By Adam Blanning
Supersensible experiences can happen in different ways. In medicine in particular, sensory and supersensory perceptions can be fruitfully combined.
How do we engage in spiritual research, especially for medicine and therapy? Should we start with substance or with process? Should we begin with attention only for spiritual beings or focus most on their physical manifestations? What helps structure our work so that we are both honest about our capacities and accurate in our perceptions?
These questions come up regularly in teaching anthroposophic medicine. What is interesting is that we often approach these questions from a favored starting point, because something already came alive for us in our own biography, an experience that spurred us to study spiritual science.
The power of thinking begins to shine
When you ask people about their own ‘spark’ experience, some share how they first encountered anthroposophy by finding Steiner’s lectures in a library or being handed one of his books by a friend. Through engagement with Steiner’s teachings the power of thinking begins to shine – so brightly and so purely that the study of anthroposophy, as a vast body of knowledge, then becomes a central task in many people’s biographies. Such power of thinking brings deepened soul forces and new perceptions. Once we meet enlivened thinking – the lifting of physical perceptions back into process, ‘what is now perceived in the strengthened force of thinking is not pale or shadowlike at all – it is full of inner content, vividly real and graphic.’ More ...
Supersensible experiences can happen in different ways. In medicine in particular, sensory and supersensory perceptions can be fruitfully combined.
How do we engage in spiritual research, especially for medicine and therapy? Should we start with substance or with process? Should we begin with attention only for spiritual beings or focus most on their physical manifestations? What helps structure our work so that we are both honest about our capacities and accurate in our perceptions?
These questions come up regularly in teaching anthroposophic medicine. What is interesting is that we often approach these questions from a favored starting point, because something already came alive for us in our own biography, an experience that spurred us to study spiritual science.
The power of thinking begins to shine
When you ask people about their own ‘spark’ experience, some share how they first encountered anthroposophy by finding Steiner’s lectures in a library or being handed one of his books by a friend. Through engagement with Steiner’s teachings the power of thinking begins to shine – so brightly and so purely that the study of anthroposophy, as a vast body of knowledge, then becomes a central task in many people’s biographies. Such power of thinking brings deepened soul forces and new perceptions. Once we meet enlivened thinking – the lifting of physical perceptions back into process, ‘what is now perceived in the strengthened force of thinking is not pale or shadowlike at all – it is full of inner content, vividly real and graphic.’ More ...
