The Rudolf Steiner Archive

3. Imaginative, Inspired and Intuitive Methods of Cognition

[ 1 ] When entering into imaginative cognition, the inner life of the human being takes on a different form than that of ordinary consciousness. And man's relationship to the world also changes. - This change has been brought about by concentrating all the powers of the soul on an easily comprehensible complex of ideas. This must be easy to grasp so that nothing from an unconscious process plays into the meditation. In this, everything must only take place within the mental-spiritual realm. Anyone who thinks through a mathematical problem can be fairly certain that he is only engaging the mental-spiritual. Unconscious, emotional or volitional reminiscences of the imagination will not play a role. Meditation must be like this. If one takes an imagination for this purpose, which one brings out of memory, one cannot know how much of the physical, instinctive, the unconscious-spiritual is brought into the consciousness at the same time and brought to spiritual effectiveness when resting on the imagination. - It is therefore best to choose something for meditation that is certain to be completely new to the soul. If you take advice on this from an experienced spiritual researcher, he will take this into consideration above all. He will suggest a meditation content which is quite simple and which you have certainly never thought of before. It is not important that the content corresponds to an already experienced or even a fact of the sensory world. One can resort to a figurative idea that does not depict anything external, e.g. "wisdom flowing in the light". It depends on resting on such a complex of ideas. During this resting, the spiritual and mental forces intensify, just as the muscular forces intensify when performing work. Meditation can be short at one time, but it must be repeated for long periods if success is to be achieved. Depending on one's disposition, this success may come after weeks for one personality and years for another. If someone wants to become a real spiritual researcher, he must do such exercises in a strictly systematic, intensive way. First of all, by meditating in the manner indicated here, the meditator will achieve a greater degree of control over the statements of a spiritual researcher through his inner life than ordinary common sense. But even this, if it is sufficiently unbiased and unprejudiced, is quite sufficient for such a control.

[ 2 ] Meditation must be aided by training in strength of character, inner truthfulness, tranquillity of soul and complete prudence. For only when the soul is imbued with these qualities will it gradually imprint on the entire human organization what is formed as a process in meditation.

[ 3 ] Once the right success has been achieved through such practice, one experiences oneself in the etheric organism. The experience of thought takes on a new form. One experiences thoughts not only in the abstract form as before, but in such a way that one feels forces in them. The thoughts experienced before can only be thought; they have no power to be active. The thoughts that one now experiences have a power like the forces of growth that transform a person from a small child into an adult. For this very reason, however, it is necessary that meditation is carried out in the right way. For if subconscious forces intervene in it, if it is not an act that proceeds in a purely soul-spiritual manner in full contemplation, impulses are developed that intervene in the human organism in the same way as the natural forces of growth. This must not happen in any way. One's own physical and etheric organism must remain completely untouched by meditation. With correct meditation one comes to live with the newly developed thought-power content outside one's own physical and etheric organism. One has the etheric experience; and one's own organism enters into a relationship of relative objectivity with the personal experience. You look at it, and it radiates back in thought form what you experience in the ether.

[ 4 ] This experience is healthy when you reach a state in which you can alternate freely between an existence in the ether and one in your physical body. If there is something that forces you into the etheric existence, then the state is not the right one. One must be able to be in oneself and outside oneself according to completely free orientation.

[ 5 ] The first experience that can be gained through such inner work is the contemplation of one's own past earthly life. One sees it as it has been shaped by the forces of growth from childhood onwards. One looks at it as in thought-formations that are condensed into growth forces. You don't just have the memory images of your own life in front of you. We have before us images of an etheric course of events which has taken place in our own being without having entered our ordinary consciousness. What is in the consciousness and lives in the memory is only the abstract concomitant of the real process. It is, so to speak, only an upper wave, which in its formation is a result of the deep process. One overlooks the weaving and working of one's own etheric organism in the course of earthly life.

[ 6 ] The effect of the etheric cosmos on the human being is revealed in the contemplation of this process. What is at work there can be experienced as the content of philosophy. It is wisdom, but not in the abstract form of the concept, but as the form of the etheric working in the cosmos.

[ 7 ] For the ordinary consciousness, only the very small child who has not yet learned to speak is in the same relationship to the cosmos as the regular imaginer. But this child has not yet separated the forces of thought from the general growth (etheric) forces. This only happens when learning to speak. There the abstract powers of thought are separated from the previously existing general powers of growth. The human being in his later course of life has these abstract powers of thought; but they are only in the physical organism; they are not absorbed into the etheric existence. Therefore man cannot bring to consciousness the relationship he has to the ether. The iniaginating human being learns this.

[ 8 ] The very small child is an unconscious philosopher; the imagining philosopher is again the small child, but awakened to full consciousness.

[ 9 ] The inspirational exercise adds a new ability to the previously developed abilities, namely to remove images on which one has rested in meditation from one's consciousness. It must be expressly emphasized that here the ability must be developed to create away images previously grasped arbitrarily in meditation, and again completely at will. It is not enough to create images that have not been brought into consciousness by free will. Greater mental energy is needed to create images that have been acquired in meditation than to eradicate images that have entered consciousness in a different way. And this greater energy is needed to progress in supersensible knowledge.

[ 10 ] In this way one achieves an awake but completely empty soul life. One persists in awake consciousness. If one experiences this state in complete prudence, then the soul fills itself with the spiritual facts, just as it fills itself with the physical-sensual facts through the senses. This is the state of inspiration. One experiences oneself with an inner life in the cosmos, as one otherwise experiences oneself with such an inner life in the physical organism. But one knows that one experiences the cosmic life within oneself, that the spiritual things and processes of the cosmos reveal themselves as one's own inner soul life. It must now remain possible to exchange this inner experience of the cosmos with the state of ordinary consciousness at will. Then one can always relate what one experiences in inspiration to something that one experiences in ordinary consciousness. One sees in the sensually perceived cosmos an image of the spiritually experienced cosmos. The process can be compared to that by which one compares a new experience of life with an image of memory that appears in consciousness. The spiritual perception that one attains is like the new experience, and the sensory perception of the cosmos is like the memory image.

[ 11 ] The spiritual view of the cosmos that one attains in this way is different from the imaginative view. With the latter, general images of an ethereal event arise; with inspiration, images of spiritual entities arise that reign in this ethereal event. What one has come to know as the sun and moon, as planets and fixed stars in the physical-sensual world, one finds again as cosmic entities. And one's own soul-spiritual experience appears to be included in the circle of the rule of this cosmic world of beings. Only now does the physical organism of the human being become comprehensible, for not only that which the human being's senses perceive, but also the beings that are creatively active in the facts of the sense world, contribute to its form and life. Everything that is thus experienced through inspiration remains completely closed to ordinary consciousness. Man would only be aware of it if he experienced his breathing process in the same way as the process of perception. For the ordinary consciousness, the cosmic action between man and the world remains hidden. Yoga philosophy seeks to arrive at a cosmology by transforming the process of breathing into a process of perception. Western man of modern times should not imitate this. In the course of the development of mankind he has entered into an organization which excludes such yoga exercises. He would never completely detach himself from his organism through such exercises and thus not meet the requirement of leaving the physical and etheric organism untouched. Such exercises corresponded to a past epoch in the development of mankind. But what was achieved through them must be attained in the same way as has just been described for inspired knowledge. In this way, what had to be experienced by mankind in waking dreams in the past is experienced fully consciously.

[ 12 ] If the philosopher is a fully conscious child, the cosmologist must become, in a fully conscious way, a human being of prehistoric times, a time in which the spirit of the cosmos could still be seen through natural abilities.

[ 13 ] In intuition, through the exercise of will already described last time, man's consciousness is completely transferred into the objective world of cosmic spiritual beings. He attains a state of enlightenment that only primitive mankind had on earth. They were as connected with the inner being of the cosmic environment as they were with the processes of their own body. These processes were not completely in the unconscious as in modern man. They were reflected in the soul. Man experienced his growth and metabolism in his soul as if in waking dream images. And what he experienced in this way enabled him to perceive the processes of his cosmic environment in a dreamlike, feeling way with their spiritual inner being. He had a dreamlike intuition, of which only an echo remains today in particularly gifted people. For the consciousness of primitive man, the environment was both material and spiritual at the same time. What was experienced in a semi-dreamlike way was religious revelation for primitive man. For him this was a straightforward continuation of the rest of his human life. These experiences in the spirit world, which primitive man knew in a dreamlike way, remain completely unconscious to modern man. The supersensible intuitive cognizer brings them to full consciousness. He is thus transported back in a new way to the state of primitive mankind, for whom world consciousness still provided the religious content.

[ 14 ] Like the philosopher to the fully conscious child, the cosmologist to the fully conscious man of an expired middle epoch of humanity, so the religious cognizer in the modern sense again becomes similar to primitive man, only that he experiences the spiritual world in his soul not as a dream, but fully consciously.