The Rudolf Steiner Archive

First Steps Toward Imaginative Insight

[ 1 ] Understanding the world in its development has always been linked to understanding humanity itself. And it is, after all, widely known that in times when people looked not only at material existence but also at the spiritual, human beings have always been conceived of as a microcosm, as a small world; that is to say, human beings were understood in such a way that one saw in them—in their nature, their actions, and their entire presence in the world—a concentration of all the laws of the world, all activities, and indeed the entire essence of the world. In such times, it was firmly asserted that an understanding of the world is possible only on the basis of an understanding of human beings.

[ 2 ] But this immediately presents a difficulty for the truly open-minded person. At the very moment when a person seeks to attain so-called self-knowledge—which, after all, can only be true knowledge of humanity—he finds himself facing himself as the greatest of all mysteries, and after some time of self-observation, they must admit to themselves that their being, as it appears in the world that surrounds them through the senses, is not fully revealed even to their soul—to themselves. Human beings must admit to themselves that a part of their being remains unknown and hidden from ordinary sensory perception. And so human beings face the task of first developing their true being through self-knowledge—and of first seeking out their true being—before they can come to know the world.

[ 3 ] A very simple line of reasoning can show a person how, in the world that surrounds him through his senses, his true nature—his inner activity as a personality, as an individual—cannot exist. For at the moment a person passes through the gate of death, as a corpse he is subject to the laws and the world’s existence that otherwise surround him in the sensory world. The physically dead person is subject to the laws of nature—those very laws that are at work out there in the visible world. But then that structure which we must call the human organism dissolves; then, depending on the method of burial, the person disintegrates over a shorter or longer period of time.

[ 4 ] A simple consideration thus shows that those laws—which we must describe as the sum of our natural laws, since we come to know them externally through sensory observation—are suited solely to dissolving the human organism, but not to building it up. And we must seek out those laws, that activity, which—in fact—struggle against the forces, the laws of dissolution, throughout earthly life from birth to death, or even from conception to death. At every moment of our lives, through our true inner human being, we are fighters against death.

[ 5 ] And if we look around in the sensory world—in that part of the sensory world that human beings today are able to comprehend exclusively, namely the mineral, lifeless world—we see that it is precisely governed by those forces that signify death for human beings. For it is merely an illusion held by today’s natural scientists that they might one day succeed in understanding even plants using the laws that govern the external sensory world. We will not succeed in doing so. We will come close to understanding plants—and that may be an ideal—but we will certainly not be able to investigate the plant, let alone the animal or the physical human being itself, through the laws that surround us in the external sensory world.

[ 6 ] As earthly beings, from conception to death, we are, in our true innermost being, fighters against the laws of nature. And if we truly wish to advance toward human self-knowledge, we must explore the activity that operates within the human being as a struggle against death. Indeed, if one wishes to fully explore the human being—and it is precisely this exploration that these lectures are intended to address—one must demonstrate how, through the evolution of the Earth, humanity has come to a point where its inner activities ultimately succumb to death in earthly existence, and where death triumphs over the hidden forces that oppose it.

[ 7 ] All of this is intended, for the time being, merely to draw your attention to the direction these reflections are to take in the coming days. For the truth of what I am about to say will only become clear through the individual lectures themselves. We can therefore begin by simply observing the human being with an open mind to indicate where we must seek the true inner nature of the human being—the personality, the individuality. We do not find it in the realm of natural forces; we must seek it outside the realm of natural forces.

[ 8 ] But there is another clue—I would like to offer only clues for now—and that is this: When we live as human beings on Earth, we live fully immersed in the present moment. Here, too, one need only be open-minded enough to grasp the full significance of this statement. When we see, when we hear, when we perceive through our senses in any other way, we are absorbed in the moment. That which has passed and that which lies in the future can make no impression whatsoever on our ears, our eyes, or any other sense. We are absorbed in the moment and thus in space.

[ 9 ] But what would a human being be if he were devoted solely to the moment and solely to space? We have, for example, ample evidence from the observation of the natural world that a person does not remain human in the full sense of the word if he is devoted solely to the moment and to space. The medical histories of many people attest to this.

[ 10 ] There are well-documented cases of people—the cases have been thoroughly studied—who, at a certain moment in their lives, cannot remember what they experienced before and are left to that moment. At that moment, they do the most absurd things. Completely at odds with their previous lives, they buy a train ticket, travel to a certain station, and do everything that, from a rational standpoint, can be done in that moment—and they do it even more ingeniously and skillfully than they otherwise would have. They go to lunch at the right time; they carry out all the tasks of daily life at the right time. When they arrive at the terminal station covered by the ticket, they buy another ticket—perhaps in contradiction to their first journey. In this way, they sometimes wander aimlessly through the world for years until they find themselves in some place; there, they do not know where they are. Everything they have done since buying that first train ticket or leaving home has been erased from their consciousness, and their memory only resumes for the time that had elapsed before that. And with that, their inner life—and indeed their entire human existence on earth—plunges into chaos. They no longer feel as connected to their whole being as they once did. They were always attuned to the present moment and could always orient themselves correctly in space, but they have lost their inner sense of time and their memory.

[ 11 ] The moment a person loses their inner sense of time—that is, their inner, real connection to their past in earthly life—they are plunged into a state of chaos. The mere experience of space can do nothing to promote the health of their entire being.

[ 12 ] In other words, however, this means: Human beings, through their senses, are always devoted to the present moment, and even in cases of illness, they can isolate their existence—in terms of space and time—from the totality of human existence; yet they do not remain human in the full sense of the word.

[ 13 ] We are being made aware of something in human beings that falls outside of space and belongs solely to time. So we must say: If the experience of space is one thing for human beings, the experience of time is another—one that must always remain present within them, for memory must make the past present within them if their being is to be fully realized. Thus, being present in time is indispensable for human beings—something they must possess. Time as the past, however, is never present in the present moment. Human beings must constantly bring it into the present moment for their own experience. There must therefore be forces within human beings for the preservation of the past that do not originate in space—forces that are not to be understood in the sense of spatially acting laws of nature, but rather lie outside of space.

[ 14 ] These are clues that point out to us that when human beings are made the center of our understanding of the world—and must therefore proceed from self-knowledge—they must first and foremost seek within themselves that which lifts them out of spatial existence, that is, from the existence of which the senses alone tell us, and makes him a temporal being within this spatial existence. Human beings must therefore draw upon powers of cognition within themselves that are not bound to the senses or to spatial perceptions if they wish to perceive their own nature. And precisely at this present moment in human development, when the natural sciences are leading humanity into the laws of space in such an extraordinarily significant way, the true human being has, for reasons that will also become apparent in these lectures, been largely lost to human perception in general.

[ 15 ] At this very moment, therefore, it will be particularly necessary to point out those inner experiences that, as you have seen, first bring a person out of space and into time and its experiences. And starting from there, as we shall see, a person enters the spiritual world at all.

[ 16 ] The knowledge that has led from the sensory to the supersensory has, throughout the ages, been called “knowledge through initiation”—the knowledge of what constitutes the very impulse of human existence, what is the active force of the personality and the active force of individuality. And it is this knowledge of initiation—insofar as it is possible for people today—that I will discuss in these lectures. For it is from this knowledge of initiation that we are to consider the development of the worlds and the development of humanity in the past, present, and future.

[ 17 ] I will therefore begin by discussing how one can attain such initiatory knowledge. Even in the way these matters are discussed today, the initiatory knowledge of the present differs significantly from that of the past. In the initiatory knowledge of the past, individual teachers of humanity struggled to perceive the supersensible in the world and in human beings. Students who had an intuitive, purely human impression of what lived within such teachers of the supersensible sought them out and accepted what these teachers could offer them—not out of compulsion, but out of the authority conveyed by the impression of their personalities.

[ 18 ] Therefore, throughout the entire history of human development up to the present, you will consistently find accounts of how individual disciples were required to submit authoritatively to the authority of a teacher, a “guru.” On this point alone—as on so many others that we will encounter in these lectures—the science of initiation today cannot follow the same path as the science of initiation of the past. The guru never spoke about the path through which he himself had attained his knowledge. And in earlier times, there was no question whatsoever of publicly revealing the path to higher knowledge. Such teachings were practiced solely within the mystery schools, which in those earlier times served as the higher schools on the path to the supersensible.

[ 19 ] Today, such a path would no longer be possible in light of the general human consciousness to which we have struggled to ascend at this present historical moment. Therefore, anyone who speaks of supersensible knowledge is naturally compelled today to explain, first of all, how one arrives at such supersensible knowledge. It must then be left to each individual to decide, in light of their own life path, how they relate to these exercises of the body, soul, and spirit—through which one develops those powers within the human being that look beyond the laws of nature and beyond the present moment into the true nature of the world, and thus also into the true nature of the human being. It will therefore be the natural course of these lectures that I first say at least a few words, by way of introduction, about the manner in which modern human beings in particular can acquire knowledge of the supersensible.

[ 20 ] In doing so, one must take as one’s starting point the human being just as he is, just as he positions himself within earthly existence in relation to space and to the present moment. As an earthly being, the human being comprises—in soul and body—and I say this with full deliberation: in soul and body—a threefold nature: the thinking, the feeling, and the willing being. And when we look at everything that lies within the realm of thinking, the realm of feeling, and the realm of willing, then we have encompassed the human being’s share in earthly existence.

[ 21 ] Let us first consider the most important aspect of what enables human beings to take their place in earthly existence. This is undoubtedly the human capacity for thought. For it is this capacity for thought that gives human beings the full clarity about the world that they need as earthly beings. Feeling remains obscure and indefinite in comparison to luminous thinking. And even more so the will: those depths of the human being from which the will springs forth are, at first, completely beyond the reach of ordinary observation.

[ 22 ] Just consider what “wanting” means in the ordinary world, in ordinary experience. You decide, let’s say, to fetch a chair and move it to another spot. You have the thought of carrying that chair from there to there. You see that in your imagination. Then what lies in your imagination flows down into your blood and muscles in a way that is completely unknown to you. What now happens in your blood, muscles, and nerves while you walk over, lift the chair, and carry it here—that, too, exists only in your imagination. You picture it. But the actual inner activity—what is taking place inside your skin—remains completely unconscious to you. Only the result is visible to you in your thoughts.

[ 23 ] Thus, the will is the most unconscious aspect of waking activity. We will discuss human sleep activity later. During waking activity, the will remains entirely in the dark, in total obscurity. And in fact, we know as little about what happens in the will as a result of thought as we do in ordinary earthly life about what happens to us from the moment we fall asleep until we wake up. We remain oblivious to the inner nature of the will even while we are awake. Only imagination, only thinking, is what brings clarity into human earthly life.

[ 24 ] Feeling then lies between willing and thinking. And just as dreaming lies between sleeping and waking—as an indeterminate, chaotic act of imagination, half-asleep, half-awake—so feeling lies between willing and imagining and is, in fact, a waking dream of the soul. What we must therefore take as the most immediate aspect of the human being is nevertheless imagination, or thinking. But how does this thinking unfold in ordinary earthly life?

[ 25 ] It plays a thoroughly passive role in our entire human existence on Earth. One need only be completely honest about this in self-observation. From the moment of waking until falling asleep, human beings surrender themselves to the external world. They allow sensory impressions to wash over them, and ideas become linked to these sensory impressions. We move away from the sensory impressions, or the sensory impressions move away from us. The ideas remain in the soul. They gradually transform into memories. But, as I said, if one is honest in self-observation as an earthly human being, then one will have to admit: these ideas that one gains in ordinary life contain nothing other than what has entered the soul from the external world through sensory perception. One need only search, in an honest and unbiased way, for what one carries within the soul; somewhere one will find that it has been brought about by an external impression.

[ 26 ] In this regard, it is especially the mystics who do not delve deeply—and I say this explicitly—who do not delve deeply who succumb to illusions. They believe that through a more or less obscure form of inner training they can gain inner insights into that which underlies the world as a higher divine reality. These half- or quarter-mystics often speak of how an inner light of the soul has dawned upon them, how they have spiritually beheld this or that.

[ 27 ] However, anyone who approaches self-observation with true precision and honesty will be able to see how many mystical visions stem from nothing other than external sensory experiences that have been transformed over time. And as paradoxical as it may seem, there may be a forty-year-old mystic who believes he is having a direct, imaginative-visionary experience—namely, I will take something concrete from the Mystery of Golgotha, in that he sees this Mystery of Golgotha inwardly and spiritually. He now feels immensely uplifted within. A skilled psychologist can now trace the course of this forty-year-old mystic’s earthly life and discover that, as a ten-year-old boy, he had briefly seen a small picture somewhere during a visit his father had taken him on. This small picture, which related to the Mystery of Golgotha, made little impression on his soul at the time; but it remained, it transformed, it sank into the deepest recesses of the soul, and in the fortieth year of his life it rose as a great mystical vision. This is what must be emphasized above all else if one dares at all to speak more or less publicly today about the paths to supersensory knowledge. For those who take these paths lightly will, as a rule, be able to speak of them only in a dilettantish manner. Precisely those who wish to be justified in speaking of mystical and supersensory paths must, so to speak, be fully aware of everything that can lead to errors in this field. Such a person must know precisely how ordinary self-knowledge actually consists mostly of transformed external impressions, and how true self-knowledge today must be sought through inner development, through the drawing forth of powers of the soul that are not present from the outset. Here one must look specifically at the passivity of ordinary thinking. Ordinary thinking forms its impressions exactly as the senses dictate. What comes first is also first in thought; what comes later is also later in thought. What is above is above in thought; what is below is below in thought. And so, in ordinary conception—not only in everyday life but also in science—human beings merely passively follow the processes unfolding in the external world. Our science has, in fact, progressed to the point of regarding it as an ideal to discover how things unfold in the external world without thought exerting the slightest influence on them. Our science regards it as its ideal to make thinking as passive as possible in its research methods. In doing so, it is quite right within its own field. It achieves the greatest progress in its field precisely when it adheres to this method. But it is straying further and further from the true nature of the human being. For the first step in those methods of supersensible cognition—which may be called meditation, concentration on the inner soul forces, or by other names—is to find the transition from purely passive thinking to the inner activity of thinking.

[ 28 ] And if I were to describe the very first step in the most basic terms, it would have to be this: Instead of allowing oneself to be inspired from the outside to form some idea, one should take an idea that one has drawn purely from within oneself and place it at the center of one’s consciousness. It does not matter at all whether this idea is, as they say, true, for what matters is that it has been actively drawn entirely from the innermost depths of the soul. Therefore, it is also not good to retrieve such an idea from memory, for in what we remember, the most varied and indeterminate impressions cling to all our ideas. So when we ourselves retrieve something from memory, we cannot be sure of everything we are passively thinking along with it, or whether we are truly establishing our meditation inwardly in an active sense.

[ 29 ] Therefore, one can proceed in three ways. One can, however, proceed entirely on one’s own. Take, for example, a concept that is as simple and easily comprehensible as possible—one that you know you have formed at this very moment. It does not correspond to anything you are merely recalling. So, for my sake, let one also form an idea that is as paradoxical as possible—an idea that consciously deviates from everything one can passively receive. One need only be certain of the activity, the inner process, through which the meditation has come about.

[ 30 ] Or a second approach involves going to someone who has experience in this area and saying, “Give me a subject for meditation.” This can lead to the fear of becoming dependent on that person. Well, if one remains aware that, from the moment one has received the subject of meditation, every step is now taken independently through one’s own inner activity, you have merely created the opportunity to receive something new—something you haven’t yet thought of yourself, which is therefore new and which you must grasp through your own inner activity precisely because it comes from another—if you remain aware of this, then dependence does not arise. In particular, you must act in accordance with this awareness.

[ 31 ] The third, finally, is this: One can also seek out a teacher in a way that is, at first, I would say, invisible. Take any book that you know for certain you have never held in your hands; then open it to a random page and read any sentence. In this way, one is certain to encounter a completely new sentence that one must engage with through inner activity. Make this sentence the subject of your meditation, or a figure you have found in such a book—anything you have discovered in such a way that you can be absolutely certain you have not encountered it before. That is the third way. In this way, one can create a teacher for oneself out of nothing. The very fact that you sought out the book, that you read it, that you allowed the sentence or the character or something else to reach you—that is the teacher.

[ 32 ] So today there is certainly a way to embark on the path to the higher worlds in such a way that one can be certain: no other power unjustifiably interferes with the activity of thought into which one thereby enters. And that is what is essential for people today. For we will see, as these lectures progress, that what is particularly necessary for people today—especially when they wish to develop themselves toward a higher world—is respect for and appreciation of their free will. And if free will is not valued, how can inner activity develop at all! The moment one person becomes dependent on another, their will is inhibited. And this is precisely what matters in meditation as it is possible today: that a person carries it out out of inner activity, out of the will in thinking—which is otherwise least valued in passive external observation, and especially in modern science.

[ 33 ] This is how one enters into active thinking. Just how quickly this development proceeds depends entirely on the individual’s own nature. One person may achieve it in three weeks if they consistently repeat the same exercises—preferably the same ones over and over; another in five years; another in seven years; yet another in nineteen years; and so on. The essential thing is never to lose the energy to seek the transition to this active form of thinking. But at a certain point, one truly comes to know a different way of thinking than the one one had before. One comes to know a way of thinking that does not unfold in passive images like ordinary thinking, but rather a way of thinking that is inwardly quite active, that is power—and one knows this, even as one clearly experiences it: it is power, just as there is power when I raise my arm or point with my finger. You come to know a way of thinking in which you feel yourself to be a bearer of the power of your own human being. You come to know a way of thinking that—and I am not speaking figuratively here, but expressing the concrete, actual truth—can set things in motion, and you know it can set things in motion. You know that ordinary thinking does not set anything in motion. When I run into a wall and get a bump, I have made contact with my physical body—made contact through my sense of touch. My sense of touch is based on the fact that I can bring my body into contact with things. I make contact. Ordinary, passive thinking does not make contact; it merely imagines being struck. For ordinary, passive thinking is not a reality; it is an image. The thinking one arrives at in the manner described is reality; it is something in which one lives. It makes contact just as a finger makes contact with a wall. And just as one knows that one cannot penetrate everywhere with a finger, so too does one know in this real thinking—into which one is entering—that one cannot penetrate everywhere with it. That is the first step. One must take this first step: to transform one’s own thinking, through activation, into a spiritual organ of touch, so that one feels within it as if one were thinking—just as one otherwise walks, grasps, and feels—and knows: one lives within a being, not merely within ordinary thinking, which merely reflects, but one lives within a reality, within a spiritual organ of touch, of which one has become a complete part as a human being. |

[ 34 ] This is the first step one must take: to transform one’s thinking so that one feels within oneself: “You have now become the thinker yourself.” Everything comes full circle. And thinking is not like physical touch. Your arm is part of your body, and once you’ve fully grown, it’s already fully formed. But with thinking that has become active, it’s like a snail that can extend and retract its feelers. One lives in a being that is certainly powerful, but also internally mobile—a being that moves forward and back again, that is inwardly active. So, as we shall see, one can feel one’s way around the spiritual world with an elongated sensory organ, or one can withdraw it when it causes spiritual pain.

[ 35 ] These are the things that must, however, be taken seriously by anyone who wishes to approach the true nature of the human being: the transformation of the human being into a completely different being. For one does not see what a human being actually is unless one first has the opportunity to perceive something entirely different within the human being itself than what earthly sensuality presents. And what is developed through the activity of thought is the first supersensory aspect of the human being. I will describe this in more detail later. First, we have the human physical body, which can be perceived with the ordinary sense organs and which, of course, also offers resistance when touched with the ordinary sense of touch. Then we have the first supersensible member of the human being—one can call it the etheric body or the body of formative forces, as one wishes; the term itself is not important; we simply need a terminology. So I will refer to it as the etheric body or body of formative forces in the future. Within it lies the first supersensible member of the human being, which—through a higher form of touch, a form of touch into which thinking has been transformed—is in fact just as perceptible as physical objects on the outside are to physical touch. Thinking becomes supersensible perception. And through this supersensible perception, the human etheric or formative body becomes graspable, visible in a higher sense. This is, so to speak, the first real step into the supersensible world.

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[ 36 ] The very way in which I have tried to illustrate that thinking gives way to an experience of an inner reality of power will also make you realize how insignificant objections to this genuine spiritual development are—such as the following: “Anyone who wants to enter the spiritual world in this way may be indulging in some kind of fantasy; they are succumbing to autosuggestion.” — That is precisely what happens at first: people say, “Anyone who, after such development, wants to speak of the higher worlds is merely repeating the images of their own autosuggestion.” People then come and say to you: “But there is, after all, the possibility that someone who has often drunk lemonade need only think of lemonade, and then they also feel the so-called physiological sensation of a watery sensation in the mouth, as if they were drinking lemonade. There are forms of autosuggestion that are that strong.”

[ 37 ] All of this is certainly true, and the insights that the physiologist and the psychologist can arrive at through knowledge must indeed be well understood in order to apply the necessary precautions—specifically, they must be well understood in a practical sense by those who enter the spiritual world along the correct path, as I intend to describe here, along a true path. To anyone who believes they can make themselves drink lemonade through autosuggestion when they have no lemonade at all, I can reply: That is certainly possible; but let them show me someone who has actually quenched their real thirst through such an imagined, autosuggested lemonade! That is precisely where the difference lies: whether something exists only in passive imagination or whether it arises within a person as an experience. Through our overall connection with the real world, we achieve a state in which we stand within the world—purely mentally, spiritually—through an activation of thought, in such a way that thinking becomes for us like touching. Of course, we are not feeling our way around a table or a chair; rather, we learn to feel our way within the spiritual world, to touch it, and to enter into a real relationship with the spiritual world. And it is precisely in this way—through this activation—that we come to recognize the difference between mystical, fantasized autosuggestion and the experience of spiritual reality.

[ 38 ] These objections, then, all stem from the fact that one has not yet truly looked into the way in which modern initiatory science describes its path, but rather judges it from the outside, having at most merely heard the names of certain things, or having taken only a very superficial, external notice of them. The person who enters the spiritual world in the manner described—who comes into contact with and feels the spiritual world—knows how to distinguish whether they are merely imagining, in retrospect, what they have experienced through their activated thinking, or whether they are truly perceiving through this activated thinking. After all, even in everyday life, one can distinguish between what one actually experiences when one clumsily reaches into a flame with one’s finger, and what one imagines afterward: “There is the flame; I am reaching into it with my finger.” This is a vital difference—one actually hurts, the other merely imagines the pain. And on a higher plane, one experiences this distinction between what is merely imagined about the higher worlds and what is actually experienced within oneself.

[ 39 ] Well, the first thing one experiences in this way is precisely true self-knowledge. For just as, in the momentary perception of life, the table, the chairs, the entire hall here in all its beauty, the clock that isn’t running, and so on—just as all of this stands before us in external spatial life, creating a momentary sensory impression—so too does the temporal world present itself to thinking that has become real, to activated thinking; and first and foremost, the temporal world of one’s own human self. That which one has experienced—and which can otherwise be brought into consciousness only as a mental image from memory—presents itself as a present tableau in which what is long past is present. This is, after all, also described by people who have experienced a shock due to the mortal danger they faced while drowning and so on, and it is even acknowledged today by people with a thoroughly materialistic outlook—I always add this—that those in mortal danger have a tableau of their own earthly life unfolding before them in their minds. This scene does indeed present itself to the person who has activated their thinking in this way, as if suddenly appearing before the soul—spanning from the moment one first learned to think in earthly life up to the present moment. Time becomes space. What has passed becomes present. An image stands there. The characteristic feature—which I will have to discuss in more detail tomorrow—is that, although the experience is image-like and one still has a sense of space, it is merely a sense of space. For this space that one now experiences lacks the third dimension. Nowhere does one experience a third dimension; instead, everywhere one experiences space only in two dimensions—so that one perceives in a pictorial way. That is why I also call this perception “imaginative perception”—a perception that, like painting, operates in two dimensions, which is, after all, initially a pictorial perception, a perception that manifests itself in two dimensions.

[ 40 ] You might ask: If I’m standing there and experiencing things in two dimensions, what is it like when I take a step forward and am once again experiencing things in two dimensions?

[ 41 ] There is simply no difference between them. The third dimension is completely absent as an experience. I will have to speak about this on a later occasion: how, in our time, because people no longer have any awareness of these things, they seek the fourth dimension in order to enter the spiritual realm. The truth is that as soon as one progresses from the physical to the spiritual, it is not a fourth dimension that arises, but rather the third dimension ceases to exist. And one really must familiarize oneself with reality in this realm, just as one has familiarized oneself with reality in other respects. Just as people once believed that the Earth was flat, and that one would eventually reach something indefinite—where the world was boarded up, meaning one had reached the end—and just as it was a step forward when people realized that one returns to the starting point when sailing around the Earth—so it will be a step forward in the inner comprehension of the world when we come to realize: When we enter the spiritual realm, we do not extend the first, second, and third dimensions into the fourth dimension, but rather return once more to the second. And we will see how one even returns to the first dimension. That is the truth. It is evident in the external view of the world in our time that people proceed in a purely external manner—I would say, as if merely counting: first dimension, second dimension, third dimension—there must also be a fourth dimension. No, one returns to the second dimension; the third is transcended, and one gains a true imaginative insight that is first present within one’s own self, as in a tableau of life, so that in the present moment one surveys—in powerful images, as I will discuss in more detail later—what one has experienced in earthly life, how one has lived through this earthly life from within.

[ 42 ] There is still a considerable difference compared to mere memories. Mere mental images appear in such a way that one has the feeling that what lives primarily in memory is what has come to us from the outside world in the form of perceptions—what we have experienced in terms of pleasure and pain, what other people have done to us, and how other people have approached us. This is what one experiences primarily in memory that is purely conceptual. In this tableau I am describing, one experiences things differently. In mere memory—let’s say one met a person ten years ago—one experiences how that person approached one, what they did to one—good, bad, and the like. In this tableau of life, however, one experiences how one oneself first cast one’s gaze upon that person, what one did, how one acted to win their love, and what one felt. So in this tableau of life, one perceives what develops from the inside out, whereas mere memory presents what develops from the outside in.

[ 43 ] One can therefore say that this tableau of life is something like an experience in the immediate present, in which events do not unfold one after another, as in memory, but exist side by side in two-dimensional space. One can very well distinguish this tableau of life from a mere tableau of memory.

[ 44 ] What one achieves in the process is an increase in inner activity—the active experience of one’s own personality. That is the essence of it. One lives more intensely; one develops more intensely the forces that radiate from one’s own personality. Once one has experienced this, one must now take a further step. Actually, no one likes to take that step. And this further step involves what one might actually call the strongest possible inner struggle. For what one experiences in this tableau—what one finds in these images, in which the experience presents itself to one’s soul—is, even for those things that were painful when they were actually experienced in the past, a subjective feeling of happiness. What is connected to this imaginative insight is an immensely strong subjective feeling of happiness.

[ 45 ] All those religious ideals and descriptions—such as the descriptions of Islam—that depict life beyond this earthly existence in blissful images have emerged from this subjective sense of happiness. This has arisen from the experience of this sense of happiness in the imagination.

[ 46 ] When you have to take the next step, you must first set aside this feeling of happiness. For now it is necessary—after first having activated this thinking arbitrarily, as I have described, through meditation and concentration of thought, and after having ascended through this activated thinking to the tableau of one’s own life—now it is necessary to push all of that out of one’s consciousness with all one’s strength.

[ 47 ] Well, in everyday life, it’s sometimes quite easy to shut out the contents of consciousness. People who are preparing for exams, for example, have plenty to complain about when it comes to blocking out the contents of consciousness that should actually be there. And ordinary sleep, after all, is nothing other than the blocking out of everyday contents of consciousness. But even this suppression occurs passively. For the person taking an exam will certainly not consciously suppress what he knows. It happens passively. A person does this out of weakness, out of his weak power of presence. But precisely after this power has been strengthened, this suppression must now take place for the next step of supersensory knowledge.

[ 48 ] It is, in fact, very easy for a person who has concentrated all their mental powers on a self-chosen subject to develop a certain tendency to remain fixated on that subject; and because a feeling of happiness is associated with this mental image, one is inclined to cling to it. One is happy to hold on to it. But one must now be able to erase from consciousness that which one has sought to achieve through a kind of intensification of power. This is more difficult than erasing such things in ordinary life, as I have indicated.

[ 49 ] As you know, if you gradually deprive a person of sensory impressions—if you make it so that the person sees nothing, if you darken the room, if you silence everything so that the person hears nothing, and finally suppress even tactile sensations—then the person falls asleep. This empty state of consciousness—into which a person would otherwise fall asleep—must be brought about deliberately. But by erasing all sensory impressions, including all self-generated ones, a person must simply remain awake. This is what is significant: simply being awake, possessing the strength, the inner activity, to simply be awake, and no longer having any external impressions or self-generated experiences. This is the creation of empty consciousness—but of empty consciousness that is fully experienced.

[ 50 ] Then, when one in this way again shuts out that which one has just brought into consciousness through heightened powers—that is, when one creates an empty consciousness—this consciousness does not remain empty, for then the second stage of knowledge sets in, which, in contrast to imaginative knowledge, can be called inspired knowledge. Once we have attained such empty consciousness through this preparation, we place ourselves in a position where—just as the visible world normally presents itself to the eye and the audible world to the ear—the spiritual world now presents itself before our soul. Now it is no longer our own experience, but rather the external spiritual world “pressing upon” us that now stands before us. And if we are strong enough not only to set aside individual parts that we have worked out, but to set aside the entire tableau of life all at once—so that we can allow it to come and then set it aside again—so that, after having experienced the tableau of life, can establish an empty consciousness and simply remain awake—then the first thing to enter this empty consciousness is the pre-earthly life that the human being lived before descending into an earthly body through conception. This is the first true supersensory experience one has after establishing empty consciousness: to behold one’s own pre-earthly life. From this moment on, one comes to know the immortality of the human being from a perspective that is not emphasized at all today. Today, people speak only of immortality. In that way, one does not come to know reality at all. Immortality is the negation of death. Certainly, it is just as true as the other side—we will have much to say about this—but what one first comes to know through this insight on the path I have only been able to sketch is not immortality, the negation of death, but rather non-birth, the negation of birth. Non-birth is just as essential to the human being as immortality. And once we come to understand once again that eternity has these two aspects—immortality and non-birth—only then will we be able, through knowledge, to penetrate once more into that which endures, into the truly eternal within the human being. |

[ 51 ] All modern languages still have the word “immortality”; but they have lost the word “unbornness,” which the older languages likely had. First, one lost one aspect of eternity—unbornness—and now, in the materialistic age, human consciousness faces the tragic moment in which one can also lose immortality by no longer wishing to know anything at all, within the realm of a purely materialistic worldview, about that which lives within human beings as the mental and the spiritual.

[ 52 ] Today I was able to outline for you only the very first steps—and these only in broad strokes—on the path into the supersensible worlds. We will have more to explore in the coming days and will then move on to what can be understood along this path about humanity and the world—in the present, the past, and what is necessary for us to know for the future as well.