Divine Beings and Cosmic Forces in Esoteric Practice

GA 266III — 1 June 1913, Helsinki

Esoteric Lesson

In our esoteric lessons, we must raise ourselves up to the divine beings around us, and because we as esotericists know that many steps separate us from the divine essence, which is spoken of so lightly in exoteric life, we turn to the gods who stand between us and the highest spiritual regions, to the gods of the days. In this way, we consciously place ourselves in the experience of time, in the experience of the rule of the various gods on the various days.

As esotericists, many things must become different for us than they are in ordinary life. We must begin to feel ourselves as living beings in the great sea of the soul and spirit around us, and know that just as we are physically one with the surrounding world through the air we breathe, we are spiritually and soulfully embedded in the spiritual world around us. When we wake up in the morning, we take a long breath and inhale the spirit that we are, and when we fall asleep, we exhale again, back into the spiritual world. Everything around us changes; when we see sunlight, we esotericists no longer see it only physically, but we know that without sunlight we could not feel ourselves as “I,” that sunlight also contains the power that creates the “I.” And when we look at the moon with its changing shape, we know that it is connected to the power that enables us to have offspring. Life, which passes through the generations, is connected to the moon. We can see this everywhere in symbols. We see the sun rise and set. And we see the four changing shapes of the moon and encounter this in the symbol with the four roses, which can be a symbol for the sun's ego power and the moon's reproductive power (regenerative power).

But to do this, we must be able to read and not just stare at things. And then we see Mercury as the messenger, and we know that through his power our ego is brought into connection with the reproductive power, that the messenger, the occult Mercury, represents the connection. And so, thinking of the sphere from which we come every morning, just as we do at every birth, we can feel reverence resonating within us: E.D.N. — and then we know that behind the physical sun and the sun that creates the ego there is a third sun, the Christ force, with which we can connect: I.C.M. — and then we can also follow hopefully with the P.S.S.R.