14. How Can We Know About Supernatural Worlds?

Such are the ordinary thoughts that human beings experience in their winter time: People use these thoughts to give the soul spiritual content, to fill the soul – just as wheat grains are used to provide food. But the thoughts that are used for meditation and concentration are like the wheat grains that are sown, from which dormant powers are brought out, which are made to sprout and grow. Human beings have only come to know the partial effectiveness of their thoughts. Through meditation and concentration, we cause thoughts to sink into our soul life, giving them a completely different essence; they sprout and blossom, and human beings then consciously experience what they otherwise experience unconsciously during their soul summer: a new world, the so-called imaginative world. The fruit of their efforts does indeed appear before their soul. Although they have not raised the soul's summertime to consciousness in quite the same way as in normal life, they have brought what descends into the unconscious during the soul's summertime to sprout and blossom, as if humans were to bring forth vegetation from individual grains of wheat in wintertime. But it is necessary for human beings to get to know the other side of their being, in which the soul appears in its fertility, in its sprouting, budding life. Otherwise, thoughts only function as images; now they germinate and sprout when we treat them not merely as images, but scatter them and really bring them to germination. Then, through self-knowledge, one truly brings about the summertime of the soul. And just as we hypothetically assumed earlier that consciousness disappeared in spring and now an unknown world is experienced in summer, so now the soul surveys a world unknown to it. In fact, the essence of our soul has the ability to bring forth what would otherwise remain unknown, if it does not stop halfway, but uses thoughts as seeds, so to speak. Meditation, concentration, and contemplation are nothing other than bringing forth what otherwise remains unknown, using thoughts and feelings—these can also be used—to unfold a new world.