Spiritual Imagination and Spiritual Inspiration

Rudolf Steiner: 

The decision, or the effort of will, . . . leads to the development of an activity that does not exist anywhere in the external physical world, and that very soon reveals itself as the creative activity within our own being, lying beyond the reach of our ordinary consciousness. It is the activity which may be seen in our soul-spiritual being when it works upon our organism by drawing regenerating forces out of its spiritual environment; it is the soul-spiritual core which lives in the spiritual cosmos.

In the next stage, which is technically designated as inspiration, we learn to recognize the soul-spiritual core of our being, and how it lives within the creative forces of the cosmos. Whereas imagination, the first stage of initiation, only led us into our inner being by conjuring up a merely visionary world, the process of inspiration leads us to a higher stage. A flash of light breaks in upon our whole visionary world, something that really seems to come out of the spiritual cosmos, as does conscience, and we observe that it speaks to us in the same way in which conscience speaks to us in our ordinary consciousness. Conscience may be compared to the way in which inspiration speaks to the imaginative consciousness; but then imagination passes over to the stage of inspiration, and we enter a real, supersensible world.

Source: https://martyrion.blogspot.com/2020/12/hello-we-have-been-trying-to-contact.html