II
Inspiration and
Intuition
Let us once
more call up before our souls whither modern Initiation leads, after the
first steps to Imaginative knowledge have been successfully taken. A man
then comes to the point where his previous abstract, purely ideal
world of thought is permeated with inner life. The thoughts coming to
him are no longer lifeless, passively acquired; they are an inward
world of living force which he feels in the same way as he feels the
pulsing of his blood or the streaming in and out of the air he
breathes. It is therefore a question of the ideal element in thinking
being replaced by an inward experience of reality. Then indeed the
pictures that previously constituted a man's thoughts are no
longer mere abstract, shadowy projections of the outside world, but
are teeming with an inward, vivid existence. They are real
Imaginations experienced in two dimensions, as indicated
yesterday, but it is not as though a man were standing in front of a
painting in the physical world, for then he may experience visions,
not Imaginations. Rather is it as though, having lost the third
dimension, he were himself moving about within the picture. Hence it
is not like seeing something in the physical world; anything that has
the look of the physical world will be a vision. Genuine Imagination
comes to us only when, for example, we no longer see colours
as we do in the physical world, but when we experience them.
What does this mean?
When you see
colours in the physical world, they give you different experiences. You
perceive red as something that attacks you, that wants to spring at
you. A bull will react violently to this aggressive red; he
experiences it far more vividly than does man, in whom the whole
experience is toned down.
When you
perceive green, it gives you a feeling of balance, an experience neither
painful nor particularly pleasant; whereas blue induces a mood of
devotion and humility. If we allow these various experiences of
colour to penetrate right into us, we can realise how it is that when
anything in the spiritual world comes at us in the aggressive way red
does in physical life, it is something corresponding to the colour
red. When we encounter something which calls up a mood of humility,
this has the same effect as the experience of blue or blue-violet in
the physical world. We can simplify this by saying: we have
experienced red or blue in the spiritual world. Otherwise, for the
sake of precision, we should always have to say: we have experienced
something there in the way that red, or blue, is experienced in the
physical world. To avoid so many words, one says simply that one has
seen auric colours which can be distinguished as red, blue, green,
and so on.
But we must
realise thoroughly that this making our way into the super-sensible, this
setting aside of all that comes to us through the senses, is always
present as a concrete experience. And in the course of this
experience we always have the feeling I described yesterday, as if
thinking had become an organ of touch extending throughout the human
organism, so that spiritually we feel that a new world is opening out
and we are touching it. This is not yet the real spiritual world, but
what I might call the etheric or formative-forces world. Anyone who
would learn to know the etheric must grasp it in this way. For no
speculation, no abstract reflection, about the etheric can lead
to true knowledge of it. In this thinking that has become real we
live with our own formative-forces or etheric body, but it is a
different kind of living from life in the physical body. I should
like to describe this other way by means of a comparison.
When you look
at one of your fingers, you recognise it as a living member of your
organism. Cut it off, and it is no longer what it was; it dies. If
this finger of yours had a consciousness, it would say: I am no more
than a part of your organism, I have no independent existence. That
is what a man has to say directly he enters the etheric world with
Imaginative cognition. He no longer feels himself as a separate
being, but as a member of the whole etheric world, the whole etheric
cosmos. After that he realises that it is only by having a physical
body that he becomes a personality, an individuality. It is the
physical body that individualises and makes of one a separate
being.
We shall indeed
see how even in the spiritual world we can be individualised — but
I will speak of that later. If we enter the spiritual world in the
way described, we are bound at first to feel ourself as just one
member of the whole etheric Cosmos; and if our etheric body were to
be cut off from the cosmic ether, it would mean for us etheric death.
It is very important to grasp this, so that we may understand
properly what has to be said later about a man's passage through the
gate of death.
As I pointed
out yesterday, this Imaginative experience in the etheric, which becomes
a tableau of our whole life from birth up to the present moment of
our existence on Earth, is accompanied by an extraordinarily intense
feeling of happiness. And the flooding of the whole picture-world by
this inward, wonderfully pleasurable feeling is a man's first higher
experience.
We must then
be able — as I also mentioned yesterday — to take all we have
striven for through Imagination, through our life-tableau, and make
it all disappear at will. It is only when we have thus emptied our
consciousness that we understand how matters really are in the
spiritual world. For then we know that what we have seen up to now
was not the spiritual world, but merely an Imaginative picture of it.
It is only at this stage of empty consciousness that — just as
the physical world streams into us through our senses — so the
spiritual world streams into us through our thinking. Here begins our
first real experience, our first real knowledge, of the objective
spiritual world. The life-tableau was only of our own inner world.
Imaginative cognition reveals only this inner world, which appears to
higher knowledge as a picture-world, a world of cosmic pictures. The
Cosmos itself, together with our own true being, as it was before
birth, before our earthly existence, appear first at the stage of
Inspiration, when the spiritual world flows into us from outside. But
when we have arrived at being able to empty our consciousness, our
whole soul becomes awake; and in this stage of pure wakefulness
we must be able to acquire a certain inner stillness and peace. This
peace I can describe only in the following way.
Let us imagine
we are in a very noisy city and hear the roar of it all around us. This is
terrible — we say — when, from all sides, tumult assails
our ears. Suppose it to be some great modern city, such as London.
But now suppose we leave this city, and gradually, with every step we
take as we walk away, it becomes quieter and quieter. Let us imagine
vividly this fading away of noise. Stiller and stiller it becomes.
Finally we come perhaps to a wood where all is perfectly silent; we
have reached the zero-point where nothing can be heard.
Yet we can
go even further. To illustrate how this can happen, I will use a quite
trivial comparison. Suppose we have in our purse a certain sum of
money. As we spend it from day to day, it dwindles, just as the noise
dwindles as we leave the town. At length comes the day when there is
nothing left — the purse is empty. We can compare this
nothingness with the silence. But what do we do next if we are
not to grow hungry? We get into debt. I am not recommending
this; it is meant only as a comparison. How much have we then in our
purse? Less than nothing; and the greater the debt, the more we have
less than nothing.
And now let us
imagine it to be the same with this silence. There would be not only the
absolute peace of the zero-point of silence, but it would go further
and come to the negative of hearing, quieter than quiet, more silent
than silence. And this must in fact happen when, in the way
described yesterday, we are able through enhanced powers to
reach this inner peace and silence. When, however, we arrive at this
inner negative of audibility, at this peace greater than the
zero-point of peace, we are then so deeply in the spiritual world
that we not only see it but hear it resounding. The world of pictures
becomes a world of resounding life; and then we are in the midst of
the true spiritual world. During the moments we spend there we are
standing, as it were, on the shore of existence; the ordinary
sense-world vanishes, and we know ourselves to be in the spiritual
world. Certainly — I will say more of this later — we
must be properly prepared so that we are at all times able to return.
But there is something else to come — an experience previously
unknown. Directly this peace is achieved in the empty
consciousness, what I have described as an inwardly
experienced, all-embracing, cosmic feeling of happiness gives way to
an equally all-embracing pain. We come to feel that the world is
built on a foundation of cosmic suffering — of a cosmic
element which can be experienced by the human being only as
pain. We learn the penetrating truth, so willingly ignored by those
who look outside themselves for happiness, that everything in
existence has finally to be brought to birth in pain. And when,
through Initiation-knowledge, this cosmic experience of pain
has made its impression upon us, then out of real inner knowledge we
can say the following:
If we study the
human eye — the eye that reveals to us the beauty of the physical
world, and is so important for us that through it we receive
nine-tenths of the impressions that make up our life between birth
and death — we find that the eye is embedded in a bodily cavity
which originates from a wound. What was done originally to bring
about the eye-sockets could be done to-day only by actually cutting
out a hollow in the physical body. The ordinary account of evolution
gives a much too colourless impression of this. These sockets into
which the eyeballs were inserted from outside — as indeed the
physical record of evolution shows — were hollowed out at a
time when man was still an unconscious being. If he had been
conscious of it, it would have involved a painful wounding of
the organism.
Indeed, the
whole human organism has been brought forth out of an element which for
present-day consciousness would be an experience of pain. At this
stage of knowledge we have a deep feeling that, just as the coming
forth of the plants means pain for the Earth, so all happiness,
everything in the world from which we derive pleasure and blessing,
has its roots in an element of suffering. If as conscious beings we
could suddenly be changed into the substance of the ground beneath
our feet, the result would be an endless enhancement of our
feeling of pain.
When these
facts revealed out of the spiritual world are put before
superficially-minded people, they say: “My idea of God is quite
different. I have always thought of God in His power as founding
everything upon happiness, just as we would wish.” Such people
are like that King of Spain to whom someone was showing a model of
the universe and the course of the stars. The King had the greatest
difficulty in understanding how all these movements occurred, and
finally he exclaimed: “If God had left it to me, I would have
made a much simpler world.”
Strictly
speaking, that is the feeling of many people where knowledge and religion
are concerned. Had God left the creation to them, they would have made a
simpler world. They have no idea how naive this is!
Genuine
Initiation-knowledge cannot merely satisfy men's desire for
happiness; it has to guide them to a true understanding of
their own being and destiny as they come forth from the world in the
past, present and future. For this, spiritual facts are necessary,
instead of something which gives immediate pleasure. But there is
another thing which these lectures should indeed bring out. Precisely
by experiencing such facts, if only through knowing them
conceptually, people will gain a good deal that satisfies an inward
need for their life here on Earth. Yes, they will gain something they
need in order to be human beings in the fullest sense, just as for
completeness they need their physical limbs.
The world we
meet in this way when we go on beyond Imagination into the stillness of
existence, out of which the spiritual world reveals itself in colour
and in sound — this world differs essentially from the world
perceived by the senses. When we are living with it — and we
have to live with the spiritual world when it is present for
us — we see how all sense-perceptible, physical things and
processes really proceed from out of the spiritual world. Hence as
earthly men we see only one half of the world; the other half is
occult, hidden from us. And through every opening, every happening,
in the physical-material world, one might say, this hidden half
reveals its spiritual nature first in the pictures of Imagination,
and then through its own creative activity in Inspiration. In the
world of Inspiration we can feel at home, for here we find the
origins of all earthly things, all earthly creations. And here, as I
have indicated, we discover our own pre-earthly existence.
Following
an old image, I have called this world, lying beyond that of
Imagination, the astral world — the name is not important
— and what we bring along with us from that world, and have
carried into our etheric and physical bodies, we may speak of as our
astral body. In a certain sense, it encloses the Ego-organisation.
For higher knowledge, accordingly, the human being consists of four
members: physical body, etheric or formative-forces body, astral
body, and Ego-organisation. Knowledge of the Ego, however, entails
a further super-sensible step, which in my book,
Knowledge of the Higher Worlds,
I have called “Intuition”. The term Intuition may easily be
misunderstood because, for example, anyone with imaginative, poetic
gifts will often give the name of intuition to his sensitive feeling
for the world. This kind of intuition is only a dim feeling;
yet it has some relation to the Intuition of which I am speaking. For
just as earthly man has his sense-perceptions, so in his feeling and
his will he has a reflection of the highest kind of cognition, of
Intuition. Otherwise he could not be a moral being. The dim
promptings of conscience are a reflection, a kind of shadow-picture,
of true Intuition, the highest form of cognition possible for man on
Earth.
Earthly man
has in him something of what is lowest, and also this shadow-picture of
what is highest, accessible only through Intuition. It is the
intermediate levels that are lacking in him; hence he has to acquire
Imagination and Inspiration. He has also to acquire Intuition
in its purity, in its light-filled inner quality. At present it is in
his moral feeling, his moral conscience, that he possesses an earthly
image of that which arises as Intuition. Hence we can say that when a
man with Initiation-knowledge rises to actual Intuitive knowledge of
the world, of which previously he has known only the natural laws,
the world becomes as intimately connected with him on earth as only
the moral world is now. And this is indeed a significant
feature of human life on Earth — that out of a dim inner
presentiment we connect with the highest realm of all something
which, in its true form, is accessible only to enhanced
cognition.
The third step
in higher knowledge, necessary for rising to Intuition, can be achieved
only by developing to its highest point a faculty which, in our
materialistic age, is not recognised as a cognitional force.
What is revealed through Intuition can be attained only by
developing and spiritualising to the highest degree the capacity for
love. A man must be able to make this capacity for love into a
cognitional force. A good preparation for this is to free ourselves
in a certain sense from dependence on external things; for instance,
by making it our regular practice to picture our past experiences not
in their usual sequence but in reverse order.
In ordinary
passive thinking we may be said to accept world events in an altogether
slavish way. As I said yesterday: In our very thought-pictures we
keep the earlier as the earlier, the later as the later; and when we
are watching the course of a play on the stage the first act comes
first, then the second, and so on to a possible fifth. But if we can
accustom ourselves to picture it all by beginning at the end and
going from the fifth act back through the fourth, third, second, to
the first, then we break away from the ordinary sequence — we
go backwards instead of forwards. But that is not how things happen
in the world: we have to strain every nerve to call up from within
the force to picture events in reverse. By so doing we free the inner
activity of our soul from its customary leading-strings, and we
gradually enable the inner experiences of our soul and spirit to
reach a point where soul and spirit break loose from the bodily and
also from the etheric element. A man can well prepare himself for
this breaking away if every evening he makes a backward survey of his
experiences during the day, beginning with the last and moving
back. When possible even the details should be conceived in a
backward direction: if you have gone upstairs, picture yourself first
on the top step, then on the step below it, and so on backwards down
all the stairs.
You will
probably say: “But there are so many hours during the day, full of
experiences.” Then first try taking episodes — picturing,
for instance, this going up and down stairs in reverse. One thus
acquires inner mobility, so that gradually one becomes able to go
back in imagination through a whole day in three or four
minutes.
But that,
after all, is only the negative half of what is needed for enhancing and
training spiritually our capacity for loving. This must be brought to
the point when, for example, we lovingly follow each stage in
the growth of a plant. In ordinary life this growth is seen only from
outside — we do not take part in it. We must learn to enter
into every detail of plant-growth, to dive right down into the
plant, until in our own soul we become the plant, growing,
blossoming, bringing forth fruit with it, and the plant becomes as
dear to us as we are to ourselves. In the same way we can go above
the plants to picture the life of animals, and down to the minerals.
We can feel how the mineral forms itself into the crystal, and take
inward pleasure in the shaping of its planes, corners, angles, and
having a sensation as of pain in our own being when the minerals are
split asunder. Then, in our souls, we enter not only with sympathy
but with our will into every single event in nature.
All this must
be preceded by a capacity for love extending to mankind as a whole. We
shall never be able to love nature in the right way until we have
first succeeded in loving all our fellow-men. When we have in this
way won through to an understanding love for all nature, that which
made itself perceptible first in the colours of the aura, and
in the resounding of the spheres, rounds itself out and takes
on the outlines of actual spiritual Beings.
Experiencing
these spiritual Beings, however, is a different matter from experiencing
physical things. When a physical object is in front of me, for
example this clock, I stand here with the clock there, and can
experience it only by looking at it from outside. My relation to it
is determined by space. In this way one could never have any real
experience of a spiritual Being. We can have it only by entering
right into the spiritual Being, with the aid of the faculty for
loving which we have cultivated first towards nature. Spiritual
Intuition is possible only by applying — in stillness and
emptiness of consciousness — the capacity for love we can first
learn in the realm of nature. Imagine that you have developed this
capacity for loving minerals, plants, animals and also man; you are
now in the midst of a completely empty consciousness. All around is
the peace which lies beyond its zero-point. You feel the suffering on
which the whole existence of the world is founded, and this suffering
is at the same time a loneliness. Nothing yet is there. But the
capacity for love, flowing up from within in manifold forms, leads
you on to enter with your own being into all that now appears
visibly, audibly, as Inspiration. Through this capacity for love you
enter first into one spiritual Being, then into another.
These Beings
described in my book,
Occult Science,
these Beings of the higher
Hierarchies — we now learn to live in our experience of them;
they become for us the essential reality of the world. So we
experience a concrete spiritual world, just as through eye and ear,
through feeling and warmth, we experience a concrete physical
world.
If anyone
wishes to acquire knowledge particularly important for himself, he must
have advanced to this stage. I have already mentioned that through
Inspiration pre-earthly spiritual existence rises up in our soul; how
in this way we learn what we were before we came down into an earthly
body. When through the capacity for love we are able to enter
clairvoyantly into spiritual Beings, in the way I have
described, there is also revealed that which first makes a man,
in his inner experience, a complete being. There is revealed what
precedes our life in the spiritual world; we are shown what we were
before ascending to the last spiritual life between death and
rebirth. The preceding earthly life is revealed, and, one after
another, the lives on Earth before that. For the true Ego, present in
all the repeated lives on Earth, can manifest only when the faculty
for love has been so greatly enhanced that any other being, whether
outside in nature or in the spiritual world, has become just as dear
to a man as in his self-love he is dear to himself. But the true Ego
— the Ego that goes through all repeated births and deaths
— is manifest to a man only when he no longer lives
egotistically for momentary knowledge, but in a love that can forget
self-love and can live in an objective Being in the way that in
physical existence he lives in self-love. For this Ego of former
lives on Earth has then become as objective for his present
life as a stone or a plant is for us when we stand outside it. We
must have learnt by then to comprehend in objective love something
which, for our present subjective personality, has become quite
objective, quite foreign. We must have gained mastery over ourselves
during our present earthly existence in order to have any
insight into a preceding one.
When we have
achieved this knowledge, we see the complete life of a man passing
rhythmically through the stages of earthly existence from birth or
conception till death, and then through spiritual stages between
death and rebirth, and then returning again to Earth, and so on. A
complete earthly life reveals itself as a repeated passing through
birth and death, with intermediate periods of life in purely
spiritual worlds. Only through Intuition can this knowledge be
acquired as real knowledge, derived directly from
experience.
I have had
to describe for you — in outline to begin with — the path of
Initiation-knowledge that must be followed in our time, at this
present stage of human evolution, in order to arrive at true
spiritual knowledge of the world and of man. But as long as human
beings have existed there has been Initiation-knowledge, although it
has had to take various forms in different evolutionary periods. As
man is a being who goes through each successive earthly life in a
different way, conditions for his inner development in the various
epochs of world-evolution have to vary considerably. We shall be
learning more about these variations in course of the next few
days; to-day I should like to say only that the Initiation-knowledge
which had to be given out in early times was very different from what
has to be given out to-day. We can go back some thousands of years,
to a time long before the Mystery of Golgotha, and we find how
greatly men's attitude to both the natural world and the spiritual
world differed from that of the present time, and how different,
accordingly, was their Initiation-knowledge from what is appropriate
today.
We have now
a very highly developed natural science; I shall not be speaking of its
most advanced side but only of what is imparted to children of six or
seven, as general knowledge. At this comparatively early age a
child has to accept the laws relating, let us say, to the Copernican
world-system, and on this system are built hypotheses as to the
origin of the universe. The Kant-Laplace theory is then put forward
and, though this theory has been revised, yet in its essentials it
still holds good. The theory is based on a primeval nebula,
demonstrated in physics by an experiment intended to show the
earliest conditions of the world-system. This primeval nebula can be
imitated experimentally, and out of it, through the rotation of
certain forces, the planets are assumed to have come into being, and
the sun left behind. One of the rings split off from the nebula is
thought to have condensed into the shape of the Earth, and everything
else — minerals, plants, animals, and finally man himself
— is supposed to have evolved on this basis. And all this is
described in a thoroughly scientific way.
The process
is made comprehensible for children by means of a practical demonstration
which seems to show it very clearly. A drop of oil is taken,
sufficiently fluid to float on a little water; this is placed on a
piece of card where the line of the equator is supposed to come; a
pin is run through the card and the card is whirled round. It can
then be shown how, one after another, drops of oil detach themselves
and rotate, and you can get a miniature planetary system out of the
oil, with a sun left in the middle. When that has been shown to us in
childhood, why should we think it impossible for our planetary system
to have arisen out of the primeval nebula? With our own eyes we have
seen the process reproduced.
Now in moral
life it may be admirable for us to be able to forget ourselves, but in a
demonstration of natural phenomena it is not so good! This
whole affair of the drop of oil would never have worked if there had
been no-one there to twirl the pin. That has to be taken into
account. If this hypothesis is to hold good, a giant schoolmaster
would have had to be there in the Cosmos, to start the primeval
nebula revolving and keep it turning. Otherwise the idea has no
reality.
It is
characteristic of this materialistic age, however, to conceive only
a fraction of the truth, a quarter, an eighth, or even less, and this
fraction then lives with terribly suggestive power in the souls of men.
Thus we persist to-day in seeing one side only of nature and of nature's
laws.
I could give
you plenty of examples, from different spheres of life, clearly showing
this attitude towards nature: how — because a man absorbs this
with the culture of the day — he considers nature to be
governed by what is called the law of cause and effect. This colours
the whole of human existence to-day. At best, a man can still
maintain some connection with the spiritual world through religious
tradition, but if he wishes to rise to the actual spiritual world, he
must undertake an inner training through Imagination, Inspiration,
Intuition — as I have pictured them. He must be led by
Initiation-knowledge away from this belief in nature as
permeated throughout by law, and towards a real grasp of the
spiritual. Initiation-knowledge to-day must aim at leading men
from the naturalistic interpretation of the Cosmos, now taken for
granted, to a realisation of its spirituality.
In the
old Initiation-knowledge, thousands of years ago, the very opposite
prevailed. The wise men of the Mysteries, the leaders in those
centres which were school, church, and art-school at the same time,
had around them people who knew nothing of nature in the Copernican
sense, but in their soul and spirit had an instinctive, intimate
experience of the Cosmos, expressed in their myths and legends, which
in the ordinary civilisation of to-day are no longer understood.
About this too we shall have more to say. The experience that men had
in those early days was instinctive; an experience of soul and
spirit. It filled their waking hours with the dreamlike pictures of
imagination; and from these pictures came the legends, the myths, the
sayings of the gods, which made up their life. A man looked out into
the world, experiencing his dreamy imaginations; and at other
times he lived in the being of nature. He saw the rainbows, the
clouds, the stars, and the sun making its speedy way across the
heavens; he saw the rivers, the hills arising; he saw the minerals,
plants, animals.
For primeval
man, everything he saw through his senses was a great riddle. For at the
time of which I am speaking, some thousands of years before the
Mystery of Golgotha — there were both earlier and later times
when civilisation was different — a man had an inward feeling
of being blessed when dreamlike imaginations came to him. The
external world of the senses, where all that he perceived of rainbow,
clouds, the moving sun, and the minerals, plants, animals, was what
the eye could see, while in the starry world he saw only what the
pre-Copernican, Ptolemaic system recorded. This external world
presented itself to people generally in a way that led them to say:
“With my soul I am living in a divine-spiritual world, but
there outside is a nature forsaken by the gods. When with my senses I
look at a spring of water, I see nothing spiritual there; I see
nothing spiritual in the rainbow, in the minerals, plants, animals,
or in the physical bodies of men.” Nature appeared to these
people as a whole world that had fallen away from divine
spirituality.
This was how
people felt in that time when the whole visible Cosmos had for them the
appearance of having fallen away from the divine. To connect these
two experiences, the inward experience of God and the outer one of a
fallen sense-world, it was not merely abstract knowledge they needed,
but a knowledge that could console them for belonging to this
fallen sense-world with their physical bodies and their etheric
bodies. They needed a consolation which would assure them that this
fallen sense-world was related to all they experienced through their
instinctive imaginings, through an experience of the spiritual which,
though dim and dreamlike, was adequate for the conditions of those
times. Knowledge had to be consoling.
It was
consolation, too, that was sought by those who turned eagerly to the
Mysteries, either to receive only what could be given out externally,
or to become pupils of the men of wisdom who could initiate them into
the secrets of existence and the riddles that confronted them.
These wise
men of the old Mysteries, who were at the same time priests, teachers,
and artists, made clear to their pupils through everything contained in
their Mysteries — yet to be described — that even in this
fallen world, in its rising springs, in the blossoming trees and
flowers, in the crystal-forming minerals, in rainbow and drifting
clouds and journeying sun there live those divine-spiritual
powers which were experienced instinctively in the dreamlike
imaginations of men. They showed these people how to reconcile the
godforsaken world with the divine world perceived in their
imaginations. Through the Mysteries they gave them a consoling
knowledge which enabled them once more to look on nature as filled
with the divine.
Hence we learn
from what is told of those past ages — told even of the Grecian age
— that knowledge now taught to the youngest children in our
schools, that the sun stands still and the earth circles around it,
for instance, is the kind of knowledge which in the old Mysteries was
preserved as occult. What with us is knowledge for everyone was for
that age occult knowledge; and explanations of nature were an occult
science. As anyone can see who follows the course of human
development during our civilisation, nature and nature's laws are the
chief concern of men today; and this has led the spiritual world to
withdraw. The old dreamlike imaginations have ceased. A man
feels nature to be neutral, not entirely satisfying, belonging
not to a fallen, sinful Universe, but to a Cosmos that by reason of
inner necessity has to be as it is. He then feels more sharply
conscious of himself; he learns to find spirituality in that one
point only, and he discovers an inner urge to unite this inner self
with God. All he now needs — in addition to his knowledge of
nature and in conformity with it — is that a new
Initiation-knowledge shall lead him into the spiritual world. The old
Initiation-knowledge could start from the spirit, which was
then experienced by people instinctively, and, embodied in the myths,
could lead them on to nature. The new Initiation-knowledge must begin
with a man's immediate experience to-day, with his perception of the
laws of nature in which he believes, and from there it must point the
way back to the spiritual world through Imagination, Inspiration,
Intuition.
Thus, in
human evolution, a few thousand years before the Mystery of Golgotha,
we see the significant moment of time when men, starting out from an
instinctive experience of the spirit, found their way to concepts and
ideas which, as the most external form of occult science, included
the laws of nature. To-day these laws of nature are known to us from
childhood. In face of this indifferent, prosaic attitude to life,
this naturalism, the spiritual world has withdrawn from the inner
life of man. Today, Initiation-knowledge must point back from nature
to the spirit. For the men of old, nature was in darkness, but the
spirit was bright and clear. The old Initiation-knowledge had to
carry the light of this brightness of the spirit into the darkness of
nature, so that nature too might be illumined. Initiation-knowledge
to-day has to start from the light thrown upon nature, in an
external, naturalistic way, by Copernicus, Giordano Bruno, Galileo,
Kepler, Newton and others. This light has then to be rescued,
given fresh life, in order to open the way for it to the spirit,
which in its own light must be sought on the opposite path to that of
the old Initiation.
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