123. EL, Zuerich, 12-17-'12
When
one wants to meditate, one must order oneself to exclude all thoughts
and to only have the soul content of the mediation in one's
soul. After that, soul quiet must set in, emptiness must begin, and
then wait to see whether something flows in from the spiritual world,
wait with patience and perseverance. Then one may have an experience
that's like a dream that flits by. Then one has the feeling:
“Something is thinking in me,” “An angel touched
me,” “I raise myself into his kingdom.”
Our
relation to our thoughts is like that of an angel to the Holy Spirit.
The Holy Spirit doesn't think like we do — he lets his
angels rush through the world as his messengers.
Such an
experience is the first step into the spiritual world, and one should
watch for it.
One
should feel and experience: It thinks me with piety.
One can
now raise oneself further to the divine principle that vitalizes and
weaves through the world and to which we owe our existence. Then one
has an experience such as: It weaves me.
Thereby, we touch the hem of the clothes of beings whom we call
Spirits of Movement.
Even in
ordinary life, we must dive down or bump into something in order to
develop consciousness. We bump into our physical body and wake up. We
also bump into something after death, into Christ-substance. We must
wake up in it, dive down in it to become aware of the spiritual
world, so that we're not asleep there.
But
having consciousness doesn't mean that one has
ego-consciousness yet. We also have consciousness in the experience
that something thought in us, but it's only when we remember
that something has thought in us that we connect the experience with
our ego.
So we
lose our ego at death, and we dive down dead as a soul to find
ourselves and to gradually become conscious in the
Christ-substance.
Then we
come to sublime beings whom we feel we should call Thrones or Spirits
of Will, and the mantra for this is: It works me. Here one
should feel reverence and devotion.
If we
have a luminous moment in the spiritual world we see our body down
below, but it takes a high stage of vision to see it as in a mirror.
At the beginning of such experiences we see an image of a coffin with
a man in it, or a bathtub filled with hot water, or we stand before a
door that doesn't open. All of these images are in the physical
body that doesn't let us in.
When we
experience the image that we're looking at our physical body
down there, and that we're born out of the divine-spiritual
world, then we express this in the words:
Ex
Deo nascimur.
When we
imagine how we dive down into the Christ-substance to die, then this
is:
In
Christo morimur.
And how
we reemerge from the trickling water in a fine body and move up into
the spiritual world:
Per
Spiritum Santum reviviscimus.
Notes from memory of
120 [123] esoteric lessons that Rudolf Steiner gave in 1904-1912 and
meditation texts and exercises he wrote down in Aus den Inhalten
der esoterischen Stunden, bibl. No. 266, vols. 1 and 2.
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