Maya, Lucifer, and the Good Deities: Esoteric Preparation

GA 266II — 13 March 1910, Munich

Esoteric Lesson

In esotericism, we must pay attention to something we call the spirit of the day. The divine creative beings have expressed a different spirit in each day, and the masters of wisdom and harmony of feelings have given us meditations in which we can approach these spirits on different days. Let us begin today [Sunday] with the motto given to us by the Masters for this day:

Great comprehensive spirit,
many archetypes sprouted from your life ...

Today we want to talk about how easily esotericists tend to forget even the simplest exoteric introductory sentences of theosophy. One such sentence is: “Everything that is perceptible to the senses is maya, is illusion.” Every esotericist should make this sentence a constant meditation. Most people will think that they have long since understood this sentence. But how little they actually bring it into their lives, into their feelings, what they would have to include with it, very few consider. For example, someone might say: I pray the Lord's Prayer every morning and draw strength for the whole day from the spiritual content of this wonderful prayer. Now, one of the masters of wisdom said that he prays the Lord's Prayer only once a month, and the rest of the time he prepares himself to pray it worthily on that one occasion. The first person might then say that he also wants to pray it only once a month, because one must emulate a master. - But what would that be? That would be utter arrogance. It would be an expression of the feeling that we could do the same as a master, that what he can draw from the spiritual content of the Lord's Prayer at his level would also be accessible to us. We often think we have eradicated a trait such as arrogance, but we have only pushed it into another corner of our being. For all these qualities are also maya, as are the concepts we form here on the physical plane of good and evil, right and wrong. When we spoke in the exoteric lessons about the influences of the Luciferic beings, we formed the view, on the one hand, that these influences are “bad” and must be resisted; but on the other hand we know that Lucifer has brought us freedom. However, we should not carry over into the higher regions, where the struggle between Lucifer and the good deities takes place, the concepts of good and evil, right and wrong that we have been taught. This struggle manifests itself as a battle, and indeed as a battle that takes place largely in the human soul. There is an occult secret that certain characteristics of human beings develop too quickly during earthly evolution, and Lucifer is involved in this. How does this come about?

Lucifer comes from the lunar evolution and brings the lunar tempo into everything that comes under his influence. Since he primarily influences our intellect and our reason, these have developed far ahead of us. We will go through many more incarnations with the most varied experiences, but our intellect and our reason will remain the same as they are today. But what is the consequence of this advance development? It means that we cannot bring our intellect into harmony with the wisdom we find on Earth, and that this results in error upon error. I can give you a trivial example of this. After the first terrible eruptions of Mount Pelée were over, the local scholars calculated that there would now be a longer period of calm between eruptions. But the eruptions returned, worse than before, and lava and debris buried not only the proclamations of the scholars, but also the scholars themselves. This is an example of how our combining intellect, instead of slowly working its way into the wisdom of the forces of nature, rushes ahead and thereby gets on the wrong track.

Lucifer has his influence everywhere on earth. But we would be mistaken if we sought its expression in earthquakes, storms, weather, and hailstorms. On the contrary, we must seek his influence in everything that blossoms quickly toward maturity, and this acceleration must be restrained and prevented by the good deities. Weather disasters are often the expression of the good deities, the obstacles they must place in Lucifer's path to prevent too rapid a development. These obstacles correspond to the development of the moon, balancing Lucifer's lunar tempo; what was right on the moon is now destructive in its effects.

And likewise, they [the good deities] must intervene in the development of the esotericist in a hindering way. What is Lucifer's work in our esoteric life? His influence is that we carry over into our meditations the maya of our everyday concepts from material life. But so that we do not enter the spiritual worlds unprepared in this erroneous way, it is precisely the good deities who throw obstacles in our path, obstacles such as all our bad qualities. These are: pride, vanity, envy, anger, resentment, which break out when we approach the deity with our earthly views and feelings. And until we have removed these obstacles ourselves, the spiritual worlds remain closed to us; for they must be kept pure from everything that is Maya.

When we think about this relationship between the good deities, Christ, and the Luciferic beings, Lucifer, the meditation sentence, “Everything around us is Maya, is illusion,” appears in a completely different light. We realize how often we forget in everyday life that things and qualities that we consider very essential are only Maya.