rcises themselves, carried out through a systematic
course of occult training. These must be so arranged that the
consciousness of the student is enabled during meditation to scan minutely
all that passes within his soul. In order to bring about imagination, the
first thing to be done is to form a symbol. In this there are still
elements taken from external observation; it is not only man who
participates in their content, he himself does not produce them. Therefore
he may deceive himself concerning them and assign their origin to wrong
sources. But when the occult student proceeds to the exercises for
inspiration, he drops this content from his consciousness and immerses
himself only in the soul-activity which formed the symbol. Even here error
is still possible: education and study etc., have induced a particular
kind of soul-activity in man. He is unable to know everything about the
origin of this activity. Now, however, the occult student removes this,
his own soul-activity, from his consciousness; if then something remains,
nothing adheres to it that cannot easily be reviewed; nothing can intrude
itself in respect to its entire content that cannot easily be judged.

In his intuition, therefore, the occult student possesses something which
shows him the pure, clear reality of the psycho-spiritual world. And if he
applies this recognized test to all that meets his observation in the
realm of psycho-spiritual realities, he will be well able to distinguish
appearance from reality. He may also feel sure that the application of
this law provides just as effectually against delusions in the spiritual
world as does the knowledge in the physical world that an _imaginary_
piece of red-hot iron cannot burn him.

It is obvious that this test applies only to our own experiences in the
supersensible world, and not to communications made to us which we have to
apprehend by means of our physical understanding and our healthy sense of
truth. The occult student should exert himself to draw a distinct line of
demarcation between the knowledge he acquires by the one means, and by the
other. He should be ready on one the hand to accept communications made to
him regarding the higher worlds, and should seek to understand them by
using his powers of judgment. When, however, he is confronted by an
"experience," which he may so name because it is due to personal
observation, he will first carefully test the same to ascertain whether it
pos