According to Steiner, as a result of his out-of-body examination of John the Baptist and his mission, he discovered that baptism at the time truly was, in fact, an induced “drowning.” Practitioners such as John the Baptist would hold the seeker of baptism underwater until their consciousness either left the body or was “loosened” from the body, but before death could occur. This was a way to “jump-start” the inculcation of more profound intuitive abilities. What can Creator tell us?

This is a partial misunderstanding of John the Baptist's intentions. What he was doing was not trying to shock the system to make it come alive in a way to restore intuition, it was to truly present a test of faith that one must be ready for, that is why he held the people underwater, to allow them to put themselves to the test: did they have the faith that this would result in a transformation for them or not? If they panicked and struggled and fought, this was a sign of their lack of readiness to fully embrace the divine. So this was easily misconstrued as an attempt to become more insightful and intuitively aware, but that was not truly what was happening, it was the experiencing of a challenge to the physical being when wanting to truly reach beyond the self and embrace the divine and put one's trust in divine support. So this was a kind of strategy, a device to create a signal event in a person's life as a point of demarcation between the past, as a kind of student still in the learning and acquisition phase, and then graduating to a higher level of understanding and a demonstration of inner strength and a state of greater completion, in not only undergoing the dunking but drawing great meaning from it, being ready to be literally transformed, starting out as a mere human and ending up in the arms of the divine with heart and soul. So it was at once, a symbolic gesture with a physical corollary for reinforcement. In this way, it was a clever device to assist people in making a firm commitment to their spiritual journey, their allegiance to the divine and divine principles, and to become, in essence, fully qualified as a follower of the divine—a rite of passage.