Esoteric Development and the Transformation of Consciousness

GA 266II — 20 June 1910, Oslo

Esoteric Lesson

Recording A

Prayer to the spirit of Monday:

Great comprehensive spirit,
in your life forms, feeling shone ...

To support our meditations, we have helpful thoughts that have been given in all legitimate esoteric schools and which, if you visualize them and allow them to work on you, immersing yourself in them meditatively, are of infinite value. These thoughts are not like our ordinary, everyday thoughts; when we engage with them, they have germinating, awakening powers for us.

One such thought is the following: Just as we know our consciousness as waking and sleeping consciousness, we imagine the [consciousness] of the surrounding spirits of the earth working on us when we say: in the mineral kingdom, the earth spirits sleep; the plants are their waking thoughts and their life; the animals are their dreams. When we immerse ourselves in this thought and imagine, for example, what our thoughts are: fleeting, misty formations, and compare them with those of the earth spirits, we feel the immense distance. Their thoughts sprouted from the earth as the green plant cover in infinite variety. Their thoughts are therefore creative forces in the physical world. In past evolutions of the earth, these spirits once passed through the human stage as we have. At that time, they thought as we think now. They have developed higher and higher and have become creative beings. We have before us in them what we should strive for.

We must always remember that through our occult development we become different from other people. Our interests change, and one often hears esotericists complain that they feel their interest in many things that previously interested them waning and that an inner desolation and emptiness is taking hold of them. However, this is a completely normal and quickly passing state. The emptiness of their souls will soon be filled with interests that will replace the others a hundredfold, even a thousandfold. Nevertheless, we should not give up our connection with other people, with the interests that used to fulfill us, and above all we should not demand that other people change the circle of their interests. The difference between the exoteric and esoteric human being is that the exoteric human being is firmly intertwined with his other bodies, pushing everything to the outer surface, so to speak. The ordinary person, who is born into a people, a family, thereby inherits certain concepts of good and evil, of truthfulness and other virtues that the creative deities placed in them in the course of evolution. The esoteric person will gradually live according to these virtues out of his own insight. But he must not disregard the concepts that prevail in people about them, for then he could encounter serious dangers as far as his development is concerned. In him, the inner human being is gradually detached from the outer. His higher parts leave his lower parts alone, and if he does not observe the ordinary laws of humanity, for example, those concerning truthfulness, he can fall into a habit of lying, which naturally hinders his development and can cause much harm. All the discord and strife, even among esotericists, can be traced back to this.

However, we do not leave only part of our etheric body and our sentient soul alone—we begin our esoteric work in the sentient soul—but also, so to speak, our physical body, and we experience all kinds of states, including illnesses, in it. We are afflicted by states that we have not known until now, but we should not consider them illnesses and rush to a doctor, because an exoteric doctor cannot, of course, give us anything for these states, and they will pass on their own. On the other hand, one should not consider every illness that afflicts one to be caused by occult development and think that no doctor can treat one anymore. That is spiritual arrogance. One can still seek advice from a doctor for a long time when one is ill. The esotericist should always take care of his health in the right way.

No one should allow themselves to be deterred from development by the difficulties that may arise through the loosening of the etheric body, out of cowardice or laziness. This loosening is something that must occur if one wants to enter the higher worlds. And if we strive earnestly for this, the Master of Wisdom and Harmony of Feelings will meet us with his power and will not deny us his help.

If not in this life, then most certainly in the next, we will achieve the goal of spiritual vision.

Record B

There are other aids,¹ which can lead relatively quickly to a deeper insight into the spiritual connections, and these are the following three sentences:

In the mineral kingdom, the gods sleep;
in the plant kingdom, they dream;
in the animal kingdom, they wake and think.

To take the animal kingdom first, we must imagine that spiritual beings were once at our level and had confused thoughts just as we do now, whereas they have now progressed to the point where their thoughts have become so regular and definite that they unfold before us what we see as the animal world. If we immerse ourselves in such a mental image, then the course that our thought development will take will become fixed within us, and we will thereby come into closer contact with the beings who have placed their thoughts into the earth, and also with that Being who has placed into the earth the power which in its entirety is the Christ power.

As esotericists, we experience great inner transformations, which essentially boil down to making our ego less physical, until we finally perceive the ego as a higher or second ego within us.

Compared to exotericists, we as esotericists develop completely different feelings and sensations in our astral body. Moral and ethical impulses now come from within, whereas previously they were prescribed to us as certain, fixed norms by religion or human laws, which we then followed. Through this new way of experiencing, the connection between the ego and the ordinary astral body is gradually loosened, and feelings become more independent, more from within. This can result in a person initially appearing more immoral than the average person, while they are busy working their way out of their traditional feelings and sensations.

The etheric body also gradually loosens; habits, prejudices, and circumstances change and resist what is imposed on us from outside by the spirit of the times and common ideas. What was once believed to be true now appears to us to be false, out of proportion, and one easily comes into conflict with the outside world. In this transitional period, it often happens that people themselves become less truthful, that they can only view circumstances in a distorted way, and so on.

Great changes also take place in the physical body, which could be called a loosening of the body, whereby a feeling of illness can arise in all possible parts of the body. People then believe that their bodies are becoming sicker or more frail, and during the transition period this may indeed appear to be the case; but they will soon notice that these “illnesses” cannot be cured with the old remedies.

The danger of loosening the body lies in the fact that one can develop a great disregard for human and worldly conditions, which would only lead one deeper into deception. What we should do is apply a kind of average standard; and we can do this by constantly looking up with deep reverence and admiration to what human beings have achieved with the help of spiritual beings from outside, by recognizing the greatness of these spiritual influences on people who are still spiritually asleep. In this way we can recognize the higher path of self-awareness, and by placing ourselves between the two extremes, we can be of help to those who have only just begun to become aware.