Sixth Lecture

Imagination initially provides an image of supersensible reality; inspiration transports us into it. We achieve this inspiration by using an inner technique, just as we bring about the possibility of imagination through meditation and concentration, to develop another ability that cannot be particularly appreciated in ordinary life. One must observe in such a way that one brings oneself to a reasonably clear awareness of what forgetting is, what throwing an idea out of consciousness is. One must practice meditatively in artificial forgetting, in sorting out ideas, and must thereby develop the ability to now also reject and ultimately erase the imaginative life, the life in images, that one has acquired. Those who have only managed to develop their imagination cannot yet penetrate into spiritual reality; only those who have managed to erase these imaginations, which at first, I would say, appear only as a realization of the imaginative faculty, can do so, for these imaginations are, in fact, more or less self-made. The point is to empty one's consciousness, as it were, to apply the act of forgetting arbitrarily to this imaginative life, so that one learns what it means to live in a completely awake consciousness that does not imagine, but which has brought its inner energy to bear through previous imagining and has now rid itself of its content, what it means to live in such a powerful consciousness. One must learn to know this, then one rises from imagining to knowledge through inspiration, then one also knows that one is touched by a spiritual reality that reveals itself in a soul-spiritual process that can be compared to inhaling and exhaling, to the rhythmic process of breathing in general. Just as the rhythmic breathing process consists of taking in the outside air, working it through internally, and then releasing it again in a different form, after we have identified with it in a certain way, so we learn about a spiritual-soul process that consists of being able to feel the inner power of consciousness that we have gained, to breathe it in, so to speak, spiritually and soulfully into this consciousness that has been strengthened by imagination. But through this, objective imagination shines forth in this strengthened consciousness. We breathe in the spiritual world, we let it enter us, we identify with it, we live ourselves out of ourselves; a rhythmic interaction with the spiritual world takes place.