14. How Can We Know About Supernatural Worlds?

Rudolf Steiner: [It has] not been clearly defined what is meant today, and also in earlier lectures, when speaking of clairvoyance. [It is] not so much [a] state, but [the] goal of self-education of the soul. Above all, spiritual science aims to carry out self-education in such a way that the human being is able to do what is necessary, for example, the eradication of imagination — so that the spiritual world only appears later. This extinguishing cannot be accomplished through anomalous reflections of inner qualities, hallucinations, visions, or delusions. The content of spiritual science can only be that which is achieved in the manner described, whereby the soul always controls itself and is able to control itself. Then, of course, one can just as well speak of clairvoyance and clairsentience, because these terms no longer apply here. Strictly speaking, it is then not clairvoyance, not seeing, but a different soul process. But because imagination [works] like [a] concept for recognizing the physical, imaginative seeing can still be sufficiently described as clairvoyance. And [thus] one can still speak of clairvoyance. Clairvoyance [is] more accurate than ordinary feeling.