The Rudolf Steiner Archive

Afterword (8-11th ed.)

[ 1 ] The path to supersensible knowledge described in this text leads to a spiritual experience; in light of this, it is of the utmost importance that those who seek it do not succumb to delusions or misunderstandings regarding it. And it is all too easy for people to be misled regarding what is under consideration here. One of the delusions—and a particularly serious one—arises when the entire realm of soul experience, of which true spiritual science speaks, is misrepresented in such a way that it appears to belong to the realm of superstition, visionary dreaming, mediumship, and various other degenerate forms of human striving. This misplacement often stems from the fact that people—who, in a manner far removed from a genuine pursuit of knowledge, seek a path into the supersensible reality and thereby fall into the aforementioned degenerations—are confused with those who wish to follow the path outlined in this work. What the human soul experiences on the path referred to here takes place entirely within the realm of purely spiritual and soul-related experience. It is only possible to undergo such experiences if a person can make himself as free and independent of bodily life for other inner experiences as he is in the experience of ordinary consciousness—that is, by rising above what is perceived from the outside or what is desired, felt, or willed within thoughts that do not arise from the perceived, felt, or willed itself. There are people who do not believe in the existence of such thoughts at all. They maintain that a person cannot think anything that is not drawn from perception or from the physically conditioned inner life. And that all thoughts are, so to speak, merely shadows of perceptions or inner experiences. Anyone who asserts this does so only because they have never developed the ability to experience, with their soul, a pure life of thought that is rooted within themselves. But for those who have experienced this, it has become a matter of experience that wherever thinking reigns in the life of the soul, and to the extent that this thinking permeates other soul activities, the human being is engaged in an activity in which the body plays no part. In ordinary soul life, thinking is almost always intertwined with other soul activities: perception, feeling, volition, and so on. These other activities come about through the body. But thinking plays a role in them. And to the extent that it does, something takes place within the human being and through the human being in which the body is not involved. People who deny this cannot rise above the illusion that arises from the fact that they always observe thinking activity in conjunction with other mental functions. But in inner experience, one can mentally bring oneself to experience the thinking aspect of inner life separately from everything else. One can isolate from the scope of soul life something that consists solely of pure thought. In thoughts that exist in and of themselves, from which everything that constitutes perception or a bodily-conditioned inner life has been eliminated. Such thoughts reveal themselves through themselves, through what they are, as a spiritual, a supersensible essence. And the soul that unites with such thoughts—by excluding, during this union, all perception, all memory, and all other inner life—knows itself to be in a supersensory realm through thinking itself and experiences itself outside the body. For the one who sees through this entire situation, the question can no longer even be considered: Is there an experience of the soul in a supersensory element outside the body? For him, this would mean denying what he knows from experience. For him, the only question is: what prevents people from acknowledging such a certain fact? And to this question he finds the answer that the fact in question is one that does not reveal itself unless a person first places himself in a state of mind in which he can receive the revelation. Now, people initially become suspicious when they themselves are first required to do something purely on a spiritual level in order for something independent of them to be revealed. They believe that, because they must prepare themselves to receive the revelation, they are the ones creating the content of the revelation. They want experiences in which the person does nothing and remains entirely passive. If, moreover, such people are unfamiliar with even the simplest requirements for the scientific understanding of a set of facts, they regard soul-contents or soul-manifestations—in which the soul is reduced to a level below that of conscious self-activity, as found in sensory perception and voluntary action—as an objective revelation of a non-sensory essence. Such soul-contents are the visionary experiences, the mediumistic revelations. — But what comes to light through such revelations is not a supersensible world; it is a sub-sensible world. Human conscious waking life does not take place entirely within the body; rather, the conscious part of this life takes place primarily at the boundary between the body and the physical external world; this is true of sensory perception, in which what occurs in the sense organs is just as much the intrusion of an extracorporeal process into the body as it is the penetration of this process from the body outward; and so it is with the life of the will, which is based on the human being’s placement within the fabric of the world, so that what happens within the human being through his will is at the same time a part of world events. In this psychological experience, which takes place at the boundary of the body, the human being is highly dependent on his bodily constitution; but intellectual activity intervenes in this experience, and to the extent that this is the case, the human being becomes independent of the body in sensory perception and volition. In visionary experience and in mediumistic manifestations, the human being enters into complete dependence on the body. He excludes from his soul life that which makes him independent of the body in perception and volition. And as a result, the contents and manifestations of the soul become mere revelations of bodily life. Visionary experience and mediumistic manifestation are the result of the fact that, in these experiences and manifestations, the human being is less independent of the body with his or her soul than in ordinary life of perception and volition. In the experience of the supersensible, as referred to in this text, the development of the soul’s experience proceeds in the exact opposite direction from that of visionary or mediumistic experience. The soul becomes progressively more independent of the body than it is in the life of perception and will. It attains the kind of independence that can be grasped in the experience of pure thoughts, enabling a much broader range of soul activity.

[ 2 ] For the supersensible activity of the soul referred to here, it is of extraordinary importance to gain a clear understanding of the experience of pure thinking. For, in essence, this experience is in itself already a supersensible activity of the soul—albeit one through which one does not yet perceive anything supersensible. One lives in the supersensible realm through pure thinking; but one experiences only this in a supersensible way; one does not yet experience anything else that is supersensible. And the supersensible experience must be a continuation of that soul experience which can already be attained in union with pure thinking. That is why it is so significant to be able to experience this union correctly. For it is from an understanding of this union that the light shines which can also bring true insight into the nature of supersensible knowledge. As soon as the experience of the soul were to sink below the clarity of consciousness that unfolds in thinking, it would be on the wrong path toward true knowledge of the supersensible world. It would be overtaken by bodily functions; what it experiences and produces would then not be a revelation of the supersensible through itself, but a bodily revelation within the realm of the sub-sensible world.

[ 3 ] As soon as the soul enters the realm of the supersensible with its experiences, these experiences are of such a nature that linguistic expressions for them cannot be found as easily as for experiences in the realm of the sensory world. When describing supersensible experiences, one must often be aware that, in a sense, the gap between the linguistic expression and the actual reality it describes is greater than in physical experience. One must come to understand that many expressions, like a metaphor, only gently allude to what they refer to. As stated on page 22 of this text: “Originally, all the rules and teachings of spiritual science are given in a symbolic sign language.” And on pages 56 and following, reference had to be made to a “specific writing system.” It is easy for someone to be tempted to want to learn such a text in a similar way to how one learns phonetic symbols and their combinations for the writing of an ordinary physical language. It must be said, however, that there have been and still are schools and associations of spiritual science that possess symbolic signs through which they express supersensible realities. And whoever is initiated into the meaning of these symbols thereby gains a means of directing their soul experience toward the relevant supersensible realities. But what is essential for supersensible experience is rather that, in the course of such a supersensible experience—as it can be attained by the soul through the realization of the content of this text—the soul, in its contemplation of the supersensible, gains the revelation of such a text through its own experience. The supersensible speaks to the soul in a way that the soul must translate into symbolic signs so that it can fully comprehend it. It can be said: what is communicated in this text can be realized by every soul. And in the course of this realization—the path of which the soul can determine for itself according to the instructions provided—the results described herein will manifest. One should regard a book such as this as a conversation between the author and the reader. When it is said that the initiate requires personal instruction, one should understand this to mean that the book itself is such personal instruction. In earlier times, there were reasons to reserve such personal instruction for oral, secret teaching; at present, we have reached a stage in human development in which spiritual scientific knowledge must be disseminated on a much larger scale than in the past. It must be accessible to everyone to a far greater extent than in the past. Here, the book takes the place of the former oral instruction. The belief that one absolutely needs personal instruction beyond what is stated in the book is only partially correct. Of course, one or the other may need personal guidance, and such guidance can be meaningful to them. But it would be misleading to think that there are essential points not found in the book. One finds them if one reads correctly and, above all, if one reads it in its entirety.

[ 4 ] The descriptions in this book appear as if they were instructions for a complete transformation of the whole person. However, anyone who reads them correctly will find that they intend to say nothing more than what inner state of mind a person must be in during those moments of his life when he wishes to face the supersensible world. He develops this state of mind as a second entity within himself; and the healthy, other entity continues to function in the old way. He knows how to distinguish between the two entities with full consciousness; he knows how to bring them into interaction with one another in the right way. He does not render himself useless and incapable for life by losing interest and skill in it and by “being a spiritual researcher all day long.” It must be said, however, that the way of experiencing the supersensible world will shed its light on the whole being of the human being; but this cannot be in a way that distracts from life, rather in a way that makes this life more effective and fruitful. – The reason the description had to be presented as it is stems from the fact that every process of cognition directed toward the supersensible does indeed engage the whole human being, so that at the moment a person is absorbed in such a process of cognition, they must be so with their entire being. Just as the process of color perception involves only the individual part of the eye with its nerve extensions, so a suprasensory cognitive process involves the whole person. The person becomes “all eye” or “all ear.” Because this is so, it appears that when one speaks of the formation of suprasensory cognitive processes, one is speaking of a transformation of the human being; one might think that the ordinary human being is not quite right and must become something entirely different.

[ 5 ] I would like to add something to what was said on page 115 ff. in “On Some Effects of Initiation,” which—with some modifications—may also apply to other sections of this book. – It might well occur to someone to ask: What is the point of such descriptions of the pictorial manifestations of supersensible experience? Couldn’t this experience be described in ideas without such a sensory rendering? To this one must reply: It is essential to the experience of supersensible reality that the human being, within the supersensible, recognizes himself as a supersensible being. Without this awareness of one’s own supersensible being—whose reality is fully revealed in its own way in the description given here of the “lotus flowers” and the “etheric body”—a person would experience themselves in the supersensible realm as if they were merely standing within the sensible world in such a way that the things and events around them were revealed to them, but he would know nothing of his own body. What he perceives in the “soul body” and the “etheric body” as his supersensible form enables him to stand in the supersensible realm with self-awareness, just as he stands in the sensory world with self-awareness through the perception of his sensory body.