88. EL, Karlsruhe, 10-10-'11
Before we can begin with
the esoteric lesson, I'm obliged to tell you something, namely that
one of our members from the more intimate circle gave me a brochure,
as if driven by a right impulse, and this induces me to say a few
things As you know each esoteric pupil, depending on his
predisposition, gets exercises that for deeper lying reasons and
through their buildup and sequence of word bring about what a pupil
needs for his development. The sequence of words is of the greatest
importance, also which word is used and where it stands, so that what
is intended is attained. Many of you have received the verse: In
pure rays of light … as a morning exercise.
Now I just received a
brochure that contains the following:
I
see in the pure rays of light
The Godhead of the world;
In love to all beings radiates the divinity of my soul.
I live in the Godhead
And find myself again
In the Godhead of the world.
It is hard to determine how
the writer of this brochure arrived at the formula, for it belongs
exclusively to our esoteric school. It could be that one of our students
was careless enough to tell it to outsiders. We could also imagine the other
case — that actually happened several years ago — that
someone meditated in a rooming house, and a man was in the adjacent
room who took in these ideas clairvoyantly. We should always have the
greatest sympathy for people like the first case mentioned, for as
esoterics, we know that everything punishes itself, even if nothing
bad was intended. The reason it must have this effect is that every
word of the formula was put in its place with the greatest care, and
if they are torn out of context, they'll have the opposite
effect. One has created a contrary effect through an arbitrary change
in the word sequence and through the use of the positive little word
“I” — whereas everything was kept in flux and as if
objective in the original formula, so that everything is supposed to
work through the imaginative picture. Our meditations should always
proceed from our inner moral impulses; the other world and especially
our personal ego should be excluded completely. We should grasp the
Godhead of the world and the way it streams through the world with
its divine light in our thoughts quite objectively. Our ego
shouldn't become obtrusive here or then the effect would become
just the opposite. Quite differently constituted spiritual effects
would then have to appear, namely Luciferic effects.
In the first line, I see
in pure rays of light, the moral impulse that suppresses the ego in
all humility and that should e completely devoted to the divine
spirit of the world in which one rests while forgetting oneself,
doesn't come out.
The egotistical principle
also emerges strongly in the last lines:
I
live in the Godhead
And find myself again
In the Godhead of the world
for something quite different
is experienced in the I rest.
From this, one sees how very
exact and careful we must be so that we also use the words of our meditation
quite correctly in our thoughts.
We'll now pass on to several
images that we can use for our esoteric training because they have a
very strong effect. We know that the path to higher worlds first goes
through Imagination and then via Inspiration and Intuition. The
pictures that shall now be given strengthen the organs that lead to
imaginative perception.
In our theosophical teachings
we've often heard that the world is maya, that we ourselves are
nothing but maya, and if even outer science is beginning to explain
the world in this way, we should then take this saying even more
seriously.
If we look at this rose, then,
it has an upwards directed flower and a stem directed downwards. But
what seems to be there is no true image. Science has taught us that
what we see comes about through a crossing of light rays, so that the
upside-down image of the rose appears in our eye, whereas we see the
outer picture of the rose with the flower up. That's the mirror
image of the real light phenomenon in us. From this we see that what
we perceive outside is maya, and it's a reverse maya, where
down is up. That's the way it is with everything around us; the
whole world whose surface we think we see — and ourselves
also — is really standing on its head. If we want to perceive the
true shape of the world then we mustn't look for mirror images
but we must look for the realities behind them before they become
reflected in the outer world. Practically everything is the opposite
of the way we imagine it. What seems to be up is down; what seems to
be behind us is in front; what seems to be left is right,
they're really coming from the left; if we see objects standing
before us, then in reality forces are there that press towards us
from behind. The same is true of the starry heavens. We see it before
us when we look up; in reality, it's reflected to our eyes by
forces that are behind us.
If we want to arrive at the
truth in the world, we must ascend from the Spirit of Form to the Spirits
of Movement, so that the latter can help us to see what is placed
before us as a mirror image by Spirits of Form as the inversion of
reality. We can use the following as a symbol to gain practice in
this. When we see a rose with a flower on top, we move it down in our
thoughts and therewith make a movement that the forces of the Spirits
of Movement can symbolize for us.
But there is one thing in
man that is no mere sensory illusion, that's no maya. This is the word
that resounds from men, the living word, the logos. The word
doesn't come to us from outside, it's something alive in
us, it's our real being. It streams out of our soul life; we
who let the word stream out over our lips are it ourselves with all
of our feelings. And if we top to think that the word is the Logos
and that everything that's spoken in the world is spoken out of
this source, we'll then feel a deep responsibility towards the
word.
Only what men have said in
their words will survive the earth and pass over to the next planetary
condition. As we said, what we hear from the left comes from the
right, but the sound that we utter is the only thing that's no
different from what it seems to be. It sounds forth from within and
it really comes from within. Divine beings, the Logos, speak to us
out of it.
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