The Sources of Artistic Imagination and Supersensible Knowledge II

When speaking of clairvoyance, people think that it refers to something that only a few twisted people have, something that is completely outside of life. It is not so. That which is earnest looking is always present in life. We could not stand in life if we were not all clairvoyant for certain things. It is important that the serious seer does not mean something that is outside of life, but that it is only an enhancement of life in certain ways. When are we clairvoyant in our ordinary life? We are clairvoyant in a case that is so little understood today because, from a materialistic point of view, all kinds of craziness have been formed about the way we grasp a foreign ego when we are confronted with a foreign body. There are already people today who say: You only perceive the soul of another human being through a subconscious conclusion. We see the oval of the face, the other human lines, the color of the face, the shape of the eyes. We have become accustomed to finding ourselves face to face with a person when we see something physical like this, so we draw the analogy that whatever is in such a form also contains a person. — It is not so; that is what supersensible knowledge shows. What appears to us in the human form and coloring is a kind of perception, like the perception of color and form in a crystal. The color, form and surface of a crystal present themselves as themselves. The surface and coloring in a human being cancel each other out, making themselves transparent, ideally speaking. The sensory perception of the other person is spiritually extinguished: we perceive the other soul directly. It is an immediate empathy with the other soul, a mysterious and wonderful process in the soul when we stand face to face with another person in our own humanity. There is a real stepping out of the soul, a stepping over to the other. This is a clairvoyance that is present in life always and everywhere. This kind of clairvoyance is intimately connected with the mystery of the incarnate. The seer becomes aware of this when he rises to the most difficult seerical problem: to perceive the incarnate in a seerical way. For the ordinary view, the incarnate has something resting about it; for the seer, it becomes something moved within itself. The seer does not perceive the incarnate as something finished, he perceives it as an intermediate state between two others. When the seer concentrates on the coloring of the person, he perceives a continuous fluctuation between paleness and a kind of blush, which is a higher blush than the ordinary blush, and which for the seer merges into a kind of radiance of warmth. These are the two borderline states between which the coloring of the person oscillates, with the incarnate lying in the middle. For the seer, this becomes a vibrating back and forth. Through the paleness, the seer understands what the person is like inwardly, in their mind and intellect, and through the blush, one recognizes what the person is like as a being of will and impulse, how they are in relation to the external world. What is in the inner character of the person vibrates to a higher degree.