IX. Pictorial Representations as a Necessary Educational Tool for Mental Training

The best means for a larger circle of people to arrive at a thinking free of sensuality is today Theosophy, if Theosophy is understood in the sense that the human being learns to detach the images from sensuality. Particularly in those areas that go a little beyond the most elementary, man is led by theosophy to thinking that is free of sensuality. If, for example, you want to understand what the etheric body or the astral body is, you cannot see them externally. That is precisely what theosophy gives you: it describes things that you cannot see externally. Or when we describe the old moon in Theosophy, we create a picture of it, a very drastic one, in fact, in which we combine sensual and supersensible ideas, so that a materialistically minded person would say: He is painting something that is not possible. Yes, in Theosophy one must teach something that is almost impossible for today's conditions and describe the old moon in such a way that there were no such rocks, minerals and stones on it as there are on our earth today. The entire old moon consisted of a living substance that could be compared in density to a kind of spinach puree or cooked salad, a body halfway between minerals and plants, half plant, half mineral. We find something like a semi-vegetable life on the old moon. Minerals as they are today did not yet exist at that time. If you look at today's peat bogs, where there is also a kind of semi-vegetable substance, you would get an outwardly similar picture to the substance of the old moon. Instead of rocks and mountains, you would have found at most something on the old moon that is like the bark of our trees today. Now every naturalist will object that something like that could not exist as a planet. But it is precisely this that is needed, and it is a necessity in order to understand other epochs of development, for the human being to tear his thinking away from what today adheres to the conceptions of ordinary sensory thinking and feeling, and to arrive at a thinking that is free of the senses. Thinking that is free of the senses is not abstract thinking, but very, very real thinking. If we think of the old moon as a kind of large salad with its bark and so on included, then this is “sensual-supersensual” thinking, as Goethe says. By detaching color and form from sensuality and projecting them freely into space, you have gained imaginations through sensual-free thinking. Anyone who regards this as a firm foundation will never be able to stumble when ascending to higher worlds.