Besonnenheit is the retained, heightened self-possession toward one's own I that Steiner made the test separating true Imagination from vision and hallucination.
Besonnenheit in Anthroposophy is the level-headed self-possession a person keeps toward their own I, and Rudolf Steiner made it the working test of whether supersensible cognition is healthy. In the fifth lecture of Anthroposophy: Its Roots of Knowledge and Fruits of Life (GA 78, Stuttgart, 2 September 1921), Steiner placed visionary and hallucinatory life beneath ordinary sense perception, because both run on a diminished sense of self. Imagination, the first stage of supersensible knowledge, runs the other way: the sense of self is raised rather than dimmed, and the knower can begin and end the picture deliberately. The bearer is the I working through the consciousness soul, which is why Steiner tied the exercises of How to Attain Knowledge of Higher Worlds to a strengthened self, not a loosened one. Anyone who prizes visions above sense perception, he said, has not yet grasped spiritual science at all.
Besonnenheit is usually rendered as prudence, presence of mind, or level-headedness, and in Steiner's usage it names an exact inner posture: staying distinguishable from the content of your own consciousness. When that distinction weakens, images take charge and the person is dreaming, hallucinating, or entranced. When it strengthens, the same picture world can be entered on purpose and left on purpose.
In Steiner's Own Words
What is it about human beings themselves that actually characterizes visionary, hallucinatory life? One of the characteristics is a diminished sense of self, a diminished awareness of oneself. By surrendering ourselves to our healthy state of mind and our healthy experience of external sensory reality, we have precisely what we can call prudence in relation to our own ego. At every moment when we look at the external world in a healthy way, when we place ourselves in the external world in a healthy way, we must be able to distinguish ourselves to a certain degree from what is the content of our self.
What it Means Today
The closest modern laboratory analogue is lucid dreaming. In 1980 Stephen LaBerge, then a doctoral candidate at Stanford University, asked sleeping volunteers to signal from inside a dream using a pre-arranged sequence of left and right eye movements, the one muscle group not paralysed during REM sleep. The polygraph recorded the signals while the sleeper stayed asleep, and the result was published with Lynne Nagel, William Dement, and Vincent Zarcone in Perceptual and Motor Skills in 1981. What that experiment verified was not the dream imagery, which nobody doubted, but the persistence of a self inside the imagery that could keep an agreement made while awake.
That is the exact quantity Steiner had isolated sixty years earlier and called Besonnenheit. Ordinary dreaming and hallucination score low on it: the images arrive, the self is submerged, and no agreement survives. Lucid dreaming scores high, and lucidity researchers still measure the state by that retained self-reference rather than by vividness of picture. Steiner's demand was stricter, since he wanted the strengthened self carried into waking exercise rather than found by accident in sleep, but the measuring stick is recognisably the same one.
Thalira synthesis: Besonnenheit is best read not as calmness but as a load-bearing capacity, the amount of image a self can carry without being carried off by it, which is why Steiner treated pride in one's visions as evidence that the capacity had failed rather than grown.
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