This Classic work is now copyright expired and therefore in the public domain.

An Outline of Occult Science by Rudolf Steiner

V. KNOWLEDGE OF THE HIGHER WORLDS

page 29 of 38 | page 1 | An Outline of Occult Science - home

The ideal development would be that no exercises should be done by means of the physical body but that everything which has to take place within it should result only as a consequence of exercises for intuition. As, however, the physical body offers such powerful impediments, the training may permit of some alleviations. These consist in exercises which affect the physical body; yet everything in this domain that has not been directly imparted by the teacher, or those having knowledge and experience of these things, is fraught with danger. Such exercises, for instance, include a certain regulated process of breathing to be carried out for a very short space of time. These regulations of the breathing correspond in quite a definite way to particular laws of the psycho-spiritual world. Breathing is a physical process, and when this act is so carried out as to be the expression of a psycho-spiritual law, physical existence receives the direct stamp, as it were, of spirituality, and the physical matter is transformed.

For this reason occult science is able to call the change due to such direct spiritual influence, a transmutation of the physical body, and this process represents what is called "working with the philosopher's stone" by him who has a knowledge of these matters. He who knows these things, frees himself indeed from those concepts which have been limited by superstition, humbug and charlatanry. The significance of the phenomena does not become less to him who knows, just because, as a spiritual investigator, all superstition is foreign to him. When he has acquired a concept of a significant fact, he may be allowed to call it by its _correct name_ although that name has been fixed upon it as a result of misunderstanding, error and nonsense.

Every true intuition is in fact a "working with the philosopher's stone," because each genuine intuition calls directly upon those powers which act from out the supersensible world, into the world of the senses.

-------------------------------------

As the occult student climbs the path leading to cognition of the higher worlds, he becomes aware at a particular point that the cohesion of the powers of his own personality is assuming a different form from that which it possesses in the world of the physical senses. In the latter the ego brings about a uniform co-operation of the powers of the soul--primarily of thought, feeling and will. These three soul powers are actually, under normal conditions of human life, in perpetual relation one with another. For instance, we see a particular object in the external world, and it is pleasing or is displeasing to the soul; that is to say, the perception of the thing will be followed by a sense of either pleasure or displeasure. Possibly we may desire the object, or may have the impulse to alter it in some way or other; that is to say, desire and will associate themselves with perception and feeling. Now this association is due to the fact that the ego co-ordinates presentment (thinking), feeling, and willing, and in this way introduces order among the forces of the personality. This healthy arrangement would be interrupted should the ego prove itself powerless in this respect: if, for instance, the will went a different way from the feeling or thinking. No man would be in a healthy condition of mind who, while thinking this or that to be right, nevertheless wished to do something which he did not consider right.

The same would hold good if a person desired, not the thing that pleased him, but that which displeased him. Now the person progressing toward higher cognition becomes aware that feeling, thinking, and willing do actually assume a certain independence; that, for example, a particular thought no longer urges him, as though of itself, to a certain condition of feeling and willing. The matter resolves itself thus: We may comprehend something correctly by means of thinking, but in order to arrive at a feeling or impulse of the will on the subject, we need a further independent impetus, coming from within ourselves. Thinking, feeling and willing no longer remain three forces, radiating from the ego as their common centre, but become, as it were, independent entities, just as though they were three separate personalities. For this reason, therefore, a person's own ego must be strengthened, for not only must it introduce order among three powers, but the leadership and guidance of three entities have devolved upon it.