Loosening the Bodies: Esoteric Practice and Spiritual Development

GA 266II — 31 December 1910, Stuttgart

Esoteric Lesson

The esotericist should clearly realize what he is actually doing with his exercises, the spiritual exercises given to us. We have often spoken about the esotericist's striving to loosen the etheric body, indeed all four bodies from one another. This can now be done in two ways, exoterically and esoterically.

The physical body can be induced to expel or squeeze out the etheric body by preparing the physical body sufficiently through diet, breathing exercises, etc. Our vegetarian lifestyle basically has the sole purpose of supporting the physical body in this endeavor. These are the exoteric means of loosening. The esoteric means are our exercises, our spiritual exercises. And it must be said that these are the main thing, that we should do them with devotion and seriousness, that everything else should only be support for this main thing. In our materialistic age, many people, in their materialistic longing, would gladly follow the most extreme dietary rules and do hours of breathing exercises if they could achieve something by doing so; but to exert themselves spiritually through meditation and concentration is much more uncomfortable, and it is often only then that spiritual laziness becomes apparent. But if we were to squeeze our etheric body out of us through physical influences alone, the physical body would have nothing to give it, and it would step out empty into the unknown. Then conditions arise in which, for example, we cannot grasp something properly in our thinking when we want to think something through. We cannot make proper use of the physical with our etheric brain because we are not really in it. It is as if we were swimming in water and trying to grasp something that keeps slipping away from us. The sensible esoteric will tell himself in such situations that he must first create order through appropriate concentration of the will and mental exercises. Even with normal development, some things will happen that we must tell ourselves are temporary suffering. For when the etheric body is withdrawn, the physical body is initially similar to a plant from which the sap has been withdrawn for a time. It withers. And so the physical body also dries up to some extent, although this is not physically visible, and where it has predispositions to disease, these come to the surface. But when the etheric body has been properly saturated with spiritual truths, it draws new strength from them, and this in turn has a healing effect on the physical body. One can observe that when a person is imbued with spiritual truths, or even when they simply allow theosophical thinking to work within them, cuts and wounds in general heal more easily in the physical body.

Through our meditations, we first work on the astral body. This is the builder of our nervous system, which runs to the spinal cord, or, as we say today, emanates from it. Now we must achieve that, through impressions from the astral body, lotus flowers unfold in the etheric body, which are connected to each other and in this way create, so to speak, a front mark.

This front mark is, of course, only present in the etheric-astral realm and can only be formed through meditation and concentration. That is why they are the most important thing for our esoteric development. And the only thing that is directly harmful to the esotericist is the consumption of alcohol. Alcohol must be avoided at all costs. It is of course good if we support the process through a vegetarian diet, because this lifting of the etheric body is by no means easy nowadays. Many of our modern professions are directly designed to drive the etheric body firmly into the physical body, so that it can often cause direct pain to the clairvoyant when he sees something like this. Even the food served in our large hotels today is designed to drive the etheric body firmly into the physical body.

Through esoteric work on ourselves, we should acquire a new way of thinking, feeling, and willing. We must tell ourselves that once we have summoned the courage to follow the path of the esotericist, we must take a leap across an abyss. We must allow a well-considered thought to pass into our feelings and then permeate them completely, so that we do not carelessly say something that we have not actually grasped in all its depth. A sentence that one hears so often from people today, and yet one that is used as abusively as few others, is: “I am a Christian.” Esotericists should realize that “being a Christian” is a distant, distant ideal that they must strive for unceasingly. Living like a Christian means above all accepting whatever fate brings us with serenity, never murmuring against the work of God, accepting with joy whatever He sends us. This means letting the following sentence become second nature: “Look at the birds in the sky; they do not sow, they do not reap, they do not gather into barns, and yet they are given food.” Accepting what we are given with gratitude means living according to this saying. If we do not do so, it becomes blasphemy on our lips. It should be clear to us that if we do not prepare ourselves sufficiently for the leap across the abyss into the spiritual realms, we can cause such damage through words and thoughts that the gods must destroy worlds in order to repair this damage. For what is corrupt must be destroyed in order to be rebuilt.

We came into being from the spiritual realm — Ex Deo nascimur. And when we take the leap across the abyss, we express this [through] In Christo morimur — in the firm confidence that we will be reborn in the Holy Spirit: Per Spiritum Sanctum reviviscimus. However, because we are to hold the name of the Most Holy, which has always been connected with our earthly development, so sacred that we do not utter it unworthily, there is an esoteric version of the Rosicrucian motto in which the name is omitted:

Ex Deo nascimur
In - - - morimur
Per Spiritum Sanctum reviviscimus.