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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-4972
On-line since: 15th June, 2009
METHODS OF IMAGINATIVE, INSPIRED AND INTUITIVE KNOWLEDGE OR COGNITION
THE inner life of man assumes another form from that of ordinary
consciousness when it enters upon imaginative knowledge. His
relationship to the world is also changed. This change is brought
about by the concentration of all the powers of the soul on a
presentation-complex which can easily be seen in its entirety. This
last condition is necessary to avoid any kind of unconscious process
playing a part in the meditation; for in this everything must come to
pass only within the psychic and spiritual spheres. The man who
thinks out a mathematical problem can be fairly certain that he is
employing only psychic-spiritual forces. Unconscious memories,
influenced by feeling or will, will not enter into it. It must be the
same with Meditation. If we take for it a thought which is brought up
out of memory, we cannot know how much at the same time we introduce
into the consciousness from the physical, or instinctive, or
unconsciously psychical, and cause it to react in the soul on the
presentation during meditation. It is, therefore, best to choose for a
subject of meditation something which one knows for certain to be
quite new to the soul. If we seek advice on this point from an
experienced spiritual investigator, he will lay particular stress on
this. He will recommend a subject which is perfectly simple and which
quite certainly cannot have occurred to us before. It is of no
importance that the subject should even correspond with some known
fact taken from the world of the senses. We can take as an idea
something pictorial, but not necessarily representing a picture of the
outer world, e.g., In Light lives streaming Wisdom. It
depends on the power of reposeful meditation with such an
image-presentation. The spiritual and psychic powers are strengthened
by such a calm meditation just as the muscles are strengthened by
performing a piece of work. The meditation can be short at a time, but
it must be repeated over a long period to be successful. With one
person success can be attained after a few weeks, with another only
after years, according to natural predisposition. The man who wishes
to be a true Spiritual Investigator must do such exercises
systematically and intensively. The first result of meditation in the
way here indicated is that the man who practises it has through his
inner life a greater control over the statements of a Spiritual
Investigator than the man of ordinary healthy intellect, though the
latter, if sufficiently unfettered and unprejudiced, is also quite
capable of such control.
Meditation must call to its aid the exercise in character
strengthening, inner truthfulness, calmness of soul, self-possession
and deliberation. For only then, when it is thoroughly imbued with
these qualities, will the soul gradually imprint on the whole human
organization what in meditation appears as a process.
When success is reached by means of such exercises, we find ourselves
in the etheric organism. The thought-experience receives a new form.
We experience the thoughts not only in the abstract form as before,
but in such a way that one feels the power in them. Thoughts of former
experience can only be thoughts, they have no power to
stimulate action. Whereas the thoughts we now have have as much power as
the powers of growth which accompany man from childhood to maturity,
and just for this reason it is necessary to carry out meditation in
the right way. For if unconscious forces intervene in it, if it is not
an act of complete and deliberate thoughtfulness, and done in
self-possession taking a purely psychic and spiritual course, impulses
are developed which step in as do the natural powers of growth in our
own human organism. This must in no wise occur. Our own
physical and etheric organism must remain completely untouched by
meditation. The right kind of meditation enables us to live with the
newly-developed power of thought-content quite outside our own
physical and etheric organism. We have the etheric experience; and our
organism itself attains to a personal experience of a relationship
with a relative objectivity. We look at it (our organism) and in the
form of thought it radiates back what we experience in the ether. This
experience is healthy if we arrive at the condition in which we can
with complete freedom of choice alternate between an existence in the
ether and one in our physical body. The condition is not right if
there is something which forces us into the etheric existence. We must
be able to be in ourselves and outside ourselves in accordance with
perfectly free orientation.
The first experience which we can win through such an inner labour is
a review of the course of our own past life on earth. We see it as it
has progressed by means of the powers of growth from childhood
upwards. We see it in thought-pictures which are condensed into powers
of growth. They are not simply remembered scenes of our own life which
we have before us. They are pictures of an etheric course of events,
which have happened in our own existence, without having been taken
into the ordinary consciousness. That which the consciousness and
memory hold is only the abstract accompanying appearance of the real
course. It is, as it were, a surface wave which is in its shape the
result of something deeper.
In the process of viewing this progress the working of the etheric
Cosmos on man is brought out. We can experience this work as the
subject-matter of Philosophy. It is wisdom, not in the abstract form
of the conception, but rather in the form of the working of the
etheric in the Cosmos.
In ordinary consciousness it is only the young child who has not yet
learnt to speak who is in the same relationship to the Cosmos as the
man who uses his imagination correctly. The child has not yet
separated the powers of thought from the general (etheric) powers of
growth. This happens only when he learns to speak. Then the powers of
abstract thought are separated from the universal powers of growth
which alone were previously present. In the course of his later life
man has these powers of abstract thought, but they are part of his
physical organism, and are not taken up into his etheric being. He
cannot, therefore, bring his relationship to the etheric world into
his consciousness. He can learn to do this through Imagination.
A quite small child is an unconscious philosopher; the
imaginative philosopher is again a small child, but
wakened to full consciousness.
Through the exercise of Inspiration a new capacity is
added to those already developed, namely, the capacity to obliterate
from the consciousness pictures which have been dwelt upon in
meditation. It must be clearly emphasized that here the
capacity must be developed again to obliterate when one likes pictures
which have previously been taken up in meditation by one's free will.
It is not enough to obliterate presentations which have not been
implanted in the consciousness by free choice. It requires a greater
psychic effort to abolish pictures which have been created in
meditation than to extinguish those which have entered into the
consciousness in another way. And we need this greater effort to
advance in super-sensible knowledge.
On such lines we achieve a wakeful, but quite empty soul-life; we
remain in conscious wakefulness. If this condition is experienced in
full thoughtfulness the soul becomes filled with spiritual facts, as
through the senses it is filled with physical. And this is the
condition of Inspiration. We live an inner life in the
Cosmos just as we live an inner life in the physical organism. But we
are aware that we are experiencing the cosmic life, that the spiritual
things and processes of the Cosmos are being revealed to us as our own
inner soul-life. Now the possibility must have remained of always
momentarily exchanging this inner experience of the Cosmos with the
condition of ordinary consciousness. For then we can always relate
what we experience in Inspiration to something we experience in
ordinary consciousness. We see in the Cosmos that is perceived by the
senses a reproduction of what we have spiritually experienced. The
process may be compared with that by which one compares a new
experience in life with a memory-picture which rises in the
consciousness. The spiritual outlook which we have won is like the new
experience, and the physical view of the Cosmos like the
memory-picture.
This spiritual outlook, thus attained, differs from the imaginative.
In the latter we have general pictures of an etheric occurrence; in
the former, pictures appear of spiritual beings who live and move in
this etheric occurrence. What we know in the physical world as Sun and
Moon, Planets and Fixed Stars, these we find again as Cosmic beings;
and our own psychic-spiritual experience appears enclosed in the orbit
of these cosmic essences. The physical organism of man now becomes
intelligible for the first time, for not only all that his senses take
in contributes to its shape and life, but also the beings who work
creatively in the affairs of the sense-world. Everything which is thus
experienced through inspiration remains completely shut out from the
ordinary consciousness. Man would only be conscious of it if he
experienced the process of breathing in the same way as he experienced
the process of observation. The cosmic disposition between man and
world remains hidden for ordinary consciousness. The Yoga-philosophy
seeks the road to a Cosmology whereby the process of breathing is
transformed into a process of observation. Modern western man should
not imitate that. In the course of human evolution he has entered upon
an organization which for him excludes such Yoga-exercises. He
would never through them get quite away from his organism, and so
would not satisfy the requirement to leave untouched his physical and
etheric organism. Such practices corresponded with a period of
evolution which has gone by. But what was attained by them had to be
gained in the same way as has just been described for inspired
knowledge; the method, that is, of experiencing in a state of full
consciousness what in past times man had to experience in waking
dreams.
If the Philosopher is a child with fully-developed consciousness, the
Cosmologist must become in a fully conscious way a man of past ages,
in which the Spirit of the Cosmos could still be seen by means of
natural faculties.
In Intuition man is completely translated through
the exercises of the Will described last time together with his
consciousness into the objective world of the cosmic, spiritual
beings. He attains a condition of experience which alone on earth the
first men had. They were in as close a connection with the inwardness
of their cosmic surroundings as they were with the processes of their
own bodies. And these processes were not completely unconscious as
with modern man. They were reflected in the soul. Man felt in the soul
his growth, and the chemical changes of his body, as in waking
dream-pictures. And this experience enabled him to feel also the
processes of his cosmic circumstances with their spiritual inwardness
as in a dream. He had dreamlike intuition of which we find to-day only
an echo in some people specially inclined to it. The world around him
was, in the consciousness of primitive man, both material and
spiritual; and what he experienced then in a semi-dream state was for
him religious revelation, a direct continuation of the other aspects
of his life. These experiences in the spirit world, of which primitive
man was only half conscious, remain completely unknown to modern man.
The man with super-sensible, intuitive knowledge brings them into his
full consciousness, and so in a new way he is transported back to the
condition of primitive man, who still derived the religious content
from his world-consciousness.
As the Philosopher resembles the fully-conscious child, and the
Cosmologist the fully-conscious man of a past middle human period, so
the man with religious cognition in a modern sense resembles primitive
man, except that he experiences the spiritual world in his soul, not
as in a dream, but with full consciousness.
Last Modified: 02-Nov-2024
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