The Sources of Artistic Imagination and Supersensible Knowledge II

The experiences with art in particular can be used to characterize what the seer experiences in detail in his soul abilities. By trying to put himself in the place of the architect in his architectural forms and proportions, in what the architect encloses in his buildings, he feels a kinship with these architectural proportions and harmonies, with that which develops in him, in the seer, as a completely different thinking than the shadowy thinking of ordinary life. One would like to say: the clairvoyant develops a new thinking that is related to nothing so much as to the forms in which the architect thinks and which he fashions. The thinking that rules in ordinary life has nothing to do with true seership. The thinking that rules in seership includes space in its creative experience. The seer knows that with these forms, which are living thought forms, he enters into the supersensible reality behind the sense world, but that he must develop this thinking that lives out in spatial forms. The seer perceives: In all that lives in the harmony of measure and form, will and emotional feeling are active. He learns to recognize the forces of the world in such measure and number relationships through the designs that live in his thinking. Therefore, he feels related in his thinking to what the architect designs. In a certain sense, a new emotional life awakens in him — not that of ordinary consciousness — and he feels akin to what the architect and sculptor create in forms. For supersensible knowledge, a representational intellectuality is born that thinks in spatial forms that curve and shape themselves through their own life. These are thought-forms through which the soul of the seer plunges into spiritual reality; one feels akin to what lives in the forms of the sculptor. One can characterize the seer's thinking and new perception by considering his experiences with architecture and sculpture.