Crossing the Threshold

 

Rudolf Steiner:

My dear sisters and brothers, the description of the spiritual path which leads from the sunny, light-filled world in which we live on earth appears on the other side of the yawning abyss of being at first as a gloomy, night-cloaked darkness. The path which leads us to where we become aware that, when we seek our own being in all that lives in the depths, flows in the air, all that creeps and flies, in all that our senses perceive in the majestic glow of the stars, in the powerful depths of universal space, in the immeasurably distant flow of time, that all that does not contain our being, the true source of our humanity, that it becomes gloomy when we look here for our humanity. The description has led us thus far to show that we must find the way past the Guardian of the Threshold, who has told us so much about the meaning of the spiritual world, over to what is still night-cloaked, black gloom, so that it can become bright there, and in this brightness the light arise to illumine before the eyes of our soul our own being, and therewith the being and essence and interweaving of the world.

It must be clear to us that in the moment - and we have come so far in the description - when we have crossed over the abyss of being, past the Guardian of the Threshold, in that moment an important change takes place in the human being, that is, in ourselves.

Let us look, my dear sisters and brothers, at our human existence as it is between birth and death on earth: we grasp the world thinking, we grasp the world feeling, we act in the world by willing. But thinking, feeling and willing are interwoven in our human earthly existence. If we want to carry out something in the near future, we consider it first, so what we carry out is already present as a seed in our thoughts. We see it flowing out in impulses of will. We feel that it is worthy. We feel love flowing to this or that being. Because we feel it, we form a thought about it. Or we go beyond that and carry out a deed of love towards the being, we let ourselves grow wings of love, and are urged forward to willing. But all that – thinking, feeling, willing – is closely related to our humanity as it unfolds between birth and death in the physical world. We are at one in thinking, feeling and willing.

And the truth is that we are only really awake in our thoughts. They are bright and clear, although the Guardian of the Threshold had revealed them to be illusory. They are bright and clear, we are awake in them.

Our feeling is darker and less clear. We are closer to existence in feeling, but the content of what we feel is like a dream, so that we can only speak of dream-feeling, even when awake.

The will, however, as it emerges from our being, remains at first completely unclear to our normal consciousness. We have the thought that we want this or that; the thought appears, grasps the organism; the organism acts, carries out the thought; we see what we have carried out, again with thought. But the will itself rests in deep sleep, as do the things in our soul rest between falling asleep and awakening.

But the initiate sees the thoughts in their living state, which they were in before the human being had descended from the supersensible world to the sensory one. He sees radiant being in the thoughts. But this radiant being he sees is not the illusion of thoughts as in ordinary thinking.

We stand beside the Guardian of the Threshold. The abyss of being is there; before us – beyond the abyss, beyond the threshold – is the black, night-cloaked gloom; but from out of the darkness gleaming, living shapes are moving. We say to ourselves – because we sense that the kind of thoughts we had as physical persons have abandoned us – we say to ourselves: There is our flowing, living thinking. It doesn't belong to us now, it belongs to the world. Light on light, thought extracts itself from the black gloom. We know that thought, all our thinking, is there as the first brightness within the black gloom that we are approaching.

And then we see something further down. We have the feeling – and the Guardian of the Threshold points to it with an admonishing gesture – we see how the darkness below is becoming fire-like. Fire, dark fire yes, but fire that we can sense psychically, spreads out below us. What we recognize as our willing comes towards us over the abyss of being. The initiate gradually learns the following: What happens when thinking merges with willing? The thought – of what is wanted – is grasped; then this thought merges with corporeality as beneficent fire. What brings the will to existence is warmth, which is fire when our own will meets us from out of the darkness.

And between this warmth, from which our willing streams toward us across the abyss of being (for our human will is a mere reflection of our cosmic will) – between this warm, dark out-streaming from below, which has at most a whiff of bluish-violet, and the bright lights of thoughts above, between both there is an interweaving, flowing warmth rising, light descending. Light-enveloped warmth rising, warmth-enveloped light streaming down: that is our feeling.

It is a powerful picture which the Guardian of the Threshold draws. And now we know that when we cross over from the sensory world, from the world of physical reality in which we are between birth and death, into the world of the spirit, then we will be – in thinking, feeling and willing – no longer the unity that we are here; there we are Three. In the universe we are Three: our thinking merges with light across the threshold; our will becomes fire; our feeling becomes light-enveloped fire.

We must have the courage to expand and intensify the Self, the I, so that it holds the Three together when we cross over. 

Source: Recapitulation Lesson #6, September 17, 1924

Southern Cross Review, issue #130. Translation by Frank Thomas Smith.