Clairvoyance

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Rudolf Steiner (1915)

Clairvoyance generally refers to the ability of non-sensory perception in the broadest sense. People who possess this ability are called clairvoyants - or seers for short. Clairvoyance in the sense meant by Rudolf Steiner is directed towards the perception of the higher supersensible worlds. Modern clairvoyance is based on the trained ability of imagination, which, unlike the old dream-like clairvoyance, is a fully conscious, purely soul-spiritual perception. This includes in particular reading the Akasha Chronicle, the spiritual world memory, in which, however, one does not directly see the outer sensual events, but the spiritual archetypes from which they have emerged.

Imagination differs from vision, in which imaginatively perceived spiritual phenomena in the astral world are unconsciously transferred to the sensual daytime consciousness and directly sensualised. The heightened sensory-free imaginative consciousness, which is brighter than normal everyday consciousness, also excludes any confusion with mere phantasy, arbitrary imaginings or even hallucinations. The clairvoyant ability is all the more highly and purely developed, the higher realms of the world can thereby be perceived in a purely supersensory way. Imagination also differs from extrasensory perception, as it is also studied in parapsychology. This can refer, as was the case with Swedenborg, for example, to simultaneous but distant events, but also to past or future physical events, in which latter case one speaks of precognition.

Epistemological basis

Johann Gottlieb Fichte
Friedrich Wilhelm Schelling, Painting by Joseph Karl Stieler, 1835
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe,
Idealising oil painting by Joseph Karl Stieler, 1828
Signature
Signature

For Steiner, the starting point of modern self-aware clairvoyance is the observation of thinking, i.e. the intellectual view of one's own thinking activity, through which the I becomes aware of itself, independent of its physical organisation, as a purely spiritual being. Steiner thus ties in directly with the philosophy of German idealism, namely Johann Gottlieb Fichte and Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph Schelling. On 13 January 1881, at 12 midnight, he wrote to his childhood friend Josef Köck in this regard:

„It was the night of 10 to 11 January, during which I did not sleep for a moment. I had been occupied with individual philosophical problems until half past one in the morning, and then I finally threw myself onto my bed; last year, my endeavour was to investigate whether it was true what Schelling said: "We all have a secret, wonderful ability to withdraw from the change of time into our innermost self, stripped of everything that came from outside, and there, under the form of immutability, to look at the eternal in us. I believed and still believe that I have discovered this innermost faculty quite clearly in myself - I had suspected it long ago -; the whole idealistic philosophy now stands before me in an essentially modified form; what is a sleepless night against such a discovery!“ (Lit.:GA 38, p. 13)

Another important foundation of a different kind for Steiner was Johann Wolfgang von Goethe's "Anschauende Urteilskraft" (visual power of judgement), which was directed towards the sensual-supersensory perception of nature and which had led him to the experience of the primordial plant. It is the ideal archetype, the conceptual and at the same time vivid archetype from which all plant species can be imagined to have emerged through modification.

„The archetypal plant becomes the most wonderful creature in the world, which nature itself should envy me for. With this model and the key to it, one can then invent plants into infinity which must be consistent, that is, which, even if they do not exist, could nevertheless exist and are not picturesque or poetic shadows and appearances, but have an inner truth and necessity. The same law will apply to all other living things.“ (Lit.: Goethe's Works WA, p. 203 and 204)

Goethe starts with sensual perception and ends with intellectual perception, which reveals itself with, from and through sensual perception. He devoted his full attention to the immediate sensory impressions; his thinking never strayed far from immediate perception, just as his perceiving was never thoughtless. He writes about this in his essay «Bedeutende Förderung durch ein einziges geistreiches Wort» (Considerable advancement through a single witty word):

„Dr. Heinroth in his Anthropology ... speaks favourably of my nature and activity, indeed he describes my way of proceeding as a peculiar one: namely, that my faculty of thought is objectively active, by which he means that my thinking is not separate from the objects, that the elements of the objects, the views, enter into it and are penetrated by it in the most intimate way, that my viewing is itself a thinking, my thinking a viewing, which method the aforementioned friend does not wish to deny his applause.“ (Lit.: Goethe's Works, p. 77)

Goethe knew only one source of knowledge, the world of experience, in which the objective world of ideas is included. The primal plant is not accessible to discursive, logically deductive thinking, but only to direct, intuitive intellectual contemplation. Immanuel Kant had denied humans such a faculty. Goethe vigorously contradicted this:

„When I tried, if not to penetrate Kant's teaching, to make the best possible use of it, I sometimes thought that the delicious man was proceeding in a mischievously ironic manner, in that he seemed at times to be endeavouring to restrict the faculty of knowledge in the narrowest possible way, and at other times to be pointing with a sideways glance beyond the limits that he himself had drawn. He might have noticed, of course, how presumptuously and foolishly man proceeds when, comfortably equipped with little experience, he immediately and rashly denies and tries to establish something, a whim that runs through his brain, to cancel out the objects. That is why our master restricts his thinker to a reflective discursive power of judgement, forbids him a determining one altogether. Then, however, after he has sufficiently cornered us, even brought us to despair, he decides on the most liberal expressions and leaves it up to us to decide what use we want to make of the freedom that he to some extent allows. In this sense the following passage was most significant to me:

«We can think of an understanding which, because it is not discursive like ours, but intuitive, goes from the synthetic general, the conception of a whole as such, to the particular, that is, from the whole to the parts: Here it is not at all necessary to prove that such an intellectus archetypus is possible, but only that we are led to that idea of an intellectus archetypus in the opposition of our discursive understanding (intellectus ectypus), which is in need of images, and the contingency of such a constitution, that this also contains no contradiction.»

It is true that the author here seems to point to a divine intellect, but if in the moral, through faith in God, virtue and immortality, we are to raise ourselves into an upper region and approach the first being: so it might well be the same case in the intellectual that, by beholding an ever-creating nature, we made ourselves worthy of spiritual participation in its productions. After all, if I had first unconsciously and out of an inner urge restlessly pushed towards that archetypal, typical thing, if I had even succeeded in building up a representation in keeping with nature, then nothing could now prevent me from courageously passing through the adventure of reason, as the old man from Königsberg himself calls it.“ (Lit.: Goethe's Works, p. 91)

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.
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