III. Historical Occurrences of the Last Century

As to crossing over the threshold, naturally not everyone today can accomplish that, for the human being has become accustomed in the course of recent centuries to consider everything he encounters as taking place in time. But the first experience beyond the threshold is of a world in which time as we understand it has no significance. The time concept must be abandoned. Hence it is advantageous for people who wish to prepare themselves for an understanding of the spiritual world, to begin this training at least, by trying to picture backwards—let us say a drama, which outwardly starts, of course, with the first act and proceeds to the fifth—to picture it as starting at the end and going back to the beginning of the first act; to imagine and feel a melody, not in the succession in which it is played, but letting the tones run backward; to picture the daily experience, not from morning to evening, but running backward from evening to morning. In this way we seriously accustom our thinking to the canceling of time. In our daily life we are accustomed to picture the second event as occurring after the first, the third following the second, the fourth following the third, and so on; and our thinking is always an image of external happenings. If now we begin to think sometimes from the end toward the beginning, to feel from the end toward the beginning, we impose an inner compulsion upon ourselves, and this compulsion is good, for it forces us out of the ordinary sense world. Time runs one, two, three, four, and so on, in this direction. If we reverse our thinking, so that it goes from evening to morning, thus: instead of from morning to evening, then we are thinking against time. We cancel time.