V. Knowledge of the Higher Worlds—Concerning Initiation

To begin with, the soul is weak over against all that offers itself for perception in the world of soul and spirit. The pupil will already have had to expend considerable energy of soul in order to hold fast in meditation the symbolic or other pictures which he built up out of the data of the world of sense. But if he wants in addition to attain to actual observation in a higher world, he will have to do more than this. He must be able to abide in a condition wherein not only the stimuli of the external world no longer influence his soul, but even the Imaginative thought-pictures are completely obliterated from his consciousness. For the moment has now arrived when that which has been formed and fashioned within him by dint of deep inner concentration of soul can come to view. Everything now depends upon the pupil's having sufficient inner energy of soul to allow it to be actually seen by him spiritually; it must not escape his notice, as invariably happens when the forces of the soul are too little developed. The soul-and-spirit organism that has come to development within him and that the pupil has now to apprehend in self-perception is frail and evanescent. Many and serious are the disturbances that come from the outer world of sense and from memories of the same, and that persist in the mind even when the pupil does his utmost to shut them out. Nor is it only the disturbances of which we can be aware that come into question; still more serious are those of which we are totally unaware in ordinary life.