The Rudolf Steiner Archive

On the Cognition of the Spiritual World

[ 1 ] Insight into the results of spiritual science is facilitated if, in the ordinary life of the soul, one focuses on that which gives concepts that can be expanded and transformed in such a way that they gradually approach the processes and entities of the spiritual world. If one does not choose this path with patience, one will easily be tempted to imagine the spiritual world to be much too similar to the physical or sensual world. Indeed, without this path, one will not even be able to form an accurate idea of the spiritual itself and its relationship to man.

[ 2 ] The spiritual events and beings approach man when he has prepared his soul to perceive them. The way in which they penetrate is quite different from the appearance of physical facts and beings. But one can gain an idea of this quite different appearance if one places the process of memory before the soul. - One has experienced something more or less a long time ago. It emerges at a certain moment - through this or that occasion - from the underground of the soul's experience. One knows that what has emerged in this way corresponds to an experience; and one relates it to this event. At the moment of recollection, however, one has nothing of the experience other than the memory image. - One now imagines an image emerging in the soul in such a way as a memory-image is, but in such a way that this image does not express something previously experienced, but something foreign to the soul. One has thus formed an idea of how the spiritual world first appears in the soul when this soul is sufficiently prepared for it.

[ 3 ] Because this is so, the one who is not sufficiently familiar with the conditions of the spiritual world will always approach with the objection that all "supposed" spiritual experiences are nothing more than more or less indistinct memory images, which the soul only does not recognize as such and can therefore take them for revelations of a spiritual world. Now it should not be denied that the distinction between illusions and realities in this area is a difficult one. Many people who believe that they have perceptions from a supersensible world are certainly only occupied with their memories, which they do not recognize as such. In order to see clearly here, one must be informed of many things that can become the source of illusions. For example, one need only have seen something once, so fleetingly that the impression has not fully penetrated the consciousness; and it may appear later - perhaps even completely changed - as a vivid image. One will affirm that one has never had anything to do with the matter, that one has a real intuition.

[ 4 ] This and many other things make it quite understandable that the claims of extrasensory vision appear highly questionable to those who are not familiar with the nature of spiritual science. - Whoever carefully observes everything that is said about the development of spiritual vision in my writing "How does one attain knowledge of the higher worlds?" will be able to distinguish between illusion and truth in this field.

[ 5 ] But the following may also be said in relation to this. The spiritual experiences first appear as images. They rise from the underground of the prepared soul as such images. It is now important to gain the right relationship to these images. They only have value for supersensible perception when they do not want to be taken in and for themselves through the whole way in which they present themselves. As soon as they are taken in this way, they are hardly worth more than ordinary dreams. They must announce themselves like letters that one has before one. One does not grasp the form of these letters, but one reads in the letters that which is expressed by them. Just as something written does not call upon us to describe the forms of the letters, so the images that form the content of supersensible vision do not call upon us to grasp them as such; rather, they bring about by themselves the necessity to refrain entirely from their pictorial nature and to direct the soul towards that which is expressed through them as a supersensible process or entity.

[ 6 ] As little as anyone can make the objection that a letter, through which one learns something previously completely unknown, is composed only of the letters known for a long time, so little can it be said of the images of supersensible consciousness that they contain only that which is borrowed from ordinary life. - This is certainly true to a certain extent. But the real supersensible consciousness is not concerned with what is borrowed from ordinary life, but with what is expressed in the images.

[ 7 ] First, however, the soul must prepare itself to see such images appear in the spiritual circle of vision; to do this, however, it must also carefully develop the feeling not to stop at these images, but to relate them in the right way to the supersensible world. One can certainly say that true supersensible perception not only includes the ability to see a world of images within oneself, but also another, which can be compared to reading in the sensual world.

[ 8 ] The supersensible world is initially to be imagined as something completely outside of ordinary consciousness. This consciousness has nothing at all by which it can approach this world. Through the powers of the soul's life, which are strengthened in meditation, the soul first comes into contact with the supersensible world. As a result, the labeled images emerge from the floods of the soul life. As such, these are a tableau that is actually woven entirely by the soul itself. It is woven from the forces that the soul has acquired in the sensual world. As a tapestry of images it really contains nothing other than what can be compared to memory. - The more one realizes this for the understanding of clairvoyant consciousness, the better it is. One will then be under no illusion about the nature of the image. And one will thereby also develop a proper feeling for the way in which one has to relate the images to the supersensible world. One will learn to read through the images in the supersensible world. - Through the impressions of the sensory world one is naturally much closer to the beings and processes of this world than through the supersensibly seen images of the supersensible world. One could even say that these images are initially like a curtain that the soul places in front of the supersensible world when it feels touched by it.

[ 9 ] It is important that one gradually finds one's way into the way of experiencing supersensible things. The proper interpretation, the correct reading, gradually emerges from the experience. For more significant supersensible experiences, it will be clear from what one has seen that one cannot be dealing with memory images from ordinary experience. However, many inconsistent claims are made in this field by those who have acquired, or at least believe they have acquired, a conviction of certain supersensible knowledge. How many people relate certain images that appear in their souls to experiences of earlier earthly existence when they are convinced of repeated earthly lives. One should always be suspicious when these images seem to refer to such previous earth lives which are similar to the present one in this or that respect, or which appear in such a way that the present one can be easily understood intellectually from the supposed earlier ones. When the true impression of the previous life or lives on earth appears in the real supersensible experience, then it is probably mostly shown that this or these previous lives were such as one could never have formed them, or mentally wished to form them, by all thinking out of the present, by all wishing and striving for it. For example, in a moment of the present life one will receive the impression of one's previous earthly existence, in which it is quite impossible to acquire abilities or the like which one possessed in that life. Far from such more significant spiritual experiences giving rise to images that could be memories from ordinary life, these images are usually such that one could not have fallen for them in ordinary experience. - This is even more the case with real impressions from the supersensible worlds. For example, there is often no possibility of forming images out of ordinary life that relate to the existence between the earth lives, that is, the life between the last death of the human being in the previous earth life and the birth into the present one. One can experience there that in the spiritual life one has developed inclinations towards people and things that are in complete contradiction to the corresponding inclinations one develops in earthly life. One recognizes that one was often driven in earthly life to deal lovingly with something that one had rejected and avoided in the previous spiritual life (between death and birth). Everything that could emerge as a memory of this matter from ordinary experience would have to be different from the impression one receives through the actual perception from the spiritual world.

[ 10 ] The person unfamiliar with spiritual science will still have objections even if things are as they have just been described. He will be able to say: well, you love one thing. Human nature is complicated. Every inclination is mixed with a secret aversion. This appears to you at a particular moment in relation to the thing in question. You regard it as a prenatal experience, whereas it may be explained quite naturally by subconscious mental facts. - There is generally nothing to be said against such an objection except that in many cases it can certainly be correct. The knowledge of the supersensible consciousness is not to be gained in an easy way. But as true as it is that a "supposed" spiritual researcher can be mistaken and relate a subconscious fact to an experience of prenatal spiritual life, it is also true that spiritual scientific training leads to such self-knowledge, which also encompasses the subconscious state of the soul and can also free itself from illusions in this respect. But nothing else is to be asserted here than that only such supersensible knowledge is true which, in the activity of cognition, can distinguish that which comes from the supersensible worlds from that which one's own imagination has only formed. This ability to distinguish, however, is acquired in living in the supersensible worlds in such a way that one distinguishes perception from imagination in this field as surely as one distinguishes hot iron, which one touches with the finger, from a merely imagined hot iron in the world of the senses.