When this type of slippery thinking happens the heart goes, Holy Cow man, I wish you wouldn't dump your thinking overboard all of the time, because I don't know if what your finding out about this is lawful or not. Do you? You say, "Well, my pendulum told me this was true. Think about that. If your pendulum was a being,(it really stands in for your unconscious body elemental being) and you talked to it? What do you think it would say? Would it tell you that it was infallible? Would it tell you that it was a free being? Do we know any free beings who are infallible? This is mighty deep water using subconscious codes to run a life.

So there's another level of the work, another possibility for understanding the spiritual dimension beyond the senses. This path has to do with giving the heart images so that it can intuit deeper spiritual mysteries, but do the intuiting as a thinking process. And that involves disciplining the heart by selecting pictures and applying the attention to the pictures in such a way as to perceive whether or not the rhythms are moving lawfully. The heart needs to ask is this protocol a lawful sequence? If it's a lawful sequence, then the heart can enter into it, into the movements of it, and the nerve can say, "What I'm understanding, heart, is that you feel that this is lawful." And the heart can go, "yeah, I feel that it is moving lawfully." And then the nerve will go, "Well, if it's okay by you, it's fine by me, because I can't get an answer no matter how much data I throw at this thing. All I can do is bring up more conflicting data." And the soul mood that results from living in heaps of conflicting data is called skepticism, the root of modern science. But there's a difference between pathological skepticism and healthy skepticism. Healthy skepticism is very good, it arises out of the discipline of the thinking as a reticence towards making judgments. When applied to one's own treasured opinions this type of skepticism is a wonderful tonic for the soul.

Chronic skepticism, pursued as a way of life usually means you're a pain in the butt, fundamentally. To the pathological skeptic nothing is okay. Everything is suspect. This type of behavior is just a rampant melancholia. So chronic skepticism is not what we're after. But healthy skepticism means that the head understands that it can never come to a complete answer. In order for an answer to arise, the heart understands that the process of asking a question has to be worked with consciously and rhythmically. The heart really understands that fantasy has to be transformed into the process of forming pictures that move lawfully in order for the heart to be able to arrive at an inner knowing through reversal. So the rule which the heart steers itself by is: anything you can think, you also have to be able to think the exact opposite and have the two of them meet one another point for point in your deliberations. That process is called pondering in the heart or contemplation.

The idea is that once your heart has expanded to include both sides of the problem and has taken the time to run the inner pictures forward and backward again and again so that it truly doesn't matter to you which way it ends up, then your heart sees clearly. Once it does not matter to you what the answer is, that's when you get close to getting a much better question. A really good question is much better for the heart than a whole raft of answers which have been understood by the head. But if your heart is invested in one side or another, then the nerve thinking can dominate the heart and says, okay, I know that there is conflicting stuff around this but I can tell you what the 'right' answer is for now so you won't have to go back and forth any more. That's the way your nerve works: off/on, one-zero, yes-no. That's a nerve thing. And what it works with best is memory, especially memories of things which have been encountered in the sense world. So memory relies on things like, how many ones do I have on this side and how many zeros on the other side? Let's see, I have one more one than I have zeros. That means the answer must definitely be one.

But think about that. I have forty-nine ones and fifty zeros. The nerve answer is zero. Does it make sense to your heart? No. But the nerve, goes, upff, it came up zero man! What do you not understand about zero? That's the answer. Zero! Okay, next! Next problem.

But our heart goes, wait a minute. What about all these forty-nine ones here -- and this next presidential election (Gore - Bush) is going to be very much like this, with a little Ralph Nader thrown in! So are we going to have a president we can all get behind? Probably not. Whichever way it goes. This is a perfect picture of nerve driven relationships. It's a perfect picture. The nerves are out in the world as wires. Everything that once was a deep secret esoteric function is now out in the world manifest. Clairaudience -- telephone. Remote viewing -- TV. Every esoteric capacity that a person once had to work on for years and years, now you can just pay $129, get on a server and send a big funky download of photos of your trip to Katmandu to somebody in Stuttgart --instantaneously. I mean hey, we're not talking about months. We're talking about real time right now! You get the apparatus and then bang you are hooked to the whole of the electronic dream! Think about it. When you hit that key -- choooh! everywhere you go there you are! That use to be an esoteric dream to do that. And you would study with a guru for years to do that. And now it's outside, manifest for as little as $129.99. These are all imaginations of the ways in which the nerves work in the act of knowing.

But the knowing that comes out of the blood is very different, it is more subtle and difficult to understand because that has to do with cosmic lawful movement. But the electronic world has analogs for this type of knowing also. To see this we need only to look at the media. The moving lights of the media. The great irony is that moving light is just what the heart is really looking for -- movements of light. It is the hearts spiritual task to create movements of light in the soul through which we can realize our connection to the Cosmos. These light movements created by the heart eventually result in the formation of the other organs of the body. Remember that the heart is the first organ to develop. But what the heart is yearning for is that the movements of light be lawful, not that they sell toothpaste.

Because, as we saw earlier, when the movements of light that I am taking in through my eyes go through my limbic structure and the midbrain, I need to be able to say to myself, this sense experience I am having is true. My heart needs to grasp the movements and be invested in them or it faces dire uncertainties. And the very faculty which we need to be able to let the heart find a way to ponder the lawfulness is the very faculty which is being threatened by cheap and unlawful images moving through the world. The heart always want to know, how do I know that this is true? And that is the very thing that is being attacked. As a culture we are losing the capacity to tell whether what we're perceiving is moving lawfully or not. The heart asks from "every image, "Is this image in accord with the archetype that is standing behind this or is there a bottom line agenda made to sell me something? Can I invest my attention in this and surrender to it or do I have to keep up my guard while I am unconsciously having the feeling that someone is consciously trying to get me to suspend belief?

This is a very radical realm of esotericism that I don't hear addressed very much in the Anthroposophical Society. The media are already recognized as either evil or misguided, and it is thought that by recognizing the problem it is solved. Giving this impulse a name does not solve this challenge. In reality, a problem this huge is not really something to be solved. But it's definitely something to be addressed. And it doesn't mean doing away with media. We can forget that idea. The flickering lights are here to stay. Unless the plug is pulled by something really big.

But perhaps an esoteric way to address this challenge is by somehow training the heart to see lawful things, to train the heart to see. I really think that this is an important future capacity, because more and more we're going to be given images that will keep us unbalanced. The unbalancing is happening where things are put into images that create inner soul situations where our emotional life gets expanded way beyond anything we can control or deal with. Situations which happen worlds away and which we have no possible way to control or solve. Emotionally we have no way of dealing with these things. So the images go in, they bounce around in the soul, there's a reaction in the blood, usually of oh, my God, this is out of control and I'm helpless, and then the uncertainties arise. Today this is even further out because we don't know whether the image we are seeing is really real or not, but we see it and, therefore, there's a certain something behind it, especially if it's a picture of a head from here up talking about something in an authoritative way. Then we go, this must be real, this must be true, what's coming out of the mouth of that head there. The level of magic needed to put that talking head in that box makes what is said seem much more powerful than it might be if we were talking to the head in person. This is very deep stuff, but it has very much to do with the need of the heart to experience moving images of light. We need to build a new clairvoyance out of this need.

[Question]: Is telepathy two hearts speaking to each other?

[Response]: Yeah, it is. But the great danger in telepathy is when we uncritically believe what comes to us without having a protocol for testing it. That's the great danger. Not to say that what we experience telepathically is not true. But the question is, do you know it's true. Or do you hope that it is true? Did you opt to form a code to deal with the incoming stuff and now the code has been grandfathered into the system of belief so you no longer check the code? That is the ultimate uncreativity. You form the code and you say, this must be what it is, and then you never check the code. That's the danger in telepathy. A lot of people have it, no doubt about it. However, the problem is, can you trust it. How do you know? And in order for your telepathy to become yours, you have to practice giving it away. Give your code away and see if there is anything left of your telepathy. That is a good Rosicrucian beginning.

So the forming of an image that you think you've received telepathically or an intuition that you think you've received telepathically -- the first step is imagination. You have to actually form the image as clearly as possible. Number one, imagination.

Number two, inspiration or what Rudolf Steiner calls reading the esoteric script. You have to try to see, was there a sequence in the becoming of the image? If there was a sequence and you can think the sequence as a clear inner picture, your heart can enter in. If it's just a fact or if it just fits your code, then your heart is shut out. The soul simply shifts to nerve thinking as a default. In the old clairvoyance it is possible to say, this knowing here is too big for my heart to deal with, and I need an answer right now, so I'm just going to go into my nerve code, use my pendulum and bingo there's my answer.

So if your heart really wants to enter into the knowing, you have to have at least what once was known as the three day rule. The three day rule is an esoteric rule where you come to me with a question, and I say to you, see me in three days.

[Question]: That has to do with having an open question and not having to have an answer?

[Response]: Absolutely. So this is all about open questions. I know it sounds paradoxical, but the heart is nurtured by questions that have no easy answers. It is fed by the clarity of the empty space if we can keep the nerve occupied with big enough thoughts of the essence of beingness while the heart is sitting in silent contemplation. Fortunately the best thing to keep the nerve occupied with big thoughts about the essence of beingness is total silence -- but for the nerve to tolerate total silence, the total silence must be structured. Silence is structured by the function of the witnessing consciousness. Silence which allows spacing out ends up being three monkeys at lunchtime. But when we strive to go into total silence in an organized and structured way, the Witness accompanies the thinking to say to the nerve, uh, I know it seems like death here in this silence but look , I'm still here communing with you even though nothing of a sense nature is going on. In states of total silence the nerve gets bored and dredges up things from the bottom of the pond to stimulate the inner picture process. The Witness which lives outside of the sensations found in the nervous system, can quickly see what is happening, acknowledge what's coming up, recognize it and then say, thank you for sharing to the nerve, and go back into total silence. The Witness can recognize the nerve impulse because it is superconscious and simultaneously in the presence of the Witness the nervous system knows that someone is home even though the house is awfully quiet. In meditation the nerves are occupied sensing the essential beingness of the Witness. They need no outside source of sensation to be occupied.