The Rudolf Steiner Archive

Epilogue (1918)

If the soul wants to acquire the ability to penetrate the supersensible world with understanding, it must first strengthen its powers by developing an activity from within that is essentially based on mental images. But this mental image must not be exercised merely in the strength in which it unfolds in ordinary consciousness following and accompanying sensory perception. There, the mental image is of much less strength than perception. Practiced only in this strength, it could never develop the soul's ability to enter the supersensible world. Although it remains a mere mental image, it must strengthen itself to the power of perception itself. It must not remain in the weaving of shadowy afterimages of the visible. It must condense itself into vividness, into pictoriality. One creates living images. But it is not important to dwell on these images with the power of the soul. One directs one's attention away from the images and toward one's own image-creating activity. In this way, one finds oneself in an inner, empowered self-awareness; but one also notices, after weeks, months, or even longer periods of time, when one has taken up this inner soul exercise again and again, that through this grasp of one's empowered self-awareness, one has come into contact with a supersensible world. At first, contact with this world is chaotic, experienced as a general emotional impression. Gradually, however, a differentiated, objective world of images emerges from the chaos. One becomes aware that through the practice of image formation, one has enabled oneself to weave images with one's strengthened self-awareness, which in their own revelation represent images of an objective supersensible world. (More precisely described, this is the experience of the human soul with the webs of images that the soul encounters on its way into the spiritual world and which are discussed on page 18 of this writing. By visualizing these processes in clear inner experience, those who strive for supersensible consciousness have the unmistakable opportunity to recognize reality in the field of the supersensible and to distinguish it from mere illusions of the deluded imagination. Page 19 of this text states that the images of consciousness at the beginning of supersensible experience “are initially like a curtain that the soul places before the supersensible world when it feels touched by it.” One must speak of such a “curtain.” For in the beginning, the images serve only to lift one's own self-consciousness into the supersensible world. Through them, one feels oneself to be a spiritual being, but one does not yet see an objective supersensible outer world through them. It is as if one had eyes in the sensory body, which one feels to be part of one's own organism, but which are not illuminated within themselves, so that the outer world cannot unfold its effects in them. One must, as it were, make the images weaving in the soul spiritually transparent through continuous activity in them. They gradually become so through their own development. They become such that one does not see them, but only feels them as living in the soul, yet through them one perceives the essence of supersensible reality.

Upon entering the supersensible world, one of the first impressions is that, through one's self-consciousness raised up into this world, one sees oneself connected in sympathies and antipathies with the beings of this world. (See p. 54 ff. of this publication.) From the experiences gained in this way, one already notices that one must also leave the sensory world in terms of one's mental images if one really wants to enter the supersensible world. What one sees in the supersensible world can be described well through mental images taken from the sensory world. One can speak, for example, of a being revealing itself as if through a color phenomenon. However, anyone who accepts such descriptions of the supersensible should never forget that when the true spiritual researcher speaks of such a color, he means that he experiences something that is perceived by his soul in the same way as the perception of the color in question by the sensory consciousness. Anyone who wants to express with their description that they have something before their consciousness that is the same as a sensory color is not a spiritual researcher, but a visionary or someone who hallucinates. But with the experiences of sympathy and antipathy, one really has the first supersensible perceptions of the supersensible world before them. There are people who are disappointed precisely because the spiritual researcher has to tell them that when he expresses himself through mental images taken from sensory experience, he only means illustrations of what he has seen. For such people do not really strive to get to know a supersensible world that is distinct from the sensory world, but want to recognize a kind of doppelganger of the sensory world as the supersensible world. This supersensible world is supposed to be finer, more “ethereal” than the sensory world; but otherwise it should not make the demand to be grasped by other mental images than the sensory ones. But anyone who really wants to approach the spiritual world must also be willing to acquire new mental images. Anyone who only wants to imagine a diluted, hazy image of the sensory world cannot grasp the supersensible. The power of memory, which plays a prominent role in the soul life of ordinary consciousness, does not come into consideration as an exercised human ability in perceiving the supersensible world. (This must be taken into account so that what is said on page 57 f. of this writing is not misunderstood.) The human soul has this power of memory in its life in the physical world, exercising its activities in this world through its bodily organization. When the soul, lifted into the supersensible world, encounters the beings and processes of this world, it does not exercise the power of memory. At first, it will only observe what is before it in this world, without retaining any memory of the impressions when it returns to its body. But it does not stop there. The soul takes with it from its experience in the physical world an echo of its ability to remember, and through this it is able to know in its supersensible experience: I am here in the spiritual world the same as I am there in the sensory world. This ability to remember is necessary for it, because otherwise it would lose the connection in its self-consciousness. In addition, however, the self-consciousness raised up into the supersensible world also acquires the ability to transform the impressions experienced in this world in such a way that they make impressions in the body of the same kind as the sensory impressions of the physical world. And this makes it possible for the soul to retain a kind of memory of what it has experienced in the supersensible world. Otherwise, these experiences would always be forgotten. But while the impressions of the physical world affect people in such a way that they can later remember them through what they themselves have caused in them, in the supersensible realm they must perform such an operation on the experiences themselves that enables them to know about them later in their ordinary consciousness. In supersensible experiences, everything must take place in the full light of consciousness. Nevertheless, the spiritual researcher has difficulty in retaining his experiences in the supersensible realm in his memory. He cannot easily tell other people “just from memory” what he knows; when asked to do so, he is often compelled to recreate in his soul the conditions under which he had the experience he is describing, in order to see again what he saw when he is asked to talk about it.

The relationship between the images experienced in the supersensible world and their corresponding reality (cf. p. 63 f of this writing) is also not as simple a process as the relationship between a soul impression and a sensory object or process. In the supersensible world, consciousness must fully understand this relationship. It is not like having a table in front of you. The table stands before the soul; what goes on within it does not live at all or is completely overshadowed in consciousness. When perceiving a supersensible being, even if one has made the image “transparent” in the manner described above, one has the emotional experience of this image in self-consciousness. And it is precisely by immersing oneself completely in this emotional experience with the supersensible consciousness that reality appears before the soul, the experience of which can and must be clearly distinguished from the experience of the image. These two experiences must not be allowed to blur into one another. For therein lies the source of illusions about what one experiences.