Rudolf Steiner, Dornach, Switzerland, November 23, 1923:
...Now, if you expect that it is only necessary to look to right or left and see a cloudy form as your astral body, you will be disappointed, for it does not happen in that way; you must pay attention to what really does occur. What may really occur is, for example, that after a time, through such experiences, you may gradually see the dawn in a new way; you may have a new feeling on seeing a sunrise. Gradually, along this path, you will come to experience the warmth of the dawn as something of a prophetic nature, as if it were announcing something, as if the dawn had a natural prophetic force in itself. You will begin to feel the dawn as spiritually forceful, and you will be able to connect an inner meaning with this prophetic force, so that you get a feeling, which you might at first regard as an illusion, that the dawn is related with your own being. Through such experiences as I have described you may gradually bring yourself into a condition in which you feel when you see the dawn: “The dawn does not leave me alone. It is not merely yonder while I am here; I am inwardly united with this dawn; it is a quality of my own inner feeling. I myself at this moment am the dawn.” When you feel thus united with the dawn so that you yourself experience as it were the color, radiation, and shining, the appearing of the Sun out from the colors and the light, so that in your own heart a Sun arises, as it were, out of the morning glow as a living feeling — then you will also feel as if you yourself are traveling with the Sun over the vault of heaven; you will feel that the Sun does not leave you alone, the Sun is not there while you are here but you feel that your existence extends in a certain sense to the Sun existence and that you travel with the light throughout the day.
If you develop this feeling — which, as we have said, does not come from thinking, for in that way one can only reach man himself — but which we can develop out of memory in the way indicated, when you develop this experience out of your memory, or rather out of the forces of memory, then the things which you perceived formerly with your physical senses begin to wear a different aspect; they begin to be spiritually and psychically transparent. When a man has once attained this feeling of traveling with the Sun, of gaining strength at dawn to go with the Sun, he sees all the flowers of the meadow in a different aspect. The blossoms do not remain passive, showing the yellow or red colors which they have on the surface — but they begin to speak. They speak to our hearts in a spiritual way. The blossoms become transparent. The spiritual part of the plant stirs inwardly, and the blossoming becomes a kind of speaking.
In this way man really unites his soul with the external life of nature, and he thus gains the impression that there is something behind the existence of nature, that the light with which he has united himself is borne by spiritual beings, and in these spiritual beings he gradually comes to recognize the features of that which has been pictured by Anthroposophy.
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