# Transforming Soul Forces Through Esoteric Meditation Practice

## GA 266II — 22 September 1912, Basel

### Esoteric Lesson

Record A

In yesterday's lesson, we saw from the example of children at play how the esoteric student behaves toward exoteric life when he has left it behind and embarked on the esoteric path, how he now, when he plays children's games again, even better than the children themselves, because he does not relate to the toys as the children do, but relates to the children themselves. It is not the toys that matter, but the relationship to the children, his state of mind. It is the same on the esoteric path. The student enters into a different relationship with his environment. He sees it with different eyes than before. In a certain sense, he has grown beyond it, and yet he understands it better. We should not become uninterested in the things of the outer world. Through esoteric training, one gradually loses interest in what one was interested in before.

As they live their lives, people are more attached to some people than to others. They are then naturally inclined either not to notice the faults of those they are attached to, or to excuse them much more easily than those of people they dislike. This attitude must also be transformed in the esotericist. Their relationship with their fellow human beings must become more impersonal. This should not happen overnight; it would not even be right; it could disrupt karmic connections. But gradually they must come to want to help even those they do not like. This will naturally cause the person to see the faults of others—even those he loves—more clearly than before, but this does no harm; it is compensated for by esoteric training.

Our state of mind really does change. Today we must go into more detail about what happens to us in the moments when we finish our meditations. It is not the same whether this influence of the spiritual world occurs immediately after meditation or later in the course of the day, nor is it the same whether it is a consequence of meditation or whether it is only so-called atavistic clairvoyance or clairaudience or the presentation of visions.

It is most valuable for our soul life if these transitions are only fleeting and easily forgotten. The main thing for the esotericist is to pay attention, to train themselves to learn to notice these fleeting glimpses of the spiritual world. Through esotericism, our thinking becomes more refined, more spiritual, and more independent of the brain. Let us consider how the concepts of time and space play a role in human perception. However, time and space are maya in the spiritual realm. An esoteric student may suddenly experience a moment in the midst of exoteric life when he feels that it is not he who is thinking at that moment, but that he is perceiving his thought body, as it were, with the thoughts weaving and working within him. He will have the intense feeling that something is thinking (feeling, willing) within him. This weaving and working of thoughts is always present, but in the subconscious, and only in very special moments does it enter consciousness. This thinking must become ever more refined, spiritual, and independent of the physical brain; the feeling must awaken more and more that something spiritual is thinking, feeling, and willing within us. Now someone might ask: Isn't this a contradiction, when we say that we want to receive everything with full consciousness, and then we say that thoughts, the I, work in the subconscious? Such questions are an aftereffect of the current brutal logical thinking — brutal not only toward human beings, but also toward thinking itself. The esotericist, however, must learn to think in a refined and subtle way; he must become aware that in the esoteric everything undergoes a transformation.

In the life of the senses, human beings are aware of their three soul forces—feeling, thinking, and willing—through which the soul works: the sentient soul, the intellectual soul, and the conscious soul. When entering the higher worlds, these three soul members blur into one another, as it were; and yet they are separate. Here, too, there seems to be a contradiction. But one must know that the three soul members are never completely separate, even though each seems to exist on its own.

All of man's desires, drives, and passions surge and swell in the sentient soul. But man had to have something as a counteracting pole for his egoity. The earlier guiding powers of human evolution recognized this, and therefore they placed fear into the sentient soul of man. This is pointed out in the mystery play “The Guardian of the Threshold.” Man had to have fear, otherwise he would have approached everything in order to have it for himself, and his egoism would have become too strong. The ancient educators were also clearly aware of this, and the telling of fairy tales and ghost stories was a factor in their education. In modern education, telling children ghost stories has been completely eliminated. To a certain extent, however, this is necessary for the child's soul, insofar as it evokes wonder in the soul, because this develops into reverence for something unknown. A child who is never told about anything unknown or great can never feel devotion in later life. The esotericist must consciously transform fear into reverence, piety, devotion, and self-sacrifice. When entering the spiritual worlds, fear must be transformed into reverence; therefore, it is good to cultivate it on the physical plane. However, if the feeling of fear in a person is exaggerated and the ego is not strong enough to prevent it from affecting not only the soul but also the body, the physical body, then what we know as rabies can arise, for example. This can always be traced back to a weak ego. Just as physical forces are seized by fear in connection with a weak ego, so those affected by it fear everything that is disconnected, such as water (aquaphobia), something that approaches them in the element of water. This is a false influence of spiritual forces on the soul and the physical body.

For the intellectual soul, the basic condition is wisdom, which is so often thwarted by compassion. It is peculiar that these two poles are opposed to each other in the intellectual soul. How often is the intellect thwarted and influenced by compassion. Empathizing with other beings, feeling their suffering and joy as if it were our own, is something that should be achieved through conscious meditation. We must come to feel as if we were all one, and we must learn to feel that time and space are separate, as already stated at the beginning. We can illustrate this with an example.

A mother will feel the pain of her child very differently when she is still carrying it in her lap, differently again when it is two or three years old, and yet differently when the child is twenty years old. Similarly, the feelings towards one's own child are different from those towards a stranger's child. A mother will feel differently because she is connected to her child, is one with it, just as we are part of the unity of the spiritual worlds. And we also see that Maya changes through time and space, and that this also changes our soul's empathy.

It will often turn out that we frequently feel an immense bliss within ourselves when we experience such empathy. But we should not give in to this mood. This should only be the prevailing feeling when we are free of the physical body, that is, when we are not feeling in the physical body but in meditation, and then enjoy the immense bliss of creatively participating in the world.

This feeling of bliss produces the greatest egoism; therefore, it is only beneficial through meditation. In our physical existence, we should endure everything that fate imposes on us with serenity and learn to feel as if none of this concerns us at all, but accept it calmly and serenely, as if our body were foreign to us. Likewise, we must awaken within ourselves the feeling that we are not destined to make progress, but that we can rejoice in the progress of others as much as in our own. For the development of the world, it is quite irrelevant who makes the progress, but for us, the struggle against and transformation of egoism is the essential factor.

The feeling of being able to switch oneself off is one pole of the conscious soul. The opposite pole, however, which protrudes from the spiritual world, is the conscience. This now holds us back when we want to commit actions that are not in accordance with moral laws. We must let ourselves be guided and directed by our conscience and not act according to the principles of the great statesman who, although he apparently let himself be led by his horses, nevertheless guided them as he wished and gave them direction.

We must take care on the physical plane to develop our conscience in the right way, for only what we have acquired can we take with us into the spiritual worlds. But conscience also changes through our meditations. There is a stage, and this is the most difficult stage for the occultist: becoming “conscience-less.” But to reach this stage, a person must already be very advanced and have cleared everything out of their soul; they must have completely transformed vanity and ambition, these most terrible forces of the soul, which can cause people to fall again and again.

Being “unconscionable” is just feeling completely free of the body in the sense of higher self-knowledge, so that one can then feel like a center for taking in truths from the spiritual world. We must learn to lead a double life, to feel that we carry our physical body around with us like a piece of wood. The esotericist must learn to feel that his entire body is an organ for thinking, feeling, and willing.

He must learn to think not only with his physical brain, which is enclosed by the hard skull, but with all parts of his body, and that his hands, for example, are better organs for thinking than his brain. He must gradually spiritualize the physical so that everything becomes merely a tool for him. He must become such that when he looks at his hands, especially his etheric hands, he does not see them at all, just as he does not see his brain or his eyes now.

Example: the axe in the hand. Just as we perceive the axe as something external, so must the hand also be perceived as something external to us, something that does not belong to us. We must be the driving factor that guides the hand as a tool with which we work. (The hand must be the driving factor with which we work, must be the driving spirit, and everything must become one.)

Within ourselves, we must work beyond everything physical and spiritualize ourselves to such an extent that we become like our archetype.

> The seed of my body lay in the spirit ...

Record B

Let us once again draw a comparison between the behavior of adults toward children's games and the position of the esotericist toward external life. Just as adults can play better than children because they approach children's games from a different perspective, so the esotericist should be able to perform his daily tasks better because he infuses them with the devotion and strength that his meditative life gives him.

What does he gain through meditation? He draws his three soul forces together to a single point, so to speak, and concentrates them on the spiritual worlds, which then allow something appropriate to flow into each of the souls. The three soul forces—the sentient soul, the intellectual or emotional soul, and the conscious soul—become more closely related to each other yet more distinct when they are raised to the spiritual realm. This is an apparent contradiction, but the esotericist must accustom himself to a more subtle logic than that which we encounter in modern materialistic thinking, for that is brutal. For example, according to ordinary logic, one might say that in esoteric lessons we are always told that we must never disregard our consciousness, our clear thinking; but last time we heard that, in addition to this thinking, we should develop something else within ourselves that thinks independently of it. This might seem like a contradiction. However, those who criticize this forget that this is achieved through meditation, and that it is therefore something completely different from the esotericist unconsciously allowing thoughts and mental images to arise within themselves.

The forces that guide the development of the earth allow something to flow into the sentient soul, through which our instincts, desires, and passions surge, that is very beneficial to human beings and without which they would not be able to relate properly to their environment, namely fear. Without fear, human beings would feel at home with everything higher and would want to carry the democracy established on earth into the spiritual worlds. If they counter fear in the right way with their ego, they transform it into reverence, into the piety we spoke of last time, and thus treat this feeling in the right way. - It can become dangerous in a special case when the ego is extinguished in the sentient soul. This happens, for example, when a person is infected with rabies. Then the feeling of fear grows to enormous proportions, and the person feels horror at everything that does not have an immediate sensory effect, for example, water. This explains the frequent fear of water in rabies. - Nowadays, people are very averse to frightening children with ghosts. To an excessive degree, this is indeed harmful, but there is no harm in children having a sense that something is at work behind visible things. Children who have never experienced this feeling through fairy tales find it much more difficult to develop a sense of awe within themselves. And adults' fear of children's fear of ghosts is really unnecessary.

Something else flows into our intellectual soul from the spiritual worlds. We think in it, but the powers that guide the development of the earth have added compassion and empathy to this thinking. The forces that think within us and awaken empathy for other beings are active in the same soul. That is why we also call this the intellectual or emotional soul, hence these two names. Esotericists should develop this empathy in particular. Until now, it has been colored in humans entirely by the degree of their liking or dislike for their fellow human beings. When something happens to someone we love, we feel it more strongly than we do for someone else. But we should not only rejoice with another or suffer with them, we should also be absorbed in their joy and suffering. We should feel it as our own. If someone cuts their finger, we should feel as if we have cut our own finger. — There is also a danger here: namely, that compassion degenerates into a kind of bliss in which we revel.

The gods who preside over the development of the earth have placed conscience in the consciousness soul. This is a force, the only force that can and must restrain man, that is, his ego. In the esoteric, its effect is different. It was said of a famous statesman that his decisions and actions led him like his horses, but his horses went where he directed them. Esotericists have the power to direct their conscience, and therein lies the great danger of becoming unscrupulous, of directing the horses wherever one wants. Our passions play a fatal role here. If we allow ambition and vanity, these adhesives of human development, to arise within us, it can have a very corrupting effect. They accompany human beings all the way up to the spiritual worlds.

To strengthen our sense of togetherness, each of us should send the following thought out into the world every Sunday morning at 9 a.m.: “In the spirit of humanity, I feel united with all esotericists.”

Record C

We must take seriously the comparison between the relationship of the esotericist to his environment and that of an adult to the children with whom he plays. The adult will not have so much a relationship with the toys as the child does, but rather a relationship with the children themselves. What makes him play is his interest in the children. This must also be true of the esotericist; his interest in his fellow human beings must cause him to do everything in ordinary life as well and as accurately as possible, even though his motivation is different from that of the exotericist:

We have pointed out how, for those who practice seriously, a certain awareness of a second life of thought will arise. This is not a subconscious life of thought, because it is brought about by conscious practice, i.e., by the person's desire to become conscious of themselves. We also said how difficult it is to maintain this second consciousness in the first, how everything it brings us “flits by,” as it were. What is given to us by the gods announces itself, so to speak, with modesty, while we must treat with suspicion what comes to us in lasting, intrusive visions. That which is based on atavistic clairvoyance can have something compelling about it; that which is given to us by the gods, if we have prepared ourselves for it in the right way, never has this character, but rather always has something fleeting about it, something that is difficult to retain. We must accustom ourselves to a certain subtlety of thought. We receive impressions through our soul of feeling, our soul of understanding, and our soul of consciousness. What is mixed in with our soul of feeling is fear. Without fear, there would be no piety; we would immediately want to familiarize ourselves with everything in brutal egoism. What holds us back, what allows us to still feel something, to recognize the sacred in things or beings, what we must refrain from, is a certain nuance of fear. This is good and, in higher consciousness, is increasingly transformed into reverence, piety, humility, and veneration. The opposite of fear must be the sense of self, which one must not lose.

What is mixed in with our intellectual soul is compassion and joy. That is why it has two names: intellectual soul and emotional soul. Compassion for others becomes, in higher consciousness, unity with others. One no longer feels compassion, one is the other being. This feeling poured out in everything in higher consciousness has something blissful about it; one feels one's own being spread out in an all-encompassing being that suffers and rejoices with all beings. However, this can become a danger for ordinary exoteric life. For the experience of this feeling of bliss can also become a kind of higher egoism. Therefore, in ordinary life, the intellect, the calm insight, must be the counterpole to empathy.

What lies in our consciousness soul is the conscience. But by entering into the higher life, the conscience becomes such that one can determine for oneself in what way it speaks, that one follows it, but oneself indicates the path it must take. However, if moral feeling is not strongly trained and developed in ordinary life, a kind of lack of conscience can arise. That is why one must be firm in ordinary life when it comes to moral principles, because in the higher worlds conscience follows the will of the human being and is determined by the will. This lack of conscience must then find its opposite pole in a certain feeling of solidarity with the whole of humanity. We must feel more and more united with the whole of humanity. Our own personal and physical existence will become less and less important. The body will become a kind of toy with which we, as adults, play among children in life in order to be of use to our fellow human beings. But this must also be the case with regard to our astral body. Our desires, inclinations, sympathies, and antipathies should no longer seem important to us. We must cultivate a sense of solidarity with all of humanity. Even if we do not like someone, we must still want to help them with the greatest love, perhaps even with more love than if we felt sympathy for them. Our own progress should no longer seem so important to us. We must do everything we can, but we must feel that it is the same for the development of humanity as a whole whether I have a certain ability or someone else does. We must be able to rejoice just as much in the progress of another as we would in our own progress. Only when we can view our own body as something belonging to the outside world will we be able to think with our whole body. As long as we are conscious of our body as something that belongs to us, we cannot use it as an organ of knowledge. We must actually reach the point where we no longer see our hand, for example, only then will the hand become the organ of thought that it can be. In this way, we must feel more and more at one with the whole of humanity and regard our bodies as toys that we use in life to help our fellow human beings.

Record D

The day before yesterday, we talked about how we should relate to exoteric life as adults relate to children's games. The adult will play better like the child, but out of love for the children, not for the toys. We should not think that the life of an ascetic monk is the ideal we should strive for. We should faithfully fulfill our daily duties and only lift ourselves completely out of everyday life in our meditation.

The first thing we will experience as a result of meditation is more subtle thinking. Materialistic thinking is brutal. We should pay attention to the web of thoughts, to the “it thinks in me” – when this flashes within us like a shadow without the involvement of our own ego thoughts.

Now one might say that this is a contradiction: on the one hand, I am supposed to pay attention to and increase this unconscious web of thoughts within me, and on the other hand, my thinking within me is supposed to become more and more conscious.

However, such an objection shows that it does not yet originate from that subtle esoteric thinking, because – one must always pay close attention to everything that is said – it was said that these thoughts will arise in the meditator as a result of meditation. It was not meant to be a flash of thoughts in exoteric life. The divine powers manifest themselves in a chaste, even modest manner. Much less beneficial is the so-called atavistic, inherited clairvoyance of the exotericists. The devil reveals himself in a turbulent manner, in strong, tangible images. In a delicate, modest, dreamlike way, God reveals himself to the esotericist.

As we ascend into the spiritual worlds, we should learn to perceive ourselves more and more as a trinity. As a trinity consisting of the sentient soul, the intellectual or emotional soul, and the conscious soul. Here again, there is an apparent contradiction when it is said that, on the one hand, there is an ever closer union and intermingling of the three, and on the other hand, a stronger isolation of each individual soul force.

Fear is something that must be present in the sentient soul, otherwise human beings will never attain true reverence, never attain the devotion and piety that we should develop toward the spiritual powers. When one loves a rose or a human being, there is always a mixture of fear in the feeling of love. One does not want to offend the other person, one wants to maintain a certain distance from them, a distance from what lies within them.

It is foolish when modern materialistic educators, for example, want to completely banish the fear of ghosts from children's lives. This fear of fear is wrong. It is good for children to have an inkling of the unknown; this prepares the ground for reverence. Of course, this must not be exaggerated; it must never be allowed to reach the point where fear gains the upper hand and the ego loses its boundaries in the sentient soul. In mental insanity, in physical terms, for example, rabies, which occurs at the same time as a fear of water, because everything material is then perceived as unpleasant.

In the intellectual or emotional soul, compassion arises — hence its second name — which is very often fought against by the intellect and vice versa. The esotericist develops more and more compassion, love for the whole world, and a joyful willingness to sacrifice. One wants to help, to help especially those people who are unsympathetic. We should not only rejoice with others, not only suffer with them, we should be the joy, the suffering ourselves.

Bliss then arises in the intellectual soul for the spiritual world. The greater the physical suffering and mental pain, the greater the bliss there.

Conscience arises in the consciousness soul. We should develop it here on the physical plane, where it can be developed.

It is said of a statesman that he only follows his horses, but they lead him where he wants to go. So it is with conscience. In the bodiless state, which we must attain in order to live in the supersensible world, we must give direction to conscience. Therefore, we must have guided it correctly here already.

The esotericist must always be vigilant about himself, about that which wants to gain the upper hand: From a lack of conscience, a higher conscience in the spiritual world thus arises in the consciousness soul.

When we experience ourselves in the consciousness soul, we come to feel connected with all of humanity.