The Higher Self: Reunion with Adam's Retained Etheric Body

GA 266I — 7 December 1909, Berlin

Esoteric Lesson

When we enter into an esoteric life through meditation, we must make a decision: to place something at the center of our lives, something new that has not been there before, but which is now to become the main thing. The success of our exercises will depend on the intensity of this decision. One can understand esoteric life as accepting the exercises one receives as an addition to everyday life, doing them like any other ordinary work. But then one will notice that the progress one makes is not particularly significant. The decision that the esotericist should make is to relate everything that happens in his ordinary life to his esoteric life, to really feel that this is the center from which his whole life is directed, from which something constantly flows into this life.

What should we achieve with our meditations? If we perform them correctly, we should develop a strong force, a force that uses the words of meditation as an instrument with which we gradually create the spiritual organs in our astral body with which we will perceive the spiritual environment. The impressions we make on the mass of our astral body only become permanent little by little, because we can compare our astral body to an elastic mass that takes on impressions but returns to its former shape after a while. We make these impressions during sleep, when our ego and astral body have left the physical and etheric bodies. The more strongly and intensely we devote ourselves to our meditations, the more intense the impressions in the astral body become, until they finally become permanent and organs develop from them, which we call lotus flowers. This process is described to us in the saying that comes to us from the masters of wisdom and the harmony of sensations:

The seed of my body lay in the spirit ...

However, we cannot really use these organs until they have become so strong that they can press themselves from the astral body into the etheric body. Only when the etheric body has received an impression do the gates open for us, before which stands the cherub with the flame of the whirling sword.

We have heard that our physical and etheric bodies cannot exist for a second without the I and the astral body, and that therefore, at the moment when these two leave the physical and etheric bodies during sleep, beings of a higher nature enter them, beings that are identical in nature to our I and astral body, but much higher. An archangel replaces our astral body, a spirit of personality replaces our ego. We encounter these high spirit beings when we have developed our astral organs, and esotericism calls this powerful event, which is so sacred to us, the “encounter with the higher self.”

We should look forward to this moment with feelings of deepest devotion and intense awareness of its holiness. If we do not meditate in this spirit of genuine, true humility, the spiritual world will not reveal itself to us in its true form, but all kinds of fantasies will appear to us, and the moral result for us will be a destructive arrogance. It is a blessing that the world into which we wish to enter, prepared by a rightly existing school, is closed to us by the cherub with the fiery sword as long as we are not sufficiently prepared. The guardian of paradise stands exactly at the point where we slip into deep sleep, where we lose consciousness. If we did not lose it here, we would see him. But a glimpse into the world of the archangels would destroy us, for we are not equal to it.

Why is this archangel, who inhabits our etheric body, called our higher self? Why do we strive for union with him? We must touch upon a mystery that concerns the human being. As we see human beings here on earth in their present state, they are actually a Maya, they are not complete. In ancient Lemurian times, the earth was once so depopulated, so desolate, that only a single human couple remained on it, strong enough to animate the animal forms. The other humans had spread out to other planets, and essentially, the people of today are descended from this original couple. In this respect, too, the Bible's account of Adam and Eve is correct, even if it is presented in the form of an allegorical narrative. Lucifer took possession of these first humans and permeated their astral bodies with his influences. Through these Luciferic influences, the Ahrimanic influences later became possible, along with everything that helped humans to live out their lives in the physical-sensory realm. As a result, the spiritual world disappeared more and more behind the material world, which became an impenetrable veil for them. If human beings had remained solely under the influence of the divine-spiritual beings who created them, they would not have become free, but would always have recognized the spiritual through matter. These guiding creators now wanted to prevent the danger that the entire etheric body would also be permeated by Luciferic influences. Therefore, they separated a part of Adam's etheric body and kept it in the spiritual worlds. And this etheric body¹ is the higher self with which we are to reunite, with which we are only then a complete human being. The esotericist should say to himself: Over there, this higher self, which actually belongs to me, is waiting for me to reunite with it, and in my meditation I should strive toward it with all my fervor, should form myself into a chalice that receives this higher self. Paul, who was an initiate in these matters, uses exactly the right expressions when he speaks of the “old” and “new” Adam.

This union of the etheric body that had been left behind with a human being happened for the first time when Jesus of Nazareth was born, as told in the Gospel of Luke. This boy Jesus received the etheric body of Adam. With this part of the etheric body, the high, guiding creative beings had retained for human beings the ability of individual thinking and [individual] speech. Human beings do think, but it is not thinking that they produce individually themselves; rather, they take from the divine substance of thinking that permeates the world. Nor do human beings have an individual language; rather, high spiritual beings gave it to groups of human beings. Groups of people have a common language. People must first acquire their own thinking and their own language through reunification with their higher etheric body. Since the ability to speak lies in this etheric body, the legend that tells us that the baby Jesus did not need to learn to speak, but spoke to his mother after his birth in a language she understood, is understandable.

Through the fact that this etheric body of Adam connected itself for the first time with a physical human body, it became subject to the spirit, to which every spiritual entity that descends into matter is subject, to the law of numbers, of multiplication. Just as the seed placed in the earth produces the ear of corn with its many grains, so the body of Jesus was the womb of the earth for the etheric body of Adam, the point of passage for multiplication, and it is these multiplied etheric bodies that await us. And when we are immersed in meditation, so that all external life disappears for us, so that we neither hear nor see, then we will gain the feeling as if we were dying away in order to be reunited with our higher self and live again. For the newer, rightly existing esoteric schools, the cross is therefore the symbol of resurrection to this new life. It is not birth that is taken as the starting point of this life, but death, the death of Christ on the cross at Golgotha, and this life has as its symbol the holy blood that flowed there. That is why we have united the dead plant, the dried wood, and the living red roses sprouting from it in the Rosicrucian cross. And in our meditation we should feel that we are born of God, as it says in our main motto, which should be the motto of our esoteric life, and that we die in Christ by allowing the power of our meditation to become a light within us that shines into the higher worlds; and this warmth, these rays, meet our higher self, and in this way it unites with us as the Holy Spirit, in whom we are reborn:

Ex Deo nascimur
In Christo morimur
Per Spiritum Sanctum reviviscimus.