Imagination

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Imagination, in the everyday sense, means the ability to create inner mental images that either recreate an external reality from memory or are the product of pure fantasy. Through spiritual training, imagining can be developed into a higher cognitive ability, which opens the view for higher levels of existence. Ideally, the body-bound sensual qualities are completely stripped away and the imagination passes over into a purely soul-spiritual experience. Imagination, understood in this higher sense, is a psychic consciousness, also called etheric vision, in which the image-consciousness of the Old Moon unites with the present object-consciousness on a higher level.

The concept of a "spiritual eye" in connection with the faculty of imagination goes back at least to Cicero, who speaks of the mentis oculi in his discussion of the appropriate use of the simile by the orator.[1] Cicero is clearly not referring to a real spiritual faculty of perception, such as is only given by the imagination, but to an inner sensual faculty of imagination that is as concrete as possible. He therefore recommends speakers to use vivid images and not those of which one has merely heard, "for the eyes of the mind are more easily directed to the objects which we have seen than to those which we have only heard".[2] In fact, external sensory perception, the inner sensory faculty of imagination and real imagination, which is a non-sensory, purely mental perception, make use of the same mental organ, namely the two-leaved brow chakra, albeit in different ways. When the activity of the two-petalled lotus located between the eyebrows turns inwards, the capacity for external, sensual perception arises. When its "astral tentacles" turn outwards, imagination arises (Lit.:GA 115, p. 54). This gives rise to a self-aware image-consciousness that man will fully develop on the New Jupiter, which will follow the present Earth evolution as the next embodiment of our planetary system. Imagination is a kind of fully conscious, non-dream clairvoyance. Imaginative consciousness begins to light up when the experiences of the astral body are depicted in the etheric body and are thrown back into consciousness through the latter in the form of moving images. True Imaginations are imaginary in the sense that they do not represent a sensory-physical reality, but are the purely mental image of an autonomous spiritual reality.

Bodiless consciousness

In order for the imagination to unfold, consciousness must detach itself from the bodily tool. Forces that are otherwise used up by the body must be turned into the soul:

„No human being knows how his movements, how everything that works there, that he can be an acting human being in the physical outer world, how that comes about and what force works there. Only the spiritual researcher notices this when he comes to so-called imaginative knowledge. There one first makes images which work by drawing stronger forces out of the soul than are otherwise used in ordinary life. Where then does this power come from which unleashes the images of imaginative experience in the soul? It comes from where the forces work that make us an acting human being in the world, that make us move our hands and feet. Because this is the case, one only comes to imagination when one can remain at rest, when one can bring the will of one's body to a standstill, can control it. Then one notices how this power, which otherwise moves the muscles, flows up into the soul-spirit and forms the imaginative images. So one accomplishes a rearrangement of the forces. Down there in the depths of the corporeal is something of our very own being, of which we feel nothing in ordinary life. By eliminating the physical, the spirit that is otherwise expressed in our actions penetrates up into the soul and fills it with what it would otherwise have to use for the physical. The spiritual researcher knows that he must remove from the body that which the body otherwise consumes. For imaginative knowledge, therefore, the bodily must be eliminated.“ (Lit.:GA 150, p. 92f)

Differences and similarities between sensual perception and imagination

In his "Outline of Occult Science" (Lit.:GA 13) Rudolf Steiner writes:

„The impressions which one receives of this world are in some respects still similar to those of the physical-sensuous. Whoever recognises imaginatively will be able to speak of the new higher world in such a way that he describes the impressions as sensations of warmth or cold, perceptions of sound or words, effects of light or colour. For he experiences them as such. But he is aware that these perceptions express something different in the imaginative world from what they do in the sensuous and real world. He recognises that behind them there are not physical-material causes, but spiritual-spiritual causes. If he has something like an impression of warmth, he does not attribute it to a piece of hot iron, for example, but he regards it as the outflow of a mental process such as he has hitherto known only in his inner mental life. He knows that behind imaginative perceptions there are spiritual things and processes, just as behind physical perceptions there are material-physical beings and facts. - In addition to this similarity between the imaginative and the physical world, however, there is a significant difference. There is something in the physical world that appears quite differently in the imaginative. In the physical world, we can observe a continual coming into being and passing away of things, an alternation of birth and death. In the imaginary world, this phenomenon is replaced by a continuous transformation of one into the other. For example, in the physical world one sees a plant perish. In the imaginative world, to the same extent that the plant withers away, the emergence of another form appears, which is physically imperceptible and into which the decaying plant gradually transforms itself. When the plant has disappeared, this structure is fully developed in its place. Birth and death are concepts that lose their meaning in the imaginative world. In their place comes the concept of the transformation of one into the other.- Because this is so, those truths about the nature of man become accessible to imaginative cognition which have been communicated in this book in the chapter "Nature of Humanity". For physical-sensual perception only the processes of the physical body are perceptible. They take place in the "area of birth and death". The other members of human nature: the life body, the sentient body and the I, are subject to the law of transformation, and their perception is opened up to imaginative cognition. He who has advanced to this realisation perceives how that which lives on with death in a different mode of existence dissolves, as it were, out of the physical body.“ (Lit.:GA 13, p. 350f)

Literature
References to the work of Rudolf Steiner follow Rudolf Steiner's Collected Works (CW or GA), Rudolf Steiner Verlag, Dornach/Switzerland, unless otherwise stated.
Email: verlag@steinerverlag.com URL: www.steinerverlag.com.
Index to the Complete Works of Rudolf Steiner - Aelzina Books
A complete list by Volume Number and a full list of known English translations you may also find at Rudolf Steiner's Collected Works
Rudolf Steiner Archive - The largest online collection of Rudolf Steiner's books, lectures and articles in English.
Rudolf Steiner Audio - Recorded and Read by Dale Brunsvold
steinerbooks.org - Anthroposophic Press Inc. (USA)
Rudolf Steiner Handbook - Christian Karl's proven standard work for orientation in Rudolf Steiner's Collected Works for free download as PDF.
  1. ↑ Cicero: De Oratore, Liber III: XLI: 163.
  2. ↑ „Facilius enim ad ea, quae visa, quam ad illa, quae audita sunt, mentis oculi feruntur.“, J. S. Watson (trans. and ed.): Cicero on Oratory and Orators, Harper & Brothers, (New York), 1875: Book III, C.XLI, p.239.
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