Paths and Goals of Spiritual Man

GA 125 — 21 November 1910, Leipzig

VII. Imagination as a Preliminary Stage of Higher Soul Faculties

During their beautiful friendship, so significant for the newer intellectual life, Goethe and Schiller exchanged the works on which they were working, and when Schiller received parts of “Wilhelm Meister” from Goethe, he wrote to Goethe, overwhelmed by the impression of the chapter he had just received: “So much, however, is certain, the poet is the only true man, and the best philosopher is but a caricature compared to him.”

At the time, this might have sounded strange, but for us today it does not. We enter into Schiller's soul and gain insight into the truth of his words when we measure them against the significant letter that Schiller wrote to Goethe shortly after the beginning of their friendship. Both had discussed their views on nature and the world in their conversations. In the letter in question, Schiller expresses how Goethe does not gain his view through speculation, but seeks a necessary truth in the totality of the world's phenomena. Everything is contained in Goethe's intuition, and he has little cause to borrow from philosophy, which can only learn from him.

In Goethe's way of looking at the world, in his inner attitude, from which he created his works, Schiller sees something that introduces man particularly deeply into the secrets of existence. When one examines the thoughts and opinions that play between Goethe and Schiller, one sees Schiller absorbed in Goethe's imagination, in the inner truth of Goethe's imagination. At that time, Schiller was writing his Letters on the Aesthetic Education of Man, in which he explains how man can develop into a fully human being through evolution, which is inherent in every human being as the higher human being. In Goethe's way of radiating his imagination, Schiller found something that makes a human being a complete human being; he saw in it a way to live into that which can bring a person into true harmony with the origins of things.

When you hear great minds talk about imagination like this, it seems very different from the way imagination is talked about today. Now that it is contrasted with objective observation, it is as if imagination were something arbitrary, something that leads people to put things together in any old way. (Gap in the stenography.)

If we consider that Goethe was a naturalist, so to speak, a specialist, his following statements have a double value: Man strives to fathom the secrets of nature and longs for its worthy interpreter, art. Art and beauty are manifestations of the secret laws of nature, which could never be fathomed without them. When imagination, which only plays out of feelings and impulses, mixes with other achievements of the human soul, we have to admit that it sometimes leads away from the truth. It is not for science and research. But as a forerunner of higher cognitive abilities, it shows the way to hidden connections between things that would not be seen without it. But for certain areas of life, it is absolutely necessary that what the imagination combines be substantiated by research in strict external evidence.

Accordingly, Goethe's words or Schiller's position seem to make it necessary for us to determine in Goethe how he sees something in his imagination that offers truth, in contrast to an arbitrary, disorderly game that we can call the fantastic play of ideas. When we seek to scientifically explore the laws of nature, our observations force us to our judgment. This is not the case with fantasy. Certain ideas or thoughts must be connected by inner necessity if they are to be justified. There must be something that leads them from thought to thought in a certain direction.

When we hear great minds speak of such truths, it is certainly permissible to apply to their insights the standards of the methods used in spiritual research, which lead to the truths that are often discussed. The methods are the so-called clairvoyant ones that enable messages about the facts and beings of the spiritual world. In their presentation, we will also touch on the lower forms of clairvoyance, but only briefly, because they can never lead to real goals. In contrast, we will make the method and scope of the higher clairvoyance, achieved through proper training, the subject of our consideration.

Some who only know the lower form of clairvoyance, which occurs as somnambulism, for example, consider it to be an illness. There are conditions in which the soul life of a person is filled with images from other worlds. It is a kind of sleep, perhaps of such a light degree that the layman mistakes it for complete wakefulness. When such a “clairvoyant” perceives images in this sleep-like state, they sometimes offer something strange and amazing. They can be prophetic in nature. Such a person can make statements about illnesses before they occur, or, what seems even more astonishing to the layman, they can state exactly what will help against them and so on. In such states, the person in question has another world before them. Anyone who denies this has not done any research. What is gained through such a lower form of clairvoyance is not the subject of our consideration today, but rather what is acquired on the path of trained clairvoyance.

The aspiring clairvoyant consciously takes each step, with strict self-control. The only question is this: how should we imagine the development of such a clairvoyant? If we want to define the essential, we can certainly compare it to the means of external research. In science, the researcher seeks to fathom the secrets of nature with the help of instruments. The trained clairvoyant also works with an instrument, and indeed with a very complicated instrument, without which he can investigate nothing. His instrument is precisely himself — not in his everyday state, but only when, through spiritual-scientific methods, he has transformed his cognitive faculty into a different soul constellation and created new spiritual organs for himself, when he can therefore testify from his own experiences. It cannot be that the external senses exhaust the insights. With every new organ, a new content of the environment is formed. There may be hidden worlds around us. For the trained clairvoyant, the otherwise hidden world becomes just as real as the external one. Just as after an operation for the blind, so a whole world flows towards the clairvoyant, which is his experience.

It should not be thought that this can be achieved by external means. I can, of course, only hint at how it happens. Later on I hope to be able to tell you more about how research is carried out. A person will observe most faithfully when he receives what the world of the senses has to tell him, uninfluenced by subjective effects. It is essential that man should only give nature the opportunity to express itself. The less subjective combination there is involved, the better it is. Man cannot help reflecting on the external world from which he gains his perceptions, but it is by no means the case that all his concepts, ideas and images flow into him from the external world. He draws the essential from his own inner being. This can be seen, for example, from the way in which modern thinking has come to understand the structure of the solar system. Copernicus and Galileo may well have seen the same thing that had been presented to the outer eye since time immemorial. But it was they who first established the laws. Copernicus added new combinations to the old observational material and thereby did the essential work. The same applies to orthodox Darwinism. Similar observations had been made before Darwin and Haeckel, but they approached the subject with a new state of mind. We must realize that concepts and ideas are not something that flows into us from the outside, but something that man himself must produce. When you sail out to sea, where you cannot see land, the vault of heaven seems to rest on the surface of the sea in the form of a circle. You will only understand why this is so if you are able to construct the circle around the point in the middle in your thoughts. In this way you can understand all the laws, and then reality must conform to them. Kepler would never have been able to find the path of the planets if elliptical orbits had not previously appeared in his mind.

Thus we carry our ideas to external things, which tell us: We accomplish what you have thought. - And so you come to understand that the same thing that lives in your soul underlies this external sense world as a law. Now imagine that a person tries to hold on to a thought that is constructed in his own soul. If a person succeeds in detaching himself from all external observation and directing his entire inner attention to the thought, a soul process takes place that is called concentration. The human soul must first take hold of something that lives only in the soul and hold on to it with all inner rigor. Now, of course, that is not enough, but it must be repeated over and over again. However, it is not effective to hold on to mental images that come from outside.

Now there is experience in this field, there is advice available on how to best develop the powers of the soul through concentration. There are certain core principles. It is not necessary to be convinced of their reality from the outset. The greater the lack of prejudice, the better it is. One instruction, for example, says: Fill your soul with a certain content, devote yourself solely to this soul content. You need not believe in it, but you must let it work in you, concentrate on it, and you will find that you achieve an effect in your soul through the content. It may be that external truth does not apply to the sentence; that does not matter, what matters is the working power in the soul. You will see that inner experiences arise with constant repetition.

Symbolic pictures are particularly effective. I would like to remind you of one in particular: the deeply significant symbol of the black cross with roses. Let us recall the abstract meaning of the rose cross: Goethe's “Stirb und Werde” (Die and Grow), namely, the demand that we, in developing our soul, must rise above the things of the sensual world so that it disappears around us, dies away. He whose soul remains empty is but a “gloomy guest on the dark earth”. If you succeed and are quite certain that something higher is growing out of the hidden depths of your soul, then you have become new in higher worlds. Dying in the cross, rising in the roses — that is the meaning of the symbol of the Rose Cross. In the mineral and vegetable worlds, spiritual life is everywhere to be found, and a presentiment suggests that the underlying spiritual is of physical origin. The outer world is ultimately only the physiognomy of a spiritual world. The human soul is like steel or flint; it conjures up divine-spiritual content from within the human soul's life. The important thing is to find the right symbol. Someone may say: You may well speculate as to what the Rose Cross means. The researcher is indifferent to that. When we establish a natural law in physics, science tells us something, explains it. The Rose Cross tells us nothing. — But that is not the point. It is most effective when symbols are ambiguous. One enters into a pure, inner soul activity, and by leaning on the symbol as a starting point, one concentrates in the soul on this symbol.

Let us consider what the soul consciously does; that is what matters. What works in the human being are forces that are capable of awakening what is dormant, experiences that are the only guarantee that it is an inner reality when the person comes to the feeling: Actually, the cross was only a kind of bridge. Now I have received something in my soul life, something quite different, which arises in my soul, an experience that I cannot receive through external things. At first the disciple does not know whether he has a mirage or reality before him. It depends on developing further abilities, because even what has just been described is still a detour for the clairvoyant, they are pictures. In the course of further practice, a feeling develops: it depends on what is expressed in the images. — If you press on your eye or apply an electric current to it, a glow of light may appear, determined by the inner constellation of the eye. This is roughly how it is when the images appear; they flash through the soul like spiritual lightning. When you are confronted with an object, you know that it is not produced by your eye, but that it communicates with your eye. The same thing happens in the spiritual realm. The seer now knows just as surely that he did not make the object, that the object expresses itself to him through his inner organs. In fact, the way the pictures are experienced now expresses objective facts. Just as imagination and perception are distinguished externally, so it is necessary that the seer be preserved in his healthy senses, for in hardly any other field is confusion as easily possible as in that of inner experience. Therefore, other things must go hand in hand with it.

If the observer were to practise only what has just been described, he could become a madman who believes that he can magically transform appearance into reality through his personality. It is necessary that the human being learns to renounce everything in the experience of the higher spiritual world that is connected with his desires and inclinations. Psychologically, the present human being behaves differently. He may correct the external sensory impressions, but feeling and subjective inclination are all too easily involved. An experience of spiritual reality must be preceded by the renunciation of every wish that something could be one way or another. Only when all sympathy has been eliminated can one experience objective spiritual reality.

Something else is essential. For those who are led on the way to clairvoyance in a professional, not amateurish way, who learn to see in a way that corresponds to the truth, it is of great value that they do not start the way without certain prerequisites. It is a difficult path. Therefore, one must have absorbed truths beforehand, messages from those who have already researched. It is also possible to start out with less knowledge, but then the soul world remains poor, its contents crowd together like fixed ideas. This is how those clairvoyants come about who then believe, for example, that they have united with God, describe him and so on. When such clairvoyants describe the higher worlds, their descriptions appear trivial. But to anyone who approaches the higher worlds with the tried and tested experiences of the spiritual researcher, a manifold world content appears, and everything outside appears only as a small part of the great world. The person who makes this experience his own knows that what he is experiencing is not deceiving him. He can perceive spiritually with the same certainty as in the external sense world. This is trained clairvoyance.

What must happen for these higher senses to be developed? For spiritual science, the human being is not only an external physical body, but for higher vision he also has the otherwise invisible etheric body and the astral body, the carrier of desire and suffering. You know what sleep represents for spiritual research. The physical and etheric bodies remain in bed, while the astral body and the I act on the physical body from the outside. On awakening, the astral body returns to the physical and etheric bodies, and the sense world reappears. Thus, during sleep, the astral body and I step out of the physical body. How can a person hear and see the sense world? With eyes and ears, otherwise the world would be colorless, lightless, and soundless. When the astral body leaves the physical body, it is in the spiritual world, but it has no organs. If it had such organs, it could perceive the spiritual environment as it perceives its surroundings in the physical. So if a person is to perceive the spiritual world, spiritual senses must develop in him. This happens through the methodical schooling of the soul life. When the astral body of a person who has been trained in this way, using spiritual methods, leaves the body, it is in a completely different situation than under ordinary circumstances. It is as if what was previously a chaotic mass in the astral body is now structured and forms organs. What used to be a misty, smoky mass is beautifully formed. This takes a long time. Since ancient times, this process has been called catharsis, purification or cleansing. The inner being of the human being is then cleansed of drives, desires and passions. This is the first stage.

The second stage follows on from the first. When a person returns to their physical and etheric bodies in the morning, the external organs have the stronger powers; they drown out the subtle new sounds in the internal organs. These are always present, but they are weak as long as they are drowned out by the powers of the etheric body in the sense organs. Later, the human being learns to handle the internal organs so that he can also see the spiritual perceptions alongside the sensory perceptions. This process is called enlightenment, photismos. These are very real processes that have been experienced.

Step by step, in every detail, the person applies the given method to train himself to become an instrument of perception. The schooling should thus cause him to provide his inner man with organs. Just as nature has perfected the outer man, so the path of development is continued, and what nature has begun is carried forward by the person himself. When man in this way gains insight into the spiritual, he owes this to the fact that his inner man has become ruler over the physical and etheric bodies. Man has become his own master. In the beginning he attains control over his etheric body. In the trained clairvoyant this happens in such a way that the etheric body adapts its powers to those of the astral body, it becomes elastic. If clairvoyance occurs of its own accord in pathological conditions, it is due to other causes. It falls under the same laws, but it is uncontrollable. When a person is affected in a certain way, or when he is ill, the etheric body can become partially or completely free from the physical body; it can be loosened. This is not normal. Then the person has an etheric body that is not as attached to their physical body as it is in the normal state of being, and is therefore easy to handle. In contrast, the spiritual student strengthens the astral body and thereby helps it to gain control over the etheric body. In case of illness, a part of the etheric body can be released and then handled by the astral body. Such people can sometimes gain real insights into the spiritual world because the condition is based on the same principles, but they are not reliable. The strict results of spiritual research are not achieved in this way.

The question is sometimes asked: How can a disease process produce extrasensory perception? — Health and knowledge do not have to go the same way, there is no contradiction in this, but also no recommendation. In any case, we see what is based on what leads facts of the higher world into the field of vision of man. Just as we enjoy the surrounding world, so we find in the spiritual world that which first makes the sensual world understandable to us. The communications of the spiritual researcher are based on processes that he has experienced. By telling this, he conveys facts of a world that can also be understood by the ordinary mind, while our soul world is otherwise determined by what is happening in the physical. That, for example, the image of the rose can affect me is possible because the rose lets its forces flow into me. It is the same in the spiritual realm. The trained clairvoyant experiences the spiritual outer world in his soul life. He says to himself: The sense world is determined by law through entities, whose working and rule is opening up to me. I see that a blossom is approaching me in this way, worked out of the spiritual, out of spiritual foundations. I must make sacrifices in my soul life in order to let the world of higher spiritual entities flow into me. Imagine that this world is there and at work, that man could enter into it. This world, which the clairvoyant sees, is all around him. It acts on man as a determining power, which he does not see, but which flows in on him in a subconscious way. The clairvoyant is not satisfied with just seeing the person as he is shaped on the outside.

The soul-power of imagination can also be stimulated by the spiritual worlds. There we have the real basis of imagination and an understanding of Schiller's saying, which characterizes what is created in this way. Thus we can understand Goethe's statement: “There is imagination that has an inner certainty. There is a fantastic quality that combines, and there is a fertile imagination that is inspired by the forces that the clairvoyant beholds. Schiller, in view of his circumstances, could have had no inkling of spiritual science, but he sensed and felt that Goethe was justified in ascribing to imagination the ability to fathom certain secrets.

No matter how much external fact the intellect can supply, genuine imagination can be much truer. Man is predisposed to ascend into the worlds of the spiritual, for the corresponding abilities slumber in every human being. Every human being will achieve it, even if it takes many lives. Until then, he can be stimulated by art, in which not only the world of the senses is expressed, but the creative spirit itself, which has gone through the medium of imagination. It is the outer image of the same. Thus we may say that imagination and clairvoyance are set for man as a share in spiritual life, as a great goal, as something that some have already achieved and that is superior to all other existence. When trained, clairvoyance leads the human being into the higher worlds. Imagination is its representative in the world of the senses. That is why it has an outstanding significance among the human soul forces. Imagination is the representative of clairvoyance in the world of the senses.