From the Contents of Esoteric Classes

EL, Hannover, 2-7-'14

Verse for Saturday. Every esoteric makes progress if he does his exercises with the proper perseverance and intensity. If he doesn't progress it's because he doesn't pay enough attention to what comes from the spiritual world. This is very intimate and subtle. One must immerse oneself entirely in the words that are given as exercises, everything else must not be there for the meditator, he must be as if removed from his physical body. He must only be aware of his I. At the end of meditation the content of the same must be extinguished, and only the waking I must be there with an empty content. These are the most productive moments, in which the spiritual world can flow into the meditator. Or else during the day one suddenly has the feeling that something is flitting by, so that one knows that something from the spiritual world was just there. Then a feeling of deep piety takes hold of one.

The content of what flows to a meditator when he empties himself of the after-effects of the meditation depends upon merit. It'll never be the same from one time to the next. This content depends on our morality, love of truth and on how we've lived and been since the last meditation. If we weren't entirely truthful or if we let anger and aggravation arise in us, then nothing from the spiritual world can stream into us. We get what we deserve. If we trace these things back attentively we'll always find the reason why we weren't blessed with the spirit in some lie, in a surging up of anger or the like.

If someone who knows nothing about theosophy says the Lord's prayer or some other one, he easily gets a warm feeling or one of warm piety, but this comes from his personal feelings. When an esoteric prays he will first have a cold feeling; he shouldn't bring anything personal into his prayer, he must only let the spiritual content of the same work. Inner, real warmth then comes from the spiritual world and not from his personal life.

If one occupies oneself with an object that one has chosen for concentration every day — the first subsidiary exercise — connects one thought after another with it, then if one lets 15 minutes pass without plunging back into daily activities, after months of serious exercising one will feel as if something was coming into the head or brain, as if the etheric body was coming back into the brain in waves. In the second subsidiary exercise, initiative action, in which one exerts one's will in some activity at particular times, after the exercise one will gradually feel as if one had been active in one's etheric body; one has the feeling: I felt myself in my etheric body. Then a feeling of deep reverence and piety moves into the meditator's soul.

In the third subsidiary exercise — harmony between joy and sorrow — we're supposed to find our way into all happenings and fit ourselves into them. Our etheric body will then gradually expand into heavenly distances. Then we won't feel that we're in our body and the whole world is around us, but we feel that our body is spread out into the whole periphery. We feel expanded and poured into spiritual worlds. One feels and knows that one is in the spiritual world.

In these three subsidiary exercises we experience the two first lines of our rosicrucian verse — how we were entirely embedded in divine-spiritual forces and came down from them, and how in the third exercise we pour ourselves into the spiritual world, into the Christ. For the Christ is in the earth's aura, in the earth's atmosphere now; we must let him reign in us or as it were next to us.

In the fourth exercise, positivity ... [gap in text] Per Spiritum Sanctum reviviscimus.

Just as we walk over a meadow with blue and red flowers and we know that they're blue and red, so we'll get to the point where we experience the truth in our rosicrucian verse:

Ex Deo nascimur
In Christo morimur
Per Spiritum Sanctum reviviscimus.

In the spirit lay the germ of my body ...