III. The Spiritland

It must above all be emphasised that this world is woven out of the substance of which human thought consists. (The word “substance,” too, is here used in a far from usual sense.) But thought, as it lives in earthly man, is only a shadow picture, a phantom of its true being. As the shadow of an object on the wall is related to the real object which throws this shadow, so is the thought that makes its appearance through a human brain related to the being in the Spiritland which corresponds to this thought. Now when the spiritual sense of man is awakened he actually perceives this thought-being, just as the eye of the senses perceives the table or the chair. He moves in a region of thought-beings. The corporeal eye perceives the lion, and the thinking that is directed to the material world thinks the thought “lion” as a shadow, a shadowy picture. In “Spiritland” the spiritual eye sees the thought “lion” as truly as the corporeal eye sees the physical lion. Here we may again refer to the analogy already used regarding the Soul-land. Just as the environment of a man born blind and then operated upon appear all at once with the new qualities of colour and light, so is the environment of the person who learns to use his spiritual eye seen to be filled with a new world, the world of living thoughts or spirit-beings. There are to be seen in this world, first the spiritual archetypes of all things and beings which are present in the physical and in the soul worlds. Imagine the picture of a painter existing in the mind before it is painted. This indicates what is meant by the expression “Archetype.” It does not concern us here that the painter has not, perhaps, had such an archetype in his mind before he paints; and that it only gradually develops and becomes complete during the practical work. In the real “World of the Spirit,” there are such archetypes for all things, and the physical things and beings are images of these archetypes. It is quite understandable when anyone who trusts only to his outer senses denies this archetypal world, and holds archetypes to be merely abstractions which the intellect arrives at by comparing the objects of the senses. Such a person simply cannot see in this higher world; he knows the thought-world only in its shadowy abstractness. He does not know that a man with spiritual vision is as familiar with the spirit-beings as he himself is with his dog or his cat, and that the archetypal world has a far more intense reality than the world of the physical senses.