10. The Supernatural Human Being III

It is of particular importance to consider this first stage of spiritual experience carefully, because error can arise in two directions. One is that one can confuse what is meant here as the imaginative world with those images that arise from a pathological, abnormal consciousness, with all kinds of visions or the like. But from what has been developed here earlier, you will have seen how, already in the work of the spiritual researcher on the path to entering the spiritual world, all the precautions are taken that strictly reject the indefinite floating and hovering in all kinds of visionary things. The vision enters the soul in such a way that one does not feel involved in its creation. It appears as an image, but one cannot participate in the creation of the image; one is not inside the creation of the image. Therefore, one does not know its origin. The visionary image always comes merely from the organism, and what emanates from the organism is not spiritual-soul, but perhaps a veiling of something spiritual-soul. What is at stake is to distinguish precisely between the whole unconscious life in all kinds of visions and what the spiritual researcher means by imaginative consciousness. This consists in being present in everything that is woven in images, just as one is present in fully conscious thinking that moves from thought to thought. There is no other way to enter the spiritual world than if the activity through which one enters is as fully conscious as the most conscious life of thought. The only difference is that thoughts as such are shadowy, faded, and are acquired from external things or somehow arise from memory, while what is meant here by imagination is woven by the soul itself at the moment it arises.