The Essential Personal Work

"Our physical body and our generative powers relate to the physical world; with the astral body and the ego we enter a totally different world every night, and initially this has extraordinarily little to do with the world in which we are awake during the day. The two worlds really only work together in so far as they are brought together in the human realm."

 

Rudolf Steiner 

In the human realm is the interpenetration of the ordinary and extraordinary. The conscious and superconscious. Ordinary consciousness only sees the ordinary and believes that only the ordinary exists. Even when ordinary consciousness perceives the extraordinary, it doesn't understand what it experiences, because it tries to make sense of what it experiences as if it were ordinary.

   

The epoché is a sustained activity of consciousness, in which you relax your grip on names and definitions and judgments: that's real, that's personal/subjective, that's a fact, that's an opinion, this was a dream, that's a true story, this is my body, that's your body, that's a thought, this is a feeling.

That takes effort - not strain - and lots of practice. 

There is more than one technique to realize the one goal of the epoché, aka detachment. The self-help program of Al-Anon teaches loving detachment (different from 'tough love') through practical, daily activities and attitudes of mind. There are yoga methods of meditation that deliver on detachment, too, so-called.

Owen Barfield and JRR Tolkien, both, in their different but allied ways, explained how to study human language in such a way as to be consistently lifted up out of ordinary and into extraordinary consciousness. Barfield called it 'final participation', and Tolkien admitted of 'breaking the veil and passing through'.

What all these techniques aim for is to be able to experience directly those separate, different worlds that 'are brought together in the human realm'.