6. LISTENING TO THE SAGA OF WITH

 By way of the foregoing, the possibility arose to answer the basic question of this treatise W h a t  i s  m e d i t a t i o n? from an essential viewpoint. This requires, to be sure, as will be shown, an equally essential supplement.

            Meditation is generally understood to be an inner-psychic, repetitive and concentrative exercise that ought to render the meditant capable of penetrating into the initially hidden spiritual nature of the world and into the spirituality of his own nature. However, nothing is as yet said by this technical description about the significance and attitude with respect to the practice of meditation.

            There are countless instructions from the ancient wisdom of the past that teach a progressive path of schooling on how to gradually enter the world of spiritual beings. All these instructions, however, are traced back to t w o basic forms of all meditation. Yet both of these basic forms of meditation remain, even though they are the sources of every true meditation, up till now with respect to the meditative attitude and technique largely unconscious. It is one of the main tasks of this treatise to highlight these fundamentals common to all meditation, but thereby also to create a new meaning and a new attitude with respect to meditation, a new truly modern type of meditation.

            One of these two forms of meditating has in the foregoing already begun to become apparent. As an advance into the spirituality of the world, meditation is a process of becoming aware of the connection of the spiritual formative forces with the forces that create all there is in the world. Compared to all older meditative practices and their approaches to the highs and lows of experience, it marks an extraordinary step forward that the modern form of meditation represented here is not (based on a perceptual sort of awareness or devout bedding in a religious tradition) simply presupposed and that further acquaintance with it is relied on by following the instructions of the authoritative teacher. Today one can convince oneself in a scientific and yet generally accessible manner of the existence of a spiritual world. We acquire, as was developed here, this information through the observation of the essential difference between percept and concept and furthermore of their union in our cognition. It is the observation of the origin of reality through our spiritual activity. This concerns the first basic type of all meditation that Rudolf Steiner has developed in the first part of his Philosophy of Freedom. The practice of this meditation on each thing, being or process that can forever and always anew be carried out is one of the decisive recommendations that we owe Rudolf Steiner’s Philosophy of Freedom. This is the meditation that introduces the meditant to the saga of the With. In the foregoing, it was discussed that this saga encompasses each thing and being of our world.  It was furthermore shown that this saga tells of the intertwining of generation and perishing, of growth and decay in each thing and being. If one regards generation as gradual formation, the rising of a form out of the formless (even such nondescript items as a match are gradually built up in our consciousness from a random multiplicity of objective percepts), then the growth and rise of a tree can be chosen as a generally valid image for this process of generation. In the fore-going, it also became clear, however, that to every process of generation is also connected a process of perishing, namely the solidifying of the vital mobile concept into a perceptually fixed and individualized form. Therefore this image must be supplemented:  the living, rising tree form as an image of generation must be united with another tree form, which is always intrinsically connected to it, whose life forces are in the process of solidifying, dying away. It was furthermore brought forward that this double form can also be an image for showing how we are connected with our destiny. For by co-creating all world phenomena, reality in general, we are on the one hand engulfed in that part of our destiny which comes to expression as its origin.  These processes that shape our destiny, are on the other hand also unified with those processes that are perishing. And these are the means out of which we develop our individual independence and through which we are capable of imparting new impulses to the world.

            The meditation that listens to the saga of With, to the construction of that which is formatized from the separateness to a holistic structure, is a b a s i c  t y p e   o f  a l l m e d i t a t i n g. It is practiced on every arbitrary object, a glass, chair, crystal or flower by differentiating in an ever waking act of observation what is with respect to these shapes percept and what is concept, and how these two components for the construction of holistic objects are unified, as well in what way they are thereby mutually modified.