3. Natural Science and Anthroposophy

Let us ask ourselves: How does imagined thinking move? As I said, we first have the experience of being connected to the outside world; we live ourselves into some event in the outside world with our whole being. This speaks to our will impulses, or rather, it speaks to our feelings; it also speaks to our thoughts. We live in it with our whole being. We may even make a physical effort in having the experience. In short, we live in it with our whole being. In this way, this soul, in having our ideas, plunges down into the depths, and in the image we can bring it up again. We can say: in ordinary experience, we proceed from the external experience to ordinary memory in that the external images undergo a certain inner metamorphosis. In meditation, which is available in anthroposophical research, we go the other way. We first learn to have an image that is not allowed to link to an external experience, not to subconscious reminiscences, and learn to progress — now not to an external experience, but to a supersensible experience, also to those experiences that lie before our birth or before our conception. In this way we get to know the pre-existence of the soul, the spiritual being of the soul, in a way that we otherwise only get to know what external experiences have brought us up to a certain point in our childhood. It is the reverse experience, but one that leads us to spiritual experience, where we start from the image and ascend to the experience. And if at the same time we practise a certain self-discipline, namely a self-discipline that increasingly leads us to act out of what we know in ordinary life as the feeling of love, then we learn to recognize objectively where we can develop our activity in love from the tasks that the outer world gives us. If we get to know this life in the outer world, then after much practice, the progression from image to reality will gradually be such that we progress from the imaginative consciousness through the inspired to the intuitive consciousness. This means that we learn to stand within the inner objectivity, within the inner necessity of the spiritual world.