86. EL, Muenchen, 8-23-'11
My dear brothers and sisters!
As we know, it's our duty at the beginning of each esoteric lesson
to address the Spirit, the regent of the day who helps to direct the
earth in world evolution. (Verse for Wednesday) Today we'll go
into what one can look upon as the only right and true beginning of
clairvoyance. The most important thing in all esoteric activity and
inner development is to create calm, inner quiet and to keep it after
the actual meditation. After we've meditated on the verses or
have done the other things that the masters of wisdom and of the
harmony of feelings have given us for our training, we should remain
absolutely quiet for awhile. Nothing from everyday life, no memory of
it and not even a feeling of our body should press in there. We must
feel bodiless and as if empty; we must eliminate thoughts about our
own existence and should only accept the fact of our existence. But
one shouldn't fall asleep or get into a dream state.
Then one has a condition
in which clairvoyance can begin. What arises before our inner gaze in
such moments comes from the spiritual world. There are ways of telling
whether the images that emerge there are purely spiritual or whether
they're illusory.
What would happen if the
etheric body would leave the physical body for even a moment? The
physical body would contract, shrivel and become wrinkled; it tends to
contract into a very small space and then to eventually dissolve into
nothing. The etheric body tends to spread out into the widths of
space; then it feels connected with all forces out in space. It fills
the physical body and spreads it out to the size it has.
Old people get wrinkles
through this tendency of the physical body to shrink. The physical
body shrinks because the etheric body doesn't work in there anymore
like it did when the man was young.
Something similar happens
to our etheric body during meditation. The etheric body streams and spreads
out in space and feels its way into everything. The same is true at
the moment of death when the physical body releases the etheric body;
this can also last for days.
It's a blissful sensation
when the etheric body feels as if it's dissolved in space. And
things would remain like this until rebirth if the astral body
wasn't there to pull the etheric body back together again
through its desires, drives and passions; thereby a man enters
kamaloca.
During meditation one should
try — and this can be done after years of effort — to get to
the point where one's interior feels illuminated. A man becomes
a light that illumines the objects in the spirit world that approach
him. The things we perceive in such moments when the soul is very
calm aren't like the ones in physical life where we see them
from outside, like we see the sun rising on the horizon in the
morning. Rather, to stick with the sun example, we feel as if we were
in the sun that rises there on the horizon of our clairvoyant
consciousness. We feel as if we were divided up in space. But
illusory figures arise before us, then, if we bring personal feelings
of sympathy and especially of antipathy, improper fondness for
certain people, etc. into our meditation. In someone who lies and is
dishonest in daily life, the lies stream into space with his etheric
body. The dishonestly is rayed back by the things that a pupil sees
there, just as a mirror reflects an image of our face and an echo
throws back our voice. Then dissembling shapes such as beautiful
angel figures appear there, caused by the dishonesty that streams out
with the etheric body. Through the relation of these figures to our
own dishonesty the latter is increasingly consolidated, and
eventually we can't distinguish between truth and lies
anymore.
Now some of you may think
that there must be ways to protect oneself against these delusive images.
But as truly as I'm speaking here and am advocating the
esotericism behind which stand the masters of wisdom and of the
harmony of feelings, so true it is that there's no way to
immediately dispel these illusory images an to prevent them from
appearing. Only through very patient, steady work on oneself, through
the overcoming of dishonesty in oneself, can one gradually get to the
point where these illusory things don't appear anymore and lies
don't become reflected because they aren't there
anymore.
Someone who is proud, who
begins esoteric training with false ambition, who feel a wild desire to
experience all truths of the spiritual world as fast as possible
produces errors in himself, thereby. He becomes receptive for all
gossip out in the world He likes to stick his nose into men's
everyday affairs as he listens eagerly to all sensational comments
and phenomena. Then he cannot distinguish between true and false
things anymore.
That's how ambition and
error are connected. Each of us must combat unhealthy cravings for
the highest truths, pride, lies and dishonesty in himself. We must
raise ourselves to the highest morality in daily life if we want to
arrive at the right clairvoyance, which an only emerge from
mediations that are done properly.
To do these correctly,
one must not bring feelings and thoughts about everyday life into them,
otherwise one would pollute the etheric substance that should radiate
out there.
The longer and more
intensively the meditations are done, the more intensive their effect
is, but one must be a little cautious here. One who notices that he
doesn't feel well, gets dizzy or the like, shouldn't mediate too long,
and he should think seriously about what he did wrong. One should
feel the same after a mediation as before it. We should think about
our esoteric life very often. We should know our defects and make it
quite clear to ourselves how bad we are. But this knowledge of our
badness shouldn't depress us. That would be crass egotism, for
through this depression we would show that we thought we were better
than we really are, whereas we do have the defects that we acquired
ourselves through our previous life and that thereby became our
karma. See the defects quite clearly and then start to get rid of
them.
We must learn to think
objectively. Those who say that they're already thinking
objectively, are often making a big mistake, for this assumption is
only subjective, it's a delusion.
Pride or ambition leads to
error and superstition; we must not succumb to this. We should confront
everything that comes to meet us from whatever side, with an alert,
open intellect, clear thinking and sharp logic. We shouldn't
swear by what seems right to us at first; investigate it critically,
don't give in blindly to something. That's also the way
it should be in our esoteric life; no belief in authority is
demanded.
And my dear sisters and
brothers, the masters of wisdom and of the harmony of feelings let me
tell you that you should always maintain and use all of your intellectual
powers with respect to the wisdom that's given by them, with
respect to what I'm justified in advocating here, and also with
respect to me. One should approach what's said and advocated
here with healthy human understanding, with sensibleness and with an
open-minded thinking, if it is only opened far enough. You
shouldn't swear by this or that but should judge for
yourself.
And so we'll summarize
everything that this class — which like all esoteric classes
should be a sacred one for us — has brought us with the words:
In
the spirit lay the germ of my body.
And the spirit has imprinted in my body
The eyes of sense,
That through them I may see
The lights of bodies.
And the spirit has imprinted in my body
Reason and sensation
And feeling and will,
That through them I may perceive bodies
And act upon them.
In the spirit lay the germ of my body.
In my body lies the germ of the spirit.
And I will incorporate into my spirit
The super-sensible eyes
That through them I may behold the light of spirits.
And I will imprint in my spirit
Wisdom and power and love,
So that through me the spirits may act
And I become a self-conscious organ
Of their deeds.
In my body lies the germ of the spirit.
(Extract from C:) Right
after awakening in the morning if one tries to dive back down into the
spiritual worlds one came from by emptying one's soul and immersing oneself
in one's meditation, one can then attain a memory of one's
experiences in spiritual worlds during the night.
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