AN_OUTLINE_OF_OCCULT_SCIENCE_BY_RUDOLF

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held to the sensory course of events.
One needs this exercise to familiarize oneself with the spiritual world. Thought strengthens itself in
this way in a healthy manner. It is therefore also good not only to review in retrospect one's daily life,
but to retrace in reverse order, for instance, the course of a drama, a narrative, or a melody. More
and more it will become the ideal for the student to relate himself to the life events he encounters in
such a way that, with inner certainty and soul tranquillity, he allows them to approach him and does
not judge them according to his soul condition, but according to their inner significance and their inner
value. It is just by looking upon this ideal that he will create for himself the soul basis for the surrender
of himself to the above described meditations on symbolic and other thoughts and feelings.
The conditions described here must be fulfilled, because supersensible experience is built upon the
foundation on which one stands in everyday soul life before one enters the supersensible world. In a
twofold manner all supersensible experience is dependent upon the starting point at which the soul
stands before it enters into this world. Anyone who, from the beginning, does not consider making a
healthy judgment the foundation of his spiritual training will develop in himself supersensible faculties
with which he perceives the spiritual world inexactly and incorrectly.
His spiritual organs of perception will, so to speak, unfold incorrectly. Just as one cannot see correctly
in the sense world with eyes that are faulty and diseased, one cannot perceive correctly with spiritual
organs that have not been constructed upon the foundation of a healthy capacity for judgment.
Whoever makes the start with an immoral soul condition elevates himself to the spiritual world in a
way by which his spiritual perception becomes stupefied and clouded.
He stands confronting the supersensible worlds like someone observing the sensory world in a stupor.
Such a person will, to be sure, make no important statements. The spiritual observer in his state of
stupor is, however, more awake than a human being in everyday consciousness. His assertions,
therefore, will become errors in regard to the spiritual world.
----
Footnotes:
The point is not whether this or that idea of natural science finds the above thoughts justified or not.
For it is a question of the development of such thoughts by means of plant and man that may be
gained, without any theory, through simple, direct perception. Such thoughts have indeed their
importance also, besides the theoretical ideas about the things of the outer world, which in other
connections are of no less importance. Here thoughts do not have the purpose of representing a fact
scientifically, but of constructing a symbol that proves itself effective in the soul, notwithstanding the
objections that may occur to this or that individual in fashioning this symbol.
Part 3
The inner excellence of the stage of imaginative cognition is attained through the fact that the soul
meditations described are supported by what we may call familiarizing oneself with sense-free
thinking. If one forms a thought based upon observation in the physical sense world, this thought is not
sense-free. It is, however, not a fact that man is able to form only such thoughts. Human thought does
not need to become empty and without content when it refuses to be filled with the results of sense-
observations.
The safest and most evident way for the student of the spiritual to acquire such sense-free thinking is to
make his own, in thinking, the facts of the higher world that are communicated to him by spiritual
science. It is not possible to observe these facts by means of the physical senses. Nevertheless, the
student will notice that they can be grasped mentally if he has sufficient patience and persistence.
We are not able to carry on research in the higher worlds without training, nor can we make
observations in that world; yet without higher training we are able to understand the descriptions of
spiritual researchers, and if someone asks, "How can I accept in good faith what these researchers say
since I am unable to perceive the spiritual world myself?" then this is completely unfounded.
For it is entirely possible merely by reflecting on what is given, to attain the certain conviction that
what is communicated is true, and if anyone is unable to form this conviction through reflection, it is
not because it is impossible to believe something one cannot see, but solely because his reflection has
not been sufficiently thorough, comprehensive and unprejudiced. In order to gain clarity in regard to
this point we must realize that human thinking, when it arouses itself with inner energy, is able to
comprehend more than is usually presumed. For in thought itself an inner entity is already present that
is connected with the supersensible world.
The soul is usually not conscious of this connection because it is accustomed to developing the thought
faculty only by employing it in the sense world. It therefore regards communications from the super-
sensible world as something incomprehensible. These communications, however, are not only
comprehensible to a mode of thinking taught through spiritual training, but for every sort of thinking
that is fully conscious of its own power and that wishes to employ it. By making what spiritual
research offers increasingly one's own, one accustoms oneself to a mode of thinking that does not
derive its content from sense-observations.
We learn to recognize how, in the inner reaches of the soul, thought weaves into thought, how thought
seeks thought, although the thought associations are not effected by the power of sense-observation.
The essential in this is the fact that one becomes aware of how the thought world has an inner life, of
how one, by really thinking, finds oneself already in the region of a living supersensible world. One
says to oneself, "There is something in me that fashions a thought organism; I am, nevertheless, at one
with this something."
By surrendering oneself to sense-free thinking one becomes conscious of the existence of something
essential flowing into our inner life, just as the characteristics of sense objects flow into us through the
medium of our physical organs when we observe by means of our senses. The observer of the sense
world says to himself, "Outside in space there is a rose; it is not strange to me, for it makes itself
known to me through its color and fragrance." One needs now only to be sufficiently unprejudiced in
order to say to oneself when sense-free thinking acts in one, "Something real proclaims its presence in
me that binds thought to thought, fashioning a thought organism."
But the sensations experienced by observing the objects of the outer sense world are different from the
sensations experienced when spiritual reality manifests itself in sense-free thinking. The observer of
sense objects experiences the rose as something external to himself. The observer who has surrendered
himself to sense-free thought feels the spiritual reality announcing itself as though it existed within
him, he feels himself one with it. Whoever, more or less consciously, only admits as real what
confronts him like an external object, will naturally not be able to have the feeling, "Whatever has the
nature of being in itself may also announce itself to me by my being united with it as though I were
one with it." In order in this regard to see correctly, one must be able to have the following inner
experience.
One must learn to distinguish between the thought associations one creates arbitrarily and those one
experiences in oneself when one silences this arbitrary volition. In the latter case one may then say, "I
remain quite silent within myself; I produce no thought associations; I surrender myself to what 'thinks [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]

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