The Rudolf Steiner Archive

Afterword (8-11th ed.)

[ 1 ] The path to supersensible knowledge, which is characterized in this writing, leads to a spiritual experience to which it is of particular importance that those who strive for it do not indulge in any deceptions or misunderstandings about it. And it is natural for man to deceive himself about what is in question here. One of the deceptions, a particularly serious one, arises when the whole field of soul experience, which is the subject of true spiritual science, is so displaced that it appears to belong to the realm of superstition, visionary dreaming, mediumism and many other degenerations of human striving. This shift often stems from the fact that people who, in their way of striving for genuine knowledge, want to find a way into the supersensible reality and who in doing so fall into the aforementioned degenerations, are confused with those who want to follow the path outlined in this book. What is experienced by the human soul on the path meant here is definitely a purely spiritual-soul experience. It is only possible to live through such experiences if the human being can also make himself as free and independent of bodily life for other inner experiences as he is in the experience of ordinary consciousness, when he makes thoughts about what is perceived externally or what is desired, felt, willed internally, which do not originate from what is perceived, felt, willed itself. There are people who do not believe in the existence of such thoughts at all. They believe that man cannot think anything that he does not draw from perception or from his bodily inner life. And all thoughts are, so to speak, only shadow images of perceptions or inner experiences. Whoever claims this only does so because he has never brought himself to the ability to experience with his soul the pure, intrinsically based life of thought. But for those who have experienced this, it has become an experience that wherever thinking prevails in the life of the soul, to the extent that this thinking permeates other soul activities, the human being is engaged in an activity in the creation of which his body is uninvolved. in the ordinary life of the soul, thinking is almost always connected with other soul activities: Perceiving, feeling, willing and so on. These other activities come about through the body. But thinking plays a role in them. And to the extent that it plays a part, something takes place in the human being and through the human being in which the body is not involved. People who deny this cannot get beyond the deception that arises from the fact that they always observe the activity of thinking united with other activities. But in the inner experience, one can psychically rouse oneself to experience the mental part of the inner life separately from everything else. One can detach something from the scope of the soul life that consists only in pure thoughts. In thoughts that exist in themselves, from which everything is eliminated that gives perception or bodily conditioned inner life. Such thoughts reveal themselves through themselves, through what they are, as a spiritual, a supersensible being. And the soul, which unites with such thoughts by excluding all perception, all remembering, all other inner life during this union, knows itself with thinking in a supersensible realm and experiences itself outside the body. For the person who understands this whole situation, the question can no longer come into consideration: is there an experience of the soul in a supersensible element outside the body? For him it would mean denying what he knows from experience. For him there is only the question: what prevents people from recognizing such a certain fact? And to this question he finds the answer that the fact in question is one that does not reveal itself unless the person first puts himself in such a state of mind that he can receive the revelation. Now at first people become suspicious when they themselves are first supposed to do something purely psychologically so that something independent of them is revealed to them. They believe because they have to prepare themselves to receive the revelation, they make the content of the revelation. They want experiences to which man does nothing, to which he remains completely passive. If, in addition, such people are still unfamiliar with the simplest requirements of scientific comprehension of a fact, then they see in soul-contents or soul-productions, in which the soul is depressed below the degree of conscious self-activity that is present in sensory perception and in arbitrary action, an objective revelation of a non sensory being. Such soul-contents are the visionary experiences, the mediumistic revelations. - But what comes to light through such revelations is not a supersensible, it is a sub-sensible world. Human conscious waking life does not take place entirely in the body; it is above all the conscious part of this life that takes place on the boundary between the body and the physical outer world; thus the life of perception, in which what takes place in the sense organs is just as much the carrying into the body of an extra-bodily process as a penetration of this process from the body; and thus the life of the will, which is based on a placing of the human being into the world being, so that what happens in man through his will is at the same time a member of world events. In this psychic experience, which runs along the boundary of the body, man is highly dependent on his bodily organization; but mental activity plays a part in this experience, and to the extent that this is the case, man makes himself independent of the body in sense perception and volition. In visionary experience and in mediumistic production, the human being becomes completely dependent on the body. He eliminates from his soul life that which makes him independent of the body in perception and volition. As a result, soul contents and soul productions become mere revelations of bodily life. Visionary experience and mediumistic production are the results of the fact that man is less independent of the body in this experience and production with his soul than in the ordinary life of perception and will. In the experience of the supersensible, which is meant in this writing, the development of the soul-experience now goes exactly in the opposite direction to the visionary or mediumistic one. The soul becomes progressively more independent of the body than it is in the perceptual and volitional life. It achieves the independence that can be grasped in the experience of pure thoughts for a much broader soul activity.

[ 2 ] For the supersensible soul activity meant here, it is extraordinarily important to see through the experience of pure thought with complete clarity. For basically this experience itself is already a supersensible activity of the soul. Only one through which one does not yet see anything supersensible. One lives with pure thinking in the supersensible; but one only experiences this in a supersensible way; one does not yet experience anything else supersensible. And the supersensible experience must be a continuation of that soul-experience which can already be achieved in union with pure thinking. That is why it is so important to be able to experience this union correctly. For it is from the understanding of this union that the light shines which can also bring right insight into the nature of supersensible knowledge. As soon as the soul-experience would sink below the clarity of consciousness, which lives itself out in thinking, it would be on a wrong path for the true knowledge of the supersensible world. It would be seized by the bodily activities; what it experiences and produces is then not a revelation of the supersensible through it, but a revelation of the body in the realm of the sub-sensible world.

[ 3 ] As soon as the soul penetrates the field of the supersensible with its experiences, these experiences are of such a nature that the linguistic expressions for them cannot be found as easily as for the experiences in the realm of the sensual world. When describing supersensible experiences, one must often be aware that the distance of the linguistic expression from the real facts expressed is, so to speak, greater than in physical experience. One must acquire an understanding of the fact that many an expression, like a visualization, only delicately points to that to which it refers. Thus it is said on page 22 of this book: "Originally all the rules and teachings of spiritual science are given in a symbolic language of signs." And on page 56 f. it was necessary to speak of a "certain writing system". It is now easy for someone to want to learn such writing in a similar way as one learns phonetic symbols and their combinations for the writing of an ordinary physical language. It must be said, however, that there have been and still are schools and associations of spiritual science which are in possession of symbolic signs through which they express supersensible facts. And whoever is initiated into the meaning of these symbols has a means of directing his soul experience towards the supersensible realities in question. But what is essential for the supersensible experience is rather that in the course of such a supersensible experience, as it can be achieved by the soul through the realization of the contents of this writing, this soul gains the revelation of such a writing through its own experience in the contemplation of the supersensible. The supersensible tells the soul something which it must translate into visualizing signs so that it can fully consciously comprehend it. It can be said: what is communicated in this writing can be realized by every soul. And in the course of the realization, which the soul can determine for itself according to the information given, the results described occur. Take a book such as this as a conversation that the author has with the reader. When it is said that the secret disciple needs personal instruction, take this to mean that the book itself is such personal instruction. In earlier times there were reasons for reserving such personal instruction for secret oral teaching; at present we have reached a stage in the development of mankind in which spiritual-scientific knowledge must be much more widely disseminated than in former times. It must be accessible to everyone to a completely different extent than in the old days. The book takes the place of the earlier oral instruction. The belief that one needs personal instruction over and above what is said in the book is only conditionally correct. One or the other may, of course, need personal help, and such help may be meaningful to him. But it would be misleading to think that there are main things that cannot be found in the book. They can be found if one reads correctly and especially if one reads completely.

[ 4 ] The descriptions in this book appear as if they were instructions on how to completely change the whole person. Whoever reads them correctly, however, will find that they want to say nothing other than in what inner state of soul a person must be in those moments of his life in which he wants to face the supersensible world. He develops this constitution of soul as a second entity within himself; and the healthy other entity continues its course in the old way. He knows how to keep the two entities apart in full consciousness; he knows how to bring them into interaction with each other in the right way. He does not render himself useless and unfit for life by losing interest and skill for it and "being a spiritual researcher all day long". It must be said, however, that the way of experiencing the supersensible world will shed its light on the whole being of man; but this cannot be in a way that distracts from life, but in a way that makes this life more efficient, more fruitful. - The fact that the description has nevertheless had to be kept as it is, is due to the fact that every process of cognition directed towards the supersensible takes up the whole man, so that at the moment in which man is given over to such a process of cognition, he must be this with his whole being. As much as the color perception process only takes up the individuality of the eye with its nerve development, so much does a supersensible cognitive process take up the whole human being. This becomes "all eye" or "all ear". Because this is so, it appears that when one speaks of the formation of supersensible cognitive processes, one is speaking of a transformation of man; one thinks that the ordinary man is nothing real; he must become something completely different.

[ 5 ] To the article on page 115 ff. I would like to add something to what has already been said about "Some effects of initiation", which - with some modification - can also apply to other statements in this book. - Someone might well come up with the thought: why such a description of pictorial formations of supersensible experience; could one not describe this experience in ideas without such sensualization? To this must be replied: For the experience of the supersensible reality it comes into consideration that man knows himself in the supersensible as a supersensible. Without looking at his own supersensible being, the reality of which is revealed completely in its own way in the description of the "lotus flowers" and the "etheric body" given here, man would experience himself in the supersensible as if he were only standing in the sensible in such a way that the things and processes around him were revealed to him, but he would know nothing of his own body. What he sees in the "soul body" and "etheric body" as his supersensible formation makes him conscious of himself in the supersensible, just as he is conscious of himself in the sensory world through the perception of his sensory body.