118. EL, Basel, 9-22-'12
The
example of playing children showed us how an esoteric pupil is
related to exoteric life, and that he can play better than kids
because he connects himself with the latter, rather than with the
toys. The important thing is his soul attitude and his connection
with the children, and not the toys. That's the way things are
on the esoteric path also. There, the pupil gets into a different
relation to his surroundings. He looks at the latter differently than
before. In a way, he's outgrown them and yet he understands
them better. We shouldn't lose interest in things in the outer
world, although an esoteric training tends to make one lose interest
in what formerly interested one.
A man
out in life likes some men more than others. He, of course, tends to
either ignore the defects of someone he likes or to excuse them much
more easily than in someone he doesn't like. This attitude must
be changed in an esoteric. His relation to his fellow men must become
more impersonal. This shouldn't happen overnight; that
wouldn't even be right, for karmic connections could be torn
thereby. But he must gradually get to the point where he also wants
to help people he doesn't like. This makes him see
others' defects — also those of loved ones — more
clearly than before, but that doesn't do any harm; it gets
evened out again through esoteric training.
Our
soul mood really becomes different. Taking another look at what
happens to us in the moments when we end our meditations it's
not indifferent whether this playing in of the spiritual world
happens right after the meditation or only later on in daily life,
and also whether this is the result of meditation or whether
it's only atavistic clairvoyance, clairaudience or a reflection
of visions.
It's best for our soul life if these transitions only play in
fleetingly and are easily forgotten. The main thing for an esoteric
is to learn to pay attention to this brief lighting up of the
spiritual world. Through esoteric training our thinking becomes
finer, more spiritual and more independent of the brain. Look at how
important the concepts of time and space are for human feelings. And
yet time and space are maya in the spiritual world. An esoteric pupil
in the midst of exoteric life may suddenly get the feeling that
it's not he who's thinking at this moment but that
he's perceiving his thought body and the thoughts that are
weaving and working in it. He'll have the intense feeling:
Something is thinking in me. This weaving and working of thoughts is
always present in our subconsciousness, but we only become aware of
it at special moments. The feeling that something spiritual wants to
think, feel and will in us must increasingly awaken. Someone could
ask: Isn't that a contradiction when we're told to
receive everything with full consciousness, and now we hear that the
I and thoughts work in our subconsciousness? Such questions arise
from today's brutal logical thinking — not only brutal with
respect to men, but also brutal with respect to thinking. However an
esoteric must learn to think subtly and he must be aware that
everything becomes transformed in esoteric life.
In
sensory life a man is aware of his three soul forces — thinking,
feeling and willing — through which the soul works; sentient,
intellectual, and consciousness souls. These three soul members seem
to mingle when one goes into higher worlds, and yet they're
separate. This seems contradictory. But one should know that the
three soul members are never completely separate, although each seems
to exist by itself.
All of
a man's desires, passions and drives surge in his sentient
soul. But a man had to have something as a counterpole for his
egoity. The powers who led human evolution saw this, and so they
placed fear in man's sentient soul. A man had to have fear,
otherwise he would have grabbed everything in sight and his egoity
would have become too strong. Ancient pedagogues were well aware of
this, and the telling of fairy tales and ghost stories were part of
the education. Children aren't told ghost stories in school
today, but this is necessary for a child's soul to a certain
extent so that amazement is aroused in it, because reverence for
something unknown develops from this. A child who was never told
about something unknown and great can never feel devotion in later
life. An esoteric must consciously transform fear into reverence,
piety, devotion and an ability to sacrifice. When one goes into
spiritual worlds, fear must be transformed into reverence;
that's why it's good to cultivate it on the physical
plane. But if the feeling of fear in man is exaggerated and the ego
isn't strong enough to keep the fear from taking hold of not
only the soul but also of the physical body, violent rages can arise,
among other things. This can always be ascribed to a weak ego. People
who have these are afraid of water and other things that don't
hang together. This is a wrong working in of spiritual forces upon
the soul and body.
The
basic condition for the intellectual soul is cleverness, which is
often crossed through by sympathy. It is odd that these poles
confront each other in the intellectual soul. The intellect is often
crossed through and influenced by sympathy. A placing of oneself into
other beings, a feeling of sorrow and joy as if it were our own, is
something that should be attained through conscious meditations. We
must arrive at the feeling that we're all a unity, and we must
learn to feel that time and space become something separate. For
instance, a mother will have different attitudes towards her
child's pains at the ages of one, three, and twenty. She also
feels differently about her own child than about someone
else's. A mother feels differently because she's
connected with her child, is a unity with him or her, just as
we're a piece of the unity of spiritual worlds. One also sees
that maya changes through time and space and that thereby one's
soul sympathy changes.
We'll find that with such sympathy we often feel a tremendous
bliss. But we shouldn't give in to this mood. This should just
be the main feeling when we become free of the body, that is, that we
don't feel in the physical body but in meditation; and then
enjoy the tremendous bliss of working creatively in the world.
This
blissful feeling creates the greatest egoity, and that's why
it's only beneficial through meditation. In physical existence
we should bear everything that destiny places on us with equanimity,
and we should learn to feel as if all of this didn't concern us
at all, and take it as calmly as if our body was foreign to us. We
must always awaken the feeling in us that we can be just as glad
about the progress of others as about our own, and that it's
not as if we were specially chosen to make progress. It's
immaterial for world evolution who make the progress, but for us the
combating and transformation of egoism is the important thing.
The one
pole of the consciousness soul is the feeling of being able to
exclude oneself, and the other pole that projects in from the
spiritual world is conscience. This keeps us from doing things that
disagree with moral laws. We must let ourselves be guided by our
conscience, and not act according to the principle of the statesman
of whom one says that although he seemed to let himself be led by his
horses, he nevertheless directed these horses where he wanted them to
go.
We must
see to it that we develop conscience in the right way on the physical
plane; it's only what one has acquired that one can take into
spiritual worlds. Conscience changes through our meditations. The
hardest stage for an occultist is the one where he's bereft of
conscience. A man must have advanced a great deal here, must have
cleared ambition and vanity out of his soul — those worst of all
soul forces that can always drag him down again; he must have
transformed them completely.
Being
“without conscience” is a feeling of being completely
free of one's body in the sense of higher self-knowledge, in
order only then to be able to feel like a center for the reception of
truths from the spiritual world. We must learn to lead a double life,
to have the feeling that we're carrying our physical body
around like a piece of wood. An esoteric must learn to feel that his
whole body is an organ for thinking, feeling and willing.
He must
get to the point where he is not only thinking with his brain
that's encased in a hard skull, but with all parts of his body;
for instance, hands are better organs for thinking than the brain. He
must gradually spiritualize the physical to such an extent that
everything becomes a mere instrument for him. He must get to the
point where he looks at his etheric or physical hands without seeing
them, just as he now sees neither his eyes nor his brain. Just as we
feel that an ax that we take in our hand is something external, so
the hand must also be felt as something that does not belong to us.
We must be the driving factor that directs the hand as an instrument
with which we work.
We must
develop everything in us beyond the corporeal and spiritualize
ourselves so much that we become like our archetype.
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.
|