Christianity as Mystical Fact, and the Mysteries of AntiquitySteiner, Rudolf
Religion
Christianity as Mystical Fact, and the Mysteries of Antiquity
Steiner, Rudolf
Anthroposophy; Christianity and other religions; Mysteries, Religious; Mysticism
There is another way of being connected with things. A person who
clings to the kind of reality described above will hardly understand
it, but it comes to certain people at some moment in their lives. To
them the whole connection with the world is completely reversed. They
then call the images which well up in the spiritual life of their
souls actually real, and they assign only a lower kind of reality to
what the senses hear, touch, feel, and see. They know that they
cannot prove what they say, that they can only relate their new
experiences, and that when relating them to others they are in the
position of a man who can see and who imparts his visual impressions
to one born blind. They venture to impart their inner experiences,
trusting that there are others round them whose spiritual eyes, though
as yet closed, may be opened by the power of what they hear. For they
have faith in humanity and want to give it spiritual sight. They can
only lay before it the fruits which their spirit has gathered. Whether
another sees them, depends on his spiritual eyes being opened or not.
There is something in man which at first prevents him from seeing with
the eyes of the spirit. He is not there for that purpose. He is what
his senses are, and his intellect is only the interpreter and judge of
them. The senses would ill fulfil their mission if they did not insist
upon the truth and infallibility of their evidence. An eye must, from
its own point of view, uphold the absolute reality of its perceptions.
The eye is right as far as it goes, and is not deprived of its due by
the eye of the spirit. The latter only allows us to see the things of
sense in a higher light. Nothing seen by the eye of sense is denied,
but a new brightness, hitherto unseen, radiates from what is seen. And
then we know that what we first saw was only a lower reality. We see
that still, but it is immersed in something higher, which is spirit.
It is now a question of whether we realise and feel what we see. One
who lives only in the sensations and feelings of the senses will look
upon impressions of higher things as a Fata Morgana, or mere play of
fancy. His feelings are entirely directed towards the things of sense.
He grasps emptiness when he tries to lay hold of spirit forms. They
withdraw from him when he gropes after them. They are just "mere"
thoughts. He thinks them, but does not live in them. They are images,
less real to him than fleeting dreams. They rise up like bubbles while
he is standing in his reality; they disappear before the massive,
solidly built reality of which his senses tell him.
It is otherwise with one whose perceptions and feelings with regard to
reality have changed. For him that reality has lost its absolute
stability and value. His senses and feelings need not become numbed,
but they begin to be doubtful of their absolute authority. They leave
room for something else. The world of the spirit begins to animate the
space left.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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