The psycho-spiritual organs, the “lotus flowers,” shape themselves in such
a manner that to clairvoyant consciousness they appear in the vicinity of
particular physical organs of the body of the person undergoing training.
From among these psycho-spiritual organs the following should be
enumerated: that which is to be perceived between the eye-brows is the
so-called two-petalled lotus flower; that in the region of the larynx is
the sixteen-petalled lotus; in the region of the heart is to be found the
twelve-petalled lotus flower and the fourth is near the navel. Others
appear in close conjunction with other parts of the physical body.(31)
The lotus flowers are formed in the astral body, and by the time one or
the other has developed, we become conscious of them. We then feel that we
can make use of them, and that by doing so we really enter a higher world.
The impressions received of that world still resemble in many respects
those of the physical senses; and one with imaginative cognition will be
able to designate the new higher world as impressions of heat or cold,
perceptions of sound or words, effects of light or color—because it is in
this way that he perceives them. He is, however, conscious of the fact
that these perceptions express something different in the imaginative
world from what they do in the actual sense-world; and he recognizes that
behind them lie causes which are not physical, but psycho-spiritual ones.
Should he receive an impression of heat he will not, for instance,
attribute this to a piece of hot iron, but will regard it as the emanation
of some soul-process, which he has hitherto experienced only with his
soul’s inner life. He knows that behind imaginative experiences exist
psycho-spiritual things and processes just as behind physical perceptions
we have physical entities and material facts.
And yet this similarity, apparent between the world of imagination and the
physical world, is modified by one important difference. There is
something present in the physical world which, when met in the imaginative
world, bears quite another appearance. In the former we are aware of a
perpetual ebb and flow, an alternation between birth and death. But in the
imaginative world there appears, in place of this phenomenon, a continual
metamorphosis of the one into the other. In the physical world we see, for
instance, how a plant fades away, but in the imaginative world there
emerges, in proportion as the plant fades, another form, not physically
discernible, into which the withering plant is gradually transformed. When
once the plant has faded away completely, this form will have become fully
developed in its place. Birth and death are conceptions which lose their
value in the imaginative world, making way for a comprehension of the
transmutation of the one into the other.
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