Lessons for the Participants of Cognitive-Cultic Work 1906–1924

GA 265a — 1 October 1908, Berlin

The Mystery of Life and Death

Notes by Camilla Wandrey

There is an interaction between the etheric body of the plant and the cosmic ether. This interaction allows the spiritual power of the sun to penetrate the plant and protect the physical body of the plant from decay.

If this solar power cannot penetrate, for example if the plant is in the cellar and this influence is lacking, then the etheric body of the plant loses its independence. The interaction no longer takes place, the plant withers. Spiritually speaking, this is the withering of plants.

This killing brings about sense perception. That which, for example, flowed as red out in the surrounding divinity and previously appeared as an inner image in the astral body of the developing human being now envelops objects: the human being perceives them. The human being repels the influx of the gods, kills them, and this is how sense perception arises. He conquers the physical plane, but thereby also death. If he had experienced all this external sense perception at once, if the whole external world had flashed before him in a moment of tremendous lightning, then man would be killed instantly.

Now this killing takes place slowly within his whole life between birth and death, because perception means killing. But in meditation, man reconnects with the primal fire of the source of power, the life of the gods. He thus conquers death, for he participates in the life force of the gods, the inexhaustible source, by striving from the center of his ego up the paths that are shown to us by the masters.

The gods continually sacrifice themselves to us in their love, their strength, their will, feeling and thinking. And consciously receiving this sacrifice means tapping into the primal source, the primal fire of eternal life. That is the key to the temple! The right reception transforms the thorns on the path to the temple into bliss. In occultism, not receiving correctly or betraying the secrets is called sawing off the branch on which one sits.

To perceive means to kill: Everything that appears to our senses as a thing or being has previously been spread out in space as the astral body of the gods, as their thinking, feeling, and willing.

The result of the influx of the power of the gods into the astral body of the developing human being was the physical and etheric body of the human being. They are a confluence, a centering of the currents of power of the all-encompassing divinity. The germ of the I was sunk into it, and now it began its work from within. When it goes beyond its ego center, breaking through the ring of the astral body, then the human being can reunite with the power of the primal fire of the Godhead and receive eternal life.

What we perceive as red and so on is not a confluence of atoms, but of spirit.