The First Meditation from Knowledge of the Higher Worlds: The Experience of Life and Death, Growth and Decay

The First Meditation from Knowledge of the Higher Worlds: The Experience of Life and Death, Growth and Decay

From the work in progress on the second edition of the New Experience of the Supersensible, chapter 5: The Knowledge Drama of the Second Coming, second part: the spiritualization of sense-perception

 So intimate this praxis becomes, that we experience the interrelations between the forces of growth and decay, life and death, so intensely, that they become fully embodied in our whole being. And we experience what Rudolf Steiner said, that ‘for the investigator in the realm of spiritual life, they [life and death] are getting ever closer ... Man sees how death weaves itself into life, how the dying and the sprouting process merge with one another...man learns in this way of spiritual research to know death already in life, and life in death.'  Indeed, the mutual weaving and essence exchange between the forces of life and death through our whole etheric body and natural processes, becomes ‘as a chemical combination', which is, in truth an alchemical transmutation, because it means that a real transubstantiation of life and death, growth and decay, occurs not only in the soul forces but in the spiritual forces of the etheric and eventually physical bodies well.  We experience already at this preliminary stage, the nearness of that being, that gave His Ego, soul, life, and body, for the sake of the redemption of humanity and the earth:

Who leads the living to death so that it will live anew,

Who leads the dead into the living so that it will see the spirit.

 ***

The six meditations from the book, Knowledge of the Higher Worlds proved specifically fruitful for the task of spiritualizing sense perception. They form a wonderfully creative and harmonious organic whole, whose secrets are revealed only gradually, during lifelong meditative praxis.

In the six exercises we mediate on:

1 The experience of growth and decay.

2 The soul of other beings, expresses through their sounds and voices.

3 The beings and differences of minerals, plants, and animals.

4 The development of the plant from seed to a fully grown plant.

5 The withering and decay of the fully grown plant back to the seed.

6 The development and gratification of desire.

  We continue to practice the sixfold meditative cycle during long periods of time, until it becomes embodied in our whole being as a living spiritual organism, that has life of its own. On this basis, according to the needs of our supersensible research, single exercises may be used as specialized organs of perception, to accomplish specific research tasks. Also, combinations of various exercises are also formed into specialized organs, to conduct more complex investigations. This allows the development of case specific cognitive faculties, adapted uniquely to specific research requirements.

 Naturally, we can only describe single examples from this complex mediative whole and its implementation in the spiritualization of perception. Therefore, we only describe how we use the first, third, fourth and fifth exercises, defer the report about the use of the second and sixth exercises to later stages.

The first meditative exercise aims to greatly intensify the ordinary experiences of life and death, growth and decay in nature. These intensive experiences become the formative forces of the organs of supersensible perception. When these forces are embodied and ingrained in the soul and bodies, they form the solid starting point and continuous orientation on the path of spiritual science.

In Knowledge of the Higher Worlds, Rudolf Steiner describes the the goal of the first exercise as follows:

 Just as we find our way as physical beings among the things of the physical world, so now our path leads us through the phenomena of growing and dying away...We follow the processes of growing and flourishing, decaying and dying, just as our own and the world's development require.

  This exercise proved to be fundamental to the knowledge drama of the Second Coming in general, and specifically to the spiritualization of perception. The reason is that it ‘leads us through the phenomena of growing and dying away’, which underly the modern Christ experience and the second Mystery of Golgotha, described above. It therefore provides the most reliable means of orientation and navigation, not only in the etheric world, but also in the higher worlds. From the first stages of the development imaginative cognition, we therefore follow the path delimited and marked by life and death, growth and decay, that guides us safely inthe etheric, astral and spiritual worlds. Furthermore, we concentrate our attention on what Rudolf Steiner means, when he adds that we follow these processes ‘just as our own and the world's development require’. This means that from the moment we enter consciously into the higher worlds, and this begins already in the etheric world, our development becomes part of the development of the world, and the forces of life and death in our being are experienced as part of the spiritual forces of life and death in the higher worlds: ‘The forces at work in the world are both destructive and constructive; the destiny of manifested beings is birth and death. The seer is to behold the working of these forces and the march of destiny. The veil enshrouding the spiritual eyes in ordinary life is to be removed. But man is interwoven with these forces and with this destiny. His own nature harbors destructive and constructive forces. His own soul reveals itself to the seer as undisguised as the other objects’.  As we have seen in the first part of this chapter, the separation of the three soul forces confronts us with the forces of birth and death, creation and destruction, good and evil, in ourselves and in the world. And it must be repeatedly emphasized that the goal of the spiritual scientific path is not to gain ‘experiences’ of this or that partial element and aspect of spiritual reality, for satisfy personal curiosity and enjoyment, but the development the whole human being, that increasingly becomes an intimate and creative member of the spiritual world,.

 In the first meditation of Knowledge of the Higher Worlds, we meditate separately on growth and flourishing, on the one hand, withering and decay, on the other. As Rudolf Steiner points out, all meditations begin with an intensification of the wide-awake thinking and sense perception. We must powerfully intensify them through the full attention and concentration on the processes of growth and decay. Then we intensify the feelings that arise in our soul when we contemplate the processes of growth and decay. The goal of this stage is to make these feelings into the sole center of our attention and concentration, until we submerge our whole being in them, becoming them, forgetting ourselves entirely in their intensity. We must be able to completely disregard everything connected to the external forms of growth and decay, retain only the feelings that they kindled in our soul, and make the feelings into our object of mediation.

 We will know when the two exercises begin to work in us, when we experience the joy and exuberance of growth and flowering as Goethe did, who disliked illness and death, and experience decay and putrefaction with the intensity that inspired the creative genius of Schiller; this will tell us that we are on the right track!

 When the intensity of feeling become so strong, it expand inwardly and is experienced in the whole body and even overflow its boundaries. The signals the beginning of the third stage, in which the force of the will is activated, that grows out of the feelings as the feelings grew out of the external impressions of growth and decay. Now the experience of the will, experienced to begin with as pure intensify, becomes the object of mediation, and we immerse ourselves entirely in it as we did with the feelings previously. The meditation progresses thus from head to heart, body and limbs: from thinking and sense perception that is experienced through the head, tointensive feelings, experienced in the heart, to the otherwise wholly unconscious will power, that works in the whole body. As Rudolf Steiner writes, ‘particular stress must be laid on the following point: what the student thinks he must also feel with intensity... If this be accomplished in the right way, then after a time- possibly not until after numerous attempts- an inner force will be felt. And this power will create the new supersensible sight... what was formerly invisible now becomes visible, for it is created by the power of the thoughts and feelings we have stirred to life within ourselves’.

 It must be understood that the threefold intensification process, from head to toe, is an organic soul process, which cannot be artificially forced or autosuggested, but must be as much initiated as awaited; as a matter of experiential fact, after each step that we take, after focusing all of our attention and soul forces in the object of meditation, we cannot simply, linearly and mechanically, press on and on, as if more will and concentration will push us forwarded. This may be the case in the physical world, when great excretion of the will is required, but in true spiritual activity, the opposite is as true: the more we progress in our meditations, the more we must resign and let go of our personal will, wishes and desires, to achieve this or that. Of course, we do our part in thinking, feeling and willing. But the deeper we enter the substance of the meditation and forget ourselves in the process, the more we also let it go, and listen carefully, while our soul weaves and lives in inner peace, to experience how the previous activity is reciprocated by the spiritual world. This intercourse becomes a living dialogue and cooperation the more we progress on the path and, indeed, as experience shows, it becomes the very substance and form, that constitute the path.

 Many prevalent misunderstandings and disappointments would be avoided, if the pupil would realize that first the necessary intensity of feeling must be acquired, and that only after it fills the whole body and transforms into the will power, we may perceive the first true indications of supersensible impressions. Without acquiring this intensity of feeling no further progress is possible. When we bear this basic condition in mind, let us describe some of the first experiences that one undergoes in this path.

 When we acquire such intensity with the feelings aroused by germination, growth and flourishing, the first thing we experience is that the whole etheric body comes to life. It means literally comes to life, precisely as if something dead is awakened and begins to breath, circulate, grow, and transform itself continuously. We experience previously unfelt and unknown subtle movements and radiations, vibrations, circulations and weavings of etheric streams and flows. To begin with, it is experienced everywhere in the etheric body, in amore or less chaotic fashion, and becomes gradually more formed and organized with repeated practice. Eventually, we will notice that in general it answers the progress of the meditation from head to heart and limbs, with a flow from below upward, from the limbs to the lower body, heart, hands and larynx, and grows weaker in the head. Furthermore, we notice a difference between what can be called the natural functions of the etheric body, fulfilling its organic-bodily as well as astral tasks as before, and new activities, perceived to be caused by our mediations. While organ forming processes and movements in specific parts of the body continue to fulfill their usual etheric functions, other parts of the etheric body begin as it were to take notice of our work and the flows we initiated, respond, reciprocate, and eventually actively participate in it, and in many ways contribute to its main thrust. Now, the experience of the meditation on the process of decay also becomes, in the same way, after the necessary intensify of feeling was reached, a whole-body experience. But this stream takes the opposite course. Its flows from above downward, from the head via the larynx to the heart, handsand lower body, and growth weaker the closer it gets to the limbs. We continue to alternate the two meditations to intensify and increase their intensity and potency, and in doing so learn a great deal about the specific functions and activities of the two streams, the stream of life form limbs to head, and the stream of decay flowing from head to limbs. Needless to say, the etheric body is at least as complex as the physical body, and we will not try to describe it beyond the present specific research.

 What we experience now is that we are continuously growing and becoming from below upward and getting old and decaying from above downwards. It is an elementary experience, but of a profound and long-lasting significance for all the subsequent spiritual investigations. In the Rosicrucian esoteric training, at this stage the pupil ‘became acquainted with our own forces of growth and decay. ... [and] the law of ascending and descending evolution’, that prepared the conscious perception and knowledge of the etheric Christ in our time. (Lecture of 28 September 1911, GA 130).

 The meditative practice of Knowledge of the Higher Worlds leads man to an inner experience of the Rosicrucian stream, and to the works of some of its greatest masters, like Paracelsus and Van Helmont, in whose meditative practices and religious experiences of nature, man’s connection to nature and the living Christ, man can find substantial spiritual content. During the more advanced stages of the training, these specific Rosicrucian forces become visible and audible during sleep, in wakeful moment of dream and dreamless sleep, as an inspiration that relate to our meditative practices with nature, accomplished with these exercises of Knowledge of the Higher Worlds. In this manner a lively dialogue takes place between our meditations and these wakeful nightly inspirations, that greatly refresh and intensifies the spiritual scientific work. 

 So intimate this praxis becomes, that we experience the interrelations between the forces of growth and decay, life and death, so intensely, that they become fully embodied in our whole being. And we experience what Rudolf Steiner said, that ‘for the investigator in the realm of spiritual life, they [life and death] are getting ever closer ... Man sees how death weaves itself into life, how the dying and the sprouting process merge with one another...man learns in this way of spiritual research to know death already in life, and life in death.'  Indeed, the mutual weaving and essence exchange between the forces of life and death through our whole etheric body and natural processes, becomes ‘as a chemical combination', which is, in truth an alchemical transmutation, because it means that a real transubstantiation of life and death, growth and decay, occurs not only in the soul forces but in the spiritual forces of the etheric and eventually physical bodies well.  We experience already at this preliminary stage, the nearness of that being, that gave His Ego, soul, life, and body, for the sake of the redemption of humanity and the earth:

 'Who leads the living to death so that it will live anew,

Who leads the dead into the living so that it will see the spirit'.

The New Experience of the Supersensible

The Anthroposophical Knowlede Drama of our Time