The Sources of Artistic Imagination and Supersensible Knowledge II

Those who create with artistic imagination will not, as is the case with ordinary sensory perception and reflection on what is perceived, comprehend the external sensory world and reproduce it within themselves: they will change it, idealize it, or whatever else one wants to call it. It does not depend on the direction. Whether one conceives realistically or idealistically, whether one is an impressionist or an expressionist, it does not matter, but in everything artistic there is a transformation of what is otherwise recreated by the human being from reality. But what remains alive in artistic creation is what can be called the perception of the external world. The artist adheres to the perception of the external world. What remains in this artistic creation is the image of the ideas that are based on external perception, and what is connected with it in the ability to remember, in the memory. In the artist, everything he has taken in during his life continues to have an effect in the subconscious, and the better that which settled in the soul as an experience continues to have an effect in the soul, the richer the artistic production will be as the personality is directed towards external sensory impressions, the ability to imagine and remember will live in artistic fantasy. This is not the case with the soul life in the vision-gifted personality that penetrates into the spiritual world through supersensible intuition. The essential point is that one can only penetrate into the spiritual world if one can silence both outer sense perception and the faculty of imagination, which runs into memory. Memory, the faculty of perceiving external sense impressions, must be completely silent during supersensible cognition. It is difficult enough to make our contemporaries understand that it is possible for the human soul to achieve such a degree of arousal of its dormant powers, that soul life can still be present in full vividness when the faculty of imagination and perception are suppressed. Therefore, the endeavor for supersensible knowledge, if it is methodically developed, must not be objected that one is dealing with the arbitrary vision only with something reminiscent of the memory, which surges up from the subconscious. The essential thing is that he who, as a spiritual researcher, wants to penetrate into the supersensible world, should learn the method that makes it possible to shut out the memory faculty so completely that his soul lives only in present impressions, into which nothing is mixed from reminiscences arising from the subconscious, so that the soul, with what it presents and experiences, stands in a world that it consciously attempts to penetrate, so that nothing remains unconscious.