73. Clairvoyance, Reason and Science

Once such a state has been attained, the task is to fill the emptied soul with content again. This must not be content taken from ordinary life. For such a content would lead the soul back into the realm it wants to leave. But where should another content come from? Here it comes into consideration what I just described when I said that the leap must first be made half way. The soul must bring it about through further intensive efforts of will, now as if out of the nothingness of the soul life, to fill itself completely with a powerfully effective idea. This must be a symbol that does not represent any external object or event, but one that symbolizes a meaningful thing. In this case, the symbol acts as something between an ordinary idea and a phantasm. It refers to something real; but it does not represent anything real. When one concentrates all that lives in the soul upon such a symbol, one draws the inner soul together into itself, as it were, and one frees oneself from that state in which one knows the inner man only through the instrumentality of the outer man. One gets to know the experience that consists in regarding the outer man as a being that, like other objects of the outer world, does not belong to us but belongs to the objective world. It may be said of this experience that some mystics come close to it, but do not fully attain it. The philosophical critics who have discussed the experience knew it only in this imperfect form. And that is why what they object to is justified from their point of view. They find that everything that can be gained from the experience can have a personal value for a person. They admit that through it he can feel as if he has been transported into a spiritual world. But they do not admit that through this experience one can gain spiritual knowledge that is quite independent of the personality. But one can only do so when the experience deepens to such an extent that one really feels like a kind of double being. One then sees one's own organism in a completely new form. In this form, it shows with all certainty all those characteristics by which one gives one's experiences a personal coloration in normal life. And in this way it becomes a teacher of truly impersonal knowledge. One need only look at him and say to oneself: “This is what makes things appear to you with this or that nuance of feeling.” In this way one is able to eliminate everything that is subjective. This important experience, which must precede every ascent to supersensible knowledge, bears the name in the language of esoteric science: “Encounter with the ‘Guardian of the Threshold’”. Since I am not speaking here of the path that leads man to act in the supersensible world, it is not incumbent upon me to describe in detail the terrible form that this “Guardian of the Threshold” shows to all those who want to come to such action. It is quite justified that the means by which this guardian of the supersensible worlds is approached in this field is not spoken of publicly. For the encounter with him is terrible and full of danger. It brings before the spiritual eye all the instincts, desires, passions, down to the lowest forms, of which man could only be capable if all the inhibitions that education, heredity, knowledge, social sense, etc. lend to life did not work. And since nothing counteracts the terrible spectre of one's own nature, there is a serious danger that man will not be able to escape the temptations and will head towards terrible moral decay. One only has to read the descriptions of those mystics who have taken a few steps into these dangerous worlds. What they describe of temptations and wild passions is completely true. The experiences one can have there are such that the usual descriptions of hell pale in comparison. It is well known that such mystics protect themselves from these temptations by striving for a complete annihilation of their personality before they enter these regions. They kill every feeling of their own, every will of their own. “It is no longer I myself who feel, no longer I myself who will, but it is Christ in me.” This attitude of Paul's becomes the ideal of these mystics. By sanctifying their whole inner being, they seek to escape the temptations of the same. For those who do not seek complete entry into the supersensible realm, but only the gaining of knowledge from it, the meeting with the ‘Guardian of the Threshold’ is less perilous. As already mentioned, only those reasons arise at the significant boundary that determine a person to see the world in a subjective way. Now, of course, these reasons are also terribly enticing. They are so strong that there is a danger that a person will lose all sense of anything other than what is personally sufficient for them as truth. He may then lose all sense of an impersonal form of truth in spiritual matters. This danger can be avoided if the one who ventures into the supersensible has first acquired a sound judgment and genuine critical faculty. These are the only things that can be taken from the ordinary world into the world of supersensible knowledge. In regard to the content of experience the two worlds are fundamentally different; but they are the same in this, that he who really thinks logically in the one world can also do so in the other. This thinking gives the spiritual researcher nothing that he could carry over into his new world. One does not learn the nature and facts of this world through concepts that one carries over from the ordinary world into it. They can only be known through observation, through direct experience. Yet this thinking is necessary for the reason that one should not lose touch with the old world when entering a new one. It is impossible for anyone in a supersensible world to distinguish hallucination or vision from reality who is not able to compare or measure his experiences in this world with those of the ordinary world. No matter how interesting the stories about the most wonderful and marvelous things in a spiritual world may be, no matter how much they may captivate attention. They are worthless for man's understanding of the world if one is unable to explain their relationship to the ordinary sense world in a logically satisfactory way.