Meditation, Spiritual Consciousness, and the Christ Substance

GA 266II — 17 December 1912, Zurich

Esoteric Lesson

If you want to practice meditation, you must command yourself to switch off all thoughts and have only the content of the meditation itself in your soul. Then peace of mind should set in, emptiness must arise, and then wait to see if something flows in from the spiritual world, wait with patience and perseverance. Then you may have an experience of feeling absent-minded, an experience that is like a dream that flits by. You then experience the feeling: “Something is thinking in me.” - “An angel has touched me.” - “I am rising into his kingdom.”

The way we relate to our thoughts is the way the angel, the Angeloi, relates to the Holy Spirit. The Holy Spirit does not think as we do, but in such a way that he sends his angels as his messengers to rush through the world.

Such an experience is the first step into the spiritual world, and one should pay attention to it.

It thinks that one should feel and experience piety.

Now one can rise further to that which weaves and lives through the world as the divine principle to which we owe our existence. Then one has an experience such as: It weaves me.

We touch the hem of the garment of the beings we call the spirits of movement (dynamis).

Even in ordinary life, we have to submerge ourselves, bump into something in order to develop consciousness. We bump into our physical body and wake up. We also bump into something after death, into the Christ substance! We must wake up in it, immerse ourselves in it in order to gain consciousness in the spiritual world, so that we are not asleep there.

But having consciousness does not yet mean having ego-consciousness. We also have consciousness when we experience that something has been thought within us, but only when we remember that we have experienced that something has been thought within us do we connect the experience with our ego.

Thus we lose our ego in death; dead as souls, we submerge in order to find ourselves and gradually become conscious in the Christ substance.

Then we come to higher beings, which we intuitively call thrones, powers of will, and the mantra there is: It works on me. The feeling is one of devotion and surrender.

When we have a moment of clarity in the spiritual world, we see our body down below, but it takes a high level of perception to see it as if in a mirror. At the beginning of such experiences, we see a coffin with a person inside or a bathtub filled with hot water, or we stand in front of a door that will not open. This is all the physical body that does not let us in in the image.

When we experience the image of looking down on our physical body below, as if we were being born out of the divine-spiritual world, we express this in the words:

Ex Deo nascimur.

When we imagine ourselves submerging into the Christ substance in order to die, this means:

In Christo morimur.

How we emerge again from the trickling water and float up in a fine body into the spiritual world:

Per Spiritum Sanctum reviviscimus.