и, таким образом, не может сделать необходимых усилий, чтобы стать одно с ним. But in this effort lies the effectiveness - for cognitive forces, and not in unity with contain the tempo of immersion as such.
One can also reach the supersensible in another way. vision. Some people, thanks to all their predisposition to inner deepening, can achieve fiery experiences. Through this the forces of supersensible cognition can be liberated in their souls. Soие силы могут нередко как бы внезапно сказываться в душах, казалось бы, отнюдь не предназначенных к такого рода переживаниям. The supersensible life of the soul can manifest itself in the most varied ways; but such an experience, which controls the soul, as a person controls himself in his ordinary life of external senses, can only be reached by embarking on the described path of knowledge. Any other breakthrough of the supersensible world in the Experiences of the soul will lead to the fact that the Experiences will, as it were, forcibly manifest themselves, and the person will be lost in them or indulge in all sorts of delusions about their value or their true significance in the actual supersensible world.
It must always be borne in mind that the soul changes on the path of supersensible cognition. It may happen that you are not at all inclined to indulge in all sorts of delusions and illusions of the life of the world of the external senses; but as soon as you enter the supersensible world, you most gullibly give yourself over to such delusions and illusions. And it may also happen that in the being of the external senses you have a good, healthy feeling. truth which tells you that you must not believe that which only satisfies your self-affirmation, and in spite of this such a soul may come to see in the supersensible world only things which correspond to this self-affirmation. "self-affirmation participates in everything you see. You see what it turns to according to its inclination. You do not know that it is it that directs the spiritual gaze. And then it goes without saying that you take what you see for the truth. Protection can only be provided by that which, through stubborn turning thoughts on yourself, through an energetic will to self-knowledge, you will gain more and more on the way to supersensiblenatural knowledge, the readiness to really notice in your soul how much self-affirmation it has and when it speaks. And when, in inner immersion, you mercilessly and energetically imagine the possibility for your own soul here or there to fall under this self-affirmation, then you begin to gradually free yourself from its guidance.
For true For the unhindered movement of the soul in the higher worlds, it is necessary for it to assimilate for itself the view of how different the relationship of certain spiritual properties to the spiritual world and to the world of the senses. This becomes especially clear when one looks at the moral properties of the soul. In sensual being, one must distinguish between the laws of nature and the laws of morality. If you want to explain the course of natural phenomena, you cannot refer to moral ideas. Some poisonous plant is explained according to the laws of nature and is not morally condemned because it is poisonous. It is easy to understand that, as applied to the animal world, one can only speak of echoes of the moral, but that in the true sense, a moral assessment would only introduce confusion into what is truly to be considered here. Only in the interrelationships of human life does a moral judgment about the value of being begin to acquire significance. This judgment is something on which man himself constantly makes his dignity dependent, when he reaches the point that he judges himself impartially. But no one, with a correct examination of sensible being, can come up with the idea of ​​looking at the laws of nature as something similar to moral laws, or even just similar to them.
As soon as you enter the higher worlds, it becomes different. The more spiritual the worlds you enter, the more the moral laws coincide with what can be called the laws of nature for those worlds. In sensuous existence, when you speak of some evil deed, that it burns in your soul, you realize that you are not speaking in the direct sense for this existence. You know that natural combustion is something completely different. Such a distinction does not exist for the supersensible worlds. Hatred or envy are there at the same time forces acting in such a way that the corresponding actions can be called natural phenomena of those worlds. Hatred and envy cause the hateful or envious being to act on the hater or envious person in a devouring, extinguishing way, as it were, so that annihilation processes occur that damage the spiritual being. Love acts in the spiritual worlds in such a way that its action is perceived as a radiation of heat, fruitful and favorable. You can see it already. human elemental body. In the world of external senses, the hand that commits immorality business must be explained according to the laws of nature in exactly the same way as that which serves moral activity. But some elemental parts of a person remain undeveloped if there are no moral sensations corresponding to them. And the imperfect formations of elemental organs must be explained from moral properties in exactly the same way that according to the laws of nature in sensual existence, natural processes are explained from the laws of nature. But one can never conclude on the basis of the imperfect development of the sensory organ about the imperfect disclosure of the corresponding part in the elemental body. We must always be aware that for different worlds there are quite different types of laws. Human может обладать несовершенно развитым физическим органом; the corresponding elemental organ can be not only normally perfect, but even perfect to the extent that the physical one is imperfect.
The difference between the supersensible and the sensible worlds is also significant in everything that is connected with the representation of "beautiful" and "ugly". How these concepts are applied in sensible existence loses all significance as soon as one enters the supersensible worlds. “Beautiful,” if we have in mind the meaning of this word in sensible being, can be called there only such a being who succeeds in revealing to other beings of his world everything that he experiences in himself, so that these other beings could participate in everything of his world. experience. The ability to open up completely, with everything that is inside, and not have the need to hide anything in oneself, this is what could be called "beautiful" in the higher worlds. And what is understood there completely coincides with complete frankness, with an honest, open living out of what a given being contains in itself. What could be called “ugly” is that which does not want to reveal the inner content that it possesses in an external phenomenon, which retains its experience in itself and, in relation to some properties, is hidden from others. Soое существо устраняет себя из своей духовной среды. This concept coincides with the untruthful revelation of oneself. To lie and to be ugly in the spiritual world are, as a reality, one and the same, so that a being that is ugly is also a lying being.
Soже и то, что в чувственном бытии познаешь как желания, в духовном мире является в совсем different meaning. In the spiritual world there are no such desires that arise in the world of external senses from the inner nature of the human soul.
What can be called desire there is ignited by what you see outside your being. A being forced to feel that it does not have some property which by its nature it ought to possess, sees another being which has this property. And it is absolutely impossible for him not to have this creature constantly in front of him. Just as in the world of external senses the eye naturally sees what is seen, so the absence of some property invariably brings the being of the supersensible world into closeness with the corresponding other being, the possessor of this perfection. And the contemplation of this being becomes a constant reproach, acting as a true force, so that a being possessing a given defect, through such contemplation, receives a desire to correct this defect in itself. This is an experience of a very different kind than desire in sensible being. Free will in the spiritual world does not suffer damage from such circumstances. The being may resist what it wants to evoke in it such contemplation. Then it will gradually achieve that it will move away from intimacy with such a prototype being. But the consequence of this will be that such a being, which removes its prototype from itself, will itself be transferred to worlds where it will have worse conditions of existence than those that were given to it in that world for which it was predestined to a certain extent.
All this shows the human soul that with the entry into the supersensible worlds, the world of human ideas must be transformed. Concepts must be changed, expanded, and fused with others if you want to describe the supersensible world correctly. From this it follows that descriptions of the supersensible worlds, which use without any further changes the concepts created for sensible existence, always contain something untenable. It may be admitted that when in sensible existence one