67. EL, Muenchen, 8-26-'10
We'll first address the Spirit
of the Day. One can look upon it as especially good fortune if an
esoteric class can be held on a Friday.
Great
embracing Spirit, in your life I live with the earth's life.
In you am I.
You are.
I am in you.
Our leader has brought me to you.
I live in you.
Your spirit is an image of my own being.
You are.
Spirit has found the embracing spirit.
Divine bliss strides on to new world creation.
You are. I am. You are.
Great
embracing Spirit
May my I raise itself from below upward,
May it get an inkling of you in the all-embracing.
May the spirit of my being be illumined
By the light of your messengers.
May the soul of my being be enkindled by the fire flames of your servants.
May the will of my I grasp
Your creatorword's force.
You are.
May your being permeate my will
That my I be grasped by an understanding of your light's shining,
Your life's love-warmth
And your being's creator words.
You are.
We're in divine, etheric
spheres at night with our astral body and ego, from which we bring down
strength for our physical life. We are connected with divine, spiritual
beings there That's why when we wake up in the morning we should never
have banal, everyday, egotistical thoughts right away For if we do,
we cut ourselves off from spiritual beings and forces in which we
were immersed during sleep. Before we go back to any action in daily
life, to any thought about physical existence, we should devote
ourselves to our meditation as we forget ourselves and become
immersed in those regions. Every meditator should make it his sacred
duty to do his meditation right after awakening, or at least his
first thought should be to think thankfully about sublime beings.
An even holier duty, if
there can be such for every esoteric pupil, is to make it clear to himself
that he is doing a great injustice to all men and to higher spiritual
beings if he approaches meditation with impure thoughts and feelings.
For this pollutes spiritual spheres. The forces that must be used to
eliminate this pollution again are withdrawn from mankind's
progress.
One can do one's exercises
with considerable concentration and yet be unholy within oneself.
Doing a meditation like this is merely a matter of will. Of course,
the latter should be consolidated and developed. But the whole inner
life must be consecrated, so that only sacred, sublime things live in
our soul. Just as one shouldn't go into meditation with impure
thoughts and feelings, so one shouldn't go to sleep in the
evening with such things. We're polluting divine worlds if we
take thoughts of pride, vanity and arrogance with us. We should go to
sleep with thoughts of reverence and thanks towards divine beings
because we couldn't live for a minute while our ego and astral
body are outside if such beings did not maintain our physical and
etheric bodies in the meantime. We should go to sleep with reverence
towards great divine beings.
An esoteric differs from an
exoteric in that God lives in him consciously, in that he really lets
God's force become active in him. This doesn't happen
through the ideas he makes of God. Such ideas can harm a man when he
later goes into higher worlds. For instance, he wants to find the
Christ there in accordance with the ideas that he's made of
him, and thereby doesn't recognize the real Christ, for
he's different from the ever so high ideas that one can make of
him.
Arrogance, pride and vanity
in particular are qualities that an esoteric should get rid of. An
esoteric pupil who thinks that he's already gotten rid of
arrogance, pride, etc., must know that these qualities are still
present in a subtle way. There is a certain vanity in the thought
that one has laid these qualities aside and has advanced a great deal
in one's development which is much worse than vanity in outer
life, for it's intensified and applied to higher spiritual
things. We can, however, be proud of a clear, logical and correct
thinking — if it's unsubjective.
We're living in a
very special, important time. It's a time of preparation for the
Christ who will become perceptible in the etheric. We must prepare
ourselves so that we can see him there. Men who don't have the
good fortune to come to theosophy now won't be able to
experience this event.
As we've been hearing
for the last few days, we arose from higher spiritual forces. We
descended from the laps of the Gods. Knowing this, we can place the
Rosicrucian verse before our souls: Ex Deo
nascimur — we're born from God. A sentence should stand
right next to it that makes us feel very small; we should give
ourselves up and lose ourselves entirely and devote ourselves to
Christ. And if this mood lives in our soul rightly, we can have Ex
Deo nascimur and next to it: In Christo morimur — in
Christ we die. And the third sentence of this Rosicrucian saying
gives us a wide view of how we can consciously develop the
spirit — the Holy Spirit — in us: Per Spiritum Sanctum
reviviscimus — we'll live again and again in the Holy
Spirit. And if we make this Rosicrucian verse the basic mood of our
meditation we'll then take in the following verse with full
understanding and with holy feelings: In the spirit lay the germ
of my body …
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