Meditation, Temptation, and the Sacred Thought

GA 266I — 29 October 1909, Berlin

Esoteric Lesson

Last time, we discussed that we should leave all thoughts and judgments related to our external life outside during our meditations. The gate we pass through in meditation is like a narrow crack, and any thoughts that do not belong to meditation that we bring with us have a consuming effect on what is supposed to sprout within us. The temptation for the meditator to carry such thoughts with him is enormous. However, he need not fear that all the thoughts that come to him during meditation, that pass through his brain from everyday life, will have the aforementioned effect. The thoughts that the esotericist should recognize as dangerous are the tempting ones.

Last time, we saw that all the qualities we have necessarily have their opposite within us, so that anyone who has fear within them must also have feelings of hatred of some kind, which they may only discover through very subtle observation. Like qualities, the great truths in the world, indeed all things, have their opposite.

We can see this in two sayings of the greatest man who ever walked the earth. When Christ was once asked, “How should man be?”, he replied, “Be perfect, as your Father in heaven is perfect.” And when he was once told that he was perfect, he replied, “Why do you call me perfect (or good)? No one is good except God alone.” How are we to understand that on the one hand we are told, “Be perfect as your Father in heaven is perfect”? First and foremost, the esotericist must remember that he is striving for a high ideal, but that this ideal, to which he is always devoted in prayer, is something he can never attain. And how is it that the personality who appears to us as the embodiment of what we want to achieve says, “Why do you call me perfect? God alone is perfect”? We must remember that he speaks these words to us in his human form and that, as long as he dwells in this form, he speaks to us from humanity; that as the Logos—not in incarnation—he would speak differently.

If we now immerse ourselves in these words as material for meditation, with the right feelings that the esotericist should develop within himself and which are the most important thing, and if we suddenly hear something beside us saying, “I have always told you that all things in the world have two sides,” this is a tempting thought. What does it want? It wants to drag down into the trivial what has been given to us as sacred material for meditation, as a truth from higher worlds. And here the esotericist must realize that, although this trivial thought, “Everything in the world has two sides,” is also a truth, it is an everyday truth over which human beings — since they recognize it as true and can easily grasp it with their intellect — can easily rise. “Everything in the world has two sides,” is also a truth, that it is an everyday truth which man, having recognized it as true, can easily grasp with his intellect. But now he must realize that when he stands high above a thought, there is something that can carry him just as high to the other side, to the opposite pole of that thought. The opposite pole, the spiritual truth given to us from higher worlds, is grasped by feeling, not by the intellect, and this feeling carries us to the heights of devotion and opens up a view into the creative workshops through what emerges in the words: “Out of the one comes the two.” Meditating on such words awakens the creative forces. This “one becomes two” is one of the deepest mysteries of the secret of numbers. One is the number of unity. And when a second joins the one, developing out of it, we have revelation. Two is therefore the number of revelation. We can demonstrate this as a simple arithmetic example by taking an apple as a unit, cutting it in half, and thus creating a duality.

Those who meditate on my chapter about the mysteries in the book Christianity as Mystical Fact will find this truth dawning upon them, and it will carry them to the heights of cosmic realities. Thus, a seemingly simple sentence can become a subject for meditation, such as the sentence: “From one comes two.”

Those who write books whose content is suitable for meditation have a great temptation to overcome. There are books about the highest truths which, when read, leave the reader with a frosty chill, a certain reserve and dryness—and others from which a warmth of feeling, an overflowing glow, strikes him. The latter have something enchanting for many people, and some will therefore prefer them to the former. And therein lies the temptation for the writer to put his own feelings, his own enthusiasm into his messages in order to communicate them to the reader. How does this affect the reader? If the writer has managed to restrain all his own feelings and convey only the pure, chaste thought of truth, which is like a temple, like the pure, chaste mystery temples of antiquity, then the pure thought alone will illuminate something in the student, ignite it within him and lead him to the heights of knowledge. But writings that are imbued with the feelings of the writer have a consuming effect on the reader and do not allow his own spark to arise. In ancient times, in the ancient mystery centers, it was not possible to communicate with the student in this way. He had to experience in images much of what we now communicate in words. One of the first images presented to him, which he had to meditate on, was the following. He was led into a dark room. Then the darkness brightened before him, and he saw a winged old man pursuing a blue-glowing female figure. In this image he saw something he could not otherwise see on earth, and it was meant to make clear to him the moment after death when human beings look back on their lives from the end. Therefore, what man usually is before death was represented as an old man—but winged, to indicate that he had already passed through the gate of death—and the blue female figure represented the life he was pursuing backwards.

This is no longer taught today; now the necessary feelings must be kindled by pure thought. We must approach our meditation from the world in which the God we cannot see is at work everywhere: we are born of God; Christ receives us at the narrow gap; in Christ we die in order to be reborn on the other side, in the Holy Spirit.