Maya, the Doppelgänger, and Spiritual Awakening

GA 266II — 31 December 1911, Hanover

Esoteric Lesson

Record A

Today, we want to start by asking ourselves what conclusions we've come to through our exoteric study of theosophy. The answer will be that — at least theoretically — we have become aware that the whole world and we ourselves, insofar as we understand our physical body to be part of it, are maya, illusion. We accept this at least theoretically, and it remains more or less a hypothesis for us. But when we begin esoteric training, this acceptance of a mere hypothesis should increasingly become truth. It should penetrate deeply into our consciousness that we actually have no firm ground in which we can take root, that we are merely living on the surface of a foaming reflection of waves on the sea of life, that we never dive into the true sea of reality, that we are therefore constantly a plaything of illusion. And everyone who wants to follow the path of the esoteric must come to this realization. And a certain experience will occur in most people, namely a feeling of despair, of abandonment, of fear. A fear like the one you feel when you stand on the edge of a mountain and see a deep abyss below you. Despair and abandonment will envelop the budding esotericist because every support he believed he had in life falls away from him like a maya, an illusion. His God seems to have been snatched away from him because he sees only what is false and deceptive in all of creation; indeed, this realization can lead him to atheism.

And why must we go down this path, why must we consciously look deep into the world of illusion? Why, we ask ourselves, have the gods placed us in this unreal world? They could have given us the true reality directly, instead of this superficial play of waves that is life!

We will realize later that it is wise and good that the world is maya, illusion. If everything were true reality, we ourselves would no longer seek truth or perfection; we could not develop abilities, and since there would be nothing wrong, there could be no vice. We could not educate ourselves to virtue, we could not develop freely at all; since we would always be living within the active, ruling divinity, we would never have the opportunity to seek true knowledge out of ourselves, out of our own freedom, and to dive into the depths of reality. We would cease to seek God. “Seeking God” has a deep biblical meaning that can only be understood esoterically. At the end of the sixth day of creation it says: “And God rested on the seventh day.” God had been active during the Saturn, Sun, and Moon evolutions, and He rested on the seventh day after the world was created; then God was nowhere to be found until the horizon of our Earth's evolution. He was invisible, and that has a profound meaning.

The true divine lies hidden behind the visible creation — that is the great truth which we as esotericists must seek behind the appearance of the senses. And since the world is an illusion, it gives us the opportunity to develop our ego through all false appearances, so that we may find reality, the divinity itself. And what path does esoteric training show us, what means does it give us so that we can attain a quicker knowledge of the higher worlds than everyday human beings? It gives us certain exercises, concentration and meditation exercises, through which inner soul forces can be awakened in us that would otherwise remain dormant for a long time. I want to emphasize here that the student should not embark on this path out of mere trust in his teacher or perhaps out of blind reverence for him, because that would be completely the wrong way to go. He should use his own mind in everything he does, and he should not let others think for him, but should examine everything himself, including his exercises and meditations. When immersed in meditation, they should not believe in its suggestive power, for that would be a completely false assumption. They cannot have a suggestive effect because they are composed in such a way that everyone comes to the imagination by themselves, which the exercises merely point to.

Let us consider the meditation that most of you are familiar with:

In the pure rays of light ...

What could be suggestive here, when the content does not actually imply anything real? For everyone knows, while saying it to themselves, that the deity is not to be found in the rays of (external) light. The exercise merely gives us, as it were, a symbol, an inspiration to create an imaginative image within ourselves as we try to immerse ourselves with our soul in the divinity of the world. We should always let our own mind speak alone, not act out of blind faith in our teacher. It is better to remain in doubt until we arrive at the knowledge of the truth through our own work.

One day we will be ready.

And what is the other inevitable experience that human beings go through inwardly—inevitable because it is the consequence of faithfully following the esoteric exercises? It is the splitting of the personality that occurs.

The human being will gradually feel as if something is walking beside them, something that thinks, listens, and even speaks, if the person is not very strong inwardly. It is a second self that emerges, a doppelganger that one has cast out of oneself. The more seriously one has followed the esoteric path, the more one casts out the old self, that is, one sheds one skin after another like a snake. These skins—comparatively speaking—become a second body, a doppelganger that never leaves one in life. In the ancient Egyptian mysteries, the person who has cast out their doppelganger was called the “Kha-man.” The doppelganger is chained to the Kha-man to constantly remind him of what his former life was like or what he is still like. This is not always a pleasant sensation. But the awareness of always carrying this doppelganger with them will remind them of their mistakes so that they can improve. They must constantly feel this presence, otherwise it would become dangerous and they would forget all their high ideals and intentions, what their inner life actually is and what their mistakes are. Under certain circumstances, it would even be life-threatening for a highly initiated person, despite his high aspirations, if he were to forget this doppelganger for just a moment. He could actually lose his physical body through death, in much the same way as someone who, absorbed in a lofty problem, forgets to pay attention to his body and is run over as a result of this inattention. The stronger the doppelganger appears, the better it is for our development, because otherwise we would indulge in great illusions about ourselves. For we are not able to see and recognize our own progress in our development; only our teacher can do that. Let us remember that passage in the story of creation where the Elohim, after they had created man together, ascended to the sun. Only then could they judge their work, which we find expressed in the words: “And they looked upon their work, and behold, it was good.” They had attained perfection, and therefore they could judge their work.

Record B

From the teachings of exoteric theosophy, we take as a practical lesson in life the knowledge that the outer world is only maya, illusion, behind which the spiritual world, the world of reality, is hidden. Like the play of waves on the surface of the sea, the outer world with all its happenings appears more and more to the esotericist, and he feels: if I want to attain true reality, that which produces these waves and ripples of outer events, I must descend to where the forces that underlie them are; I must descend into the depths, to the bottom of the sea in my soul. The esotericist must come to a true experience of this knowledge. It must not be a mere theory for him. But the path to this experience is long and arduous. If we know that everything that surrounds us is the world of maya, that we live in this world of maya, that the world of reality is closed to us, how can we find solid ground? How can we reach true reality? These are the questions facing the true esotericist. It is as if the ground beneath his feet has been pulled away, as if he is standing on the edge of an abyss, as if he is hanging over this abyss like a black dot. It takes the greatest courage and fearlessness not to sink into this abyss that opens up before him. Everything seems dark and impenetrable to him, and he comes to doubt the existence of the divine in this world of illusion. This is a difficult moment in the development of the soul. But it is necessary to go through this.

Let us now ask ourselves: why must human beings go through this? Why must the world of true reality, the world of actuality, be veiled from them? Why must he live in this world of maya without being able to enter the world that lies behind it?

The gods guided human beings through the Saturn, Sun, and Moon epochs. At that time, human beings were still spiritual beings. The gods built the shells in which these spiritual beings called “human beings” were to live as ego beings. But he would never have come to his I-ness if things had always continued in this way. That is why the Bible begins: The gods created six days and rested on the seventh day. — Six days of creation: Saturn day, Sun day, and Moon day, and their repetition at the beginning of the Earth, the polar, the hyperborean, and the Lemurian epochs. Then they created man. Now they rest on the seventh day, the time that follows the Lemurian epoch, the Earth time, our time, so that man can come to free ego development. But for this it is necessary that he not be allowed to see the world of the gods, the world of reality, for a while. And we must be grateful to those who created the world of illusion for us, be they gods or devils—who initially cover from us the true world, the world of reality, the spiritually creative world. For we could not live in the world of reality with our present ego, with the ego that experiences itself in the personality. With this self, we would perish, we would disappear in fear and terror in this world of reality. When we leave the world of illusion, that is, when we fall asleep, this self, which lives out its life in the personality, sinks into unconsciousness, because we cannot consciously bear the forces and influences of the higher worlds into which we then enter. Our personal self is only conscious when it is submerged in the world of illusion. It must pass through this world in order to become strong and powerful, so that it can then consciously enter the world of reality with the strength it has gained. Through meditation and concentration, we gradually come to recognize that what we call our ego in ordinary life also belongs to this world of illusion, that we can pass from the consciousness of this ego into the awareness of another ego that stands behind it. With this ego, we can then enter the world of reality. The content of meditation is always such that it fills the soul with images and mental images that are not taken from the physical world.

Let us take, for example, a very simple meditation subject that will be familiar to all of you:

In the pure rays of light
The divinity of the world shines forth ...

If you meditate on these words repeatedly, you will come to experience something like a spiritual sun in which the divinity of the world shines upon us, and you will experience the pure floods of light like a garment, like an outwardly shining revelation of the divinity, like the glory of this divinity. But in order to experience this truly, it is necessary to forget oneself, that is, one's ordinary ego-consciousness, completely. Even the words, which are still something originating from the physical world, must be forgotten. Then, through the power of this meditation material, the spiritual world gradually reveals itself as a world of light. One experiences this light world of the spiritual. As this meditation verse progresses, one should not think that the words “I rest in the divinity of the world” can be achieved with one's ordinary ego. It is not this everyday ego that experiences itself in the divinity of the world, but the individual, spiritual ego that we are to find through the power of this verse. That is why the content of this saying is such that it leads us out of the world of illusion; for if we only go out into the physical world, we cannot really recognize anything that shows us that light is the garment of the divinity and that we must search behind this light, in this light, for the essence of the divinity itself. Such thoughts are not taken from the physical world. They come from the spiritual world, and through them something that is related to this spiritual world can come to life in our soul, which in turn leads us back into this spiritual world.

When the student allows such meditative content to work on his soul again and again, then the event occurs that we must regard as the beginning of actual esoteric training, as a beginning that at the same time signifies great progress. This is the event in which we suddenly perceive something like a second figure beside us, a kind of double that we have, as it were, placed outside ourselves. But the presence of this double is initially painful and uncomfortable for us. This is the onset of the “split personality” (see “How to Attain Knowledge of Higher Worlds”). The higher, spiritual human being separates from the lower. And from then on, this double is always around us; we always feel its presence. Yes, we may even hear him speak. And we must know that the more uncomfortable we feel in his presence, the faster and more thoroughly we progress. It must be so that he is thoroughly uncomfortable and fatal to us, for he shows us again and again everything that connects us through our physical being to the world of illusion, from whose bonds we strive to break free. Through this doppelgänger, we get to know thoroughly everything that we must cast out of ourselves. He shows it to us again and again. Everything that is insincere, unloving, selfish, and other bad qualities in us confronts us through the experience of this doppelgänger. And the fact that we still carry these qualities around with us, that we cannot yet shake them off, causes the feeling of unease that the doppelganger gives us. As long as we still had these bad qualities within us, in our subconscious, as it were in the depths of our soul, they did not yet come to our consciousness in all their strength. But when the spiritual human being develops and grows more and more, when he looks admonishingly at these characteristics of our soul, they have a tormenting effect through their very existence, which this spiritual human being can no longer tolerate. And that is why it is very good when the feeling of tormenting unease arises very strongly, because this is the quickest way to get rid of this doppelganger.

The being that causes the described event for the progress of the esotericist is one of the Luciferic beings that are, so to speak, assigned for this purpose: it is Samael with his hosts. The esotericist must regard its work as something thoroughly good for his progress, so that he may thereby come to recognize all the qualities and vices that hinder him in his development, and receive the strong impetus to free himself from them. Samael is the being who makes us aware of the existence of the doppelganger.

Record C

From exoteric theosophy, we take as a practical lesson in life the knowledge that the outer world is only Maya, only illusion, behind which the spiritual world, the world of reality, is hidden. The outer world appears like the play of waves on the surface of the sea; if we want to reach reality, we must descend to the bottom of the sea.

The esotericist, however, must come to experience this knowledge within himself, and the path to this is long and arduous. If we know that everything is only maya, that the world of reality is veiled from us, how are we to find firm ground on which to reach this reality?

Something approaches the true esotericist as if the ground were being pulled away from under his feet, as if he were standing before an abyss, and it takes the greatest courage and fearlessness to prevent him from sinking into the abyss that opens up before him. When the esotericist thinks deeply and seriously, he comes to doubt even the divine in this world of illusion. This is a difficult moment, but it is necessary to go through it.

Now we ask ourselves: Why did the world of reality have to be veiled from us? The gods guided human beings through the Saturn, Sun, and Moon ages as spiritual beings; but they would not have attained individuality if this had continued. That is why the Bible begins: “In the beginning, the gods created six days and rested on the seventh day.” They created through Saturn, Sun, and Moon times and now rest in our time so that human beings may come to free ego development. But for this it is necessary that they not be allowed to see the world of reality, and we must be grateful to those who created the world of illusion for us—be they gods or devils; for we could not live in the world of reality with our present ego; we would perish. Just as our ego sinks into unconsciousness when we leave the world of illusion because we cannot consciously endure the forces of the higher worlds into which we enter, so our ego had to submerge itself in this world of illusion and pass through it in order to become strong and powerful, so that we can consciously enter the world of reality.

Through meditation and concentration, we gradually become aware of our ego. The content of meditation is always such that it fills the soul with images that are not only taken from the physical world.

Let us take a very simple meditation subject that will be familiar to all of you:

In the pure rays of light
The divinity of the world shines forth ...

If you just go out into the physical world, you cannot really see anything that indicates that light is the garment of the deity. Such thoughts are not taken from the physical world; they come from the spiritual world, and through them something can be awakened in our soul that in turn leads us back into this spiritual world.

In our esoteric consideration today, we would like to mention something else that we must regard as the first beginning of progress in our esoteric training. This is the event that we suddenly perceive a second figure beside our own, a kind of double, whom we have, as it were, placed outside ourselves, but whose presence is painful and uncomfortable for us; This is the splitting of the personality, the separation of the higher spiritual human being from the lower. This double is always around us, we feel its presence; we may even hear it speak, and the more uncomfortable we feel in its presence, the faster and more thoroughly we progress. This must be so in order that we can cast out everything that is still within us in the way of insincerity, selfishness, and other bad qualities. These bad qualities, which we still carry around with us and cannot yet shake off, cause the feeling of discomfort. As long as we still had them within us, we were not yet aware of them in all their strength. When the spiritual human being grows and develops, they have a disturbing and tormenting effect through their presence, which this spiritual human being can no longer tolerate, and therefore it is very good when the feeling of discomfort arises very strongly; this is the quickest way to get rid of this doppelganger.

The being that now causes this event for the progress of the esotericist is one of the Luciferic entities that have been assigned for this purpose: it is Samael with his hosts, and the esotericist must regard their work as something thoroughly good for his progress, so that he may thereby come to recognize all those qualities and vices that hinder him in his development, and strive to free himself from them.