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also be a matter of meditation upon mere feelings and sensations.
This shows itself to be especially effective. Let us take, for example, the feeling of joy. In the normal
course of life the soul may experience joy if an outer stimulus for it is present. If a soul with normal
feelings perceives how a human being performs an action that is inspired by kindness of heart, this
soul will feel pleased and happy about it. But this soul may then meditate on an action of this sort. It
may say to itself, an action performed through goodness of heart is one in which the performer does
not follow his own interest, but the interest of his fellow-man, and such an action may be designated
morally good. The contemplating soul, however, may now free itself from the mental picture of the
special case in the outer world that has given it joy or pleasure, and it may form the comprehensive
idea of kindness of heart.
It may perhaps think how kindness of heart arises by the one soul absorbing, so to speak, the interests
of the other soul and making them its own, and it may now feel joy about this moral idea of kindness
of heart. This is not the joy in this or that process in the sense world, but the joy in an idea as such. If
we attempt to keep alive such joy in the soul for a certain length of time, then this is meditation on
inner feeling, on inner sensation.
The idea is not then the awakening factor of the inner soul faculties, but the holding sway, for a certain
length of time, of the feeling within the soul that is not aroused through a mere single external
impression.  Since supersensible knowledge is able to penetrate more deeply into the nature of
things than ordinary thinking, it is able through its experiences to indicate feelings that act in a still
higher degree upon the unfolding of the soul faculties, when they are employed in inner meditation.
Although this is necessary for higher degrees of training, we should remember the fact that energetic
meditation on such feelings and sensations, as for example have been characterized in the observation
of kindness of heart, is able to lead very far.  Since human beings are varied in character, so are the
effective means of training varied for the individual man.  In regard to the duration of meditation we
have to consider that the effect is all the stronger, the more tranquilly and deliberately this meditation
is carried out. But any excess in this direction should be avoided. A certain inner discretion that results
through the exercises themselves may teach the pupil to keep within due bounds.
Such exercises in inner meditation will in general have to be carried on for a long time before the
student himself is able to perceive any results. What belongs unconditionally to spiritual training is
patience and perseverance. Whoever does not call up both of these within his soul and does not, in all
tranquillity, continuously carry out his exercises, so that patience and perseverance form the
fundamental mood of the soul, cannot achieve much.
It will have become evident from the preceding exposition that meditation is a means of acquiring
knowledge about higher worlds, but it will also have become evident that not just any content of
thought will lead to it, but only a content that has been evolved in the manner described.
The path that has been indicated here leads, in the first place, to what may be called imaginative
cognition. It is the first stage of higher cognition. Knowledge that rests upon sense-perception and
upon the working over of the sense-perceptions through the intellect bound to the senses may be
called, in the sense of spiritual science, "objective cognition."
Beyond this lie the higher stages of knowledge, the first of which is imaginative cognition. The
expression "imaginative" may call forth doubts in those who think "imagination" stands only for unreal
imaginings, that is, a visualization of something that has no corresponding reality. In spiritual science,
however, "imaginative" cognition is to be conceived as something coming into existence through a
supersensible state of consciousness of the soul. What is perceived in this state are spiritual facts and
beings to which the senses have no access.
Because this state is awakened in the soul by meditating on symbols or "imaginations," the world of
this higher state of consciousness may be named the "imaginative" world, and the knowledge
corresponding to it "imaginative" cognition. "Imaginative," therefore, means something which is "real"
in a different sense from the facts and beings of physical sense-perception. The content of the
visualizations that fill imaginative experience is of no importance, but of utmost importance is the soul
faculty which is developed through this experience.
An obvious objection to the employment of the characterized symbolic visualizations is that their
fashioning corresponds to a dreamlike thinking and to arbitrary imagining and therefore can bring forth
only doubtful results. In regard to the symbols that lie at the foundation of true spiritual training,
doubts of this character are unjustified. For the symbols are chosen in such a way that their connection
with outer sense reality may be entirely disregarded and their value sought merely in the force with
which they affect the soul when the latter withdraws all attention from the outer world, when it
suppresses all impressions of the senses, and shuts out all thoughts that it may cherish as a result of
outer stimuli.
The process of meditation is best illustrated by a comparison with the state of sleep. On the one hand it
resembles the latter, on the other it is the complete opposite. It is a sleep that represents, in regard to
everyday consciousness, a higher waking state. The important point is that through concentration upon
the visualization or picture in question the soul is compelled to draw forth much stronger powers from
its own depths than it employs in everyday life or in everyday cognition. Its inner activity is thereby
enhanced.
It liberates itself from the bodily nature just as it does during sleep, but it does not, as in the latter case,
pass over into unconsciousness, but becomes conscious of a world that it has not previously
experienced. Although this soul state may be compared with sleep in regard to the liberation from the
body, yet it may be described as an enhanced waking state when compared with everyday waking
consciousness.
Through this the soul experiences itself in its true inner, independent nature, while in the everyday
waking state it becomes conscious of itself only through the help of the body because of the weaker
unfolding of its forces in that state, and does not, therefore, experience itself, but is only aware of the
picture that, like a reflection, the body (or properly speaking its processes) sketches for it.
The symbols that are constructed in the above described manner do, by their very nature, not yet relate
to anything real in the spiritual world. They serve the purpose of detaching the human soul from sense-
perception and from the brain instrument to which the intellect is bound at the outset.
This detachment cannot occur in man prior to his feeling the following: I now visualize something by
means of forces in connection with which my senses and my brain do not serve me as instruments. The
first thing that the human being experiences on this path is such a liberation from the physical organs.
He may then say to himself, "My consciousness is not extinguished when I disregard the sense-
perceptions and ordinary intellectual thinking; I can lift myself out of them and then feel myself as a
being alongside the one I was previously." This is the first purely spiritual experience: the observation
of a soul-spirit ego being.
This, as a new self, has lifted itself out of the self that is only bound to the physical senses and the [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]