107. EL, Berlin, 3-22-'12
Our
occult exercises are supposed to bring us to imaginative knowledge.
Not so long ago they had imaginations that could be understood by any
pupil without further explanation. Today such imaginations must be
explained in words, because very few esoterics would be able to
understand them by themselves. An imagination will now be given here
that's useful for any esoteric who has the feeling that
he's not making any progress in spite of his efforts. The pupil
should imagine that his teacher or master is standing before him in
the shape of Moses, and that the latter asks him: “So
you'd like to know why you're not getting ahead on the
esoteric path?” “Yes.” “I'll tell you
why. It's because you worship the golden calf.” Then the
pupil sees the golden calf next to Moses. The latter lets fire come
up from the earth that consumes the golden calf and turns it to
powder. He throws this powder into some clear water and gives the
mixture to the pupil to drink. A few centuries ago any esoteric would
have been able to understand this image. Now it must be explained as
follows.
When we
go back in our memory, we get to a point where our memories stop and
ego-consciousness began. What lies before that is what we made out of
ourselves in previous incarnations and brought into this one.
That's the golden calf that we worship without realizing
it — our sheath nature.
The
pupil should now replace the image of the golden calf with the image
of what he was as a child, before he had an ego-consciousness. He
becomes fully aware that what he feels is his ego is just a Luciferic
effect. For, ordinary consciousness is based on memory and memory is
a Luciferic force, since it's Lucifer's task to carry the
past over into the present. If one strips oneself of what one has
through ego-consciousness, then what remains is what we've
brought with us from other earth lives.
Some
people may feel that it's hard to have to think of themselves
like that, but we won't be prepared to meet the Guardian of the
Threshold without strict concepts like that.
Then
the pupil should imagine that fire burns the child's form that
he is; he's become a little bigger since then, but basically
he's still the same sheath man that the child was, except that
the illusion of an ego has been added. He sees how the form turns to
powder, and this becomes a strong awareness that all parts of these
physical, etheric and astral sheaths must become as indifferent to
him as a pile of ashes, as indifferent as clay is for a sculptor
before he's made something out of it. He must think away his
physical body and its outer shape, his etheric body with its memory,
his astral body with its sympathies and antipathies — or think
that they are a pile of ashes.
One
might not be able to put this into practice right away. It
doesn't mean that one should suddenly hug someone one disliked,
but when we carry out this imagination as an exercises, we must be
able to get rid of all antipathies.
And the
powder is thrown into the pure water of divine substance, the way it
was before the Luciferic force worked on it. This is how the sheath
nature is to be sacrificed and the divine substance is to be given
back. But an esoteric also arrives at the insight that everything
that's now only a pile of dust for him was formed out of the
spirit. His body's shape was sculpted by the spirit, the spirit
made him into what he now is as a form. And we should take what the
spirit has made out of us back into ourselves. We should drink the
water again in which the dust was dissolved. Then we have it pure,
after the golden calf was burned, pulverized and dissolved. If we do
this, we'll feel that a whole place in us seems to become
empty; it's the place where the ego usually is — we feel
that this is getting empty. When one can either become a Buddhist and
go into a region for which a man should feel that he's too
worthy — into nirvana, into an extraterrestrial sphere. Or one
can arrive at a new awareness of the Christ impulse and can feel it
stream into the place of our ego that has become empty.
Christ
would never have been able to come to earth among the Hebrew people
if Moses hadn't destroyed the golden calf, thrown it into
water, and given it to Israel's children to drink. This
doesn't mean that one should do this imagination every
day — but maybe every 3 or 4 weeks. It's basically just
another clarification of our Rosicrucian verse.
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