drama of the visible and the invisible

Tree of Knowledge, 1913

Hilma af Klint, Swedish 

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There slumbers in every human being faculties by means of which he can acquire for himself a knowledge of higher worlds. Mystics, Gnostics, Theosophists — all speak of a world of soul and spirit which for them is just as real as the world we see with our physical eyes and touch with our physical hands.

[...] Just as in the body, eye and ear develop as organs of perception, as senses for bodily processes, so does a man develop in himself soul and spiritual organs of perception through which the soul and spiritual worlds are opened to him.

For those who do not have such higher senses, these worlds are dark and silent, just as the bodily world is dark and silent for a being without eyes and ears.


―Rudolf Steiner

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It is clear that 'higher' always means and implies 'more inner,' 'more interior', 'deeper', 'more intimate'; while 'lower' implies 'more outer', 'more external', 'shallower', 'less intimate' ... the more interior a thing is, the less visible it is likely to be. 

The progression from visibility to invisibility is just another facet of the great hierarchy of Levels of Being. We do not understand that life, before all other definitions of it, is a drama of the visible and the invisible.

Our ordinary mind always tried to persuade us that we are nothing but acorns and that our greatest happiness will be to become bigger, fatter, shinier acorns; but this is of interest only to pigs. Our faith gives us knowledge of something better: that we can become oak trees.


―E.F. Schumacher
A Guide for the Perplexed, excerpts

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