Ascending and Descending: Angelic and Archangelic Encounters

GA 266III — 21 March 1913, The Hague

Esoteric Lesson

Today's reflection will be devoted to how the soul can ascend into the spiritual worlds. Those who practice regularly, patiently, and eagerly will inevitably make progress; it is only important that they notice their progress.

After meditation, it is good to take a rest, to empty the soul completely and just wait for the images that come to us from higher worlds. Much also depends on the mood and condition of our soul: we should approach our exercises only with complete devotion and joy, with the greatest dedication. The experiences that arise vary greatly depending on the individuality and karma of the meditator. From the wealth of these experiences, I would like to pick out two today:

The first is being lifted out into space, into infinity. One feels expanded, lifted up; this is naturally associated with leaving the body. During this lifting, one sees a redness; yellowish-red clouds come toward us, from which figures gradually crystallize. This experience triggers a feeling of bliss, of happiness.

Alongside this, a second experience occurs, that of diving down, sinking into the depths. This is accompanied by a feeling of constriction, of being drawn together. The spiritual beings that one senses during this descent appear in blue-violet flashes of color. They trigger a feeling of reverential awe in us and cause people to engage in a kind of self-reflection. They show people how they really are, all their faults and errors, all their moral weaknesses in all their magnitude and reprehensibility.

Although we are already attuned to this through the review we all make every evening, human beings are not capable of recognizing this so clearly with their physical consciousness. These beings emerging from the depths also enable us to see clearly what habitual faults and wrong thinking produce in us. The beings that appear to us in bluish-violet light and show us our mistakes belong to the Angeloi, while the higher ones, the reddish-yellow light figures who pronounce judgment on him like punitive justice, belong to the Archangeloi. These experiences can also come to people in other ways, namely through sounds and tones. This is even more frightening and much harder to bear when the Archangel pronounces his judgment in a thunderous voice. But when a person has reached this hour, which comes after he has had the apparition with the guardian of the threshold, then he must have overcome his fear.

Just to be clear, here's an example, but your imagination can show you other things too.

People can see the figures rising from the depths in shades of blue and violet, with faces full of sorrow and pain. These high beings feel sorrow for us and our mistakes; this awakens in us a feeling of boundless shame. If a person now recognizes their errors and repents of their mistakes, they will see the faces of these beings shine with joy. Human beings must feel this connection between the microcosm and the macrocosm.

The beings that descend upon humans in reddish-yellow clouds of light and surround them in a circle, as often as they are at the center, instill a feeling of fear in them as punitive justice. However, this can be accompanied by a feeling of joy when these beings show them what possibilities for development exist within them and how it is up to them to bring them to fruition.

But whenever a person has these two experiences, when the figures gathered together in the reddish clouds try to unite with the blue-violet figures rising from the depths, something like a conflict arises within them. They clearly hear a voice saying:

Do not believe that, believe what comes from your own soul. That is equivalent to what you see out there in the cosmos!

That is Lucifer's voice, and that is the greatest temptation that human beings can have, since Lucifer outshines all other beings in beauty, cunning, and seduction. Like the blue-violet beings, he also rises from the depths.

We must also be clear that form no longer has any meaning in these realms. The spirits of form, the Elohim, as the Bible calls them, have their meaning on Earth. Within the spiritual worlds, we find that we can rise above them and draw closer to the spirits of movement.

We should never forget one thing: the feeling of deepest gratitude toward the higher beings and the spiritual worlds. Just as the Essenes looked forward each morning with gratitude to the approach of the sun and prayed that it might appear - so should we also return every morning with reverent gratitude to the spiritual beings in the temple of our physical body, which has been so artfully built up through the Saturn, Sun, Moon, and Earth ages, and in which we alone can acquire earthly consciousness: Ex Deo Nascimur.

And then, with this newly gained sense of reverence and gratitude, we should live ourselves into the spiritual-divine, that which redeems us from the bonds of physicality, brings us into the spiritual-supersensible, and helps us attain the greatest bliss, which is so great and powerful that the esotericist does not dare to utter the name of the highest being: In --- morimur.

And finally, in the last part of our Rosicrucian motto, consisting of ten words: Per Spiritum Sanctum reviviscimus, the self-awareness that brings man into a new incarnation is expressed. Much more than meditating on the three parts of this wonderful saying, consisting of 2 x 3 and 1 x 4 words, living the letters and vowels will bring us further.¹

21 and 25 March 1913, The Hague

If we succeed in achieving complete peace of mind after our meditation, we may be overcome by a feeling as if we are rising above ourselves and coming into contact with spiritual beings around us. This feeling is accompanied by a sense of expansion, of spreading out into a sphere above us. But we can also come out of ourselves and come into contact with other spiritual beings. This is accompanied by a feeling of constriction; we descend deep into ourselves, we feel it becoming tighter, and then we come out of ourselves on the way down, as with the other feeling on the way up. This stepping out of ourselves and the accompanying feeling of becoming wider gives a feeling of bliss; it is as if we are rising up to spiritual beings who are coming toward us. If we descend, we encounter spiritual beings who make us deeply aware of our shortcomings, and we become one with these beings. But we then also realize that the sphere in which we find ourselves in this way is connected to the sphere above us, and that now, in the recognition of our shortcomings, we feel the spiritual beings coming toward us as the avengers of the angels who come to judge and punish us, the archangels with their fiery swords. In contrast, we feel the beings of the lower sphere as mourning our mistakes, and we feel deeply that it is not we alone who are affected by our mistakes, but that spiritual beings, the messengers, the angels, mourn our mistakes. We can experience this either only inwardly or as a colored imagination. In the latter case, the sphere spreads out above us in red and red-yellow colors and below us in blue and blue-violet colors, in which the spiritual beings reveal themselves. But the two spheres connect with each other, and we feel ourselves moving within them, looking back at our bodies as something we have left behind. We can have these experiences if we meditate in the right way on the “It thinks me”; and if we could be conscious at night of the working of the good gods, we would be able to see these imaginations.

March 25 Repetition of the Berlin ES. (s) as a sign of Lucifer. Feelings (expressed there): Ahriman and Lucifer. Ten words: Tenfold nature of man, of which the fifth is the unspeakable.