עברית How the spiritualization of sense-perception is accomplished in the knowledge drama of the Second Coming
The Opening of the Gate of Perception
How the spiritualization of sense-perception is accomplished in the knowledge drama of the Second Coming
From the fifth chapter of the forthcoming new edition of The New Experience of the Supersensible
This subject was investigated in the most manifold ways by Rudolf Steiner. He points out that originally, the whole spiritual world was streaming into us in each perception. ‘What are these sense perceptions really? They also contain what we can attain with a higher consciousness: imaginations or pictures of higher reality, inspirations through which spiritual beings disclose themselves to us and the intuitions through which we become united with divine beings. All of this is contained in the percept, but it doesn't go into us, and when we investigate why this is so we find that it's Lucifer who burns it with the fire of our passions, drives and desires. Lucifer has made his home in the heart, and that's where the burning of the imaginations, inspirations and intuitions that underlie sensory things takes place, for pictures of spiritual beings press into us with every breath, with every perception’. And to balance this, the Elohim gave Ahriman access into the human brain, ‘to bring his cooling effect against luciferic fire to bear there. And the part of the fire that burns the imaginations, inspirations and intuitions of percepts that Ahriman cools down becomes thoughts and ideas in men’. [1] So we perceive a life-soul and spiritless external world, because from our heart Lucifer reaches into the senses and burns the living spirit, that streams into us with each perception, and Ahriman in the brain transforms the dead impressions further and create from them our dead thoughts and presentations. This is therefore what we must stand up against, in the spiritualization of thinking and perception, the full power of Lucifer and Ahriman, working through the whole human constitution.
Rudolf Steiner described the same process also in this manner:
‘Death takes place, for the air we breathe, in every inhalation of the air. But this is only one phenomenon. The ray of light that enters our eye must die in the same way; and we would have in the world [that we perceive] no light rays if our eye had not placed itself over against the light, as the lung does with the air. And every light ray that enters our eye dies in our eye, and by means of the death of light in our eye we are enabled to see... In our eye the ray of light is killed. We murder it in order to have the perception by means of the eye. So we are filled with what must die in us in order that we can develop our earthly consciousness’. [2]
This is precisely what happens to our unconscious, pre-birth, cosmic thinking as well, when it is grasped by the nerve- and sensessystem and petrified in the brain. We are reminded again of that essential passage from The Philosophy of Freedom: ‘our total organization functions in such a way that it separates in each cognitive act our whole human-world being into two dead halves’. On the one, perceptual side, it kills the living, ensouled, and spiritual being of sense perceptions and represent all things as physical ‘objects'; and on the other, it kills the living, ensouled and spiritual being of thinking, and we are left with its dead corpse, by means of which we can only represent, passively, the dead sense-perceptions. This killing and separation of living sense-perception and living thinking gives us our self-consciousness: the freedom between the dead sense-data and the dead concept and representation. And when we combine the two, we have reached, thereby, the truth of the objective, object-like, world, but lost the reality of the living, ensouled and spiritual worlds in which we, as whole human beings, live and move and have our true being. The cause of this dead world of external objects and intellectual concepts can be found only in imaginative cognition, achieved in true spiritual scientific investigation, namely, that ‘every light ray that enters our eye dies in our eye, and by means of the death of light in our eye we are enabled to see’, and this the reason why it is the starting point the knowledge drama of the Second Coming in the field of perception. ‘In our eye the ray of light is killed. We murder it in order to have the perception by means of the eye. So we are filled with what must die in us in order that we can develop our earthly consciousness’.
If one is not existentially shocked when one reads this, its means that the knowledge drama described in this book is not written for him. Or if he would continue to ‘read’ it, he would only downgrad it to life-and soulless ‘grammar of knowledge’. This experience must become a soul awakening, shattering, existential moral situation and event, as it could still be experienced by the young pupil around the year 1200, tested by his teacher that challenged him to see and hear the spirit directly through sense-perception, and anxiously retorted, ‘Yes, but when I use my eyes, when I look out into the world, with all its color, then it is as though my eye stops the color, as though the color suddenly turns numb and cold when it reaches the eye. When I listen with my ear to tones, it is as though the sounds turn to stone in my ear’. [3] Today, he would have answered: ‘I know that external sense perceptions and objects as we perceive and represent them to ourselves, are not real as such; that is, we transform them into what they appear to be for us in every act of perception.[4] The objects that we perceive and represent, describe and analyze, are Maya, illusion, when compared with their appearance to the higher, enlivened, ensouled and spiritual perception’. And after he has struggled for long with the limits of consciousness and with the Ahrimanic power of this illusion and deception, these grim considerations are finally transformed and reversed. At that moment he would tell his modern teacher, ‘Now I can feel the Christ in me, and I experience: “death stands at the end of [perception’s] way. I want to feel the power of the Christ: He awakens in the death of matter [perception] the birth of the spirit”. That is, if I am the killer of my perceptions, surly, then, not “I” but the Christ ‘I’ in me, can be their redeemer! And I feel encouraged in my experience, from this moment on, that any representation of a dead external object can “die in Christ”; that in reality I can break through the walls of cognition and dispels the Ahrimanic deception, and experience that each dead representation is a mental frozen grave, out of which living imagination may spring forth in the spring time of the resurrection of perception; that each and every dead representation is readily and expectedly redeemable and dissolvable’. [5] And indeed, as we shall shortly see, in the moment we perceive this killing process in us, we can hold it fast and stop it; and when we cease its unconscious killing and consolidation, it readily, thankfully, etherizes, becomes transparent, revealing the real living and ensouled world-man behind it. [6]
In the case of thinking we can, at any moment, stop and spiritualize the killing activity of thinking. We use the will force to liberate it fromits hardened, crystalized salt sedimentations in the brain cells, and immerse it in its dark and potent will core. We open, as it were, the door of miracles between every two concepts by holding them apart and space out their living time difference, as was shown above. In this moment, the death process of thinking becomes intensively and imaginatively alive for us; and through this space of livingly deadened life-time we can delve into the dynamic reality of living spirit, that works in our wholly unconscious will being. This was demonstrated in the process of the spiritualization of thinking. Now we shall practice the same miraculous act of liberation in the field of perception, to pass through our representations of the external physical object and reach the spirit of the world in the etherically extended and expanded being of man. We shall delve into the living core of external reality as we delved into the living core of the will behind thinking, and we will open the gate of perception to experience the etheric forces of the living world, as we opened the gate of thinking to experience cosmic thinking.
Notes
[1] Esoteric lesson of 3 June 1914 (GA 266).
[2] Lecture of 16 July 1914 (GA 155). My italics. For further elaboration, see also lecture of 11 April 1914 (GA 153), about the sedimentation of a dying, corpse-like mineral substance in the physical body in each sense-perception as a necessary protection against the instreaming spirit of the world, which would have been used by Lucifer to spiritualize man too rapidly. Other important indications on the subject are given in lecture of 23 May 1915 (GA 162), lecture of 10 July 1920 (GA 198), lecture of 31 March 1920 (GA 312), and lectures of 15 and 19 August 1924 (GA 243). About the objective devitalization of the atmospheric air in the course of the evolution of the Earth, see GA 194, lecture of 30 November 1919. On the necessity of having dead air in order to be conscious at all and dead warmth in order to be clever around the human head, see lectures of 10 and 20 June 1924 (GA 327).
[3] Lecture of 5 January 1924 (GA 233a).
[4] See in lecture of 8 May 1910 (GA 116), about Paul's knowledge of this fact.
[5] This conversation between teacher and pupil, is a real metamorphosis of the above-mentioned conversation that took place ‘around the year 1200’, and it did actually take place at the end of the 20th century.
[6] That objects are really 'theories', that is, already the outcome of a unconscious cognitive process in the sense of Goethe's 'every fact is already a theory', was also known to Karl Popper: 'Every description uses universal names (or symbols, or ideas); every statement has the character of a theory, of a hypothesis. The statement, "Here is a glass of water" cannot be verified by any observational experience. The reason is that the universals which appear in it cannot be correlated with any specific sense-experience ... by the word "glass", for example, we denote physical bodies which exhibit a certain lawlike behavior, and the same holds for the word "water". Universals cannot be reduced to classes of experience'. (K. Popper, The Logic of Scientific Discovery, Hutchinson, 1986). On this aspect of the relationship of thinking to sense-perception, see also endnote 27 in the 1924 edition of the Theory of Knowledge implicit in Goethe’s Conception of the World (GA 2).