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

These symbols built up in the manner above described are not as yet related to anything real in the spiritual world, but they serve to detach the human soul from sense-observations and from that instrument, the brain, to which the reason is at first fettered. This detachment is not effected until man is able to feel: "I am now perceiving something by means of powers for which neither my senses nor my brain serve as the instruments"; and the first thing man thus experiences is a liberation from the organs of sense. He is then able to say to himself: "My consciousness does not vanish when I cease to take cognizance of sense-perceptions and ordinary reasoned thought; I can lift myself out of those conditions and then feel myself as a being alongside of that which I was before"--and this is the first purely spiritual experience; the perception of a psycho-spiritual Ego-being. This has arisen as a new self out of that self which is linked to the physical senses and physical reason only.

Had this detachment from the world of the senses and from the reason been effected without meditation, the person would have lapsed into the nothingness of the unconscious state. This psycho-spiritual being was our possession prior to meditation also, but it then lacked the organs for perception of the spirit-world; and it might, indeed, have been compared to the physical body without the eye to see--the ear to hear. The strength thus employed in meditation has, in fact, been the creative means by which these psycho-spiritual organs have been formed out of a previously unorganized psycho-spiritual being. But this which man thus creates for himself is also the first thing to be perceived by him. The first experience is therefore in a certain sense, a kind of "self-perception." It belongs to the nature of spiritual training that the soul, through the self training which it gives itself at this point of its development, becomes fully conscious that the first thing it perceives in the world of imaginative forms, which appear as a result of the exercises described, is itself. It is true that these images make their appearance as a new world, but the soul must recognize that they are, however, at first nothing but the reflection of its own being, which has been strengthened by exercises. And it must not only recognize this by correct reasoning, but must have arrived at such a cultivation of the will that it is able at any time to put away and obliterate the images from the consciousness.

The soul must be able to act with complete independence within these images. This is part of true spiritual training at this stage. If it could not do this, it would be in the same position, in the sphere of spiritual experiences, as a soul in the physical world which, on looking at an object, has its attention so arrested by it that it cannot look away. An exception to this possibility of obliteration is formed by a group of inner imaginative experiences which should _not_ be extinguished at this stage of spiritual training. They correspond to the inmost kernel of the soul's being, and the occult student recognizes in those images that which forms the very essence of his being which passes through the various repeated earth lives. At this point the knowledge of repeated earth lives becomes an actual experience. In relation to everything else the before-mentioned independence of experience must prevail. And only after acquiring the faculty of obliterating experiences, is the spiritual outer world really approached. What is obliterated returns in another form, and is experienced as a spiritual outer reality. One feels that out of something indefinite one grows psychically into something definite. From this self-perception, one must then proceed to the observation of a psycho-spiritual outer world. This comes to pass when we can order our inner experience after the manner to be indicated in the following pages.

Next