Initiation or Consecration

The training of feeling takes place with the help of imagination in the school of the initiates. The student first creates a pictorial mental image of the world; then he must quietly contemplate his view of the world under Goethe's saying: “Everything transitory is only a parable.” I would like to show you, using an example I have given several times before, how to lead those who strive for spiritual development into the depths of things, how to teach them to train their feelings through imagination. If you want to grasp the development of beings with your thinking and remain stuck in thinking, you will never be able to take a proper step out of this sensory world. You can acquire all kinds of concepts about how subordinate beings develop higher and higher until they reach the human stage; you can even take the spiritual-scientific doctrine of evolution, how the Logos poured forth and formed ever more complex forms and worlds: plants, animals, humans and human kingdoms, how all differentiations came into being, evolutions and involutions, and so on. These are teachings that you will find in theosophical books, beautiful and interesting concepts. But you cannot enter the higher worlds in this way. You can form mental images that are analogies of higher worlds, but you can never enter these worlds with them. For that you need imagination. This is not something imagined. It is something that is brought forth with a productive force and does not merely take shape in concepts, so that these concepts, like Goethe's archetypal plant and archetypal animal, correspond to external realities; rather, images are formed that correspond to something much deeper, that correspond to the spirit that creates behind these things.