THE Anthroposophist, Rudolf Steiner, tells us that

“While in earthly life man develops from birth onward, he confronts the world with his power of cognition. First he gains insights into the physical sphere. However, this is but the outpost of knowledge. This knowledge does not yet reveal everything the world contains. The world has an inner living reality but man does not reach this living reality at first. He shuts himself off from it.”

Steiner is correct to make a distinction between the inner and external worlds, or what he described as the ‘sense-world’ and ‘spirit-world’, but to suggest that a newborn child immediately views the world in accordance with the senses – despite his or her very real material needs – is incorrect. It is a well-established fact that children have more of a connection with the spirit-world than their adult counterparts, which is why they tend to experience supernatural visions and vivid dreams. Steiner goes on to say that when humans learn to add

“sense-free thinking to sense perception, the illusion is permeated with reality; it ceases to be an illusion. Then the human spirit experiences itself within man and meets the spirit in the world; the latter is no longer hidden from man behind the physical world; it weaves and moves within it.”

Steiner, in my opinion, presents us with something of an erroneous chronology. Indeed, whilst it is possible for adults to cultivate a link with the spirit-world in the way that he describes, we must not discount the fact that children have access to this domain at the beginning of their lives and in most cases it dissipates with the approach of maturity. I would argue that modern civilisation, having detached people from both nature and super-nature, essentially drains us of the embryonic bridge that once allowed us to traverse the spiritual and material realms with ease.

To use a contemporary example of how this link breaks down over time, I am reminded of a friend who had his young daughter innoculated with the controversial Measles-Mumps-Rubella (MMR) vaccine. Despite the fact that she had been outgoing and vivacious, within a few days of the injection she had become a shadow of her old self and seemed to change from an extrovert into an introvert. It was as though the life had been taken from her. The severing of ties with the spirit-world, I am convinced, works in a very similar fashion and it is up to those who have lost the great fluidity and semi-incorporeality of their youth to rediscover it.

On that, at least, Steiner and I would have concurred.