From the Contents of Esoteric Classes

87. EL, Muenchen, 8-26-'11

My dear sisters and brothers! It's our duty to call on the spirit of the day of whom we must hope that he'll help us in our esoteric strivings (Verse for Saturday.)

Last time we saw that the etheric body pours out into space. This spiritual space is filled by good and gad beings of all kinds with whom we get together, with whom our etheric body becomes connected. Different spirits work down in each age, and the same beings aren't active in all places at the same time.

Someone who's in Asia has Europe in the west; in Europe, he has Asia in the east The spheres of various beings bound his individual spiritual space at various places. But in the spiritual space where a man stays, there's an empty place, as it were, that's as if separated from spiritual beings — which is filled by the man himself. The streams that work through his four-folded being hold sway there.

If we wanted to draw the way these good and bad beings work in space and how the space where a man is, is separate, one would get the following occult sign: (a regular pentagram inscribed in a circle.)

It's mainly the Spirits of Form who are now at work, but they can't press into the human being. It's the angels, archangels, and spirits of personality who work in there. Only angels can work throughout the space of this five-pointed star. If we want to indicate how far the archangels can work in, then we must separate this pentagram (blue) that we already looked in (Wonders of the World, 8-20-'11). They don't go into this pentagon but only into the five triangles (yellow.)

If we want to show how far the spirits of personality can work in, we must draw a circle around the five-pointed star. If we stretch out our arms and think of a circle going all around from head to fingertips to toe-tips, then the spirits of personality can only go into the parts that are bounded by the head, stretched out arms, and the particular arc of the circle, etc. (green.)

Spirits of Form can't get to the man anymore; at the circle, they're repelled by the forces that work in a four-membered human being. Now when the etheric body expands during meditation it's in all of these beings and facts that are outside the circle, out to the stars; it's poured out over everything without a gap. If one followed it with one's clairvoyant gaze, one wouldn't see that it stopped anywhere, or it's everywhere.

Now if a pupil still has qualities such as dishonesty, pride, etc., as was mentioned last time, then the qualities go out into spiritual space with the etheric body. And if there's a bad being here or there, the bad part in us feels related and attracted by it. The astral body goes into spiritual space with the etheric body. The intellectual, thinking part of the astral body expands out of the upper tip, the feeling part right and left form the middle tips, and the willing part downwards from the star's two other tips.

But the astral body doesn't remain as continuous as the etheric body in this expansion; pieces can separate that we can then see and follow out there in space. If we have a relation to such a bad being who's staying out there in space, part of our astral body gets stuck to this being and connects itself with it through its wish nature — it separates from the astral body. The latter breaks up into many little pieces. Thus we have parts of our astral body scattered in space that seem to be individual beings during our meditation, but we don't know that they really belong to us, and this leads to error and deception. However there are threads between these parts of our astral body; they're bound to each other and to the pentagram. This connection is produced by the man's I.

Before the mystery of Golgotha, a man had to be very bad to lose control over these scattered astral pieces. Other beings took care of this. After the Event of Golgotha, a man is supposed to exercise this control out of his I.

Even quite advanced esoterics can err by not seeing these connections correctly. To prevent this, an esoteric must devote himself to study. Thereby he gets to know what's in spiritual space, the earth's condition during Saturn, Sun, Moon and earth evolution, the beings and hierarchies that worked in to create man and to make him the way he is now, and so his ego can control the connection between the various parts of his astral body and is thereby protected from error and illusion.

An esoteric shouldn't study for himself out of curiosity or the like; he must make concentrated study his duty for the sake of man's and the earth's evolution. And when we've gotten to know our own being through intensive study, when we thereby know how and through what it has arisen, we then get a sacred feeling about this. We express this feeling in the statement: We're born from God If we permeate ourselves with this feeling in a very intimate way and we let the etheric streams(which we spoke of in the exoteric lecture on the etherization of the blood, where etheric streams go up from the heart to the head, glow and shine around the brain and activate the pineal bland) light up like flames in which everything personal is suppressed, if we sense that we must merge with the feeling that we want to completely sacrifice our own self, like spirits, as Christ sacrificed himself for world evolution — then we learn to express this feeling in the statement: we die in Christ.

And then the certainty lights up in us that we ascend to the spirit, resurrect in the spirit.

Ex Deo nascimur, In Christo morimur, Per Spiritum Sanctum reviviscimus. That's the exoteric saying of the Rosicrusians.

When an esoteric says this verse, he doesn't say the word Christ, but just lets the feeling speak.

(Extract) It's wrong to say that a particular live personality is the incarnation of this or that being, even if it's true. It's one of the most important occult laws to not make such pronouncements about living personalities in public. Things are somewhat different in an esoteric class, where one can sense the effect this has and how it's taken in by individuals.