Spiritual Centeredness and the Luciferic Challenge of Memory

GA 266II — 22 February 1912, Stuttgart

Esoteric Lesson

Recording A

In what we discussed the day before yesterday, it is above all necessary and important that the esotericist learns to feel these things, not just grasp them intellectually. But before we talk more about this, let us mention a few things that are important and valuable for the esotericist.

When one enters an esoteric stream, it is quite natural to ask oneself: How do I advance my soul, how do I develop it upward? It is of the utmost importance that we stand firmly on an esoteric center from which we look at life and allow it to radiate upon us. We should open ourselves to contemporary currents from the spiritual world. It is of absolutely no value to flirt with other directions because they seem theosophical to us, to occupy ourselves superficially with them. This directly hinders our progress. It would be much better to join a more or less false direction if we think it gives us more, because we will then also get what corresponds to us from it. The true esotericist must look at life with alert eyes from his firm, unshakeable standpoint, because life will become increasingly complicated. These complications are brought about by Luciferic beings who remained behind in their development during the Mystery of Golgotha, i.e., they did not absorb the consequences of this Mystery within themselves. What is now happening in the spiritual worlds is often shocking to those who can see into them.

What Lucifer brought us, namely that we moved into our physical and etheric bodies and did not remain floating above them, was actually good for us, for it enabled our ego to gain the power of knowledge and memory. Memory is, of course, something that also has a restraining effect. Without it, however, we would not be able to cope in the way we are stuck in our bodies; above all, we would not be able to distinguish between reality and illusion. Suppose we thought of a person we had known twenty years ago and encountered this memory image and greeted it; we would have to call this a hallucination. However, we would indulge in this kind of hallucination if we considered something backward to be something contemporary, and this is something that will often be the case in the coming times. The Luciferic beings who remained behind during the Mystery of Golgotha have, so to speak, created a vanguard in certain souls, whom they have taken possession of after their last death. These are souls who lived at the time of Tauler and Meister Eckhart in the 13th century and belonged to the community of the Beguines. They are now seeking to confuse people's minds in the coming times, and they are using the old religions of Brahmanism and Buddhism as a means to this end. These were right for their time when they were given to the ancient Indians, and Brahmanism in particular was a much more spiritual religion than Christianity still is today. The fact that it is not more advanced is due to the fact that Europeans have missed the opportunity since the Middle Ages to develop what was rightfully theirs. Above all, however, a high spiritual culture will sweep across Europe like a tidal wave from China, which will greatly impress Europeans because, due to its great age, which dates back to Atlantis, it is far superior to present-day Christianity. What is happening now in China may be of political significance on the surface, but as an expression of a much more far-reaching spiritual significance, esotericists must read a book by an outstanding Chinese author: Ku Hung Ming, “China's Defense Against European Ideas,” which has also been translated into German. Ku Hung Ming is an important thinker. What he says is not wrong, and yet there is much in it that should give esotericists pause for thought. He says that Christian missionaries came to China to bring Christianity into an ancient, high culture. Did they succeed? No. Something else happened instead. The missionaries brought Chinese culture back to Europe, and since the French Revolution, Europe has become much more Chinese than it even realizes. This Chinese man knows very well that his people are the keepers of humanity's memory and that this fact makes a deep impression on Europeans. But memory, as I said, is Lucifer's gift. Through him, we descended into our physical bodies and were expelled from the paradise of the spiritual worlds. We must now undo Lucifer's deed, but we must not think that it was not necessary.

One might ask why we had to descend. But that would be like someone who, when asked to go to a certain place to learn something, replied that it was not necessary and that he would rather stay where he was. But then he would not have the experience. And we would never have attained the consolidation of our ego in this way if we had not entered the physical body in this way.

Now, however, we should regard it more and more as an instrument. When, through meditation and concentration, we reach the point of leaving it and seeing it lying before us, the organs are indeed not active. The eyes do not see, the ears do not hear. The body has the value of a plant, but a highly developed one, and as it lies there before us, we must tell ourselves that we must completely wean ourselves from speaking of the “lower” physical and “lower” etheric bodies; for these two are marvelous structures in their organization. The physical body is a temple built for us by the lower gods, and whatever is flawed and bad in it is entirely our own doing. And when we then look at ourselves, the inhabitants of this temple, we realize that we, that is, our spiritual part, have the form of a dragon, a worm. The clairvoyant sees many who imagine themselves to be selfless, living only for their fellow human beings, with the protruding jaws and receding forehead of the worm as a sign of their egoism. Our soul still has this worm-like form, and so that we do not always see it, good gods have placed the guardian of the threshold in front of it. Now, however, we must resolve to transform this dragon and bring it up to meet the higher gods. This shall be our unceasing work. When the ancient Egyptian walked through the temple during his initiation, through the rows of sphinxes, he told himself that this temple was the physical image of the perfect dwelling place of God and that he had to attain this divinity in order to be worthy of dwelling in the temple of his body.

When stepping out of the body, the eyes lose their ability to see. They no longer see the physical sun, nor what it illuminates. Instead, the human being illuminates his surroundings himself and perceives the colors and sounds of the spiritual world. His spiritual part increases in abilities. However, if one exaggerates the act of stepping out, the physical eyes can suffer. They then no longer see clearly, but everything appears to be surrounded by an aura. In England, there are now even certain instruments for seeing the auras of things. However, this is directly harmful to the eyes, and healthy stepping out of the body does not require such practices.

The ancient Atlanteans did not yet have clear vision. They did not need it, because the sun was still veiled by thick fog and, towards the end of Atlantis, could be seen as a huge colored circle across the entire sky with a pale, veiled center.

In ancient Egypt, during initiation, physical means were used to enable the student to see the sun on the other side through the earth. Now, however, one is supposed to see the spiritual sun only through spiritual exercises.

Record B

It has often been said that our present time is a very important but also very critical period, in which great spiritual currents are flowing down into our physical world. They must serve to bring a new seed to humanity, so that its development can continue. At the same time, influences are flowing down from the past, influences that made earlier development fruitful. Our task now as esotericists should be to feel ourselves fixed in a center, as in the new seed, and not to allow ourselves to be carried away or confused by any side currents. At this very moment, a new vanguard has formed, serving to reinforce the already existing Luciferic influences. These are spirits who are not incarnated at present, but who were contemporaries of the followers of Johannes Tauler and Meister Eckhart, namely the Begards, who themselves belonged to a mystical movement at that time and also did much good for their time, who now send their impulses from the spiritual world and as such form a powerful vanguard for the Luciferic beings who remained behind during the events on Golgotha, who had to remain behind in order to intervene again later in the development. We already know from earlier communications that the Luciferic beings also bring good, and from this point of view it must be pointed out that we owe our memory and our entire power of imagination to these beings. What would it be like if we forgot all the fateful events of our youth and earlier years, or if we imagined them as if they were happening in the present? Then we would live in hallucinations, then we would become confused within ourselves.

But this is precisely what the backward Luciferic spirits want to stir up in us, the memory of the past as something still existing and beneficial in the present. If the teachings of the ancient Brahmins or of Buddhism, which promoted the development of human beings in their time, were still being transmitted to people today in exactly the same way, it would be as if the memory of our soul had been transported across time into the present. We would be living in hallucinations. An esotericist should be firmly centered, not indulging in any of these currents and especially not flirting with them, as is all too often the case today when people want to “reconcile” all parties and hold them together in a great brotherhood. Time and again, one hears that this or that personality spoke, wrote, or preached “so theosophically,” or that this or that view is so deeply imbued with theosophy. This is just allowing oneself to be misled, to be pulled out of one's center in order to temporarily go along with another current. It would be better for such esotericists to continue with such a partly good or partly evil current for a time or for their whole life than to constantly swing back and forth between one opinion and another.

One of the most characteristic things of our time is what is happening in China at the moment and which, strange as it may sound, is the result of earlier attempts by Christian missionaries to bring Christianity to China. China still possesses a genuine Atlantic spiritual science, which contains many great things, but which belongs to a closed period and from which Chinese culture cannot rise. The consequence of the missionaries going to China was not that Christianity was introduced to China, but that the Europeans became Chinese. It is the concepts and ideas of the Chinese that have flowed into the Europeans, been brought to Europe by them, and are now leading Europe into Chinese culture, so that it will become a center of the greatest confusion in concepts and perceptions.

The Chinese have the task of being the memory of humanity. They must now show humanity the spiritual treasures they have preserved from the past, for all obstacles have now been removed. It is not up to the Chinese to distinguish between memory and hallucination; that is the task of the Europeans. In the coming period, we will see that Europeans allow themselves to be confused by viewing what they experience as something new and wanting to introduce it. (See the new work on this subject: “China's Defense Against Europe” by Ku Hung Ming.)

And when an outdated form of Buddhism and everything Oriental comes over to Europe—and the Orient, being so far away, exerts the greatest attraction on people—then error and confusion will reach a climax that we can hardly imagine. The new seed that is now emerging in Europe, which must be regarded as a seed and not as a fully grown fruit, forms the center to which we must hold fast. All other currents must be decisively rejected as not belonging to this sprouting seed, with which our soul must connect its further development.

With this spiritual current we must lift ourselves up, and then what we have often described will slowly come to pass, namely that our I will form a duality: one part, which we will experience as bound to the earth and formed by earthly forces, which we will experience as separate from ourselves. We will perceive this ego as if it had become smaller; the other as something greater than what we have felt within ourselves until now. We then see our body outside ourselves and can no longer use our senses, even though they are still present. Sight, hearing, feeling—everything has left the body, and yet it lives; but it is only the life of a plant. Then we get the feeling that the body would be something very beautiful if we only did not have to live in it. Through the lower gods, our body has been formed to perfection down to the smallest details, but it is we ourselves who, through our imperfections, make this body into something inferior. Looking at it this way, we get the mental image that what is outside us as our body is like a dragon with a giant jaw and a receding forehead, and that this is what we have made of the gods' work so far. The guardian of the threshold prevents us from seeing the form of our self, but it is always there nonetheless.

We then learn to regard the higher part of our self as the most spiritual part, which draws the soul forces from within itself in order to fill itself with divine light. In ancient Atlantean times, the atmosphere was filled with such a kind of mist that the sun could not shine through it, and human beings did not yet have eyes like we do now to distinguish objects. Only gradually did a huge, bright disc filled with colors penetrate this mist, filling the entire atmosphere, and as the disc radiated more light, the eyes were formed according to the light. Thus, the spiritual part of our being is to become luminous like a sun and fill the spiritual environment with light, in which the beings we call the spiritual hierarchies then become visible. This is what the Egyptians called “seeing the sun at midnight,” which required a special act on their part because they could not bring it about in the manner described above, but had to be led to see the sun on the other side through the earth in the darkness of night. But we fill ourselves with the spiritual sun and then radiate it again with the organs we might call the spiritual eyes. The beings we then see are the higher gods, and this is what is called seeing the higher and lower gods.

You can damage your physical eyes if you try too hard to train them to see the supersensible. All the methods that are now mainly coming from England, which enable you to see people's auras in a certain artificial way, are harmful to the physical eye because they drive out the etheric body in the eye area. You can even go blind from it.