Eternal Archetypes and the Path to Spiritual Immortality

GA 266I — 13 April 1906, Berlin

Esoteric Lesson

Everything physical around us arises and passes away, only the archetypes of things do not arise and pass away; they are not created and do not pass away, they are eternal. The physical earth arises and passes away, but the archetype of the earth does not arise and pass away. The archetype of the earth is eternal. And contained in the archetype of the earth are all other archetypes of the physical world. Like the archetype of the earth, they do not arise and pass away; they are eternal. Just as the earth has its eternal archetype, so too does every mineral, every plant, every animal, every human being have its own, which shines forth in beauty and glory for all eternity. Human beings must learn to unite themselves more and more with the archetypes of things. They must ascend to them. They learn to connect with them through life with memory. When the student looks back on the day that has passed in the evening review, and remembers the scenes of the day, the joyful and painful things he has experienced, when he lets the joys and pains associated with the events of the day pass through his soul again in his memory, then he connects himself with that life which remains, which still exists even without material reality. Through his imagination, man must recall the events of his own life and the lives of others and allow his soul to be flooded with the joy and pain associated with those events: in this way he learns to ascend to the beings that embody joy and pain and learns to live consciously in the soul world. We are constantly surrounded by such beings. Then we learn to perceive them.

When we try to recall experiences from the past that we have been through, it is different from thinking back on events that we have read or heard about. The difference is that in the former case, we were there with our own selves. And that is what matters. It is good to practice recalling experiences from our past. A pain or joy that we once felt looks very different in our memory than it did in the present at the time. By recalling these experiences, we come closer to true knowledge. We see things as they really are when we are able to truly feel a pain or joy that we do not have. When we are able to allow images of what we do not see now to arise within us, we come closer to the creative divinity.

In the Rosicrucian schools, such teachings were given to the students. They had to let pleasure and displeasure associated with earlier events in their lives pass through their souls of their own free will, without the brutal reality. When one allows pleasure and displeasure to arise in the soul in this way, one awakens the soul organs. For those who were not yet able to bring this about themselves, the initiates presented dramatic images, scenes from human life, in which people learned to feel, even without the brutal reality, what is otherwise connected with the events themselves. This is what remains of the events in the world. To achieve this, man must learn to rise above himself.

Man will remember his previous earthly lives to the extent that he has learned to recognize the eternal in things and brings this eternal into the world himself.

The yoga student does breathing exercises. The breathing of ordinary people is irregular and unrhythmic. The yoga student learns to bring his breathing into rhythm. Unrhythmic breathing is actually killing. Through the breath that he exhales, man kills. He brings death to himself and other living beings as long as his breathing has not become rhythmic and full of life through yoga exercises. Through rhythmic breathing, a person's breathing also becomes individual. Among savages, even actions are not very individual. The higher a person rises in development, the more his actions will bear an individual stamp. But breathing is initially the same for all developed human beings; now the person must learn to individualize his breath. In this way, through the breathing process, he works himself more and more into the environment in a characteristic way. The more he works himself into the environment through his breathing, the more of him remains as something eternal and imperishable, and the more he will find again in all his subsequent incarnations. Through the rhythmic breathing process, he transforms the environment and thus becomes a co-worker in cosmic processes. He helps to create on Earth.

While the breath of the ordinary person kills, the breath of the purified person brings life to the environment. The air in cities is not only worse because it is polluted by all kinds of physical substances, but also because the irregular, unpurified breathing of people spoils the air. The air in cities is full of toxins due to the immorality of people. In the countryside, the air is purer than in cities. People there still lead a simpler, more rhythmic life in greater peace. While people in cities are filled with thoughts of a thousand things that flood their lives in an unrhythmic way, people in the countryside get used to fitting their lives into the rhythmic course of nature, of becoming and passing away, into the rhythm of the seasons. In rhythm with nature, they perform certain tasks at certain times of the year, thereby establishing a much more intimate connection with the great laws of the world than city dwellers, who ignore these laws completely. Through this rhythmic integration into the course of world life, people living in the countryside also bring rhythm into their own lives. Through this rhythm, the air they breathe out also becomes more rhythmic, purer, and better.

Plants exhale pure air. They are pure, without desire, selfless; that is why we feel comfortable in the plant world: it exudes life. But ordinary people bring death to the environment with their breath. They must transform their breath into something pure, full of life, through a pure, moral, selfless life, and they must bring it into rhythm through yoga exercises. Then they must learn to breathe out their individuality, to impress it upon the world: in this way they give life to the environment. Through continued training of this kind, the yogi learns to rise above the purely physical and to enter into the eternal. In this way, he ascends to the eternal, imperishable archetypes of things that do not arise and do not pass away; he also unites with his own archetype. Man arises and passes away physically, but for every human being there is an archetype that is eternal.

When the yogi learns to unite with the archetypes, he has ascended into the eternal world of the spirit; he floats above the transitory. This is the state in which it is said that the yogi then rests between the wings of the great bird, the swan, the Aum.

The Aum is the passing from the images back to the archetype—the merging into the imperishable. This merging into the eternal, this uniting with the archetypes, is also expressed in the mantra from the Upanishads:¹

Yasmājj jātam jagat sarvam, yasminn eva pralīyate
yenedam dhāryate chaiva, tasmai jnānātmane namah.

This is also what lies in the Easter idea. It is the resurrection of man from his attachment to the transitory and material into the eternal regions of the archetypes. Nature serves as a symbol for this. Just as new life sprouts everywhere from the earth around Easter, after the seed has sacrificed itself and rotted in the earth to give new life the opportunity to emerge, so too must everything base in man die. He must sacrifice his lower nature so that he can rise to the eternal archetypes of things. That is why Christianity celebrates the death and resurrection of the Savior at this time of nature's awakening from its winter sleep.

Man must also die first in order to experience resurrection in the spiritual realm. Only those who overcome their attachment to the transitory can themselves become imperishable, like the eternal archetypes, and rest between the wings of the great bird Aum. Then human beings become those who cooperate in the progress of the world. They then help to shape it for a future existence; they then work magically from their innermost being into the world.

Original self, from whom we came,
Original self, who lives in all things,
To you, our higher self, we return.