Developing Spiritual Organs Through Meditation and Thought

GA 266I — 14 June 1908, Munich

Esoteric Lesson

Record A

The waiting period that esotericists must endure until they reach their goal of entering higher worlds often seems very long to them. Some believe that their spiritual organs are developing particularly slowly. However, even the slightest impatience always has a delaying effect, especially on the development of these organs, and when the student complains of failure, he is very often wrong. For eight-tenths of the students have already developed their spiritual organs, often without even realizing it or understanding how to use them. It is like what happens to a sleeping person with their hearing organs. The ear is open as always, even in sleep, and yet the person hears nothing of the outside world because the ego has left the physical body and etheric body with the astral body.

The experience of the impressions that the outside world constantly conveys to our senses has a destructive effect on our sense organs. When we look at a rose, the red color, the shape, etc., have a destructive effect on our retina. The sensation of the rose travels along our nerve strands and has a destructive effect on them. What the retina receives, the astral body throws as an impression into the etheric body, and thus the latter receives numerous impressions from outside every day.

What has a destructive effect in the physical body is constructive in the etheric body. The latter builds itself up through impressions and experiences from outside. The same relationship exists between the astral body and the I. The astral body is destroyed by external impressions, but the I should have a constructive effect again.

The astral body comes into a new incarnation harmoniously organized and is only made disharmonious by life. Upon entering the new life, the astral body senses this, and this is the occult explanation for why the vast majority of children cry after birth. Their astral body senses the entry into life as pain, which disturbs its harmony. This harmony can only be restored by the ego, through the creation of thought images that are projected from the ego through the astral body onto the etheric body and are capable of sustaining life. The impressions we convey to our etheric body in ordinary life are mostly worthless in terms of their life force. We must now create thought images that are clear, correctly structured, and therefore capable of sustaining life. We can schematically represent what has been said in the following way:

What the sense organs receive from outside, they project (for example, the eye) onto the etheric body, where the image arises. The ego now acts from the other side on the etheric body through the astral body, forming a thought in it, which it projects onto the etheric body as an impression; and it is important that these thoughts are correct and viable. These viable thoughts form our spiritual organs, which are supposed to make us clairvoyant. Just as the gods created our physical body harmoniously, so that every organ and every limb is in its proper place, so must we harmoniously form our astral body and etheric body and make our thoughts viable. Time plays no role in this. An experienced esotericist often needs only a minute to reorder his impressions.

Through meditation, immersing oneself in certain concepts, in eternal thoughts, one creates such life-containing, organ-forming impressions in one's etheric body.

For example, it is important for every student to meditate on the concept of wisdom. This does not mean that they should now arrive at a clearly defined, intellectual definition of wisdom, but rather that they should hold views on it that are easily flexible and changeable. Wisdom and intelligence or education are very different things. In the higher worlds, where everything is more specific, there are beings who are very wise without thinking at all. They carry out plans with the utmost wisdom, but these plans have been conceived by other beings.

Among humans, too, there are those who are wise without being clever, without possessing any intellectual education. If we meditate on the concept of wisdom in the right way, something of wisdom itself will flow into us, and enlightenment will come to us from the higher worlds.

A second concept to meditate on is love. What the average person calls “love” is often nothing more than blatant selfishness. Even the love of a mother caring for her sick child is often only an expression of selfishness, trembling with the pain of losing the child. True love is always productive. That is why, as harsh as it may sound, almost only artists have any idea of love today, as they devote themselves entirely to their work. Thus, the gods created our earth out of love by devoting themselves entirely to their creation and, so to speak, sweating creation out of themselves.

What love and wisdom can unite within themselves is the self, the self that always creates in itself, that must always be “confessed” anew, as Fichte says. Fichte's philosophy can only be properly understood from the standpoint that the ego must constantly recreate itself and recognize itself. This is also what Meister Eckhart means when he says, “If I were a king and did not know it, I would not be a king.” In other words, what good is it to be a king if one is not aware of being one?

Everything casts its shadow from higher planes onto lower planes, and so these three, I, wisdom, and love, act on the next lower plane as thinking, feeling, and willing. Here they are not so specific, which is why we draw them as a triangle connected to each other.

If you think about this intensively, you will realize that the ego is transformed into thinking, wisdom becomes feeling, and love, the productive force, becomes will, which is the driving force behind creation and devotion.

As a supplement to these three points, this triangle, it is good to meditate on four further points (see drawing).

When a person urges toward a new incarnation, higher beings of four kinds create his etheric body: the sanguine, choleric, phlegmatic, and melancholic beings. Every person receives something from each of these beings, although one or the other may predominate. This predominant temperament is expressed in the entire behavior of the person, especially in children. (A sanguine child jumps around; his gaze wanders carelessly over many things. A choleric child, for example, will grasp a pear offered to him quite differently than a phlegmatic child.) Therefore (because of the interaction of all four temperaments), people have a phlegmatic feeling for one thing and a choleric feeling for another. These temperaments keep each other in balance. For example, phlegmatic people are the enemies of all philistinism, of all the pettiness into which people would fall if they were exposed to too much melancholy.

These four astral entities are in turn expressed in the physical realm:

the choleric in fire,
the sanguine in air,
the phlegmatic in water,
the melancholic in earth.

Our earth is the outer, physical expression of melancholy.

If you meditate on all this, over time, in a quiet hour, you will reach a state where, while fully conscious, you lose awareness of the external world, and in this state you will recognize what is eternal, that birth and death are only transformations. The etheric body will illuminate itself from the other side through the ego, and we will recognize the eternal, living thoughts that we imprinted on it in their workings and see that they created the clairvoyant organs that we can now use.

If we accelerate this process in any way out of impatience, the etheric body will be illuminated by the ego, and we will see in it only what life has given us in external impressions, distorted images that are often hideous, or seductive, beautiful illusions*. Therefore, the greatest patience and caution are advised so that we may create well-formed, correct spiritual organs; for with them we create our future, our new Earth. The gods meditated on our present planet, and what we create should also become as wise as it is.

Every enjoyment of art also strengthens the clairvoyant organs. When we look at a statue, for example, it is good to feel the shapes and lines in our minds. This strengthens our creative abilities.

Record B

Since modern humans live in the world, everything that enters them through their sense organs affects the etheric body and imprints itself on it.

This is not the case only during sleep.

Everything that now has a spiritual effect on the human being is brought about by the ego through the human astral body, which is also imprinted on the etheric body.

If a large number of images from the external world are imprinted on the etheric body, there is no room for images from the spiritual world. That is why it is so important for the development of humanity to do meditation and concentration exercises, because these imprint spiritual images on the etheric body. It is less important that they be practiced for a long time than that they be done intensively, so that the entire external world disappears and the human being lives only in the spiritual realm.