Lecture XVII

When our foot imprints itself in the damp earth, this imprint is a negative, a counter-image of our foot. So is it too with our thoughts. In the higher spiritual world there is a counter-image for every thought. Image and counter-image are as interconnected as seal and sealing wax. The substance is the higher spiritual being which corresponds in our analogy to the sealing wax. Now we call thought, in so far as it corresponds to the sealing wax, intuition, and the impression we call abstract thought. We can say when we think: ‘I feel the traces of what is happening in higher worlds.’ It is with regard to this fact that in religious writings, for instance in the Revelation of St. John, the expression ‘seal’ is used. This corresponds with reality. It is also because a higher being is working with us in our words that every word is the impression of a seal. With the mystics the counter-image is called Imagination. Thus we have three levels of the thought element: the intuitive, the imaginative and the ordinary abstract thinking.