When I read the reviews in the German papers of Rudolf Steiner read, I asked myself, What have I owe to the "great spiritual scientist" to mean? And how would I describe my relationship with him? I will try to answer both questions.
I Rudolf Steiner's work on the drug to know. I was twenty years old, like smoking hashish and marijuana, experimented with LSD and other hallucinogens, modest, and was generally interested in "extraordinary" experience. With my curiosity was hallucinogenic reflects mostly a love for the English Romantic poets: Blake, Wordsworth, Coleridge, Shelley, Keats ... I was interested in burning the biography of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, who had become dependent on laudanum.
One of my former teachers cared about me and gave me a book by Rudolf Steiner: "How to Know Higher Worlds." The contents of the book struck me deeply. The author spoke of spiritual worlds and corresponding end experiences that I immediately recognized. Steiner made me a question and a new perspective on the world that have shaped my life more critical.
the question is: the "extraordinary" experiences that I was concerned as strong, just as "by" strange "substances conjured illusions' to view or apply it to real "spiritual" events, even if they represent these processes be adjusted? The question is a very big issue, especially when it detaches them from drugs. It affects basically the status of our ideas, fantasies and imaginations. I found in Steiner, a relative of Coleridge, who said that our imaginative powers are a continuation of the divine creative forces on earth.
makes in his book Rudolf Steiner clearly that lie dormant in every human skills that are sovereign - that is, without outside help, for example, without drugs - in go to the spiritual world. This claim by me at the time Steiner has given the power to take my leave of the hallucinogens. Because my desires in this regard were really big back then, it seems to me afterwards to say no exaggeration: I owe my life Rudolf Steiner.
And I owe him a discourse that at me at that time employed to this day. If I renounce the idea that the images that come to me again and again, are all illusions, the question arises: What is the life when I take these ideas seriously? You could also say different: What it really means to take dreams and fantasies seriously?
After forty years I can say: Rudolf Steiner was right when he wrote that he called "spiritual" world, a kind of "order" is based - I can think of a better word right now - you can gradually get to know . The order could be so convincing that the idea that they are based only on illusions, loses its power. It is as if you walk around in a rain forest is, and always sees the same trees, plants, animals and insects, and then get to hear: the rain forest does not exist! You can
the rain forest but only really get to know when one goes into it. The "system" convincing only if it is to experience. I consider "looking again" this this "always find an access code", this "I always find new in the speechlessness-the-spirit" as a vital enrichment of my life.
Rudolf Steiner also said much and done, I do not understand, sometimes can not understand it. I maintain, however, not to be able to assess his personality and his work in depth, I suppose, however, the freedom to distance myself from a couple of things. His statements about the "yellow", "red" and "black" races, for example, find I embarrassingly wrong. And yes, I too think that these statements are dismissing as insignificant.
Rudolf Steiner in his right mind with passion and daring as an artist-researcher in the world of the unspeakable, and he has tried to find words for things and processes, feel a lot of people without access to them. The manner in which he has devoted to this task is to me a great example. And the way he has sometimes been misunderstood tragic to me a pain that binds me friendly with him.
