Knowledge of the Higher Worlds

Most manuals of spiritual training open with a technique: a breath to count, a posture to hold, a symbol to picture. Steiner opens with a feeling. Before any exercise, he says, the student has to begin with an attitude of the soul, which he names the Path of Veneration.

That is a strange place to start a book about perceiving higher worlds. You might expect him to sharpen the reader's attention first and ask about her heart later. He does the reverse, and he is blunt about it: only someone who holds this attitude can become a student at all.

He also insists the door is open to anyone. This knowledge, in his image, is no more a secret than writing is to someone who has not yet learned to read. What decides who enters is not talent or luck. It is whether this attitude is there.

Steiner offers a small test you can run on your own memory. Have you ever stood outside the door of someone you deeply admired, about to go in for the first time, and felt a kind of awe as you pressed the handle?

If so, he says, you have already felt what may become the beginning of discipleship. The room was ordinary. The handle was ordinary. What changed was you: for a moment you were entering a place that mattered more than you did.

He sees the same thing in certain children, the ones who look up to the people they revere without any urge to pick them apart. He calls such emotions a blessing, something to build on, and he means it literally. The whole training is built on top of that feeling.

Where does Steiner place reverence in his training?

• At the very end, as the reward for years of exercises
• Off to the side, as an extra for more devout students
• In the middle, once the student has found a teacher
• At the very start, as a condition before any exercise✓Correct answer

Steiner says the student must begin with the Path of Veneration, and that only someone who holds this attitude can become a disciple. Reverence is the ground the exercises stand on, not their prize.

We tend to think of perception as a separate instrument, like a camera that works the same whatever mood its owner is in. Steiner says that picture forgets something simple: "it is the soul which perceives."

And feelings, he goes on, are to the soul what food is to the body. Give the body stones instead of bread and it stops working. Veneration, homage and devotion nourish the soul, and they make it strong above all in its power to perceive. Disrespect, antipathy and belittling starve that power until it withers.

So reverence is not a pleasant extra laid on top of clear sight. In his account, it is what clear sight feeds on.

Now the uncomfortable half. Steiner says that every carping criticism frustrates the soul's powers for higher knowledge, in exactly the measure that heartfelt devotion builds them. His own age, he adds, leans hard the wrong way: children criticise far more than they worship.

But he does not sneer at criticism. He credits the habit of judging, of testing everything and holding fast to what is good, with modern science, commerce, industry and law. Without it we would have none of them.

His point is about price. What we gained in outer culture, he says, we paid for with a matching loss of spiritual life. The student is not asked to reject that culture. He is asked to rebuild inside himself, deliberately, what it quietly took away.

According to Steiner, a habit of criticising other people does not just make you unkind; it actually weakens your ability to perceive higher worlds.

True✓Correct answer

True, and he means it literally rather than as a moral nicety. Every carping criticism, he says, frustrates the soul's powers of higher knowledge in the same measure that heartfelt devotion develops them.