--| What Befall Us |----- "That which is in a man, not that which lies beyond his vision is the main factor in what is about to befall him: the operation upon him is the event." (George Macdonald, from "Lillith", chapter XVI, 1895). As the thoughts move in the mind of a man, so move the worlds of men and women in the mind of God... the offspring of his imagination. Man is but a thought of God... a man no more creates the forms by which he would reveal his thoughts, than he creates those thoughts themselves. For what are the forms by means of which a man may reveal his thoughts? Are they not those of nature? But although he is created in the closest sympathy with these forms, yet even these forms are not born in his mind. What springs there is the perception that this or that form is already an expression of this or that phase of thought or of feeling. FOR THE WORLD AROUND HIM IS AN OUTWARD FIGURATION OF THE CONDITION OF HIS MIND; an inexhaustible storehouse of forms whence he may choose exponents -- the crystal pitchers that shall protect his thought and not need to be broken that the light may break forth. The meanings are in those forms already, else they could be no garment of unveiling. God has made the world that it should thus serve his creature, developing in the service that imagination whose necessity it meets. The man has but to light the lamp within the form: his imagination is the light, it is not the form. Straightway the shining thought makes the form visible, and becomes itself visible through the form... But let a man become aware of some new movement within him. Loneliness comes with it, for he would share his mind with his friend, and he cannot; he is shut up in speechlessness. Thus He may live a man forbid Weary sevennights nine times nine, or the first moment of his perplexity may be that of his release. Gazing about him in pain, he suddenly beholds the material form of his immaterial condition. There stands his thought! God thought it before him, and put its picture there ready for him when he wanted it. Or, to express the thing more prosaically, the man cannot look around him long without perceiving some form, aspect, or movement of nature, some relation between its forms, or between such and himself which resembles the state or motion within him. This he seizes as the symbol, as the garment or body of his invisible thought, presents it to his friend, and his friend understands him... For the world is--allow us the homely figure--the human being turned inside out. All that moves in the mind is symbolized in Nature. Or, to use another more philosophical, and certainly not less poetic figure, the world is a sensuous analysis of humanity, and hence an inexhaustible wardrobe for the clothing of human thought. Take any word expressive of emotion--take the word emotion itself--and you will find that its primary meaning is of the outer world. In the swaying of the woods, in the unrest of the 'wavy plain,' the imagination saw the picture of a well-known condition of the human mind; and hence the word emotion. (George MacDonald, The Imagination: Its Function and its Culture, First published 1867 in a Dish of Orts.) -- hmmm...this correlates well to something steiner said about twenty years later. macdonald had it first; but he had it in the imaginative consciousness, while steiner brought the imaginative consciousness to clear conscious knowing. compare macdonald's statements with the following passage by steiner: Steiner on the Essential Nature of Knowledge "Therefore, what is said in this writing about the essential nature of knowledge holds good also for the knowledge of the spiritual worlds, with which my later writings are concerned. The sense-world in its manifestation to human perception is not reality. It possesses its reality in connection with that which reveals itself in man in the form of thought concerning this sense-world. Thoughts belong to the reality of the sensibly perceived; only, that which is present in the sense-existence as thought manifests itself, not externally in this existence, but inwardly in man. But thought and sense-perception are a single essence. While man enters the world in sense-perception, he separates thought from reality; but the thought merely manifests itself in another place within the mind. The separation between percept and thought possesses no significance for the objective world; it occurs only because man takes up a position in the midst of existence. It is to him that this appearance thus occurs, as if thought and percept were twofold. Nor is it otherwise in the case of spiritual perception. When this occurs by reason of processes in the soul which I have described in my more recent book Knowledge of the Higher World and Its Attainment, this then forms likewise one aspect of (spiritual) existence; and the corresponding thoughts of the spiritual form the other aspect. A difference occurs only to this extent, that sense-perception reaches its consummation through thought in reality, as it were, in an upper direction at the beginning of the spiritual; whereas spiritual perception is experienced in its true being from this beginning downward. The fact that the experience of sense-perception occurs through the senses formed by Nature, and that of the perception of the spiritual through spiritual organs of perception, first formed in a psychic manner, does not constitute a distinction in principle." (Rudolf Steiner, from a footnote in: The Theory of Knowledge Implicit in Goethe's World Conception", 1886). -- Related Articles: - Tibetan Book of the Dead SUBMIT AN ARTICLE posted: february 1, 2000 last updated: may 3, 2004