The Rudolf Steiner Archive

3. Imaginative, Inspired, and Intuitive Methods of Insight

[ 1 ] Through the meditation exercises designed to lead to imaginative insight, the entire inner life of the human soul is transformed. Likewise, the relationships between the human soul and the surrounding world are transformed. The point is that meditation, in the sense intended in the previous lectures here, consists of concentrating all the soul’s powers on a specific, easily comprehensible complex of ideas. It is important to bear this in mind: a clearly comprehensible complex of ideas—one to which the human spirit and soul can direct all their attention in the immediate present, so that while the soul rests upon this complex of ideas, nothing flows into it from any subconscious or unconscious impressions, or from impressions arising from memory.

[ 2 ] If imaginative insight is to be brought about in the proper way, one must, while meditating, hold before oneself the entire complex of ideas—to which one devotes all one’s soul forces—just as one would a mathematical problem, so that nothing from emotionally charged ideas or ideas imbued with the will interferes with the meditation. When one devotes oneself to a mathematical problem, one knows at every moment that one’s mental activity is focused solely on what is immediately before the mind’s eye. One knows that nothing emotional, nothing based on feeling, and no reminiscences from past life may enter into what one imagines and what leads to a judgment on the problem in question. One must also be in such a state of mind when meditating properly.

[ 3 ] Then it is best to surrender as fully as possible to a complex of ideas that is entirely new to you—one that you know for certain you have never thought of before. For if one were simply to draw something from memory, one could not possibly know what unconscious, emotional impulses might be at play there. It is therefore extremely beneficial for the meditator to seek advice from an experienced spiritual researcher, for the latter will ensure that the meditator has a subject of meditation about which he certainly cannot have thought before, so that what is now being meditated upon enters consciousness for the first time, nothing from memory or instinct can play a role, and only the spiritual-psychic aspect is engaged in this meditation.

[ 4 ] If such a meditation—which need only be brief each day—is repeated consistently, a state of mind will eventually arise that allows a person to feel quite clearly: Now you are living in an inner activity that has become detached from the physical body; now you are living in an activity that is different from when you engage your thinking, feeling, or volitional activity within the physical body. — What particularly strikes one here is that one clearly feels: one is living in a world separate from physical corporeality. — One gradually immerses oneself into the etheric world, and one senses this in that one’s own organism—the physical organism—assumes the character of a relative objectivity. One looks, as it were, at this physical organism from the outside, just as one otherwise looks at external objects from within this physical organism. But what becomes evident in one’s inner experience—that the meditation was successful—is that the thoughts, as it were, become denser; they do not merely retain the character they usually have, namely that of the abstract, but that one experiences something in the thoughts that is similar to the forces of growth that have transformed one from a small child into an adult, or to the forces that are at work within one daily when metabolism sustains the body.

[ 5 ] Thinking certainly takes on a real character. And precisely because thinking takes on a real character—so that one now feels oneself within the act of thinking just as one once felt oneself during one’s growth processes or life processes—it is for this very reason that this imaginative thinking must be acquired in the manner just described. For if one had acquired it in such a way that the unconscious—perhaps even the physical—had played a role during meditation, then those forces, those realities that one now experiences in supersensible thinking, would in turn exert an influence on the physical and etheric human organism. They would unite there with the forces of growth and the forces of nutrition, and by persisting in such “real” thinking, one would alter one’s physical and etheric organisms. But this must not happen under any circumstances! All activity undertaken for the purpose of this imaginative insight, all these forces, must be applied solely to the relationship between the human being and their environment, and they must not in any way interfere with the physical or etheric organism. These two must remain completely unchanged, so that when a person acquires the ability to, as it were, float with their thinking in the etheric world, they look back with their thinking upon their unchanged physical body. It has remained as it was; this etheric thinking does not interfere with it.

[ 6 ] With this ethereal thinking, one feels completely outside one’s physical body; however, it must always be possible to alternate this state of being outside—through free will—with being completely within the physical organism. Anyone who has correctly brought about imaginative perception through meditation must be able, in one moment, to be in this etheric thinking—which is experienced inwardly as a process of growth and nourishment and feels entirely real within— and in the very next moment, as this thinking fades, must be able to return to his physical body and see with his eyes as he normally does, hear with his ears as he normally does, and feel with his hands as he normally does. This free-will ability to float back and forth between being in the physical body and outside of it in the etheric realm must always be achievable. Then true imaginative thinking has been attained. I would like to explain how this works in the second part of the lecture.

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[ 7 ] For anyone who wishes to become a spiritual researcher, it is essential that they systematically undergo a wide variety of exercises over a long period of time. However, through what I have just outlined in principle, one will eventually come to experience etheric thinking to such an extent that one can verify the statements made by a spiritual researcher—although such verification is also entirely possible through ordinary common sense, provided one is sufficiently open-minded and free of prejudice.

[ 8 ] If meditation is to lead to success in the proper way, it must be supported by certain other spiritual exercises. Above all, one must increasingly cultivate such spiritual qualities as strength of character, inner truthfulness, a certain inner calm, and, above all, complete composure. This must be repeated again and again: a level-headedness that allows both the meditation exercises themselves and everything that follows as precise clairvoyance to be performed in a state of mind and spiritual disposition similar to that experienced when doing mathematics. If one habitually possesses qualities such as strength of character, inner truthfulness, composure, and a certain inner calm, then the meditative process—when repeated over and over—is capable of imprinting its results on the entire physical and etheric human organism; for some, depending on their aptitudes, this may take only a few weeks, for others it may take years—to imprint its results on the entire physical and etheric human organism, so that the person truly attains a form of inner activity in imaginative cognition similar to the activity they otherwise engage in through their physical body in the sensory perception of the world and through the body in thinking.

[ 9 ] Once a person has attained this kind of imaginative insight, they are first able to survey the course of their own life—from childhood to the present moment—as a unified whole, as a tableau of time. One sees before oneself a continuous, inwardly dynamic process of becoming as one’s own life course. But when one now views this life course through imaginative cognition, it is not at all like what one otherwise has before one as a memory of life; rather, what one now has before one is as real as the very forces of growth and life that drive the entire soul configuration out of the body of the small child, and then, in the further course of life, drive thinking and so on. One surveys everything that is taking shape inwardly—the development of the human etheric organism over the course of life. Compared to what one surveys in this way—and which is far more real than the tableau of memories—the memories that enter ordinary consciousness are merely a kind of reflection, like a surface wave set in motion by deep processes into which one is now penetrating—deep processes of life, etheric processes that otherwise do not enter consciousness at all, but which shape and form us, allowing us to become who we are in life from our birth to the present moment.

[ 10 ] These facts, these processes, appear before the imaginative consciousness. This gives human beings a true self-knowledge, beginning with their earthly life. How one arrives at self-knowledge of one’s extraterrestrial life will become clear to us in the coming days. For in fact, the first step in supersensible cognition consists in one’s own etheric life—as one has lived it from childhood to the present moment—appearing before one in its supersensible character. Only through this does one truly come to understand oneself, and what one experiences in this way is in turn reflected through one’s own physical and etheric organism in such a way that, in what one experiences as one’s own etheric processes, one has something that shows how the entire etheric cosmos manifests itself within the individual human being—how the outer etheric world, I would say, continues to undulate and vibrate within the human etheric organism.

[ 11 ] Now one might say that what one experiences in this way can be expressed in linguistic and conceptual terms, and that a true philosophy can arise from the imaginative experience of the world within the ethereal human being. However, what one experiences in this way remains entirely unconscious to ordinary consciousness. Only the very young child, before it has learned to speak, truly lives fully within this activity into which the human being enters through imaginative cognition. For as the child learns to speak, and as language develops within the soul life, certain forces are drawn off from the general forces of growth and other life forces—forces that are then experienced as abstract thinking. The child does not yet possess this abstract thinking. The metamorphosis of a portion of the forces of growth and life into powers of thought has not yet taken place. Therefore, the child is engaged in an activity toward the cosmos—an activity into which one feels transported once again through imaginative cognition—except that the child experiences it unconsciously. The imaginative thinker experiences it fully consciously with clear composure.

[ 12 ] For a person who has not attained imaginative thinking, it is impossible to grasp what is taking place between the human etheric organism and the etheric in the cosmos. A child cannot perceive it, even though it experiences it directly, because it does not yet possess abstract thinking; the person with ordinary consciousness cannot perceive it because they have not yet deepened their abstract thinking through meditation. If they deepen it through meditation, then they perceive—in a fully conscious way—that interplay between the human etheric organism and the etheric in the cosmos, in which the very young child still lives undivided. And so one might utter this paradoxical statement: The only true philosopher is the one who, as a mature human being, can once again become, in his or her state of mind, a very young child, but who has acquired the gift of experiencing this state of mind of the young child in a more awakened state than the waking state of ordinary consciousness, and to bring back into one’s entire soul life what one was as a very young child, before one had transitioned to abstract thinking through language. — And to survey what one experiences in this way with full consciousness—that is what defines the philosopher of the modern age. The philosopher of the modern age lives in the—fully conscious—state of the very young child before it has learned to speak.

[ 13 ] This is the paradox that, I believe, can illustrate particularly clearly how the human soul will indeed rise within modern intellectual life to a genuine, real philosophical state of mind.

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[ 14 ] To attain complete supersensible knowledge, it is necessary to expand one’s meditative exercises to include those practices that can lead to inspiration. This is achieved not only by practicing the resting of the soul on complexes of imagination, as has been described so far, but also—as has already been mentioned in principle in these lectures—by being able to remove from consciousness those images that have entered it through meditation or as a result of meditation. Just as one has brought about the images of imaginative cognition through completely free will, one must also be able to remove these images from consciousness, from the life of the soul. It requires greater energy of the soul to dispel images that arise either through the meditative life or as a result of it than, for example, to dispel mental images that have entered consciousness either from memory or from ordinary sensory perception. It takes more strength to remove meditative ideas and imaginative images from consciousness than it does to remove such ordinary ideas. But this greater strength, which the soul must exert, is necessary for progress in supersensible knowledge.

[ 15 ] One attains this power by striving more and more, once the imaginative images have appeared, to free one’s consciousness of them and not allow anything else to enter consciousness. As a result, what might be called a state of mere wakefulness arises, devoid of any inner content. This mere wakefulness then leads to inspiration. For when the soul has attained this empty state of consciousness in this way—through the powerful force of its self-liberation from imaginative images—the spiritual contents of the cosmos flow into this soul, which has become empty yet remains awake. Then, little by little, one has before and around oneself a spiritual cosmos, just as a sensory human being in ordinary consciousness has a physical-sensory cosmos around oneself.

[ 16 ] What one now experiences in the spiritual cosmos presents itself in such a way that it points back to what one has experienced in the sensory world. In the sensory world, one has experienced the sun, the moon, the planets, the fixed stars, and other realities of the physical-sensory world. By now being able to perceive the spiritual cosmos through a consciousness that has been emptied, by undergoing inspiration, one experiences the revelation of the spiritual essence of the sun, the revelations of the spiritual essence of the moon, the spiritual essence of the planets, and the fixed stars. And again, it must be the case that a person can, of their own free will, relate what they experience in the spiritual realm as the cosmos back to what they have experienced through their physical body as the physical-sensory cosmos. One must be able to say: I am now experiencing a spiritual essence that is revealing itself; I must relate this, as the Sun Spirit, to what I experience in the physical-sensory world as the physical-sensory Sun; and I experience a spiritual-soul being that is revealing itself, and I must be able to relate it, as the spiritual being of the Moon, to what I experience in the physical-sensory world as the Moon, and so on.

[ 17 ] Once again, human beings must be able to move freely back and forth, while at the same time being present in both the spiritual world and the physical-sensory world. They must be able to move freely with their soul life back and forth between the spiritual revelations of the cosmos and what they are accustomed to experiencing as physical-sensory revelations within physical life on Earth. When one relates the spiritual aspect of the Sun to the physical aspect of the Sun, the spiritual aspect of the Moon to the physical aspect of the Moon, and so on, this is a soul process similar to the one that occurs, for example, when one has a new perception and recalls something one has experienced before. Just as one brings together something that one encounters in a new perception—in order to clarify it for oneself—with what one has already experienced, so too, in a truly free, inspirational life, one brings together what one experiences as revelations from cosmic spiritual beings with what one has experienced within the physical-sensory world. It is as if the experience in the spiritual realm were to give rise to new intuitions about what one has previously experienced in the sensory world through one’s physical body. And one must possess the full composure to experience this higher degree of supersensory knowledge—which has something overwhelming about it—with the same calm state of mind as when bringing a new perception into connection with an old memory.

[ 18 ] This experience through inspiration differs quite significantly from what one might previously have regarded as mere imagination. Through imagination, one lives in the etheric world. In this etheric world, one feels as alive as one otherwise felt in one’s physical body. But one perceives the etheric world as a sum of processes that are, admittedly, more rhythmic—a vibration in the world-ether—which one is, however, fully capable of interpreting in terms of concepts and ideas. In the etheric-imaginative experience, one perceives a general process; one perceives supersensible, etheric realities. In inspiration, one does not merely sense such ethereal, supersensible facts that merge into one another, undergo metamorphosis, and take on all manner of forms; rather, through inspiration, one now senses how, in this undulating ethereal world—this rhythmically vibrating world—as if on the waves of an ethereal cosmic ocean, real beings float and are active. One thus perceives what reminds one of the sun, what of the moon, of the planets and fixed stars, and also of physical earthly things, of minerals and plants—and all of this within the world ether.

[ 19 ] This is how one perceives the astral cosmos. What we experience here in the physical-sensory world only in its outward form, we now recognize again in our spiritual existence, in its essential nature. And we also gain insight into the inner essence of the human organism—both the overall form of the human organism and the forms of the individual organs: the lungs, the heart, the liver, and so on. For everything that gives the human organism form and life does not stem merely—as one now sees—from what is outside in the physical cosmos around us and is active there, but rather from what exists within this physical cosmos as spiritual beings—as the Solar Being, lunar beings, and animal and plant beings—that animates and spiritualizes physical and etheric processes, and which then acts in such a way as to give the human organism life and form. One can only understand the form and life of the physical organism once one has risen to the level of inspiration.

[ 20 ] What one experiences there remains completely hidden from ordinary consciousness. One would only be able to perceive this with ordinary consciousness if one could not only see through one’s eyes, hear with one’s ears, and taste with one’s sense of taste, but if the process of breathing—inhaling and exhaling— were a process of perception—if, in the inflow and outflow of the breath, we had something like a process of perception in which we would experience the inflow and outflow of the breath internally throughout the entire organism. Because this is the case, a certain Eastern school—the school of yoga—has transformed breathing into a process of cognition, metamorphosing it into a process of perception. By transforming breathing into a conscious, if somewhat dreamlike, process of cognition—that is, by seeking to experience something in the breathing process similar to what we experience in seeing and hearing— it thereby effectively develops a cosmology—an insight into how the spiritual entities of the cosmos work within the human being, and how the human being experiences himself as a member of the spiritual cosmos. But practicing such yoga disciplines contradicts the form of human organization that Western humanity has adopted in the present day. Such yoga exercises were possible for the human organism only in an earlier era, and what yogis practice today is, in essence, already a form of decadence.

[ 21 ] For a very specific—I would say intermediate—period in the development of humanity on Earth, it was, so to speak, appropriate to the human constitution to use such yoga exercises to transform the breathing process into a process of consciousness and insight, and in this way to develop a dreamlike, yet nonetheless valid, cosmology. What led to a correct cosmology in that epoch for the educated humanity of the time—which was scientific in the sense of that era—must be achieved once again at a higher level by present-day human beings with their physical and soul constitutions; but not in that half-dreamlike, half-unconscious state as in the past, but in a fully conscious manner, as I described when I spoke of inspiration. If Westerners were to perform yoga exercises, they would—precisely because of their entirely different constitution—under all circumstances alter their physical and etheric constitutions through such breathing exercises, rather than leaving them unaffected. And into their process of cognition would enter that which comes from their physical and etheric organism and which would intrude into cosmology as something non-objective. But just as a philosopher must bring the very earliest childhood back into the life of the soul—yet must see through it with full consciousness—so too must one recall into the life of the soul that state of mind which prevailed for humanity in relation to cosmology when the yoga system was practiced, but one must experience it with complete composure, in full consciousness, in a state of wakefulness higher than ordinary wakefulness.

[ 22 ] So one might say: The modern philosopher must, in a state of full wakefulness, evoke the childlike state of mind of the individual human being within his own state of mind, and the cosmologist in the modern sense must evoke the state of mind of a middle epoch in the development of humanity on Earth, but now, in turn, in a state of full consciousness. The modern philosopher must bring an individual state of soul to full consciousness. A state of soul that once existed among the cosmologists of an earlier humanity must be evoked in a fully conscious manner by the modern cosmologist. To become a child in a fully conscious state means to be a philosopher. To be a yogi—as one might once have lived during a middle period in the course of humanity’s entire development—and to evoke this state once more and transform it into full consciousness means, in today’s sense, to become a cosmologist.

[ 23 ] In the final section, I would like to describe what it means to be a religious person.

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[ 24 ] Yesterday I described how the third stage of supersensible knowledge—true intuition—can be attained through exercises of the will, exercises which you can read about in more detail in the writings I mentioned yesterday, and which will also be described in detail over the next few days. Here, the human being is brought into a state of mind that existed as a dreamlike state of consciousness among that humanity which was the first—the primordial humanity—to live on our Earth at the beginning of human evolution. However, this primordial humanity possessed only a dreamlike, semi-unconscious, instinctive intuition.

[ 25 ] The modern scholar of religious life must once again bring this intuition to full consciousness. The more instinctive intuition of primeval humanity, however, still appears as an echo in certain individuals today who live out what they instinctively and intuitively perceive in their surroundings as spiritual forces with which they live, just as they do in the external world. They use these intuitions—which are echoes of the dreamlike intuitions of primeval humanity—in their poetic and artistic creations. These intuitions also play a role in what constitute initial scientific insights; they play an extraordinarily large role in humanity’s imaginative life today.

[ 26 ] What is described here as true, fully conscious intuition—and what is achieved in the manner described yesterday—is something entirely different. Primitive man, after all, had a completely different state of soul than modern man. He lived, so to speak, in the entire external world—in clouds and mist, in the stars, the sun, and the moon, in the plant world as well as in the animal kingdom; he lived in all of this with almost the same intensity with which he felt himself alive within his own body. It is extraordinarily difficult today to make this state of mind of early humanity vividly comprehensible to ordinary consciousness. But everything that can be recognized externally through history points us back to such a state of mind in early humanity. It was based on the fact that early humans did not actually have their physical conditions lying in the unconscious in the same way that we modern humans do. We modern humans no longer live in direct experience of our nutrition, our growth, or the processes within our physical organism. Overlaying this experience, which remains entirely in the unconscious, is the more or less conscious life of the soul in willing and feeling, or the fully conscious life of the soul in imagination. But beneath what we directly experience as imagination, feeling, and volition lies that which the human physical organism accomplishes and which remains entirely unconscious to ordinary consciousness.

[ 27 ] For early humans, things were quite different. As children, they did not experience such clear mental images as we do. Their imagination was often almost dreamlike, and their emotional life—though intense—was even more blurred and indefinite. The emotional life of the soul was much more akin to physical pain or physical pleasure than is the case with modern humans today. But in childhood, early humans felt themselves growing. They experienced their growth as a process involving both body and soul, and even as adults, they felt how food made its way through their metabolism, how the blood circulated and carried nutrients throughout the organism. Anyone endowed with an organism such as I described yesterday in its development can still today gain an insight—albeit at a lower level—into this physical experience of early humans by observing how, after grazing, cows lie down to digest, experiencing their metabolism in its particular liveliness. There is a physical-psychic life within these beings that appears almost like the resonating and inner radiance of cosmic processes. They experience an inner sense of well-being during digestion, during nourishment, and as nutrients are carried through the bloodstream; and one need not even be a clairvoyant to see from their entire outward demeanor and gestures how these animals follow their digestion with their animal consciousness.

[ 28 ] Thus, when early man entered into the Earth’s evolution, he experienced his physical processes, which were directly unified with—and formed a unity with—his soul processes. Because he experienced his own inner physical being in this way, primitive man was also able to experience the external world almost as intensely, both physically and psychically, as he felt—if I may put it this way—in his lungs, in his heart, in the processes of his stomach, liver, and so on. Thus he felt himself in the flickering lightning, in the rolling thunder, in the shifting cloud, in the changing moon. He lived through those periods of time—the waxing of the moon—just as he experienced the processes of his digestion. To him, this external world was almost as much an inner world as his own inner self. And what one experienced internally was to him like what he experienced in the flowing river and so on. The play of the river’s waves was an inner process for him, one he experienced firsthand, into which he immersed himself, just as he immersed himself in his own blood circulation.

[ 29 ] Thus, early man lived so deeply within the external world that it must have appeared to him—and indeed it is—just like his own inner world. Today, this is called animism. However, this term completely misrepresents what actually underlies this phenomenon, since it views animism as if humans had projected what they experienced within themselves out into the external world. What they experienced in the external world was a completely elementary fact of their consciousness, as self-evident to them as the meaning of color and sound phenomena is to us. One must not assume that primitive man, in a particularly imaginative way, projected into the external world what is reported to us as the contents of his consciousness. He truly perceived it in a manner as natural as we do today. Sensory perception is merely a transformed product of this original perception of primitive man, who actually perceived in the external world what those beings in the etheric and astral cosmos accomplish—beings who maintain the cosmos through their active, creative work. He perceived this—albeit as in a dream, quite dimly—but he did perceive it, and this perception was at the same time the content of his religious consciousness. Primitive man had a certain spiritual disposition toward his environment, but this disposition intensified to such an extent that, within the entire cosmos surrounding him, he simultaneously perceived the spiritual beings with whom he felt his own human being was kindred. For him, the connection that we have in derived forms within our religious consciousness was already present in his perception. For him, religious consciousness was merely the higher stage of his primitive cognition.

[ 30 ] If one wishes to ground a new religious consciousness in true knowledge, one has no choice but to return to this state of mind characteristic of early humanity. However, for modern human beings, this state must not be dreamlike or semi-conscious; rather, it must be more alert than ordinary consciousness—awake— just as I have described it for the attainment of true intuition, where we indeed gain the ability to step outside of ourselves with our own “I” and to immerse ourselves in the other spiritual beings of the cosmos and live with them just as we live in our physical organism during our physical earthly life. In earthly life, we immerse ourselves in the physical organism; in true intuitive knowledge, we immerse our “I” in the spiritual beings of the cosmos. We live with them and thereby attain the connection of our “I” with the world to which this “I” actually belongs. For this “I” is a spiritual being just like the other spiritual beings I have just referred to, and we attain, in a direct way, the connection with the spirits to whom we ourselves belong through a religious consciousness. A vague, instinctive religious consciousness was given to primitive man. We must reclaim the state of mind that primitive man possessed and experience it with full consciousness. Then we will gain a religious insight—a religion of insight—for modern humanity.

[ 31 ] Just as we must reclaim the state of mind of childhood and immerse ourselves in full consciousness if we wish to become modern philosophers—just as we must reclaim the state of mind of humanity during a middle epoch, which was able to transform the breathing process, in a dreamlike manner, into a process of perceptual cognition— just as we must bring this state of mind back into our own being and immerse ourselves in full consciousness in order to become cosmologists in the modern sense, so too must we bring back within ourselves the state of mind of primeval man with regard to his relationship to the external world and immerse ourselves in full consciousness, so that we may arrive at a religion of knowledge in the modern sense of the word. To relive the state of mind of childhood in full consciousness is the prerequisite for true modern philosophy. To relive in our inner life, in full consciousness, a middle epoch of human history in which the act of breathing could become a process of perception is the prerequisite for modern cosmology. And to raise the soul state of primeval humanity—the first humanity on this Earth, which was still in direct connection with the gods—back into the present soul mood of modern human beings, to make it active within that mood, and to immerse it in full consciousness—this is the prerequisite for a religion of knowledge for modern human beings.