Meditation

[Federica]

...

Thanks Cleric, this from my part clarifies understanding of the difference between Imaginative and Inspirative cognition, as much as it's possible at this moment.

[Federica]

First we have to consider what distinguishes sensation and image because at the bottom they are both perceptions, aren’t they? Hallucination can be indistinguishable from sensory perception. So the key is that the image is something in which we feel active. The simplest case is bringing a memory afterimage. We can’t mistake that for sensation because we’re aware that we’re summoning it through our forces.

Then the Imaginative state also has gradations. For example, taking a psychedelic also pumps into our consciousness imagery but since we confront it with our sensory habits, we expect to see things as we see tables and chairs (in Steiner’s words). This is the lowest form of Imagination, a kind of visionary experience which however remains as a mysterious wall.

With the widespread use of psychedelics today, it is a real danger that people imagine they look into the objective spiritual world in these images, while in fact they contemplate the processes at the borderline between the physical and etheric body – where the Imaginative mineralizes. For this reason I’ve always stressed that the Imaginative realm has to be seen as impressions of living spiritual activity (the thought gestures).

As a side note, I thought I'd point out that, since the key is that in the image we feel active, why call the psychedelic experience - an eminently passive experience - the lowest form of Imagination? Not saying this to be picky, but because someone could say “Ok, let’s start from that level of "Imagination lite", and I'll just have to keep in mind that it’s not objective”.

My real question is: is it correct that the same danger faced by psychedelic users - to imagine that one looks into the objective spiritual world in the images - is also there for everyone else, even when the images are summoned through active exercise?

And another question would be: since the few images I experienced didn’t feel the product of active will on my part, but scary intrusions, I guess that was nothing of imaginative nature but an experience of yet another separate nature (in case it's obvious for you to tell)?

[AshvinP]

And another question would be: since the few images I experienced didn’t feel the product of active will on my part, but scary intrusions, I guess that was nothing of imaginative nature but an experience of yet another separate nature (in case it's obvious for you to tell)?

Federica,

I remember you mentioned this previously and I don't think at that time I mentioned having similar experiences with the scary, intrusive images, although the scariness was rather short-lived for me. My understanding is that these are indeed the result of loosening our etheric bodies so that the higher ego-astral movements are more easily impressed into the etheric and perceived in the form of living images before they are 'smashed' into the slots of our physical sensory organism. If we hadn't done any inner work via spiritual exercises, we wouldn't notice even these fleeting and intrusive images (apart from ingesting substances). These movements of our soul-life, and therefore the corresponding images, are always there. Every time we go to sleep or awaken from sleep, if we can maintain a certain level of wakefulness during the transition, we can experience such images. It is like an image from our dream life is snipped out and momentarily imposed on our waking state. A few times I have experienced the 'smashing' into the sensory organism upon awakening so that a frozen after-image remains in my visual field for a short while.

So I wouldn't call this experience of another 'separate nature'. The dream space is actually what we aim to investigate with imaginative cognition (and with intuitive/inspired forces that express at that level which provide meaningful insight), but instead of experiencing them passively (perhaps similar to the psychedelic state) and having little ability to retain their insights, we aim to experience that space with active and lucid "I"-consciousness. We aim to bring the lucidity and precision of our thought-will force that we have won through experience on the physical plane into the higher-lower configuration spaces, beginning with the emotional soul space. In my limited experience and understanding, the 'intrusive' character of the images results precisely from the fact that they have not yet been brought under the harmonizing influence of our "I"-consciousness. It is sort of like what we would experience if thoughts were just popping into our head without any ability to organize them into coherent ideas. It simply means we have more work to do in strengthening our "I"-consciousness via spiritual exercises.

One thing I like to remember is how such experiences make our esoteric knowledge a living reality. If we think about it, before we have such experiences, it's quite possible that everything we are reasoning through in the domain of esoteric science is like a 'conspiracy theory'. We began to resonate with the overall narrative for whatever subconscious reasons and then we started to notice patterns of 'evidence' for its validity everywhere we started looking. Perhaps the narrative really started to help us make sense of our lives and the world around us. This is still a potential risk even at the early imaginative stage, but at least now we have lifted out beyond the mere conceptual level. Now we know for certain that this etheric-imaginative layer of our being exists and, over time, we will experience how it aligns very closely with its portrayal by objective esoteric research. The likelihood that esoteric research pertaining to the even higher layers of our being is valid has likewise increased greatly.

We now know that our thought-will force extends beyond the limits of our brain, skull, and physical body, and that this force archetypally structures our living environment in some way, but still, we cannot be certain that the experiences are not the result of some material field or instinctively conscious field that permeates the Universe. What we call "thought-will" could still be related to some external substrate that only experiences itself as such in our localized human minds. Only through inspired and intuitive cognition do we experience the Thinking-perspectives that structure our psycho-physical processes and those of the World. Then our critical or skeptical thoughts are themselves experienced as testimonies of the reality of these higher beings. The skeptical thought content immediately defeats itself by the very act of its manifestation.

[Anthony66]

Reading some of what has been written here and listening to some Steiner talks on the topic of imaginative cognition makes me wonder whether I actually have attained it to some degree if it is essentially characterised by the formation of images in the absence of sensory objects. I would be very surprised if this was the case.

When I meditate, I can quite easily enter a mode where all manner of fractal like imagery appears of which I can exert a degree of control over the form. It can be quite captivating and sometimes I allow myself to watch the unfolding patters for some time. But I've always presumed that be be a distraction and have generally avoided being drawn into it. I remember from a very young age having nightmares which involved being in a similar fractal space, often enclosed in a small room like a toilet where the walls would be morphing with these patterns. It was quite frightening and I was glad when such dreams subsided as I grew older.

Do other people here have such experiences in meditation and what is the difference between this and imaginative cognition?

[Anthony66]

Is the highlighted the end of the road? You speak of these spiritual beings, perhaps lofty spiritual beings, but what about the perspective of the highest of the high, God himself? As you know, there are plenty of individuals who have claimed to have reached such levels. Heck, many a born again Christian has risen to these rarefied levels in their come-to-Jesus moment - at least that's what they say. No need to worry about all this inner development and years of meditation, come to Jesus Cleric!

Anthony, I think I understand the source of your question. If we take the hierarchy of Cosmic Intelligence as a pyramid, it’s obvious that God should be at the top. At the same time, when we speak of spiritual beings, this suggests that since they are many, they should belong to a lower ladder of the pyramid. Yet they are also those who come directly to Jesus in mighty visions. So why bother with the Cosmic ladder if we can unite directly with the highest peak?

There are so many things which can be said here that I’m afraid it will turn into another lengthy post. I’ll try to point out only one aspect – the Divine takes different forms (sheaths as it were) along the Cosmic gradient. There’s indeed the Highest Trinity which we can conceive very abstractly as the threefold seed of the Cosmic Fractal from which all eternal potential differentiates and can be experienced through evolutionary time-arcs. When we experience the Jesus form – in meditation or in spontaneous/accidental/abnormal ways, such as the vision of Paul on the way to Damascus – we come into contact only with the sheath that is closest to us. Actually, to be more correct, the closest encounter was when the Christ impregnated the physical body of Jesus. After the resurrection it can be said that this Christ force spread out over the whole Earth and now every atom is ablaze with the Spirit. Thus the Christ being is very close to us, he is present in every particle of our physical body. What is needed is that our "I” could become like a lightning bolt uniting the Spirit above with the Elemental below.

This is as far as the physical world is concerned. On the other hand, the etheric form of Jesus, through which the Christ expressed himself continues to exist and acts as a kind of attractor, a blueprint for the perfected life processes of the human body. We can think of it as superimposed with every life body. If we imagine them all ringing as tuning forks, the diseased and corrupted life bodies can be attuned as if through resonance with this perfected life-blueprint in order to restore the harmony of their ‘vibrations’. This is a real method of healing.

This etheric Jesus form is obviously still very similar to the human form. This is what most people with spontaneous visions of Christ-Jesus really experience, although in a visionary state this life body can be experienced not as superimposed but as an Imaginative picture of the Jesus figure standing before us. This is really what “born again Christians” behold. The Christ Being indeed expresses even now through this etheric form (and thus we’re justified to speak of God as similar to human and having personal relation to us) but there are also higher forms of the Logos.

As we can see, things are not so conveniently linear. And we shouldn’t blame spiritual investigation for overcomplicating things. If we take John’s Revelation we can also see that the first character that he encounters is “the one who is like the Son of Man”. Yet later, when he rises Imaginatively through the Cosmic ladder, he beholds the Throne of God, where, as we know, we find the Lamb of God with seven horns and seven eyes. If we cling to our linear conceptions it would be quite a mystery how we find the Christ first in a human form, then as an admittedly quite grotesque animal form. So spiritual investigation doesn’t aim to overcomplicate things but to explain why this is so.

Hopefully, this throws some light on how it is possible to behold the Christ in his Jesus etheric form while being still very far from Inspirative and Intuitive consciousness through which we can approach the inner being of the higher hierarchies. Don't get me wrong. This is not to demean the etheric experience of Christ. In fact this is something that more and more people will experience in time. And this is also why we need deeper spiritual knowledge. Otherwise we'll be stopping short only at the etheric clothing of the Divine. The above should also help us understand why it is not foolish to have personal relation with the Christ being. The etheric form of the Christ indeed manifests to us like our "own personal Jesus". He's a master, a friend, a healer. Yes, the perspective of the Highest Trinity is inconceivable through our human capabilities but the Center of the Cosmic Fractal has its manifestations at each level and we should be working our way through these centers, stringing them together with our "I" as it were.

If I may summarize - the divine may be revealed to us independent of our level of spiritual development, but the nature of that revelation is dependent on our level of spiritual development.

I framed my question in terms of an example of Christian revelation while not necessarily accepting the claims of those who make it. But your response here seems to explicitly accept elements of Christian teaching, i.e. resurrection and Trinity. You seem to accept that the Trinity is in fact part of, or the apex of the hierarchy of Cosmic Intelligence. What are your grounds for this?

[Cleric K]

As a side note, I thought I'd point out that, since the key is that in the image we feel active, why call the psychedelic experience - an eminently passive experience - the lowest form of Imagination? Not saying this to be picky, but because someone could say “Ok, let’s start from that level of "Imagination lite", and I'll just have to keep in mind that it’s not objective”.

My real question is: is it correct that the same danger faced by psychedelic users - to imagine that one looks into the objective spiritual world in the images - is also there for everyone else, even when the images are summoned through active exercise?

And another question would be: since the few images I experienced didn’t feel the product of active will on my part, but scary intrusions, I guess that was nothing of imaginative nature but an experience of yet another separate nature (in case it's obvious for you to tell)?

When I said ‘lowest level’ I meant it in a completely ‘technical’ sense. Loosening of the bodies may be achieved by various means, hyperventilation, willful choking and so on. So we have to understand why such methods can’t give us a sure foundation. It would be too easy if they were simply ordained as ‘wrong’ as if by some higher authority.

Things are easy to understand when we take into account that higher development is first and foremost working on our character from many different sides, just like a diamond has to be polished from many different sides to achieve perfectly symmetric form. Much of this polishing happens in our ordinary thinking, feeling and willing, inspired by the quite time of prayer, reflection and so on.

Without such gradual polishing, the spiritual shape of the contemporary human is highly asymmetric, it morphs spontaneously, swinging in different directions as a pendulum following Lissajous figures.

Proper development is like the snowflake that grows in all direction symmetrically. These directions are like the different flows of the Zodiac, which we accommodate within the seven spheres of our soul being. In general, these are always following certain rhythmic relations. In a certain period we live in the Mars mood, open for the influences of Aries. Then these relations change. In esoteric development we have to become familiar with our “I”-experience in these different environments. We’re almost like different persons in these different astral relations. That’s why we can Imaginatively picture them symmetrically developing as the form of the snowflake. Then we can come to know that we exist by virtue of the Christ Light that shines through the Center of the relations. The different persons shaped by these relations become akin to organs of the true "I”.

If we force the loosening of the bodies, this leads to our “I”-consciousness protruding into the Imaginative. But since we don’t know ourselves as a being whose soul life revolves through the constellations of Cosmic and planetary forces, and we haven’t worked to become conscious of these different ‘selves’, we protrude like a single dangling strand on the snowflake.

In normal development, we also protrude in some direction (specific to the astral relations). But the great difference is that we are prepared to know that this is only a specific perspective, as filtered through the interplay of Cosmic and planetary forces. Then we are aware of all the alternative ‘selves’, even if they are not particularly manifested. This nevertheless gives us support in the astral world. Instead of feeling as dangling thread of ego-consciousness that has protruded from the physical shell, we feel supported in all directions by these “I”-experiences that we have developed through polishing.

As an example, if the spike that we’re experiencing leans way too much on one side it will begin to collide with another spike where we’ll recognize: “Aha! These are the soul forms that I have developed through such and such exercises.” In other words, when we emerge in the astral world in this way, we find it already structured. This is because through our preparatory work we have grown these soul forms that already align with the Macrocosmic archetypes. Conversely, when we protrude as dangling “I”-experience, we can lean quite far in some direction and we won’t feel any structure. Such an experience of the astral is inherently uncertain, everything shifts and morphs as we dangle around. These kinds of experiences, when taken as objective truth, make one believe that reality is simply divided into formed physical world and formless spiritual. Thus one imagines that after death existence could be reimagined in any way they whim (mentioned also in the other thread to Guney).

With all this said, it should be clear that normal protrusion in the Imaginative carries the same challenges as the other methods of loosening of the bodies. In other words, we shouldn’t expect that the proper development should send us on a completely smooth ride. No, as your own experience shows, scary images do appear. This is not a sign of incorrect development. The great difference however, is that through proper development we are fit to quickly orient ourselves in these environments, thanks to the fact that they have been already probed and developed through working on our thinking, feeling and willing.

Protrusion in the Imaginative can be achieved through intense concentration even without the other spiritual work. If we one-sidedly focus all our efforts on concentration and relaxing the periphery, it is indeed quite certain that soon we’ll break through. But then we’ll experience the same dangling protruding ego-strand as could be the case with psychedelics, hyperventilation, etc. So we see that even “getting through to the Imaginative with intense spiritual activity” in itself can also be dangerous. Spiritual development is a much vaster enterprise that touches upon every single aspect of existence. It is this harmonious development that makes the path ‘right’. A method taken out of this proper path and exercised in isolation can lead to just as detrimental results as any other of the forceful methods.

Now a question may arise: “If the matter is not in the methods themselves but in their encompassing harmonizing, does this mean that we can still use substances to loosen the bodies?” Well, if we’re indeed working in the proper way and do ingest a substance, nothing especially bad will happen. Things become more complicated if we believe that this allows us to see and understand things that we otherwise can’t. This leads to inner division. Our “I” is divided because we think that our sober self is incapable of achieving comparable results. This becomes a barrier for proper union with the Christ. Because in the Christ consciousness lie hidden all possibilities. We begin making a course correction when we believe that our higher self can elucidate our soul with consciousness that far surpasses in its Light and intensity anything we know so far. It is often said ‘seeing is believing’ but in this case the reverse is true ‘believing is seeing’. This doesn’t refer to blindly believing some statement. Believing here is opening for something that presently doesn’t fit our conceptions and known perceptions.

So we see that things are complicated. We can’t just label things right or wrong. The action of the psychedelic in the body is in itself neutral but the way that experience stirs our soul and spiritual life makes the difference. And things are sometimes difficult to clearly separate. For example, we make all kinds of changes in our life to make union with the higher powers more conductive. We can surely say: “If I don’t eat plant-based food it will be more difficult for me to raise in my soul.” Can we say that we’re becoming dependent on plant-based diet to expand consciousness, just as we can believe that, for example, small amount of cooked cannabis can be a good part of our diet in order to make us more receptible for the spiritual? Where do we draw the line? What foods can be considered ‘normal’ way to enhance our receptivity to the higher worlds and what are ‘detrimental’? Because seen in this way (and it is indeed true) that every food has its spiritual influence. When we ingest any matter we unite with forces and beings. All of this has mild ‘psychedelic’ effect, in the sense that certain images and currents would change in effect, yet for most foods this effect can be discovered only in the deeper soul strata. It is not so pronounced that we can recognize how something of our waking consciousness is a bit different because of what we ate. But the difference is there and we can sense it in the long run. On a vegetarian diet we’re slightly ‘high’, our thinking is lighter, it can more easily lift itself from the physical slots.

So where’s the line? Can microdosing mushrooms (taking daily doses which don’t reach noticeable effects, yet can subtly increase creativity, for example) be taken as a normal part of the vegetarian diet which simply makes it even more effective, we become even more receptible to the spiritual?

To be honest, I don’t know if such homeopathic use could have benefits. I’m leaning towards “no”. Here’s my reasoning. We can achieve powerful loosening of the bodies through fasting. This is due to the fact that a lot of the forces that are normally sucked into the digestive process become freed and they can turn into cognitive forces. Of course, we can’t fast indefinitely. While on Earth, our physical body needs nutrition. When we see things in this way, it’s like the reverse of what we said before. We don’t eat vegetarian because it gives us better ‘spiritual high’ but because it sucks us down into the organs with less intensity, it diminishes our expanded fasting state less. In other words, the food choice should be not that it stimulates the loosening of the bodies but that it prevents it least. From this perspective, foods that have the potential to forcefully loosen the bodies seem like a contradictory goal. It is almost as if we want to eat all the steaks we want but compensate for the lost leeway of the bodies by forcing it back through psychedelic foods.

When we see things in this way, we can see that our focus should always be on the purity of our thoughts, feelings and physical conduct. Food should give us the best nutrition while ideally not being ‘heavy’ in the sense that bogs our astral body in the digestive processes. I’m sorry to bring this up but when we meditate and have developed a certain sensitivity, we can very clearly distinguish how our inner space changes after we go to the toilet and evacuate the tract. Before that we may have been unable to get rid of oppressive heavy thoughts and then it is as if some clarity has settled. Yes, even our poo has psychedelic effects while still in the body.

[Federica]

These movements of our soul-life, and therefore the corresponding images, are always there. Every time we go to sleep or awaken from sleep, if we can maintain a certain level of wakefulness during the transition, we can experience such images. It is like an image from our dream life is snipped out and momentarily imposed on our waking state.

Thank you so much, Ashvin. It’s really good to know that, and it’s indeed those transitions I’m talking about. For me, waking up is black and white, but falling asleep is becoming more and more of a gradual process, where images can appear, or other things. In that transition, multiple times I have heard my voice involuntarily articulating something, which is a quite strange experience, but not scary. When I catch myself in this way, just in the moment of falling asleep, it toggles me back into wakefulness.

the 'intrusive' character of the images results precisely from the fact that they have not yet been brought under the harmonizing influence of our "I"-consciousness. It is sort of like what we would experience if thoughts were just popping into our head without any ability to organize them into coherent ideas. It simply means we have more work to do in strengthening our "I"-consciousness via spiritual exercises.

Thanks! This will hopefully help me move past the sort of ‘ten meter platform’ situation, where I am implicitly declining the experience of my own thought flow being ‘overridden from outside’. Then it’s easy to find confirmation of this fearful instinct in what Steiner says about the dangers of developing the cognitive states.

One thing I like to remember is how such experiences make our esoteric knowledge a living reality. If we think about it, before we have such experiences, it's quite possible that everything we are reasoning through in the domain of esoteric science is like a 'conspiracy theory'. We began to resonate with the overall narrative for whatever subconscious reasons and then we started to notice patterns of 'evidence' for its validity everywhere we started looking. Perhaps the narrative really started to help us make sense of our lives and the world around us. This is still a potential risk even at the early imaginative stage, but at least now we have lifted out beyond the mere conceptual level. Now we know for certain that this etheric-imaginative layer of our being exists and, over time, we will experience how it aligns very closely with its portrayal by objective esoteric research. The likelihood that esoteric research pertaining to the even higher layers of our being is valid has likewise increased greatly.

We now know that our thought-will force extends beyond the limits of our brain, skull, and physical body, and that this force archetypally structures our living environment in some way, but still, we cannot be certain that the experiences are not the result of some material field or instinctively conscious field that permeates the Universe. What we call "thought-will" could still be related to some external substrate that only experiences itself as such in our localized human minds. Only through inspired and intuitive cognition do we experience the Thinking-perspectives that structure our psycho-physical processes and those of the World. Then our critical or skeptical thoughts are themselves experienced as testimonies of the reality of these higher beings. The skeptical thought content immediately defeats itself by the very act of its manifestation.

Well said. Yes, confirmation of esoteric teachings in oneself gives certainty of the truth made accessible through those teachings. For me the changes in normal cognitive and feeling life are enough to find that confirmation. I never thought about the planes of reality in terms of potential ‘conspiracy theory’, probably because they have come as a fitting - in some sense, evident - answer to many dim questions that have been with me since early childhood, though they have been burning in the background for many years.

[AshvinP]

So where’s the line? Can microdosing mushrooms (taking daily doses which don’t reach noticeable effects, yet can subtly increase creativity, for example) be taken as a normal part of the vegetarian diet which simply makes it even more effective, we become even more receptible to the spiritual?

To be honest, I don’t know if such homeopathic use could have benefits. I’m leaning towards “no”. Here’s my reasoning. We can achieve powerful loosening of the bodies through fasting. This is due to the fact that a lot of the forces that are normally sucked into the digestive process become freed and they can turn into cognitive forces. Of course, we can’t fast indefinitely. While on Earth, our physical body needs nutrition. When we see things in this way, it’s like the reverse of what we said before. We don’t eat vegetarian because it gives us better ‘spiritual high’ but because it sucks us down into the organs with less intensity, it diminishes our expanded fasting state less. In other words, the food choice should be not that it stimulates the loosening of the bodies but that it prevents it least. From this perspective, foods that have the potential to forcefully loosen the bodies seem like a contradictory goal. It is almost as if we want to eat all the steaks we want but compensate for the lost leeway of the bodies by forcing it back through psychedelic foods.

When we see things in this way, we can see that our focus should always be on the purity of our thoughts, feelings and physical conduct. Food should give us the best nutrition while ideally not being ‘heavy’ in the sense that bogs our astral body in the digestive processes. I’m sorry to bring this up but when we meditate and have developed a certain sensitivity, we can very clearly distinguish how our inner space changes after we go to the toilet and evacuate the tract. Before that we may have been unable to get rid of oppressive heavy thoughts and then it is as if some clarity has settled. Yes, even our poo has psychedelic effects while still in the body.

Cleric,

Thanks for sharing this valuable insight. This is something I have been thinking about lately, especially since I came across one of your previous posts where you spoke about experimenting with mushrooms after some time. You mentioned that there wasn't a noticeable change in your mode of consciousness, even though some of psychedelic visual effects remained.

I can't say that I am quite following your reasoning for the "no" above, though. Let's say that we focus on developing healthy and pure spiritual habits of WFT conduct. Now, without deviating from those habits, we complement them by adjusting our diet in ways that could help loosen the bodies, for ex. by microdosing mushrooms (or perhaps using CBD?). What would be the risk here? It seems the primary risk with such things is developing an overreliance on them to the point where we feel our ordinary self is no longer up to the task by uniting faithfully with the Christ impulse, as you pointed out. But, as you also pointed out, we could theoretically say that about any changes in body-soul-spirit habits and routines that we make on the path of higher development. Maybe I develop an overreliance on taking a walk outside in nature every day. Is there something that particularly increases the risk when it comes to ingesting these sorts of substances, even in microdoses without the 'high'?

[Cleric K]

If I may summarize - the divine may be revealed to us independent of our level of spiritual development, but the nature of that revelation is dependent on our level of spiritual development.

Yes, that’s a nice way to frame it. But it’s worth mentioning that sometimes the level of development is such that the Divine simply can’t reveal itself. The layers are so thick and twisted that even if a Divine inspiration is to be flown into the soul, it will become tainted beyond recognition as it digs down. As a matter of fact, such Divine Ideas constantly flow towards our soul but ‘the problem is in our own TV’, as the saying goes.

I framed my question in terms of an example of Christian revelation while not necessarily accepting the claims of those who make it. But your response here seems to explicitly accept elements of Christian teaching, i.e. resurrection and Trinity. You seem to accept that the Trinity is in fact part of, or the apex of the hierarchy of Cosmic Intelligence. What are your grounds for this?

I have both reasoned and experiential grounds for that but simply explicating them wouldn’t be of much benefit (it won’t make matters more convincing that is).

I think we’ve spoken about this before when you said that you’re still on the fence. The picture of dark spiritual vacuum out of whose zero-field spontaneously emerge beings, who then enjoy their peer-to-peer relations and fill the Cosmos with Imaginations, is understandably convenient. Yet as I wrote in the post to Guney, these conceptions can only be verified after death. After we lose the body, we’ll finally see whether we’re a free spiritual electron in spiritual vacuum or not. The other path on the other hand, is experientially verifiable. Of course, if we look upon both of them as mere pictures of the other world, obviously they seem like standing on the same ground. If we want to be original we may even try to assign some probability amplitude about which would be fulfilled at the final collapse in the moment of death. But things look in this way only as long as we stand with our ego and contemplate the two pictures. We can’t do anything more than that with the first picture. We simply wait to see the outcome of our gamble. But with the second we can do many things. It’s all a matter of whether we’re willing to enter deep into reality and see what really animates the movie of our life. If we’re not willing to see our Earthly persona as the dream-like experience of a higher more lucid being, we’ll always want to keep the feeling that our ego is the original source of every thought, decision, action that we make. Clearly, in this way we preclude the experiential path of verification. We remain with the dream pictures of the supposed after world and only wait for the moment of rude awakening called death, keeping our fingers crossed that we’ll still feel as the same “I” as we did while in a body (only freer).

[Cleric K]

the 'intrusive' character of the images results precisely from the fact that they have not yet been brought under the harmonizing influence of our "I"-consciousness. It is sort of like what we would experience if thoughts were just popping into our head without any ability to organize them into coherent ideas. It simply means we have more work to do in strengthening our "I"-consciousness via spiritual exercises.

Thanks! This will hopefully help me move past the sort of ‘ten meter platform’ situation, where I am implicitly declining the experience of my own thought flow being ‘overridden from outside’. Then it’s easy to find confirmation of this fearful instinct in what Steiner says about the dangers of developing the cognitive states.

Here a small note may be useful. It's worth mentioning that we as human beings are not yet fully creative in the higher worlds, even if gone through high degree of spiritual development. In that sense, it may have paralyzing effect if we expect that we can control the Imaginative experiences in a way similar to our thoughts. In a certain sense we are always within these experiences, they have life of their own and we flow through them.

Actually, what we experience as Imaginations is what the Angel Imagines in us. In true Imagination we become concentric with the Angelic consciousness. Metaphorically, we can say that the Angelic being leads us as if through a museum exhibition. Our state metamorphoses through the curvatures the Angel shapes while we follow everything with our expanded thoughts, which repeat the movements of the environment so to say, and can in turn focus down concepts. It is normal that this thinking which focuses down the concepts should feel as our own. The Angel doesn't override this! Every level of being is responsible for their part. We're led through the transformation but the focusing down of the intuitive context feels as the part where we're doing our part.

This doesn't mean that we have no say about the trip we're going through. It's just that our say can only be in form of prayer, as a sacred dialog. We can ask questions, we can ask to be led in a certain chamber of the museum where specific things may be revealed. Furthermore, it is precisely through such kind of prayerful attuning that we unite with one or another Angel in order to live in Imaginations as they see them when they look through our being. This last bit is important. We shouldn't immediately conclude that what we thus experience represents what Angelic consciousness is like in general. Instead, this is what Angelic consciousness is when it unites with the human complex. The Imaginative forms in which the Angel can think through us (and which we correspondingly experience as flowing through the galleries of Imaginations) are obviously dependent on our organization, our experiences and so on. The richer our inner life is, the richer the palette is through which the Angel can Imagine the higher worlds in us.