עברית 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.
Love of Truth Opens the Eyes of the Spirit
From chapter 5 of the forthcoming new edition of The New Experience of the Supersensible- The Knowledge Drama of the Second Coming
The first meditative exercise of Knowledge of the Higher Worlds, aims to greatly intensify the soul experiences of the processes and forces of life and death, growth and decay. 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. 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 of fundamental importance 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 pay attention to what Rudolf Steiner says, 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’. This basic fact must be taken by the pupil with outmost earnestness, devotion, and courage, because it confronts him with ever growing intensity as he advances on the path. 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, to satisfy personal curiosity and enjoyment, but to develop 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 ordinary wide-awake thinking and sense perception. We must begin each meditation with giving full attention to the external appearances and processes of growth and decay. This is the first stage. Then we concentrate and intensify the feelings that arise in our soul when we contemplate them. The goal of this second 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, and intensify the feelings that they kindled in our soul, and make the feelings into the only 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.
Goethe was very conscious that Schiller and himself are ‘very different in our natures -not merely in mental, but also in physical matters’. He illustrated the point in conversations with Eckermann some 20 years after Schiller's death, in a wonderfully telling episode.‘An air that was beneficial to Schiller acted on me like poison. I called on him one day, and as I did not find him at home, and his wife told me that he would soon return, I seated myself at his writing table to note down various matters. I had not been seated long, before I felt a strange disposition steal over me, which gradually increased, until at last I nearly fainted. At first I did not know to what cause I should ascribe this wretched, and to me unusual, state, until I discovered that a dreadful odour issued from a drawer near me. When I opened it, I found to my astonishment that it was full of rotten apples. I immediately went to the window and inhaled the fresh air, by which I was instantly restored. Meanwhile his wife came in and told me that the drawer was always filled with rotten apples, because the scent was beneficial to Schiller, and he could not live or work without it.
When the intensity of feeling become so strong, it expands inwardly and is experienced in the whole body and then overflows its boundaries. This 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 sensory impressions of growth and decay. Now the experience of the will, 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. We begin with thinking and sense perception experienced through the head, continue to intensive feelings, experienced in the heart, and awaken 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’. Naturally, in the real meditative praxis, this threefold progression from thinking and perception to feeling and will, goes hand in hand with the above described meditative exercises from Occult Science, for the attainment of Imagination, Inspiration, and Intuition, but for the sake of clarity, we will concentrate only on the exercises of Knowledge of the Higher Worlds.
It must be understood that the threefold intensification process of meditation, proceeding from head to heart and limbs, is an organicsoul 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 spiritual activity, the opposite is 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 the goal of this meditation. Of course, we do our part in thinking, feeling and willing to get there. But the deeper we enter the substance of the meditation and forget ourselves in the process, the more we can also forget our volition; we can let it go, which means, that we let another will take over; but this will is our true will, not really a foreign one; nevertheless, the transition from ‘I think, I feel, I will’ to ‘It thinks, She feels, He wills’, is nothing but easy or self-evident. Our ego fights against this will all its might, and only the unceasing deepening and strengthening of the forces of devotion, reverence, and love for truth, saves us from its tyrannical domination. We must listen carefully, while our soul weaves and lives in inner peace, to experience how the previous volitional activity is replaced and 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 could be avoided, if the pupil would realize that first the necessary intensity of devotion must be acquired, and that only after it fills our entire soul and body and is transformed into the will power, we may perceive the first true indications of supersensible impressions. Without acquiring this intensity of devotion in our feelings 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 that are aroused by germination, growth and flourishing, the first thing we experienceis 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 a more or less chaotic fashion, and becomes gradually more formed and organized with repeated practice. Eventually, we will notice that in general it reciprocates 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 the more it pours into the head. We also notice a difference between what can be called the natural functions of the etheric body, fulfilling its organic-bodily as well as supporting the 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 spiritual work and the flows we initiated, and they begin to 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 processes of decay and death also becomes, in the same way, after the necessary intensify of feeling was attained, a whole-etheric body experience. But this stream takes the opposite course. Its flows from above downward, from the head via the larynx to the heart, hands and lower body, and growth weaker the closer it gets tothe metabolic-limb system. We continue to alternate the the meditations on growth and decay to increase their intensity and potency, and in doing so learn a great deal about the specific functions and activities of the two etheric 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 requirements of the specific present 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. What we notice as well at this stage is that 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 inspired 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 also today. During the more advanced stages of the knowledge drama, these specific Rosicrucian forces become visible and audible to begin with during wakeful moments of dream and dreamless sleep. What is most interesting is that we realize that this inspiration is related to our meditative practices with nature 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. We begin to feel that we are part of an extended spiritual community, that is supporting us invisibly all the time, and as described in Cognitive Yoga: How a Book is Born, we grow more and more into this community, and become its active conscious collaborators.
As we continue to meditate on the processes of growth and decay in external nature, we learn how they interact with the processes in the human body, which opens a whole field of observations in many fields of etheric research. Some aspects of the weaving together of the growth-and decay processes in the human body and in nature, will be described below, in connection with the 4th and 5thmeditations. In particular, of outmost importance to the whole development of the knowledge drama of the Second Coming, is to attain, in the new, modern spiritual scientific cognition, a similar experience to what the Rosicrucians and their inspired pupils, could still experience before the dawn of the new age of Michael. ‘Decay is the midwife of very great things! It causes many things to rot, that a noble fruit may be born; for it is the reversal, the death and destruction of the original essence of natural things. It brings about the birth and rebirth of forms a thousand times improved. ... And this is the highest and greatest mysterium of God, the deepest mystery and miracle that He has revealed to mortal man’.