From the Practical Spiritualization of Perception

From the forthcoming new edition of The New Experience of the Supersensible

Volume 2

The Knowledge Drama of the Second Coming, first part

The Practical Spiritualization of Perception

 From the outset, we emphasized that our goal is not theoretical but spiritual-practical and that everything we communicate, is the result of firsthand experience. Until now, we showed how the meditative exercises of Knowledge of the Higher Worlds are used, to create the cognitive faculties required to investigate the spiritualization perception. We can now proceed to demonstrate, on the hand of some concrete examples, some aspects of the opening process of the gate of perception, how perception is spiritualized and what becomes perceptible in this way, in connection with the investigation of the modern Christ experience.

 The ideas and the soul experiences and faculties developed in the previous meditative exercises, should be put actively aside. The only thing that we take with us from is, paradoxically, only what we cannot take with us, namely, what we cannot remember. What we can remember and reflect on, is not what we need, and what we need, is not something that can be remembered. As Rudolf Steiner emphasized, in the quotation cited above, everything that can be remembered in ordinary memory, is an obstacle and hindrance on the spiritual path; what the head filters out, what we cannot remember in our heads, is embodied in the etheric body. Not the remembered results, not the acquired faculties, if so far as they form finished capacities, can be useful; only two things form the foundation of real spiritual investigation, the presently actualized spiritual activity, which is of pure will nature, and the unremembered and unused forces, that sank into the unconscious soul-and bodily depths, during our previous meditations. Only what lives and weaves in those unconscious depths, on the other side of the mirror and veil of memory, is useful for real supersensible research. And since it is unconscious, we cannot make use of it in our ordinary consciousness, and thankfully, it doesn’t obey nor influenced by our conscious representations, wishes and desires. It lives is life in a state of virginal purity, united with the childlike, Nathanic forces of the bodies, and will join our activity only out of its pure spiritual motivation. Man knows when he has progressed thus far, because this becomes an actual experience, that his present spiritual activity is matched by the Nathanic forces. Only then will the two streams unite harmoniously, the presently active pure will, and the pure Nathanic forces. This fact cannot be emphasized enough, because it makes all the real difference between true esotericism and the widespread ahrimanic-Luciferic, intellectuall and visionary delusions. Therefore, let us state again what is at stake presently, the existential-esoteric soul mood, configuration and situation.

"The peculiarity of spiritual truths is that they cannot, properly speaking, become memorized truths. You cannot retain in your organism what you ate a week previously... So far as spiritual truths are concerned, they must be experienced over and over again until they become habit — not retained as memory pictures but become habit. The essence of meditation is that we make an appeal to what, in reality, is present only in earliest childhood. 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". [1]

 With reverence and devotion to this living spiritual truth, let us concentrate our attention on the spiritualization of perception. We start again from the beginning with the meditations from Knowledge of the Higher Worlds, with this difference, that now we remain 'with open eyes', so to speak. As a matter of fact, one could have succinctly summarized the essence of the spiritualization of perception in this saying: we repeat our meditations but keep our eyes- or other senses of choice- open. This means that we hold on to sense-perception and focus our spiritual activity entirely on this level.

 In this spirit we repeat the first, fourth and fifth meditative exercises of knowledge of the Higher Worlds, and as we did above, and in the course of our practice we oscillate harmoniously between them. After carefully observing and experience the various sense qualities of an object, its colors, hardness, warmth, smells, and so on, we concentrate our attention on its external shape and limits. The experienceof the shape and limits of the object activates the bodily senses of life, movement and balance, which awaken in turn the etheric body in the metabolic-limb system and stimulate the circulation of the life forces from below upwards. This makes the meditation etherically intensive and substantial. For this reason we do not begin the meditation by suppressing thinking and sense-perception. On the contrary, we first greatly enhance them, as we did in the case of the spiritualization of thinking. So intensively we enhance ordinary thinking and perception that this enhancement creates the forces required to suppress them. During the actual meditation, after wesuppress all perception and thinking, the pure etheric forces will flow into our thinking, feeling and will, to enhance the forces that etherize, ensoul and spiritualize sense-perception.

 After we observed, heard, touched, smelled and tasted the external object carefully, trying to use as many senses as possible, and formed adequate representations of their impressions, we suppress all further sense perceptions, and think actively, as Rudolf Steiner recommended, the object's unseen essence. But we should note the following: the liberating and spiritualization of thinking must precede the liberating and spiritualization of perception, because only through thinking we can liberate and spiritualize the forces of the will, which we cannot do, to begin with, directly in our senses. This allows us also to entirely separate thinking from perception. Above we showed that we can concentrate our attention and activity in thinking to such an extent, that when we think, we are able to think without any sensing. If we accomplish this, we will be able also to do the opposite. We would be able to stop thinking and direct the pure forces of will and life to the senses, and only sense, that is, we will be able to sense and perceive without intermingling thinking with our perceptions. The clearer we begin to experience the difference and gap between thinking and sense-perception, the better. We call it‘perception's abyss’: it leads us gradually to the sought for hidden gate of sense-perception.

Goethe stopped short of the experience of this abyss between sense-perception and thinking because it can only be experienced through the previous spiritualization of thinking. [2] As we showed also in Cognitive Yoga, this is the reason why he could also not advance beyond the soul experience of the effects of colors, to their true spiritual being. This realization is at the same time the starting point for the knowledge drama of the Second Coming in the field of perception. Becoming aware, experientially, of the gap and abyss between thinking and perceiving means opening the gate to the forces of pure will also in perceiving. The will being, liberated from thinking, leads the separated soul forces to the ultimate ‘grey spirit abys’ out of which the etheric Christ emerges; and as we shall presently see, when the will and life forces stream into the formative forces of sense-perception, they will lead us to the same experience in the external etheric world.

 If we have already transformed our thinking into pure will, described in this chapter, the next step is possible. If not, this will first have to be achieved. This must be thoroughly accomplished before we can start the spiritualization of perception. We can only liberate perception from the brain-bound thinking if we first liberate thinking itself from this bondage. Only after thinking is liberated and resurrected out of the grave of the brain, sense-perception can be liberated as well. The most creative harmony is brought about in the human soul, when the meditations of Knowledge of the Higher Worlds and Occult Science, fructify each other. As we showed above, in the exercise for attaining Imagination, given in Occult Science, we form the picture of the rose cross, from the elements of nature, and we concentrate on this image. In the exercise for attaining Inspiration, we focus our attention solely on the will activity of thinking,disregarding all the previous pictorial contends. If we accomplish this, we experience the awakening of the will forces that liberatethinking from the brain. And in the third exercise, through which the forces of Intuition are prepared, we empty our consciousness also of the will activity. Now we direct this threefold meditative process to sense-perception, and when we achieve empty consciousness, we remain fully conscious and awake in sense-perception. This variation of the meditative exercise for intuition is more difficult than the one given in Occult Science, because we keep our senses open, and naturally this causes more distractions. What comes to our aid now are the spiritual forces extracted from the meditations of Knowledge of the Higher Worlds, and they sustain and empower us to experience also sense-perception intuitively. 

 In ordinary life, we form representations of what we see, hear, smell and taste, and these representations are engraved in the etheric body, and we can recall them later as memory pictures. But if we stop all representing, we stop also the engraving of the impressions and mental pictures in the etheric body. In ordinary perception, in this moment we lose consciousness and fall asleep as happens every night. But what keeps us awake in our meditation is the will power, liberated from thinking and the physical body, that in this very moment streams from the limbs and body, gathers in the heart, and flows directly through the brain and senses. In a very real sense, we can say, that this body free will stream flows through our senses and carry the etheric body of the sense with it to the external etheric world. This is the reason why, when we stopped ordinary perception but kept holding onto pure, liberated perception of sight, sound, warmth, smell, or taste, we don’t fall asleep; also, our consciousness does not evaporate into thin ethereal air. Instead, the will that flows into the brain, separates the etheric body from the physical body of the nerves and eyes, as it did when it liberated thinking from the brain. We get a peculiar impressing in this moment. We actually see, or hear, not with the physical sense organs, but with the etheric counterpart of the sense organs. We perceive not with the physical eyes or ears, but we the etheric eyes and ears, or, more precisely, with the etheric counterpart in so far as it is empowered and liberated from the physical sense organs by the liberated will. We begin to perceive with etheric eyes that have been disconnected from the instinctive connection with the nervous system and brain, and therefore liberated also from the connection to the blood, which grasp and hold the engravings of sense perceptions in the physical body.

 Then we confront again, as we experienced previously with thinking, the fundamental role of the death forces of the intellect in hardening, fixing and killing all our sense-perceptions. Precisely in the moment of the separation of the etheric body from the physical body of the sense organs, the death forces come to imaginative light; they can hide no longer and are forced to become fully exposed to the light of imaginative perception. The will forces that liberate the etheric eye from the physical eye, make the death forces visible, that stream from the brain through the optic nerves to the eyes, confront, block, and kill the living spiritual imaginations, inspirations, and intuitions, that flow through it. At this point, we can fully confirm, from our own experience, what Rudolf Steiner meant, when he asked, ‘how would it be with sense-perception if it could only stream into us from outside—stream as in light and color into the eye, as warmth into our sense of warmth? What would then happen to us?’ [3]- Indeed, this is precisely what we experience right now, when we experience the free etheric body of the etheric eyes- not the physical eyes- meet the etheric world outside, when our representing, based on the optic nerves and their occipital mirroring, is turned off, goes to sleep, and its shining surface is darkened; but at that very moment- in the interval of night provided by the blinking of the eyes- the etheric eyes and etheric optic nerves, the etheric counterpart of the occipital theater and visual cortex mirror, wake-and light up! We remain fully conscious and awake in etheric seeing, while physical seeing falls asleep. And now we also experience how the machinations of death are revealed, how ‘when we are even only a little active in developing ideas in our thinking, we bring against the instreaming sounds, colors, smells, tastes... the world of ideas that arises out of our inwardness’. This fighting against and killing of the spiritual forces of perception, becomes absolutely real in this moment. Thanks to the spiritualization of thinking, described in the first part of this chapter, we can control at will the separation and  reconnection of the etheric body with the physical brain and senses. As we can voluntarily decide when to think physically and when to cancel it, to think spiritually, so we do in regard to perception. When we cancel our physical thinking and don’t let it encounter it with ideas and concepts, to form conscious representations about what we see and hear, warm, taste and smell, it becomes immediately evident, that ‘if we had been simply given to the world of sense-perceptions, then we would have lived as human beings in our etheric body and with the etheric body in the etheric world’. Now we live and weave in imaginative consciousness, in the etheric world opened through our etheric senses,and perceive it with our etherized sense perceptions.

 In the Michaelic yoga, we have trained our thinking and perception to spiritualize and regulate the inhalation of perception and exhalation of pure thinking, and developed pure etheric cognitive breathing, outside the dense physical body. This etheric inhalation and exhalation are the elementary experience in the praxis of Michaelic yoga. Now we concentrate all its forces to spiritualize sense-perception, as previously we applied it to thinking, and therefore we know from our experience that, ‘if you were living in an etheric sea as etheric being, you would have never come to that human consistency which you actually have in the world between birth and death’. In the etheric weaving in perceiving the etheric world outside the physical body, this consistency indeed disappears; it is no longer given to us in the physical instinctive way, that only the physical body can provide. We must replace the consistency that the physical body gives us in the physical world, with the etheric consistency brought about by our spiritual activity. We use our will forces to make sure that when we take leave of the physical body, in each etherized perception, we will not lose our sense of self and coherent forces of clear cognition in the widely open and flowing etheric world. We also learn how to us the will to contract our etheric body and fit it back exactly to the limits and confines of the physical sense organs and brain, to retain our clear-cut physical consciousness when we return to the body.

[1] Lecture of 23 April 1924 (GA 316).  

[2] Lecture of 30 October 1921 (GA 78).

[3] Lecture of 10 July 1920 (GA 198). And the following quotations.

From the Forthcoming Second Edition of The New Experience of the Supersensible