Macrocosm and Microcosm
GA 119: The Greater and Lesser World. Soul Questions, Life Questions, Spirit Questions.
In anthropop circles one often hears the statement that “we all (all humanity) have now crossed the threshold” but the implication is: in a way that is unconscious. This is because, in general, people have not consciously encountered their doppelgänger and then striven toward the Greater Guardian of the threshold.
One of the ways this might be evidenced today include the sensation of extreme pleasure/pain at news events, or events that happen to people we do not know.
For example, Steiner describes this ability to discern truth by feeling actual pleasure or pain at truth and untruth as a step toward heart thinking:
But anyone who wants to develop the immediate feeling of one thing being true and another false, in such a way that the Imaginative world plays a part in the experience, must so, train himself that error causes him actual pain and that the truth also to be encountered in physical life gives him gladness and joy.
To acquire this quality is an exacting process and it is connected with the effort involved in the preparation for entry into the higher worlds. To be indifferent to truth and error is of course more comfortable than to feel pain in face of error and joy in face of truth. There is plenty of opportunity today to feel pain at the foolishness of the contents of many books! Pain and suffering in face of the ugly, the untrue and the evil, even when only in our environment and not actually inflicted on ourselves; pleasure in the beautiful, the true, the good, even when we are not personally concerned—all this forms part of the training for the thinking of the heart.
And one could estimate that this skill has run amuck in the world we live in because it has emerged unconsciously and unobjectively.
Another example of crossing the threshold unconsciously might be the perception of the past as present today, as a kind of space existing at the same time as our current lives.
For the soul-faculty of memory, Time changes into Space as soon as we enter the spiritual world.
Memory has become an essentially new faculty. We see something belonging to the past as though it were still there in the immediate present; the length of time that has elapsed is estimated according to the distance. The past presents itself to the pupil as something placed side by side in space. When this form of memory has been attained, it is actually a reading of events that have remained. This is reading in the Akasha Chronicle; it is a world in which Time has become Space.
This lecture series also clarified the very confusing phrase “Elemental World.” (Or Elementary, in some translations)
To avoid misunderstanding I must here mention that in manuals on Theosophy, the Elementary World is usually called the Astral World; what we call the World of Spirit in there called the lower sphere of Devachan-Lower Devachan. What is there called the higher sphere of Devachan—Arupa-Devachan—is here called the World of Reason.
Finally, this series had the most clarifying explanation of the purpose and mechanism of symbolic meditation (such as the Rose-Cross) in Lecture 8. I’d recommend printing and reading the whole lecture.
