Discovering Spiritual Concepts in Nature

Clairvoyance and Observation

“If we want to attain a living understanding of nature, we must become as living and flexible as nature herself.”

- Goethe, 1817, from Goethe 1981, 56

“And thus as we descend the scale of being, Nature speaks to the senses-to known, misunderstood, and unknown senses: so speaks she with herself and to us in a thousand modes. To the attentive observer who is nowhere dead nor silent, she has even a secret agent in inflexible matter, in a metal, the smallest portions of which tell us what is passing in the entire mass." 

- Goethe, Theory of Colours, preface 

What we experience in the world always begins as the outermost surface of things. If it is a flower, we see the light that is rejected by the plant. If it is a green leaf, the plant itself absorbs all the red and rejects the green. We never see the plant itself with our eyes, but an appearance. Similarly, with the human being, we see skin, hair, nails, and teeth–all products that coalesced out of a formerly living process. Anything we can see with our eyes has “died” and become real—its potential has been exhausted and it has become actual. Which also means: what is most dynamically alive is invisible to the eye.

Anything we can sense with our bodies of the outer world is a product that has “fallen” out of the dynamic living world. Sugar, for example, is a bit like salt inasmuch as it belongs to a process that has condensed from subtler forms where it was not yet solidified. The ancient Greek term crystallos means ice. An ancient hypothesis about rock crystals was that they were a kind of water that had become frozen and had remained so that they would no longer thaw at ambient temperatures–considered mythologically, this is not that far from the truth. 

quartz silica was once molten, and by cooling precipitates into crystalline form

If we take this idea seriously, it is as if green plants are red behind the green we see and only reflect green. Conversely, limestone appears white because it rejects all light which hints at its inner dark voracious character. It is as if the world we see is a sort of photonegative of the objects “in themselves.”¹ Of course, plants do not exist in themselves but rather live as part of an entire web of life. The appearances of plants disclose something of what they seek to absorb and reject: their sympathies and antipathies.

a plant absorbs red light and rejects green, so it appears to us as green.

If our eyes did not show sensitivity to the green light radiating from a plant, it would just pass into us as unnoticed as invisible X-rays. This sensitivity means there is a skin that is able to be stimulated, absorb, and even resist the free-flowing passage of a particular stimulus. When an object is warmed by light or a fire, it absorbs the energy — the energy does not merely pass through it without resistance. The soul, and any organism, to be sensitive to specific things must be able to resist them. If I cannot resist how I feel, I am submerged entirely by the feeling and cannot feel its shape. If I cannot resist the thoughts that bombard me, I am “tossed to and fro and carried about with every wind of doctrine.”² If our eyes did not have the capacity to block sunlight, the light would simply pass through them undetected.

On a soul level, we can only perceive beings that we can resist. If we cannot resist them, we may experience various colored moods but we cannot experience any objectivity towards those moods. Instead, we will be overwhelmed in each mood like wearing tinted glasses–the entire world becomes discolored by our moods when we cannot resist them or recognize their meaning. When we can maintain a degree of objectivity towards our moods, we may find the world tinted by yellow or blue or red, but we maintain awareness that we are not seeing the objective colors in the world but rather an admixture of objective colors and our subjective mood.

By seeking complete plasticity of the soul to reflect exactly what one senses in one’s inner imagination, Goethean observation approaches some of the goals of eastern meditation, we remain still long enough in one place that we become completely absorbed in a plant. The outer form falls away and we persist in observing. Childhood associations arise, different fleeting thoughts, yet we continue to observe that single plant. As we do this, provided we persist with the right contemplative mood, the plant itself begins to evoke an objective mood. You could really almost say that what arises here is an “objective subjectivity” where our own personal prejudices are set aside and our soul becomes a sort of mirror of the object of contemplation. A “mirror” is not quite the right word, because we feel what a plant is as a feeling. We do not see the feeling itself, but the feeling is the plant’s aspiration which we see embodied as physical form. The plant is striving to return to its spiritual source. When we allow this to enter our souls, it is as if the plant is aspiring within us and a particular mood is evoked specific to that plant. The soul becomes a “mirror” not of the sense-perceptible aspect of the plant but of the volitional impulse of the plant. It is almost as if the physical form of the plant resounds within the soul and we can hear its word. But only if the soul is calm can we know the sound is true to the object we contemplate. 

In a way, when we allow this intuitive contemplation through our own effort, we are not analyzing the plant, but rather, we are walking back into the plant and feeling out its aspiration — the will impulse that preexisted the physical form of the plant itself. The outermost layer of any organism is a sort of dead “crust” but a product of a living process and one that bears a direct connection to that invisible world. These are stepping stones of the spirit, which works in the exact opposite direction of conventional science. Secular science starts with the crust of a living organism and shatters it into smaller pieces, hoping to find the causal principle in the dead skin of living things.

Secular science, for all its gains, tends to start with the deadest aspect of life and then tries to break it apart into even smaller (and deader) aspects. But matter arose from living processes, none of which are fully disclosed by formulas. Chemical formulas do not tell us the complex motions of molecules, they only show us the final balance once the reaction has finished. But life is the dynamics themselves, whereas the formula can only tabulate what is finished and stable enough to tabulate. It is as if chemical formulas can tell you the volume that water occupies and also measure the volume that water takes up when frozen as ice, but relatively little about the incredibly complex dynamics between those two stable states. Even in a cup of water, what can science tell us about all the subtle vortices and currents? There is simply too much to calculate! This is not to belittle secular science, but it concerns itself with the aftereffects, specifically only what can be quantified.

The point of departure for spiritual science is quite the opposite direction. In this sense, it does not contradict secular sciences at all, but seeks the unifying concepts that provide meaningful context for secular science. It is the inner qualities of plants we seek. These are not mutually exclusive paths, but they are in different sides of reality. The observations of secular science must be reconciled into a conceptual whole to be understood, which means we must always reach into the realm of the spirit to give even a semblance of coherence to fragmented scientific findings.

Spiritual science accepts the physical world as a meaningful manifestation of the spirit and its findings can predict certain developments that secular science eventually manifests. After all, they are both studying the same world. But you would never expect a thermometer to tell you the time of day. They are measuring different things altogether. Anytime a scientist has a “hunch” of an idea that might work, that does not arise from matter but rather from the spiritual world. 

A hermit may withdraw himself from society and aspire to “self-sufficiency” but he not only takes with him the evolutionary heritage of his entire species, but he also takes the entire cultural evolution, technologies, concepts, and language with him. Science fixated on materialism is like this anti-social hermit in relation to the spiritual world. He may pride himself on his self-sufficiency and deny his dependence on society, but everything he does remains indebted to society. Likewise, any atheist who continues to think continues to use his borrowed inheritance from the spiritual world.

If we were just composed of matter, then we shouldn’t even have begun thinking to begin with, and yet thinking is indispensable even for the most secular science. Even those who deny the existence of the spiritual world still use its tools every day. The secular scientist has in many ways attempted to sever itself from the spiritual world, which, of course, it cannot do. It is like a battery trying to deny its dependence on electricity. Fortunately, this is not the only current active in science today. Some of the most respected scientists were deeply spiritual men. 

Reaching the “objective subjectivity” of any object of contemplation requires effort. Not the kind of effort of rational analysis but the effort of keeping the attention fixed to that single object without allowing the mind to stray. It’s like keeping your gaze fixed on a candle during meditation and then shifting the focus of attention (without moving your eyes away from the flame) to your heart and observing the feelings that arise. As these feelings arise, they may seem new and unfamiliar at first, but with time they become like old friends. Once these distinct feelings start to be recognized, the intuition can grasp the unifying concept at which point these can be recognized in the normal everyday state of consciousness. 

What Steiner refers to as “atavistic” clairvoyance is a mode uncluttered by discursive reasoning. It is a mode of engagement that “just looks” and the meaningful form of plants and animals resound within the soul. Only vestiges of this remain today, though one example is the Senoi (pronounced Sng’oi) of Malaysia. Robert Wolff in his account Original Wisdom gives a remarkable story of a European man who was able to find this way of seeing. The most significant piece of advice his teacher gave him was, “stop talking!” by which he meant: stop the chattering in your mind. Once this endless conversation with oneself pauses, the world can enter the soul.

Unlike the Senoi, Wolff maintained his differentiation and capacity to reflect and analyze after the fact. This is a marked difference between the older mode of clairvoyance and the initiation of almost anyone in our modern world, regardless of their origin: we apply rational analysis after the fact, vetting our experiences and attempting to organize them systematically. There is nothing wrong with this, in fact, Steiner himself would remind people that even a clairvoyant person can be corrected by an everyday rational person.

Clairvoyance doesn’t mean infallibility anymore than being able to read ancient Greek means that one will be able to understand all the subtleties of Homer’s Iliad. Clairvoyance is almost like a sort of “literacy” in reading the book of nature. “Seership consists in learning to see from without that which in ordinary life we feel from within.”³ The difference between an old mode and the new mode is that, so to speak, we have the tendency to go back over what we have experienced and look for “repeatability” which is at the heart of any science. If it is not repeatable, it is not science.

When Steiner says that it is easy for a farmer to become “clairsentient” he means this: a farmer learns what signs mean in terms of animal and plant health. A farmer can smell when an animal is sick or even when a plant is sick. A farmer can see when a plant is not healthy even if he lacks the concept to say why it’s unhealthy (or how to heal it). But without such clear senses, it is difficult to attain clairvoyance. The farmer’s observation is paramount. Alan Chadwick liked to say that the gardener should look at every single plant every single day.

The mere practice of dedicated observing time will habituate the senses to exactitude and, over time, begin to evoke specific feelings as the observer becomes more experienced. With enough effort, these soulful feelings evoked by sense-perceptible objects can crystallize as spiritual thoughts that can be imparted to others, having germinated in the soil of the sense-perceptible world, sprouted in the feelings of the soul, and flowered in the spirit. These “seeds” of experience can be sown in the gardens of other souls because concepts can be imparted to others even if they have not put in the effort to extract them from the world themselves. If this were not the case, no one could benefit from clairvoyant insight unless they too were able to see into the spiritual world. 

There is nothing more significant than for farmers to work on themselves. A disciplined effort at impartial observation, whether it is of the sense-perceptible world or of inner feelings, or spiritual thoughts, empowers the farmer with more options. It may even feel boring, but the experience of boredom merely indicates that you’ve found an “edge” of yourself. If you do not see the divinity in what you are looking at, that is not because what you see before you is insignificant but because an organ of perception needs to be developed. 

Left: a feeling overwhelming the individual’s capacity for containment. Right: the same intense feeling able to be contained (resisted) by a larger, stronger personality. By holding the sensation, its form is contained and can be experienced.

In evolution, secular scientists hypothesize that organs begin as irritations. This isn’t entirely off the mark. In our souls, new organs of perception often begin as wounds. As old-timers will be able to tell you that rain is on the way because their bum knee is hurting again, the soul begins to become sensitive to things that at first seem somewhat removed from the original experience.

The scars of old experiences may give a somewhat tougher “skin” to the soul, but this doesn’t make us less sensitive to the world at all. In fact, like the injured knee sensing barometric changes, it is as if the soul becomes sensitive to changes in emotional weather. At first, it may just be experienced as a nuisance, but when a pattern becomes discernible after repeated experiences, a spiritual concept arrives to provide the inner meaning to the experienced phenomenon. Whether it is the pain of a knee or the tenderness of an experienced soul, patterns emerge that can be illuminated by the efforts of spiritual science. 

1. “The body itself seems like a hollow, empty mould. It is a vision where everything is reversed as in a photographic negative. The soul of crystal, plant and animal is seen as a kind of radiation, whereas the physical substance appears as an empty sheath.” - R. Steiner, Esoteric Cosmology, 82.

2. Ephesians 4:14 RSV

3.  R. Steiner, Esoteric Cosmology, 68.