עברית Spiritually speaking, one can only reach a certain intensity of self-enhanced cognitive activity, and as the wakeful active day must give place to the unconscious sleep at night, so does the research process, only it does so in a fully conscious way. The fruits of its most intensive creative, human activity, must also be surrendered and offered as a gift to the higher worlds.
COGNITIVE YOGA: HOW A BOOK IS BORN
From Chapter 2. The Mystery of Spiritual Conception
Prior to its spiritual conception, incarnation and birth, the future book, a work of art, or social moral initiative,lives a pre-earthly spiritual life as a part of the whole soul and spiritual being of the author. At this time, the potential creation is still a complex web of research problems and riddles that the text will eventually express and embody in human thoughts, words, and deeds. In this phase, it is not yet possible to distinguish its existence as an independent and separate being. The work's independent existence, relatively speaking, begins only from the moment of spiritual conception. As I described above, for fertilization and conception to occur, the problematization process of the research must be sufficiently ripe. The searching and questioning has been growing and gathering intensity in the soul and spiritual-activity of the spiritual scientist, until the spiritual core of the research, its main riddle, becomes problematic enough to ripen into a complete impasse. As this phase makes up the crucial central stage of transition from the physical cognitive process to the spiritual one, I would like to explain it again.
Though it may appear as a paradox to our ordinary understanding, this “ripeness” does not denote the phase of final completeness. This ripeness is a final stage of the human spiritualized cognitive process. But from a spiritual point of view it is also the beginning of a new phase. The ripening process of a creative problem includes everything that leads to the blossoming of the main riddle that causes and motivates the research in the first place. During the problematization phase, the research process temporarily comes to a halt. This happens after the whole process is gathered together in intensified contraction and concentration like the bud of a flower. The real “blossoming” will then take place when the researcher gives the problem up, and lets it open and subsequently unite with the spiritual world. I know that my work is ripe precisely when I arrive at an impasse on a threshold; at a problem that I cannot solve using all my previously self-acquired cognitive forces. This seems like a paradox from the ordinary point of view that can only think in a linear fashion and that believes that all problems have straightforward linear solutions. But spiritually speaking, one can only reach a certain intensity of self-enhanced cognitive activity, and as the wakeful active day must give place to the unconscious sleep at night, so does the research process, only it does so in a fully conscious way. The fruits of its most intensive creative, human activity, must also be surrendered and offered as a gift to the higher worlds. Of course, before this major impasse is reached, I experience many smaller and bigger ones during the many turns and meanderings that always characterize a complex research project. Such obstacles are eventually resolved by means of the gradual enhancement of my spiritual faculties, through the whole training and the meditative exercises used in the research of this specific domain. Therefore, I distinguish a major crisis from a lesser one, by its persistent impenetrability and consistent refusal to give in to the most intense voluntary, intentional, cognitive efforts, during a much longer period. Only then is the problem truly “ripe”, spiritually speaking, and in this sense, it opens like a flower to the higher worlds, and can be fertilized by a specific and concrete, if often very subtle, indication, hint and impulse.
What is the soul and spirit process that leads one to the stage of such ripe, exhaustive, helplessness? In our common language, these terms denote weakness, but to the spiritual scientist the opposite is the case. (We must become accustomed to the fact that the meanings of terms that we use in our physical life are reversed when we enter spiritual life.) With time, one learns the art of problematizing: how to foster and nourish an unsolvable problem. Only after many efforts and struggles can one truly know that one is on the verge of a real metamorphosis, a veritable breakthrough, having accom- plished everything that one can do thus far. One must now “go to sleep”, so to speak- only in full consciousness- and develop the soul mood of peaceful release, devoted listening, and grateful acceptance of whatever the true fate of the work would turn out to be.
As we shall see in detail in Chapter 3 below, when the problem is ripe, growing out of a prolonged time of productive spiritual research, the soul develops a special mood that can be described as active, courageous resignation. We give up the self-willed desire to achieve progress and success. This mood of creative resignation and surrender, when we let go of our personal control of the research process, frees the riddle from our intentional grip, ideas and representations, and therefore it can begin to reveal to us its true essence in the spiritual worlds. Such ripened research is always accepted by the beings that guide and support human evolution in our age. They are Michaelic beings, characterized by the fact that they accept only the creative, fully individualized, human work accomplished by means of free and conscious spiritual activity on the earth. Michael, says Rudolf Steiner, doesn't influence the human will; he expects humans to develop their spiritual work in full freedom:
"We carry up into a spiritual world the knowledge of Nature here attained, or again, the creations of naturalistic art, or the religious sentiments working naturalistically in the soul... And as we carry all this upward- if we develop the necessary faculties- we do indeed encounter Michael ... Michael is a being who reveals nothing if we do not bring him something from our diligent spiritual work on Earth... Michael will be the true spiritual hero of Freedom; he lets men do, and he then takes what becomes of human deeds, receives it and carries it on and out into the cosmos, to continue in the cosmos what men themselves cannot yet do with it... But when man does things out of spiritual activity or inner freedom, then Michael carries the human earthly deed out into the cosmos; so that it becomes a cosmic deed". (GA 233a,13.1.1924).
And this applies of course also to Rudolf Steiner, the leader of Michael's stream on earth and the “headmaster” of the human department in his cosmic school. Once human beings have sown, grown, and rightly cultivated a creative, spiritualized and truthful fruit in their human garden, Michael and his partners affirmatively accept it, develop it further in the spiritual world, and invite us to participate in its continuous spiritual development. We must bear this in mind when I describe below the spiritual side of the event of cooperative spiritual fertilization and conception, since this is an attempt to describe such a creative mutual interaction between a human being and the Michaelic school in the spiritual worlds, because, indeed, “The paths of gods and men must merge in our time. Michael will be the great mediator between the paths of gods and the paths of human beings. Let us pay heed to his work!. . . Then shall we feel our freedom join forces with the freedom of the gods”. (GA 346, 22.9.1924)