How can we best communicate spiritual truths?
From an anonymous review of an anthroposophical book, comes the following comment:
“...like many Anthroposophists, [the author] seems to have the unfortunate tendency of stating speculation or psychic impression as if it is undisputed fact.”
Does this ‘tendency’ only alienate others? Should we soften our expression of spiritual communications into the garden of personal belief or opinion? Or does such softening deny the essence of what we are standing for? Should we adopt the discipline of writing that our statements are the result of introspection, spiritual insight, personal converse, or reading? Despite the criticism quoted above, the reviewer recommended the book as worth reading.
In my experience the communication of spiritual knowledge works actively in the one who receives it, connecting me with its origins and drawing me closer to the realms of spirit. As a word connects us to the appropriate concept, so spirit truths connect us to spirit beings. As our words open the door from individual to individual, so spirit truths open the door from humanity to other spirit beings.
Our memories are laid down in our physiology. What we remember is the result of a communication received into the physical body. Spiritual truth enters our soul and inhabits it actively. It powerfully resurrects the deathly grip of materialistic thinking into a creative liveliness and active enrichment of our capacity to contribute to the evolution of our world. My mind frequently tries to tame the ‘intruder’ and force it to fit into my internal landscape. Yet spirit communications more often than not renovate soul-habit landscape quite radically before they settle down to inhabit my soul. Spirit truths transform the quality of what I do, and thrive if I can act out of love of the other through love of rendering good service.
While the supersensible Thinking leads to a self-consciousness independent of the power of Memory which is bound to the bodily nature, the supersensible Willing comes to life in such a way as to be permeated through and through by a spiritualised faculty of Love. It is this faculty of Love which enables the supersensible self-consciousness of man to perceive and grasp the supersensible external world. Thus the power of supersensible knowledge is established by a self-consciousness which eliminates the ordinary Memory and lives in the intuitive perception of the spiritual world through the power of Love made spiritual.
– Rudolf Steiner
(http://wn.rsarchive.org/Articles/SupKno_index.html [1])
Could I have wriiten this more effectively? What does the reader feel? Do these words convey the message that I intended? Are my thoughts here purely an imitation or reproduction of Steiner's views?
Anthroposophical Leading Thought (2)
Anthroposophy communicates knowledge that is gained in a spiritual way. Yet it only does so because everyday life, and the science founded on sense-perception and intellectual activity, lead to a barrier along life's way — a limit where the life of the soul in man would die if it could go no farther. Everyday life and science do not lead to this limit in such a way as to compel man to stop short at it. For at the very frontier where the knowledge derived from sense perception ceases, there is opened through the human soul itself the further outlook into the spiritual world.
– Rudolf Steiner
(http://wn.rsarchive.org/Books/GA026/English/RSP1973/GA026_a01.html [2])