2. Imagination

If the student allows the waiting time or the other advice and hints given to him by the occult teacher to influence him rightly, he will be actually preparing himself to hold his ground before certain trials and dangers that approach him when he encounters the unavoidable stage of Imagination. This stage is unavoidable for this reason: Everyone who seeks communication with the higher world without having passed through it can only do so unconsciously and is condemned to grope in the dark. One can acquire some dim sense of this higher world without Imagination; one can without it certainly attain to a sense of being united with “one's God” or “one's higher self,” but one cannot in this way come to a true knowledge in full consciousness and bright, luminous clarity. Therefore, all talk about coming to terms with the “inferior spiritual worlds” (the astral and the devachanic) being unnecessary, that the one thing needful is for man to awaken the “God within him,” is no more than illusion.—Whoever is satisfied with this approach should not be interfered with in his strivings, and the occultist would not so interfere. But true occultism has nothing at all to do with such strivings. It makes no demand upon anybody to become a pupil. But in him who seeks its discipline it will awaken no mere dim perception of himself as “godlike,” but will also try to open his spiritual eyes to what actually exists in higher worlds.