The Way of Initiation; or, How to Attain Knowledge of the Higher Worlds — John Shaqi
The Way of Initiation; or, How to Attain Knowledge of the Higher WorldsSteiner, Rudolf
Religion
The Way of Initiation; or, How to Attain Knowledge of the Higher Worlds
Steiner, Rudolf
Theosophy
There are such laws also in the world of thought and feeling, but there
they cannot impose themselves upon us from without. They must flow out
of the life of the soul itself. We arrive at such a condition when we
forbid ourselves, at all times, to foster wrong thoughts or feelings.
All arbitrary goings to-and-fro, all idle fancies, all accidental
ups-and-downs of emotion must be forbidden in the same way. But, in so
doing, let it not be thought that we bring about a deficiency of
emotion. On the contrary, if we regulate our inner life in this manner,
we shall speedily find ourselves rich in feelings and in genuine
creative imagination. In place of a mere chaos of petty feelings and
fantastic trains of thought, there appear significant emotions, and
thoughts that are fruitful, and it is emotions and thoughts of this
kind that lead a man to "orientation in the higher world." He has
entered into the right condition for the things of that world, and they
entail for him definite consequences. Just as a physical man finds his
way between physical things, so, too, his path now leads him straight
between the _growing_ and the _fading_, which he has already come to
know in the way described above. For he follows all processes of
growing and flourishing, (and, on the other hand, of withering and
decaying) that is necessary for his own and the world's prosperity.
The occult student has also to bestow a further care on the world of
_sound_. He must discriminate between the tones which are produced
from the so-called inert (lifeless) bodies (for example, a bell, a
musical instrument, or a falling mass), and those which proceed from a
living creature (an animal or a person). He who hears the striking of a
bell will receive the sound and attach to it a certain sensation, but
he who hears the cry of an animal will, in addition to this sensation,
become aware that the sound reveals also an inward experience of the
animal, either of pain or of pleasure. The student is concerned with
the latter aspect of the sound. He must concentrate his whole attention
upon it, so that the sound reveals to him something that lies outside
of his own soul, and, more than this, must merge himself in this
exterior thing. He must closely connect his own emotion with the
pleasure or pain communicated to him by means of the sound, and must
care nothing whether the sound be pleasant or unpleasant to him,
welcome or not; his soul must be filled with only that which proceeds
from the creature out of whom the sound has come. He who systematically
and deliberately performs such exercises will develop within himself
the faculty of intermingling, as it were, with the creature from which
the sound proceeded. A person sensitive to music will find it easier to
cultivate his spiritual life in this respect than one who is unmusical,
but no one should think that a mere sense of music will take the place
of this culture.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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