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Spiritual Science

Deep Dive Article

Developing Imaginations

and the Imaginative Process

Source: FreeManCreator

Definition

Imaginations are pictures in the mind that contain a multidimensional insight or realization about something, in a way that surpasses the limits of our intellectual thinking and rational understanding. A form of higher knowing or seeing.

Our thinking logic usually approaches any subject from a single dimension and then proceeds sequentially in a process of logic. Reality is much more complex. Therefore in spiritual science any subject is studied from various aspects and perspectives, in a way that does not seek for a simple definition but openly accepts all the perspectives offered as information about the true nature of that subject.

It is a faculty of our mind and consciousness, that we can have realizations at a higher level than our rational thinking. This relates to the clairvoyance at the astral level also called 'imagination', but this however has nothing to do with phantasy. Rather the term is used to describe the language of images, pictures with higher or deeper content than an intellectual thought.

The work of studying spiritual science 'as a soul process' is to do this inner work, fed by not only reading and studying, but also contemplation, meditation, pondering .. living with questions. As a result, one slowly develops the faculty that images flash up whereby one 'sees' in ones mind and thereby 'knows', without actually having thought or received an explanation in our normal language. It is up to the person than to assimilate and integrate the 'vision' and translate in words or picture to try and communicate this insight. Note the use of metaphors, analogies, and images in general can be helpful in doing so, because in those cases too one conveys about higher qualities beyond the specifics of the image used.

Example

Below is an illustration of the sketch jotted down on a piece of paper after the picture emerged in the mind and provided the overall integrative cohesion between different lecture fragments. It is added here as an example of spontaneous imagination whereby the picture arose by itself and it sufficed to put it to paper without any thinking at all.

And here is the refined image:

Development

If one combines the study beyond the intellectual with contemplation and meditation, living with questions and content matter in one's heart and soul, and contemplating in an integrative way multiple perspectives on one subject, one also surpasses the literal or theoretical meaning and rises above that to an imaginative level of grasping or starting to grasp, based on soft fleeting images that one starts to feel arise naturally as a form of fragile embryonal insight. One can sense this is about the same thing, detaching the intellectual conceptual thinking and rising from those fixed or frozen thought forms to the more fluid imaginative astral forms.

RS Lecture 1917-01-20-GA174B

It is difficult to describe these things in words because our language has been coined for the external, physical plane, so we have to exert ourselves when applying it to supersensible conditions. You could say that everything to which we ordinarily apply our understanding lives coarsely, densely in our soul because our brain is always at our disposal and is trained to deal with ideas and concepts relating to the physical plane. But to explain things which do not relate to the physical plane we have to exert our soul to such an extent that, when we study spiritual science, our brain plays an ever-decreasing part.

When we experience difficulties in understanding what spiritual science gives us, this is only because our brain impedes our understanding. Our brain is adjusted and adapted to the coarse concepts of the physical plane and we have to exert ourselves to acquire the subtler concepts — subtler only in so far as human comprehension is concerned — of the spiritual world. This exertion is entirely healthy, it is certainly good, because with spiritual science we then live in our soul in a new way, quite different from that required by physical knowledge and understanding and ideas. We transport ourselves into a world of mobile, subtle pictures and ideas, and that is significant.

It is possible for all of you to be aware of the point at which you are sufficiently within the sphere where the etheric body more or less lives on its own, using the brain only in faint vibrations. lt is the point at which you begin to feel that you no longer have to exert yourself to think the thoughts given by spiritual science, in the way in which you have to exert yourself to think everyday thoughts.

You know very well that you yourself make the thoughts which you think about everyday matters on the physical plane; you develop the concepts in accordance with the daily requirements and conditions of life, in accordance with sympathies and antipathies and with whatever is prepared by your senses and by your brain-bound understanding.

With spiritual science, however, once you really enter into it, you will begin to sense: I have not thought all this myself; it has already been thought before I think it; it is floating there as a thought and merely enters into me. When you begin to feel: This is floating in the objective thinking of the universe and merely enters into me — then you will have won a great deal. You will have experienced a relationship to that delicate etheric, floating and weaving world in which your soul lives. After that it is really only a matter of time, though it might be quite a long time, before you gradually enter that sphere which we share with those among the dead with whom we are karmically linked.

Personal Note

When one receives an imaginative insight, the 'light goes on' and one feels it in the heart and also somewhere in the back of your mind. But then immediately one is also aware of the problem. Now how to convey 'what this was'? Because one is consciously aware of the gap with other people, the so many things that are in our soul and that we come to 'know', and then what happened when so many of these pieces, even without being complete, still showed the picture of what it was all about, how it really was and is. As described this is far from an intellectual process, but immediately afterwards one tries to lay out the puzzle pieces so as to be able to show others. Yet the light that went on, and what one saw, one cannot share. Not this way.

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