VI. Thought-forms and the Human Aura

It has been said that the formations of any one of the three worlds can have reality for a man only when he has the faculties or the organs for perceiving them. Man perceives certain processes in space as light-phenomena only because he has a properly formed eye. It depends on the receptivity of a being how much of reality reveals itself to that being. Therefore a man may never say that only what he can perceive is real. There can be much that is real, for the perception of which he has no organs. Now the soul-world and the spirit-world are just as real as the sensible world, indeed they are real in a much higher sense. No physical eye can see feelings and ideas; but they are real. And as by means of his outer senses man has the corporeal world before him as an object of perception, so do feelings, instincts, thoughts, and so forth, become objects of perception for his spiritual organs. Exactly as processes in space can be seen with the sensible eye as colour-phenomena, so can the above-named soul and spiritual processes become, by means of the inner senses, perceptions which are analogous to the sensible colour-phenomena. To understand fully in what sense this is meant is only possible for one who has trodden the path of knowledge to be described in the following chapter and has thereby developed his inner senses. For such a one the soul-phenomena in the soul-region around him and the spiritual phenomena in the spiritual region become supersensibly visible. Feelings which he experiences in other beings ray out from them as light-phenomena for him; thoughts to which he directs his attention flow through spiritual space. For him, the thought of one man about another is not an imperceptible but a perceptible process. The content of a thought lives as such only in the soul of the thinker; but this content activates effects in the spirit-world. These are the perceptible processes for the eyes of spirit. The thought streams out as an actual reality from one human being and flows to the other. And the way in which this thought works on the other person is experienced as a perceptible process in the spiritual world. Thus the physically perceptible human being is only part of the whole man for one whose spiritual senses have unfolded. This physical man becomes the centre of soul and spiritual outpourings. It is impossible to do more than faintly indicate the richly varied world which reveals itself here to the seer. A human though*, which otherwise lives only in the understanding mind of the listener, appears, for example, as a spiritually perceptible colour-phenomenon. Its colour tallies with the character of the thought. A thought which springs from a sensual impulse in a man has a different colour from a thought conceived in the service of pure knowledge, noble beauty, or the eternal good. Thoughts which spring from the sensual life course through the soul-world in shades of red colour.[^1] A thought which springs from devoted and unselfish love rays out in glorious rose-red. And just as the content of a thought comes into expression in its supersensibly visible form, so also does its greater or lesser definition. The precise thought of a thinker appears itself as a formation with definite outlines; a confused idea appears as a wavering, cloudy formation.