1. The World Behind the Tapestry of Sense-perceptions. Ecstasy and Mystical Experience

On two sides—the outer and the inner sides as we may call them—man is shut off from the spiritual world. When he directs his gaze to the outer world, he perceives in the first place what is there presented to his senses. He sees colours and light, hears sounds, is aware of warmth and cold, smells, tastes, and so on. This is the world immediately around him. In contemplating this world we become aware, to begin with, of a kind of boundary. Through direct perception, direct experience, man is unable today to look behind the boundary presented to him by colours and light, sounds, scents and so forth. A trivial illustration will make this clear. Suppose we are looking at a surface painted blue. Under ordinary conditions, of course, we cannot see what is behind this surface. A shallow thinker might object that it is only a matter of looking behind the surface! But this is not so in respect of the world outspread around us, for it is precisely by what we perceive that an outer spiritual world is concealed from us and at most we can feel that colour and light, warmth, cold, and so on, are external manifestations of a world lying behind. But we cannot, at a given moment, penetrate through the colours, lights and sounds, and experience what lies behind them. We have to experience the whole outer spiritual world through these manifestations. But after a little reflection we shall be able, consistently with the most elementary logic, to say: Even if modern physics or other branches of science declare that behind the colours there is vibrating etheric substance, it soon becomes obvious that what is thus assumed to lie behind the colours is something added by thought. Nobody can actually perceive what physics declares to be vibrations, movements, of which colour is merely an effect; nor can anybody say with certainty whether there is reality in what is alleged to lie behind the sense-impressions. It is, at first, mere conjecture. The external world of the senses is spread out before us like a tapestry and we have the feeling that behind this tapestry there is something into which our faculty of perception cannot penetrate.