Parzival's Path: Shame, Fear, and Spiritual Ascension

GA 266I — 30 August 1909, Munich

Esoteric Lesson

Record A

In Parzival, a basic feeling arose after he had stood alone before Titurel and had those experiences we have spoken of. A most intimate, deepest sense of shame arose in him. This feeling of shame completely overwhelmed him. He had undergone catharsis and believed that he was now so good and pure that he could be accepted and join the followers of the Master of Masters, Christ. And in this feeling of shame, he remembered the words of Christ: “Who are you to call me good? No one is good. Only God is good.” (Mark 10:18 and Luke 18:19). And now he knew how deeply imperfect he still was and how much he still had to take in in his striving for goodness, how much he still lacked in order to be good. - And a second feeling, a feeling of fear, came over him. He believed he had long since overcome it. It was also a different feeling of fear than he had known before. It was a feeling of his own smallness and weakness as a human being that overwhelmed him in the face of the sublime divine being when he let the second word of Christ live in his soul, the word: “Be perfect, as your Father in heaven is perfect.” (Matthew 5:48). These two words should live in the soul of every esoteric.

The esoteric should live according to not one but two principles. First, he should kindle in his soul complete devotion to the divine. Through this, consciousness unfolds: it is not what one does that is good, but one must always strive to become more perfect. We should look toward what is becoming in our soul. God lives in what is becoming. If we reach the point where we act well and nobly, then it is the God within us who is good. The God who makes us act well and nobly is our archetype itself, which created us. We must become the full image of this archetype.

In everything we do, there is a selfish motive, however hidden it may be. We must realize that we cannot be completely selfless. It is world karma that causes us to act selfishly. But world karma is God. Everything that God is and does as good is better than we could do ourselves. And the esotericist should say to himself: If I carry out an action that I have made my duty, I carry it out to the best of my ability, according to the direction we feel within ourselves, and I carry it out in such a way that I say to myself that the divine working within me carries out this action, I am only the instrument of this divine working within me, then the esotericist develops according to the second principle: the higher self reveals itself to him in his striving for perfection.

There are three revelations of the higher self: first through dreams, second through intuition, and third through meditation. If the esotericist has lived long in his meditations, if he has tried again and again to live in his thoughts, words, and deeds according to the first principle just described, if he has tried again and again to take up the striving to be good—then a time comes when it becomes clear to him: If I were to remove all the joy and suffering that I have felt within myself up to now, it would be as if I were surrounded by a spiritual and soulful presence; I would no longer live in what I have removed, I would no longer be touched by the waves of pain and joy. Then the student must learn to stand firm in the center of his existence by living completely in the power of the mantra: Ex Deo nascimur. In this way, the student incorporates into his humanity the higher self, the second principle [of the I], which is not within us and therefore cannot be found by merely brooding within ourselves, but can only be attained by growing beyond ourselves.

Through the exercises, we awaken within ourselves a power that otherwise acts as a memory force, recalling mental images, feelings, and sensations that were previously stimulated by things and events in the external world that are now past. The student gets to know this power as power alone; he learns to organize it in his brain so that he finally grows toward the higher self that hovers above us.

The student now lives in this newly acquired power. Everything external, be it suffering or joy, now appears to him as if outside his center. He stands firm and closed in himself in the face of all external influences; he feels free within himself and free from everything external.

And the student senses something else. He has previously learned the teachings of karma. Now he knows that he is subject to the effects of karma. In this renewed power, he experiences the higher self that brought him into existence through birth, and he understands how what is lived out in his destiny in the outer world must be brought about by the working necessity of karmic forces. This gives him a certain joy in the face of pain and suffering. He faces everything with serenity.

When the student has reached this stage in his development, he comes to contemplation and thereby to the “consummation” of the higher self. And now his spiritual eyes and ears are organized and begin to function as he continues to devote himself to the exercises with patience, perseverance, and concentration. He learns to see the world of light of the spiritual beings and the spiritual will that resounds to him from the harmony of the spheres, audible to his open spiritual ears. And he knows that it is not through his physical organism that he can have these experiences in the spiritual world. In experiencing the pentagram, he feels himself placed within the great whole of the ethereal, spiritual world. This entire drawing, this occult writing, has a soul-awakening and spirit-liberating effect. The student should place it before the eyes of his soul again and again, and he will experience how new powers continually awaken in his soul as a result.

We have seen how Parzival, standing alone before Titurel, had the experiences that find expression in this occult writing. It expresses the whole of Christian wisdom, the whole Christian mystery that surrounds the Holy Grail. The mystery wisdom of pre-Christian times is like a greenhouse plant that only became apparent to a few individuals; what the rest of humanity received was the content of the various religions. But the wisdom of the Grail, the Christian wisdom, is a mystery that is revealed to all as knowledge, but to no one as mere content of faith. All students of Western esotericism are Parzivals.

One of Parzival's sons is Lohengrin. He is a personality that is not fully expressed in physical form. The swan is an expression of the higher individuality that outshines him. Lohengrin unites with Elsa, the human soul. She does not ask him where he comes from, she does not ponder his nature, she accepts him and receives his gifts with gratitude and humility — until, spurred on by evil gossip that he is not of noble birth, she asks him about his origins. Lohengrin must then withdraw from her. He disappears into the spiritual world.

Gratitude should be the main feeling that the student carries within himself and cherishes for the gifts he receives from the higher worlds in this incarnation. He should not investigate, search, or interpret these gifts with his ordinary earthly intellect. For this causes the higher self to withdraw from his soul. A profound warning lies in Elsa's fate before us. We should not allow any external thoughts, feelings, or sensations from the outside world to enter the sanctuary of our meditation and concentration; otherwise, the source of power through which we achieve the growth of our human powers toward the higher self will not be stimulated, and we will not be able to find the higher self, which will continually recede from us. In contemplation, cut off from all external impressions, alone in the deepest silence and contemplation, resting in the deepest solitude, we should observe the spiritual world reaching into us in its effects; we should let it work in us quietly and chastely, so that we may gradually become ourselves recognizers of the truth, become instruments of the deeds of spiritual beings.

Record B

When Parzival had lived through all these feelings and sensations in his solitude, two new feelings came over him. The first was a tightening of his whole being, and from this developed a concentrated feeling of shame. When someone has risen to the level of Parzival and knows himself to be pure and pious, he also believes himself to be a good person. Then Parzival remembered the words of Christ Jesus, the Master of Masters: “Why do you call me good? No one is good except God alone.” — In his sense of shame there had been a last remnant of pride. We too, who strive for the esoteric, should take this principle deeply into our hearts and work on it. For as we penetrate deeper into the esoteric life, we believe that we are becoming better than the other people around us. If we permeate ourselves with this principle – “no one is good except God alone” – it is only correct if we also accept a second one: “Be perfect, as your Father in heaven is perfect.” Not just one of these two principles is sufficient, but both are necessary in order to stand beside Christ, as Parzival believed he stood beside him.

The second feeling that came over him was one he thought he had long since overcome, and that was concentrated fear. Now he knew that he had not become like Christ. And that was the aftereffect of the two great images Titurel had shown him: from the lily to the rose cross. It is a delusion to believe that man can be good; only God is good. But the ideal we must strive for is not to perfect ourselves in solitude, far from other people, but to be human beings in the midst of other human beings, to stand at the center of the universe and have the strength to let the spirit work on us, the spirit that is said to have made all things, and so on.

Devotion cannot be developed until one has built something up within oneself. To want to sacrifice oneself without [first] wanting to possess something within oneself means losing oneself in the universe and thus becoming useless. These are the dangers of mystical contemplation. Even the intellect, which does not want to sacrifice itself because it does not want to lose itself, must first have built something up, and this can only be acquired within the world, so that it becomes all-round, and only then can it be sacrificed.

If we perform our exercises with the greatest reverence and sense of the sacredness of their cosmic foundation, then we will enter the cosmic realms with our soul. If we immerse ourselves intensively in an object and think of the first ascending line (see drawing), we experience the power that comes from a higher world and corresponds to the power of thought that brings creation to completion; we lose our sense of separate existence and become part of this power. This is the first exercise.

And let us take the second exercise, the one in which we take ourselves in hand; then the first power, which leads to losing oneself, is transformed into self-guidance, which represents the second power.

The third exercise, in which joy and pain are no longer felt within us but outside us, represents the third great connecting force through which the cosmos has made it possible for the sun, moon, and earth to become a trinity out of a whole, so that they could let their forces flow, which at first came from within, from a center, and later from outside, from the periphery.

These are the three great forces: attraction, repulsion, and orbiting. When joy and sorrow, sympathy and antipathy no longer play a role in our judgment, we do not lose ourselves in things; they do not encompass us, but rather orbit around us, and we ourselves stand there as a fixed, immovable point and comprehend things from within themselves. Then we gain such strength that it is as if we are being supported under our arms and led forward. Then, through the balance thus attained, we no longer allow our judgment to be determined by the external world around us, but we recognize the wisdom in everything, which then rises from our hearts and elevates us above mere intellect. And through this wisdom we will ascend to the point where the harmony of the spheres meets us and the great beings of creation, the higher hierarchies, reveal themselves to us. Then, from those heights, as if from a single point, perfect love and perfect wisdom flow into us, and the light of the heights illuminates us.

This figure [p. 511] is the symbol of ascension in esoteric life. It cannot be understood with the intellect; it must be perceived as an image. Only those who can switch off all intellectual understanding will be able to place the five points of power in the figure. These are located between the wings and the triangle, in the first (lower) pair of wings and in the upper arrow. These points form a pentagon.

The last paragraph reads as follows in another record:

If we now imagine five points between these different shapes and figures and connect them with lines, we see the human being placed in a meaningful figure within this whole great context of the universe.

This whole form, which may look a little strange, has a soul-stirring effect on the student when they consider its meaning and the underlying connections and relationships. And then we must imagine over and over again how the seed of our body lay in the spirit, how it gradually developed, and how now the seed of the spirit lies again in the body. “The seed of my body lay in the spirit ...”.

Two further drawings, handed down without text: