and lay it open. Still,
these ideas are only that which pours into the inner being of man from
the spiritual Cosmos, and moreover reveals itself in a changed form
within him. Philosophy indeed had in former times a branch called
Cosmology. But the real subject matter of this Cosmology were ideas
which had become very abstract, which had by tradition subsisted from
old forms of Cosmology. Humanity had developed these ideas at a time
when an old dream-like Imagination, Inspiration and Intuition still
existed. They were taken out of their tradition and woven into the
material of pure intellectual, logical or dialectic demonstration.
Men were often quite unconscious of the fact that these ideas were
borrowed; they were considered new and original. Gradually it was
found that in the inner life of the spirit no real inner connection
with these ideas existed. Therefore this rational Cosmology
fell almost completely into discredit. It had to give place to the
physical Cosmology, built up on the nature-knowledge of the physical
senses, which, however, to the unprejudiced eye, no longer embraced
man in its scope.
A true Cosmology can arise again only when imaginative, inspired and
intuitive knowledge are allowed their place, and their results applied
to the knowledge of the universe.
What has had to be said concerning Cosmology applies still more to
knowledge of a religious kind. Here we have to build up knowledge
which has its origins in the experience of the spiritual world. To
draw conclusions concerning such experience from the subject-matter of
ordinary consciousness is impossible. In intellectual concepts the
religious content cannot be opened out but only clarified. When one
began to seek for proofs of God's existence, the very search was a
proof that one had already lost the living connection with the
divine world. For this reason also no intellectualistic proof of God's
existence can be given in any satisfactory way. Any theory formed from
the ordinary consciousness alone is obliged to work into an individual
system ideas borrowed from tradition. Formerly, philosophers tried to
get also a rational Theology from this ordinary
consciousness. But this compared with the Theology based on
traditional ideas suffered the same fate as rational
Cosmology, only still more so. Whatever came to light as a
direct God-experience remains in the world of feeling or
will, and in fact prevents the transition to any method of conceptual
proof. Philosophy itself has fallen into the error of seeing in a
purely historical religion religious forms which have existed and
still exist. It does this from an incapacity to attain through the
ordinary consciousness to ideas on a subject which can be experienced
only outside the physical and etheric organism.
A new basis for the knowledge of the religious life can be won
only by a recognition of the imaginative, inspired and intuitive
methods, and by the application of their results to this life.
Last Modified: 23-Nov-2024
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