Time, Space, and Thought-Forms

Rudolf Steiner: The Man and His Vision, is a short book published in 1985 by Colin Wilson in which he reviews the life of Rudolf Steiner. It contains an important observation about time and space.

That observation was also made by the mystics TC Lethbridge and Richard Wagner, which Wilson discussed in another book, his 1971 book The Occult.

The observation is this:

In the spiritual realms, time stands still, whereas in the physical realm, space stands still.

Time is a perpetual “now” in the spiritual realms. In the physical realms, time keeps moving and space stands still, like when we look at a tree, then look away, it will still be there when we look back, but time will have moved on. Space is the thing which moves in the spiritual realm.

Wagner said (when visiting the spiritual realms in an out-of-body state) that “time here becomes space”.  TC Lethbridge said the physical world was like a museum, where all events are preserved, but this is not so in the spiritual realms.

Much of Wilson’s work relates to our human ability, when tapped, to step outside everyday consciousness and experience what Maslow called ‘the peak experience’, and this is a feature of Steiner’s writings which appealed to Wilson.

Wilson felt that if we can discover the “inner world” that was Steiner’s primary focus, and not let the daily grind of life, the triviality of everydayness, drag us down we can experience heightened feelings of happiness.

Those brief glimpses of what Abraham Maslow calls “the peak experience”, or the feeling of happiness that Marcel Proust experienced when he tasted the cake dipped in tea, which he described in his work In Search of Lost Time (“I had ceased to feel mediocre, accidental, mortal…”) make all the physicality we have to go through, before we return to our spirit realm home, worthwhile. 

Steiner maintained that the inner world was our natural home, and if we focused on our thought-forms, relaxing deeply, we can easily access this inner world. Most people are far to occupied by survival to get anywhere near their inner world though.

Steiner said there was no such thing as an “unintentional mental act”. You could have an unintentional physical act, like slipping in the snow and falling on your back, but you couldn’t have an unintentional mental act. When you think about something, that thought is intentional, not accidental. 

A final, extremely important, observation is made by Wilson in his biography of Steiner. This related to Steiner’s personal vision (which derives from Steiner’s work An Outline of Occult Science), and is an important step in an individual understanding that he or she is a multidimensional being.

Steiner wrote:

“All occult science is born from two thoughts…first, that behind the visible world there is another, invisible world, which is hidden from the senses; secondly, that it is possible for man to penetrate into that unseen world by developing certain faculties dormant within him”. 

This is the direction we should all be trying to travel along.

31 October 2022

[Book review: Colin Wilson – “Rudolf Steiner: The Man and His Vision”]