Lecture XVII

I would like to give you a few examples of the inner soul language of an initiate, which he doesn't always use outwardly or exoterically, but inwardly in order to form his ideas about his particular experience of the spiritual world. For instance, he might say: Dampen lightning and you will understand color. That is initiates' language. What does it mean? An initiate sees flashes of lightning; he sees something flaming up as it comes out of the universe; he looks upon it as a flickering up of the spirit in world space, and he imagines that when this lightning becomes ever dimmer or milder he gets a dampened or mild development of colors. Lightning spreads out, as it were, and becomes a colored surface. This is the way initiates think of it.