The disciplined awakening of supersensible perception through Imagination, Inspiration, and Intuition, grounded in character training rather than ritual.
Initiation in Rudolf Steiner's anthroposophy (German Einweihung) is the researched modern path on which a person develops new organs of supersensible cognition. The transformation moves through three stages of higher knowledge, Imagination, Inspiration, and Intuition, and rests on a foundation of character work, the Six Subsidiary Exercises, and meditative practice. It is an epistemological discipline, not a ceremony.
In Steiner's Own Words
The highest point in an occult school, of which it is possible to speak in a book for general readers, is Initiation. One cannot give public information concerning all that lies beyond, though the way to it can always be found by one who has previously pressed forward and penetrated the lower secrets and mysteries. The knowledge and power which are conferred upon a man through Initiation could not be obtained in any other manner excepting in some far distant future, after many incarnations, on quite another road and in quite another form. He who is initiated today experiences something which he would otherwise have to experience at a much later period and under quite different circumstances.
What it Means Today
The word initiation, in ordinary usage, still carries the perfume of secret chambers, sworn oaths, and ritual ordeals. Steiner did something quietly radical with the term. He treated initiation as researched knowledge of the higher worlds, available in principle to any disciplined thinker, taught not by hierophants in robes but by exact attention to inner life. The candidate does not seek a key from outside. The candidate builds the organ that will perceive the higher world by working on character, on thinking, on feeling, and on willing, in the same patient way a Goethean botanist works to perceive the living gesture of a plant.
What does someone actually do with this idea now? The honest answer is sit, breathe, and practise. The Six Subsidiary Exercises, control of thought, control of action, equanimity, positivity, open mindedness, and balance, are the entry training Steiner consistently named in lectures from 1904 onward. They are deliberately small, almost domestic. Behind that smallness sits a much larger claim. By transforming everyday cognition into Imagination, then Inspiration, then Intuition, the cognising person grows into a participant in the spiritual world rather than a spectator of it. Anthroposophic meditation today, in study groups, in the esoteric school, in Waldorf teacher training, still leans on this map. The path is modern because it does not ask the seeker to bypass thinking. It asks the seeker to discipline thinking until thinking itself becomes a sense. Steiner's most systematic exposition of the path of initiation appears in chapter V of Occult Science (GA 13, 1910), the cosmology-anthropology synthesis of his foundational training books. In our own age this path was given renewed esoteric form in the First Class of the School of Spiritual Science, the nineteen mantric lessons Steiner imparted in 1924. The clearest open example is the raising of Lazarus, an initiation the Christ performed before all eyes. The first of the seven stages of Christian initiation is the washing of the feet, the mood of humble service. Every ancient path of initiation was guarded within the Mystery Centres of the temples. Steiner read the stages of initiation in the journey of the second part of Faust. The path of initiation lives pictorially in the Osiris myth. What the senses present as finished world the initiate learns to read as veil; see maya. Its specifically Christian form is treated in the seven stages of Christian initiation.
Where to Read More
- How to Know Higher Worlds: A Modern Path of Initiation, GA 10
- Occult Science, An Outline, GA 13, ch. 5 on cognition of higher worlds
- Buy How to Know Higher Worlds from SteinerBooks
- How to Know Higher Worlds by Rudolf Steiner
- Rosicrucian Training Steiner: GA131 Jesuit and Rosicrucian Initiation Compared