Overcoming Inner Sadducee, Pharisee, and Essene

GA 266II — 1 September 1912, Munich

Esoteric Lesson

Record A

The esotericist has to pay attention to many things that are completely irrelevant to the exotericist. For example, he must always bear in mind that when he strives for truth, it can only ever be a relative truth, and that as an esotericist, one cannot speak of eternal truths at all. Our desires always interfere with our striving, and we must tell ourselves that we always prefer to accept a truth that pleases us rather than one that is unsympathetic to us. For example, the idea of immortality as such is more appealing to most people than the idea that everything ends with death, and they are therefore inclined to accept it as truth for this reason alone. But this is not what the esotericist should do. He should eliminate his desires, his personal feelings, and then investigate. For this purpose we have our meditations, in which we are supposed to rest spiritually, so to speak, on a certain thought content. It is not so important that we think through the content of the meditation, but rather that we let our soul rest in it; for through this constant repetition our soul forces are strengthened.

The tendency to believe in absolute, eternal truths and to defend them is a characteristic of our consciousness soul. It is now possible that the consciousness soul gains the upper hand to such an extent that it no longer controls these ideas, but is controlled by them and pours them outwards. In occultism, there is a term for this; such a consciousness soul with these ideas is called the “inner Sadducee.” We all carry the inner Sadducee within us, and the esotericist has a duty to feel this and act accordingly. (Example: When Goethe was asked p.m. [post mortem] how his works should be interpreted, he said: “From my spirit, but not with the same words I spoke to explain myself.” Saint-Martin p.m. once said: “I have many students, but most of them have spread my errors.”)

The intellectual or emotional soul can also carry something like a second person within itself, namely when a person wants to present a personally recognized truth as universally valid. People do this out of a certain sense of shame because they do not want to say, "I have recognized this truth as such through this or that experience; it is therefore a truth for me,“ but rather wants to present it as universally valid. Occultism has a term for this: ”Pharisee." The inner Pharisee is the intellectual soul that seizes control in this direction. This addiction to presenting personal truths as universal truths often results in outward hypocrisy and insincerity.

The sentient soul can also be allowed to dominate too much in its quest for truth. This is what all those do who prefer to revel in feelings rather than, for example, taking in and processing the teachings of world evolution, who prefer to immerse themselves in Tauler or another medieval mystic and reject everything else. Since the sentient soul is quite distant from the consciousness soul, it does not express its faults in such an unpleasant way as the latter, but it is nevertheless a mistake when the esotericist turns away from everything that the outer world can teach him in order to seek the truth only in inner contemplation. In occultism, this tendency to let the sentient soul predominate is called “inner Essenism.” One might object: “Yes, but an Essene is something very good.” Certainly it is; but the spiritual leaders who founded this order knew exactly where, when, and in what way they had to establish it so that it would be beneficial to the world. That is precisely the main thing in occult striving: to recognize which truth is the right one for the time in question. The Buddha knew this very well when he brought his teaching to India six hundred years before Christ. The same teaching transplanted to another place, at another time, does not have the same effect. How to make something effective is what matters.

At certain times, nodes form in the spiritual worlds, where forces from the highest worlds act upon the worlds directly above us. Such a time is now, and it is not the great initiates who can bring down these forces from the highest worlds, but only Christ, through his passing through the mystery of Golgotha. But the great initiates Buddha, Pythagoras, Zarathustra, and so on, gather around Christ and allow themselves to be influenced by his forces, regardless of whether they are incarnated in physical bodies or dwell in spiritual worlds, and they work out of this spirit.

We must now bring these three people dwelling within us, the Sadducee, the Pharisee, and the Essene, into a relationship with one another, for each one alone is something harmful. The Pharisee should serve the Sadducee, and these two together should serve the Essene. The latter should rule over the two, but he must not rule alone. As esotericists, we should really feel that we have these three within us, for when we come to the guardian of the threshold, we will feel them very clearly; for we will have to leave them behind as something transitory that does not belong in the spiritual worlds. When someone says that an Essene is concerned with the spiritual worlds, the answer must be that he is concerned with them in his own way in the physical world, but that his entire order was founded for the physical world and for a specific point on Earth, and that in the spiritual worlds, other points of view are taken.

When we stand before the Deity with these three deficiencies, which we perceive as nakedness, we will feel a sense of shame, just as Adam and Eve felt naked before the Deity, and therefore we must strive to bring these three soul qualities into the right balance.

The spiritual world is surrounded by shells that we ourselves create and that we must remove. But knowledge cannot be found by searching within oneself. It can come to us when the sun sinks into the calm sea and we allow this natural phenomenon to have an intense effect on us. Living in harmony with nature has an awakening and stimulating effect on the esotericist, but he must not devote himself exclusively to it. - Nikolaus Cusanus had his most powerful spiritual experiences on a sea voyage from Constantinople.

The master of wisdom and harmony of feelings has condensed help and support for us like the sea in a drop — something like this is possible in the spiritual realm, but not in the physical realm, of course — in the prayer that he wishes should always form the conclusion of our esoteric reflections and which represents the entire development, abundance, and ascent of human beings:

In the spirit lay the seed of my body ...

Record B

There are people who are enclosed in a certain field of vision, within which they can feel very much at home and are capable of achieving great things. Such people close themselves off, as it were, from everything that wants to enter their field of vision from outside, or they shape it in such a way that it is confined to their horizon of consciousness. These are people who live predominantly in their consciousness soul, in whom the consciousness soul strongly predominates over the other soul members. Very active people, people of will, belong to this group. The occultist has a term for these people: Sadducees.

Then there are people who want to explain everything and find everything explainable. Even if they act out of a strong desire for truth, such people easily end up not taking the truth very seriously. For there is no absolute truth. Truth is relative, changeable, and must adapt to the spirit of the times and to the individual in each person. When two people say the same thing, it is not the same; and what is true today is no longer true in exactly the same sense tomorrow or months or years later. - Today, the truest and most accurate way to speak about Goethe is not to repeat his words verbatim, as he had to speak a hundred years ago, but to speak in his spirit and in his sense, as Goethe himself would speak today in our very different times and under very different circumstances. Those who, on the other hand, adhere to the literal meaning of words and to rational explanations, become entangled in systems of thought and in concepts that are fixed once and for all.

What is true for him, what he has recognized as right and true, must be true for everyone and must always remain true.

Such people are ruled by their intellectual soul. The occultist uses the term Pharisee for this type of person.

So we have the Sadducee and the Pharisee within us, and we must be clear that both are at work in each of us and must be at work insofar as our activity on the physical plane is concerned. What matters is that neither the Pharisee nor the Sadducee in us becomes overgrown and gains dominion over the other soul members. We can see how this is to be understood in people such as Homer or Shakespeare. For example, there are statements about Homer by doctors who were intimately acquainted with him, who claim that Homer must actually have been a doctor. Or people who are really into teaching crafts think Homer must have been a craftsman because what he says about it is so incredibly accurate. Even Napoleon, that great military genius, once said that Homer must have had great tactical and strategic skills because the tactical descriptions in the Iliad seem so military and factually correct to him. The same could be said of Shakespeare. These poets understood how to subordinate their own opinions so completely, how to crawl into the essence of what they wanted to describe, that they spoke to the doctor, the craftsman, the general, and so on, as if they were themselves a doctor, a craftsman, a general, and so on.

Now there are also people who shut themselves off in a different way and, under certain circumstances, can achieve great things and be pleasant, lovable people in their own way. These are people who live entirely in their own feelings, who withdraw into their inner selves like Johannes Tauler or Meister Eckhart and become completely absorbed in them. They live like hermits in their own world, where they experience and express lofty, beautiful, deeply felt inner feelings, but in such a way that when someone else reads or experiences them, they are not quite the same. The way they experience and express them is actually only completely true for themselves. All mere mystics and vague enthusiasts, but also many important poets of all times, belong to this group. Even in our time, there are many such artistic natures. In a certain sense, this kind of inner experience can be called the basic mood of the artistically and aesthetically sensitive people of our time. - Among theosophists, too, there are many such natures who shut themselves off and consider themselves special. This mood is quite understandable, for this kind of inner disposition springs from the predominance of what should be the strongest in us and what we call the sentient soul. The occultist describes such natures with the word Essene.

One may wonder about this, for the school of the Essenes is something lofty and significant. Certainly it is. It has its full justification in fulfilling its great and lofty task in the physical world. But for the person who strives as an esoteric into the spiritual worlds, such a more or less one-sided education in the sense described as an Essene is just as dangerous as the overgrowth of the Pharisee or the Sadducee in us. The Pharisee and the Sadducee should not rule in us. The Essene should indeed rule over the Pharisee and the Sadducee, but in such a way that a proper mixture, a balance, is brought about by the harmonizing forces of the sentient soul. Willing and thinking guided by feeling, permeated with the right balanced feeling, can alone lead to harmony of the inner soul forces. In doing so, we must always remain conscious that we can only work correctly in the physical realm through these soul forces. In our ascent to the spiritual realm, the soul state achieved through proper harmony can serve as a foundation, but these soul forces themselves must remain behind the guardian of the threshold.

What remains in the spiritual realm is only what we have worked into our higher self in the form of manas. We take only the memory of the lower self and the other lower members of the human being with us into the spiritual world. When the lower members of our being die, we also take with us the extract, the sum total of the experiences and impressions of the individual incarnations as a seed for their reformation in the next incarnation, the causal body.

Record C

The forces that enable us to ascend to the higher worlds are present in every soul, but they are now bound to the physical body. The forces of the higher bodies are bound to the physical body because they are needed to gain experiences on the physical plane that cannot be gained in any other world. Once detached from the physical body, they must become one with the forces of the higher bodies, and this happens through meditation. In occult terms, this means that the Sadducee in us must be overcome.

This is the consciousness soul that overgrows the other soul life, which strives for absolute truth, even though on the physical plane there can only be one truth for a certain time, for a certain area, and one must also increase the truth with time.

Goethe was cited as an example. Dr. Steiner says:

“I experienced and saw early on how Goethe now lives as an individuality in higher worlds and how he wants to be interpreted in order to express today what he has to say. To do this, one must not use his words from back then!”

One of the secrets of the great initiates is that they speak the right words in the right place at the right time. The great wisdom of Buddha lies in the fact that he recognized the time around 500 BC as the right time for his teachings.

The important thing is how, where, and when things must be done and thought in order for humanity to progress.

The occultist can now see the great initiates who have reached the tremendous heights of initiation gathered around the Christ, whether they are embodied in the physical body or live only in the spirit, in order to be revealed to them and to receive what the Christ has brought down from spiritual worlds of such height that the other initiates cannot find the way to, so that this may now be revealed to them. gathered around Him, to be revealed by Him and to receive what Christ has brought down from spiritual worlds of such heights that the other initiates cannot find the way to, so that this may now flow into humanity.

And among these disciples of Christ are the individualities of a Buddha, Krishna, Pythagoras, and others.

The Pharisee in man is the violent soul of the intellect or emotions, which wants to make people believe as truth only what they themselves love and which makes people dishonest toward themselves.

The Essene in man is the overgrown soul of feeling, which is one-sided, closed in on itself, demands the ascent to higher worlds, and does not seek or recognize the connection with the cosmos. (Sunset and how man can perceive this event in different ways. Cusanus and the awakening of inner life.)

None of the three, neither the Sadducees nor the Pharisees nor the Essenes, may be a lord, but each must be the servant of the other. Pharisees and Sadducees must both be servants of the Essenes. The Essenes knew well that the high, glorious order can only be established on the physical plane; it does not fit into the spiritual world either.

The feeling of shame that came over Adam and Eve must come over us, shame at the nakedness of which we must be ashamed before the Deity.

If we pour out this deep feeling of shame over our entire soul life, then a power will arise from it that will teach us to overcome the Sadducees, the Pharisees, and the Essenes.

We must direct our attention to our feelings, to the inner processes and to the effects of our inner being; this is necessary for our development.

In meditation, it is important to gather all the scattered soul forces through meditation into one point of the soul, which then shuts out all physical experience. It is the strength of the power that is developed that matters, not the strength of understanding.

Everything that esotericism has to give and teach us is summarized in what the Master of Wisdom has given us in the prayer:

In the spirit lay the seed of my body ...

Record D

The predominance of the consciousness soul is called the “inner Sadducee” in occultism. It manifests itself when a person has fixed ideas about truth, considers a small field to be the all-encompassing whole, and believes that these truths are immutable, such as people of science who do not want to admit that every truth has its time and place.

The predominance of the intellectual soul is called the “inner Pharisee.” This occurs when a person has experienced a truth and wants to impose it on other people as an objective truth; when someone believes that what he has recognized as truth for himself must also apply to all other people. Therefore, there is always a certain insincerity toward oneself and toward other people whom one wants to convince that what one has personally experienced is the only valid truth. This state of mind therefore always gives the impression of hypocrisy.

The predominance of the sentient soul is called “Essene.” Although the Essenes were an order that did much good for their time, one can still speak of the “inner Essene” in human beings. This is the exclusive immersion in one's own soul, the withdrawal from others, the asceticism – in anticipation of revelations from higher worlds. In our time, it would be a calling to Tauler, Meister Eckhart, and the like, and to mysticism in general. The rejection, the unwillingness to learn anything that is necessary for the knowledge of the higher worlds in the cosmos and in nature, is what characterizes the inner Essene.

None of this can stand before the guardian of the threshold; it must be fought internally. One soul must serve the other two if one wants to become a good esotericist. The where, how, and when are always important when truth is to be revealed.

The greatness of the Buddha lay precisely in the fact that he gave his teachings at a certain time, in a certain place, and in a certain way. If his teachings are repeated now, it is not the right thing to do, for in most cases it is precisely the errors that remain and are perpetuated. Every age has its own truths or a specific form in which these are proclaimed for the progress of human evolution.

Record E

We can understand from what has happened in recent days that it is important to detach ourselves from our physical bodies. All people have the ability to do so, and yet we see in everyday life that so few are able to do it. Why is this so? In sleep, we are all in the higher worlds, but with our daytime consciousness we have no idea of this. Life here makes it so that our consciousness is occupied with the things of the physical world, so we do not notice the undercurrent within ourselves. But the powers are always there; we just don't notice them.

How is it possible to bring this ability to the fore? Through meditation, the spiritual current must become so strong that we can become conscious in the higher worlds. We don't have to think about the various physical things or our personal experiences. We must concentrate well and live only in this concentration. — One can start with a specific thought and through this thought one can get into the right mood.

The book “A Path to Self-Knowledge” is a means to achieve this. One takes a thought, develops it further, and then the powers will come to meditation. But this will be very different for different people.

People believe that truth is the same for all times and for all beings, but that is wrong. If it is truth for one era, it is not truth forever. And if a truth is true for humans, it is not true for all other beings on other planets. We see only a little bit of the truth, and the truth itself is only relative. - That was the great thing about Buddha, that he came at the right time to the right nation to give the right part of the truth that he could give. Later he moved to other places, even to another planet.

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We do not have to believe that the leader of the Essenes was like that or that Jesus was like that. Certainly, the Essene leader taught his disciples only a certain part of the truth, that which had to do with Christ, that he would come here in the physical body. They had a certain mission to fulfill, and afterwards we hear nothing more of the Essenes.

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