עברית We must clear the ground of the soul and open the most pure cognitive new page as we can, before we begin the present research.
From the Meditative Praxis of Knowledge of the Higher Worlds
Preparation
A passage from the new edition of the New Experience of the Supersensible: the Knowledge Drama of our time.
One of the things I try to describe in the new edition of the New Experience of the Supersensible, in the central fifth chapter, entitled ‘the knowledge drama of the Second Coming’, is to show how the results of the spiritual research, presented in this book, come about through the meditative praxis based on the meditations given in the books Knowledge of the Higher Worlds, Occult Science, the general main exercise, and some of the individually given meditations from the first esoteric school at the beginning of the 20th century. After some 30 years, this seems to me an important part of the knowledge drama, that can be shared with the readers, to demonstrate, how these meditative exercises are utilized, and how they led to the results of the research presented in the book.
I post below a short passage, that describes part of the necessary preparations for spiritual scientific meditation and research, given by Rudolf Steiner.
From the Meditative Praxis of Knowledge of the Higher Worlds
Preparation
So far, we have activated and warmed our thinking in the struggle with the fundamental riddles and mysteries of the complex filed of perception. Before we proceed to present some of the concrete supersensible research results in this field, we will offer a brief description of how we prepare the spiritual organs required for this research.
To begin with, a vital spiritual scientific condition of all true spiritual research must be emphasized. When we begin to prepare a process of spiritual investigation, we take great pains to suppress and eliminate from our consciousness the previous knowledge and experiences related to the research that we intend to undertake. We must clear the ground of the soul and open the most pure cognitive new page as we can, before we begin the present research. The more thorough the ‘clean-up’ of the spiritual scientific lab, our soul, from yesterday’s leftovers, the more we succeed in emptying our consciousness from the previous experiences, the more powerful and potent, fresh and energetic will be the new beginning. This is a most fundamental law and condition that underlies all real spiritual activity.
Initially, the faculty of memory as such and the contents and habits it preserves, is the main obstacle on our spiritual path. But when we deal with memory, we must distinguish clearly between three levels, each of which must be thoroughly transformed. First, we have the contents of memory, which refer to the specific experiences we had, during previous research. Second, we have the acquired and ingrained faculties that we developed, which became spiritual habits, by means of which those experiences are absorbed and processed. And third, we must confront the faculty of memory itself at its source. Deleing the contents of previous research is difficult enough, but even more difficult is to let go of the soul-and spirit faculties acquired in this research. And the transformation of the faculty of memory itself, that underlies both the contents and acquired spiritual faculties, is the most difficult task of all, because memory is part and parcel of the etheric body, which is very difficult to reach. The three tasks can naturally only be accomplished up to a certain degree in each specific time, but nevertheless, each intensive effort to do so, will be abundantly rewarded, because this general clean-up creates the most fruitful soul soil and atmosphere for the new research.
The clean-up process must be so thoroughly actualized and embodied, until it becomes a living part of our basic spiritual hygiene, habits and instincts, because 'in reality, the most fatal thing of all for a true occultist is to long to penetrate into spiritual science without desiring at the same time to do so differently than in the case of knowledge concerning the physical world’.[1]
A true occultist, on the other hand, knows from firsthand spiritual experience, that 'it is not possible to acquire a knowledge of the spiritual world in this way. On the contrary, the books dealing with the spiritual world should stimulate our inner activity anew each time we read them; they should each time bring new life and movement into our inner forces... Freedom is something that can be held fast only through constantly arising anew. Freedom is something that a human being must acquire anew at each moment, and as a matter of fact he can really acquire it only when there arises in his soul at each moment a trace of his coming into contact with the spiritual world. Look it up in my book the Philosophy of Freedom.' [2] This kind of freedom is creative freedom, the only true esoteric kind of freedom, because it ‘arises in the soul in each moment’ carrying with it a ‘trace of the coming into contact with the spiritual world’. Therefore, we must engrave it as deep as we can in our whole being, not only in our heads, but in the heart and limbs as well, to introduce some examples of the meditative praxis that was developed in the knowledge drama of the Second Coming.
In this way we prepare the soil of the soul for the planting of the seeds of meditation, and this soil is the richly nourishing and vital womb, in which the seeds of meditation can be healthy cultivated and developed and bear the fruits of fresh spiritual knowledge. As Rudolf Steiner told the young physicians, ‘the essence of meditation is that we make an appeal to what, in reality, is present only in earliest childhood [the Nathanic forces]. In that period of life, we have no picture memory and so our earliest experiences are forgotten. They live in a memory which functions through habit. And it is this form of memory that we must return to when we want inwardly to digest spiritual truths... If you activate these faculties you will develop that delicate sensitivity which leads you, not instinctively but intuitively to perceive how a plant or stone may work in the human organism... You will be developing not only your physical body but your etheric body too and what I have called memory through habit will give you a more delicate faculty of perception for what is contained in the physical environment and the faculty to behold the world as one to whom the questions about diseases of the lung, heart, etc., come from the human organism and the answers as to the remedial plants, minerals, etc., from the environment’. [3]
Notes
[1] Lecture of 29 May 1915 (GA 162). This means that the most fatal thing for the occultist is the desire to enter the spiritual world with the support of the faculty of ordinary memory, which doesn’t only block any possibility of acquiring true spiritual knowledge, but even more problematically, becomes a source of projections, delusions and deceptions, caused by the fact that earthly experiences, when carried into the spiritual world by memory, are metamorphosed and masked as spiritual experiences, and man is deluded to believe that they express real spiritual events and beings.
[2] Ibid. This demonstrates again, from another point of view, what we emphasized from the beginning, namely, the reason why pure thinking, developed by means of the Philosophy of Freedom, is the most fruitful foundation of the knowledge drama of the Second Coming.
[3] Lecture of 23 April 1924 (GA 316). Both the forces of healing and of spiritual research originate in this- Nathanic- part of the etheric body and constitute two deeply intertwined and mutually enhancing esoteric branches, arising from the same source of Christ life, and leading to the same Michaelic goal.