Steiner's name for the reversed crossing, in which a weakened I lets thinking slide into feeling and will, producing nervous and hysterical illness.
Crossing the Threshold in the Wrong Direction in Anthroposophy is Rudolf Steiner's term for the reverse of initiation: instead of thinking, feeling, and willing separating cleanly as the soul steps consciously into the spiritual world, they run together because the I has been weakened. Steiner set it out on 11 November 1917 at Dornach, in the second of the two lectures published in English as Psychoanalysis in the Light of Anthroposophy and gathered in GA 178, Individual Spirit Beings and Their Influence on the Soul-Life of Man. The threshold, he said, has a certain breadth, and the I lives inside that breadth, holding the three soul forces beside one another so they affect each other without mixing. Loss of sleep, shock, or concepts too thin to carry the feeling life loosen that hold. Thinking then slips into feeling, and the whole organism is seized by the wave. Steiner read the cases of Breuer, Freud, and Adler as exactly this reversed crossing.
Crossing the threshold in the wrong direction names what happens when the boundary between ordinary and spiritual consciousness is passed downward rather than upward. In the lawful crossing the I stays awake and the three soul forces fan apart. In the reversed crossing the I is too weak to keep them apart, so they run together below consciousness, and what surfaces is symptom rather than perception.
In Steiner's Own Words
This is what has happened in the cases described by the psychoanalysts as hysterical or nervous. Thinking, feeling, and willing have swung to the opposite side, away from the healthy direction that would lead them into the spiritual world. If you have any gift for testing and proving you may easily see how it comes about. Take the case of the girl sitting by the sickbed. Her strong ego-consciousness was reduced by loss of sleep and anxiety. The slightest thing might cause thinking to leave its track alongside of feeling and to run over into it. Then thought would be at once submerged in the waves of feeling, which are far stronger than the waves of thought, and the result in such a case is that the whole organism is seized by the tumult of feeling.
What it Means Today
The nearest contemporary evidence for this reversed crossing comes from contemplative science, not psychiatry. In May 2017, Jared Lindahl, Nathan Fisher, David Cooper, Rochelle Rosen, and Willoughby Britton published The Varieties of Contemplative Experience in PLOS ONE, a mixed-methods study run out of Britton's Clinical and Affective Neuroscience Laboratory at Brown University. Interviewing practitioners and teachers across the Theravada, Zen, and Tibetan traditions, they catalogued difficulties that recur in people meditating correctly: affective flooding, loss of the sense of agency, and a blurring of the boundary between a thought and the emotion beside it. Britton also directs Cheetah House, a nonprofit providing support and referrals for meditators in distress. Her group's repeated finding is that the field had almost no vocabulary for these states.
Thalira synthesis: what the Brown data records as an adverse effect of concentration, Steiner would read as the same threshold approached with an I that fatigue, isolation, and long silence have loosened, so the crossing runs downward into the mixing of thinking, feeling, and willing instead of upward into their clean separation. That reading changes the advice. If the practice itself caused the difficulty, the answer would be less practice. If an I too thinly equipped for what it meets caused it, the answer is the one Steiner named in 1917: concepts wide enough to accompany the feeling life once a person has entered it.
Where to Read More