This being the case, those truths concerning which we have already made certain communications in an earlier chapter of this book (see Chapter II, “The Nature of Man”) become accessible to the imaginative perception. Physical sense-perception is able to perceive only what takes place in the physical body, processes which are enacted within the “domain of birth and death.” The other principles of man’s being, namely, the etheric or vital body, the sentient body, and the ego, are subject to the law of transmutation, and the perception of them is unlocked by imaginative cognition. Any one who has advanced this far will observe that that which lives on under other conditions of being after death, detaches itself from the physical body. But development does not come to a standstill within the imaginative world. Anyone who would like to remain stationary in it, would, it is true, be able to note the entities in process of transmutation, but he would be unable to interpret the meaning of these processes of change. He would not be in a position to find his way about in this newly attained world. For the imaginative world is a realm of unrest—there is naught in it but movement and change; nowhere are there stationary points. Such points of rest are reached only by the person who, having transcended the stage of imaginative knowledge, has attained to that grade of development known to occult science as “understanding through inspiration.” It is not necessary for one seeking knowledge of the supersensible world to develop his capacities so that the imaginative cognition should have been acquired in full measure, before moving on to the stage of “inspiration.” His exercises may, indeed, be so regulated that two processes may go on simultaneously, one leading to imagination and the other to inspiration. The student will then in due time enter a higher world, in which he not only perceives, but where he can also find his way about, as it were, and which he becomes able to interpret. Progress, as a rule, consists in the occult student perceiving some apparitions of the imaginative world and becoming conscious, after a while, that he is beginning to get his bearings.