AshvinP wrote: ↑Thu Feb 01, 2024 6:45 pm
I would like to share a quote from Sergei Prokofieff that fits well with this pictorial thinking topic and what we have been discussing on the forum recently, in terms of approaching spiritual science with the inner gesture of 'study-meditate'.
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In order to show how far the stage of study can lead us on the path of initiation, it is necessary to consider the following and to take a simple example -to begin with, an experience which most anthroposophists will remember, since it is connected with their first contact with Anthroposophy! One day a book of Rudolf Steiner's came into our hands, and we began to read, one page, two pages, or even twenty, until we came to a place which contained a thought or a picture which touched us so strongly that we were moved to the depths of our soul.
What does such an experience signify? If we ponder this question, it will emerge that in a deeper sense we already know what we have read here. In other words: at the moment of this experience we have the feeling that we already know what Anthroposophy is saying to us here, only that we have forgotten it for a while and are now beginning to recall it again.
This experience was also well known to Plato, who said that all knowledge is really a kind of remembering (amnesis).
That is the moment when the study of Anthroposophy begins to contain that quality which makes it the first stage of initiation. For we have now begun to realise that everything that one can find in Anthroposophy, the picture of man and of the cosmos, their evolution, human life on the Earth and after death in connection with the hierarchies, the laws of karma and reincarnation, and much more, all belongs to us. We already know these things, but through Anthroposophy we raise them to consciousness. This is an experience which can be compared with the kindling of an inner flame which suddenly illumines what already lies in the depths of our soul, albeit in an unconscious and forgotten form.
But what does study as the first stage of initiation signify from an esoteric point of view? Every true modern initiation has the task of leading the human individual into the spiritual world in full consciousness. And in the spiritual world there are no objects, no abstract forces or energies, but exclusively the spiritual beings of the ascending hierarchies. In this sense Rudolf Steiner spoke of how the second stage of initiation, that of Imagination, can lead to knowledge of, or a meeting with, the Third Hierarchy; the third, that of Inspiration, to a meeting with the Second; and the fourth, that of Initiation, to a meeting with the First or highest Hierarchy.¹
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The fundamental experience described above of Anthroposophy as a kind of remembering sometimes stands in contrast to the difficulty that as the modern science of the spirit of humanity - it was initially given in a rigorously intellectual form. However, we come with time to realise that we should be deeply grateful to Rudolf Steiner for having given this knowledge in the objective form of pure thought, for only in this way can we remain wholly free as regards higher knowledge: thoughts do not compel.
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If we study spiritual science and gradually learn to think in the way characterized above, we learn to think in a wholly new way, not only with our physical but with the etheric brain. For all anthroposophical concepts are connected not with physical but with supersensible realities. In this realm we are, to be sure, not as yet clairvoyant; but we are nevertheless already in the spiritual world if we no more than actively think Anthroposophy. In other words: if we use our ordinary thinking to understand not physical but spiritual realities, the possibility arises for the first time to leave our physical body in a fully conscious way. For by this means we attain what may be called sense-free thinking; and that is the surest and safest beginning of a modern path of initiation leading into the spiritual world, which we otherwise embark upon only after our death or unconsciously in sleep.
Nevertheless, even though the study of Anthroposophy has become an essential part of our life, giving us answers as to the deeper meaning of life and our destiny, answers without which we could no longer exist, we may still feel that our anthroposophical thoughts are of a somewhat abstract nature.
For Anthroposophy is on this level comparable to a new language which we endeavour to learn with all its difficulties. We first have to master the individual letters, then the words, grammatical rules and so on, before we are able to read the whole text which opens for us the gate into a completely new world.
Thus one may say: in Anthroposophy we learn a language whose words are hidden in all things of the world; they are the spirit sleeping in everything, which waits to be deciphered, understood and liberated by man's newly won knowledge. But in order to achieve this, we must at this stage as a first step take up Anthroposophy in a conceptual form before we can make the next step.
Then we must learn in a second step to experience Anthroposophy in an inwardly artistic way, that is, transform its thoughts out of our own strength into pictures and imaginations. In this way spiritual science becomes for us a great work of art, a mighty drama which embraces the whole world, which is far more magnificent than for example Goethe's
Faust or Dante's
Divine Comedy and which above all has the quality that we do not merely observe it on the stage as spectators in comfortable seats but ourselves fully participate in it and are, moreover, the principal actors. By experiencing Anthroposophy in this way, we become capable of passing through the entire fullness of feelings from joy and bliss to grief and despair. And if we have come so far along this path that each time that - in our devotion to the study of Anthroposophy - we are capable of transforming through our own soul-forces the thoughts of spiritual science into living pictures or imaginations which truly take hold of all our feelings and sensations, we shall gradually observe that a wholly new faculty is unfolding within us: the faculty of living in feelings which have developed in complete independence from our physical body.
-Sergei Prokofieff, The Heavenly Sophia and the Being of Anthroposophia