Breaking Through the Eggshell: Lucifer, Ahriman, and Spiritual Initiation

GA 266III — 15 October 1913, Copenhagen

Esoteric Lesson

Record A

Through our exercises we gradually penetrate into the spiritual world, but this is not possible without coming into contact with Lucifer and Ahriman at the same time. In the Bible, we find the story of the Fall of Man, through which Lucifer and later Ahriman gained their influence over human beings. They work within human beings in such a way that when they ascend into the spiritual world, they find it difficult to bear their own selves. Certain people cannot even bear the outward sign of the ego in the physical world; that is, they faint when they see blood.

The Fall gave us self-knowledge, but with a limitation, and every time we take a step forward in self-knowledge, new temptations come our way, to the extent that we can bear them. Just as humans are limited in their physical bodies in terms of how much pain they can endure, so too are the powers with which we can endure the higher worlds.

Since Lucifer and Ahriman drove us out of Paradise when we fell into sin, they are also the ones we encounter when we want to enter the spiritual world through meditation, and they make us feel our limitations.

Ahriman is present in everything that is spiritual sounds, words, and so on that can be heard. One should always be suspicious of these, because in human language, which is differentiated into the various languages of different peoples, there is untruth. Not entirely, otherwise everyone who opens their mouth to speak would have to lie. As much truth as there is in language, so much truth can lie in the “voices.” If the voices always spoke the truth, then Lucifer should not have said during the temptation, “You will be like gods,” but rather, “I am lying.”

Lucifer gives the visions. These must be broken through, otherwise one cannot break the shell that surrounds every human being and hides the true spiritual world. The visions and the voices are around us like the shell around the chick in the egg. In a vision, one may see an angel, and when one penetrates through the vision, the angel will turn into a serpent, the sign of Lucifer, for he also appeared in the form of a serpent during the temptation. Or you may see the color blue in your meditation—if you break through it, the blue may disappear and turn red, and then it becomes clear that you have been looking at your own passions.

As a result of Lucifer's temptation, human beings did not receive everything that the gods have; they received untimely knowledge, but not life. As a result, everything we recognize and perceive is permeated by Lucifer and Ahriman. This is also basically true of the content of our exercises. If you look at your exercises, you will find that they are designed in such a way that they never appeal to human egoism, which many people find very unpleasant. We do not meditate on “love” or “truth,” because all that would only promote egoism. But nevertheless, concepts such as ‘light’ and “warmth,” which are found in our exercises, are things of the physical world that human beings initially know only through the physical senses. All these are still gifts from Lucifer. Therefore, after meditation, we should let go of the content, empty the soul completely of these impressions; in doing so, we renounce everything that comes from Lucifer and Ahriman and prepare ourselves for the purely spiritual world. Then the world of the senses disappears for us, and the spiritual world opens up before us, which has nothing in common with the physical world.

The ordinary human being is like a chicken that would consider its eggshell to be the real world. If the chicken could perceive within its eggshell, it would not see it as small, but greatly enlarged, as large as we see our world. It would see the contents inside the shell as the whole world. This is how we see our eggshell, that is, our aura, spread out around us as the blue vault of heaven. If we break through our shell, the sun and moon are eclipsed, the stars fall to the earth, and in their place the spiritual world spreads out.

People live in their eggshells – their auras. The Elohim gave us our auras, and through the Fall, these became like shells around us, and we are inside them like chickens in eggs. The sky and the stars are our limits, and we must break through them with the power of our souls, just as the chick must break through the shell with its own strength. Then we enter a new world, just as the chick has a new world before it when it crawls out of the egg. And since all humans actually have the same eggshell around them, astronomy as we know it could also arise, which allows the heavenly bodies to move across the vault of heaven.

The eggshell is this: Ex Deo nascimur. In order to break through it and take something with us into the spiritual world, we must bring with us that which penetrates our shell from the outside world—that is, from the spiritual world—which is what we have in common; that is Christ. That is why we say: In Christo morimur, and hope that when we have broken through the shells with Christ's help, we will be resurrected: Per Spiritum Sanctum reviviscimus.

Record B

We should perceive the suppression of meditation as the battle with Lucifer.¹

We must penetrate both the voices and the images in order to arrive at the truth. The following example is given: Let us imagine the chicken inside the egg before it hatches. It is surrounded by the eggshell, which is what the chicken knows and sees, what it sees from the inside, just as we, who have the eggshell around us, see the sky and everything, everything that the eye can see. That is all the egg as seen from the inside. We also see our own aura from the inside. We must pierce and break through this eggshell, just as the chicken pierces it with its beak, throws it off, and enters a new world. Only then do we enter the world of divine-spiritual beings, of hierarchies.

To achieve this, we must let go of everything in meditation, switch off everything that wants to reach us in the form of other thoughts and feelings, except for the content of the meditation. But then we must also let go of this, switch it off and yet remain conscious; that is the meaningful part of it, that is what we must feel.

Lucifer lives in our thoughts, including our thoughts in meditation. We therefore form a covenant with Lucifer in the thinking of meditation. Now we must let go of thinking in meditation, i.e., empty ourselves, let go of the content of meditation, detach the power of thought from thinking. Through arbitrary suppression with waking consciousness, we voluntarily kill, with consciousness, that which comes from Lucifer.

It is a matter of generating concentrated attention without an object. Being attentive to an object is the beginning of meditation; then one must divert one's attention and give thinking back to the gods; that is what is significant. And only then does one enter the true, spiritual world.

After man succumbed to the temptation of Lucifer, who said to man, “You will be like the gods!” — then the deity says, “No!” — And the gods take away the life of what Lucifer has given, i.e., they inflict death upon him.

When one enters the spiritual world, one has the experience of feeling the power that shapes the human body; one comes behind oneself. Judgment, the ability to distinguish between good and evil, is what man learns to recognize through Lucifer.

The body has limits to how much pain it can endure; when these limits are exceeded, unconsciousness ensues. The soul also has limits; when these are exceeded, unconsciousness ensues.

By detaching thinking from the brain, one experiences oneself outside of one's brain. It is as if one were circling one's brain in currents; that is how one feels. One literally sneaks around one's brain afterwards. If one continues what is otherwise ordinary thinking and feels connected to the processes that always precede it, [feels connected] to that which gives rise to the thought process, then one experiences a feeling that can be expressed as follows: one is literally afraid to let it come to mind. It takes a certain effort to communicate such truths and facts, these spiritual mental images that one has experienced outside the brain, because one now knows what is actually at work in human beings. One observes the destructive process of ordinary thinking. The spiritual researcher manages for a while not to carry out the destructive process. He stands beside his brain. Devotion to the universe without agitation is part of spiritual research. Then the spiritual researcher learns to do everything arbitrarily that is otherwise done involuntarily by human beings in their sleep. The spiritual researcher learns to feel all the functions of the body, breathing, the glands, etc., and stands outside the whole human being, feeling him externally. Through devotion and deepening of the soul forces of thinking and especially of feeling, the spiritual researcher achieves this.

In such meditation, in such a mental image, one must be with one's heart. We should meditate emotionally, then we will not only be outside our brain with our thinking power, but we will then circle around the whole human being. Then it dawns on our consciousness: You were there before conception, you descended to this incarnation! We look out over earthly life. We have a typical occult experience: it is as if lightning splits this body! To describe the experience as an image: it is as if lightning flashes through the house, flashes through your body and carries it away.

This is a shocking experience! It is the experience of coming close to death! Now you know and see what the spiritual and soul essence of the human being is!

Then one must also learn to concentrate one's will selflessly away from external, everyday activities in the realm of speech. Just as one can detach the power of thought from the brain and detach the whole human being through feeling, so one can detach the power of speech from language itself. The movements of speech must be silenced; one must not allow speech to occur. You have to practice this inwardly, spiritually and emotionally, but inwardly you are still performing the same activity as when you speak. You have to get to the point where you don't even let the sound enter your nerves. What is otherwise needed for speaking must remain with the gesture.

Mantric meditation is not a concept, but only the inner experience of sound. We listen to ourselves, but do not allow it to come to speech. In this way we will get to know our previous earthly lives; this is true memory. The powers of the soul allow us to look into life beyond birth and conception; the powers of the will show us our previous earthly lives.

Record C

What is the Fall? Something happened that actually shaped the development of humanity differently than it should have been according to the counsel of the gods, and especially Yahweh. Man should have become a creature that followed the instincts of the gods, just as animals follow their instincts. But now he was given his own discernment between good and evil, earthly knowledge. This taught them to judge for themselves – but it also initially deprived them of knowledge of heaven. And esotericists undertake to conquer “the other” knowledge of the earth, that of the spiritual world. This is not as comfortable as the life of other people, who just drift along, because esotericists have serious duties and responsibilities, for example, toward the truth. He knows that if he has told someone an untruth in an incarnation, he must make amends by telling them the truth. This is not always easy; it can even be terribly difficult, but it must be done, because karma must be fulfilled. The esotericist may feel, for example, that something is choking him in his throat; this is the spirit of truth that wants the untruth to be eradicated. The esotericist must accept this as a warning to speak the truth. Or, in another case, he may feel a tingling in his blood. These are the hidden egoisms that are present in the ego; as long as the human being hides from them, does not want to see them, this is expressed in the fact that the human being cannot see the expression of the egoistic ego, the blood. He becomes powerless at the sight of blood, i.e., he hides from the egoisms that tingle in it.

The Luciferic and Ahrimanic forces are at work everywhere, and the esotericist becomes very familiar with them; he must fight them and must not shy away from the fight. Man has received earthly knowledge through the serpent, through Lucifer, and it must be guided until death, for death is a consequence of earthly knowledge. Man must learn to feel himself inwardly dead [...]² He must be able to let his thinking die and yet remain an alert, conscious human being. The content of his meditation has been given to him in words of human language, but language is Lucifer's work (the Tower of Babel); they [the words] have obscured the actual human language, the original language. Thus, man had to receive Luciferic content even into his meditation. If people now believe that they hear voices at certain stages of their soul development, and if these voices speak to them in any language, they must already know that this is Lucifer, that this is a lie, and through strong inner strength they must break through the shell of these lies in order to arrive at the truth, that is, at the true spiritual world, which is covered from them by this shell. And if they believe they see images, then Ahriman is at work in the first instance. The human being is like a chick in an egg, believing that the shell of this egg is like a mirror and reading from it what it is itself. The human being must again have the inner strength, when, for example, an angel appears to them, to penetrate this image with their inner power of knowledge, and lo and behold, a devil appears from the transformation of the angel. The little cake could believe that its shell was the universe, and human beings believe the same thing. They are stuck in their eggshell and believe that this blue shell of the world egg, in which they see the stars, the sun, and the moon, is the world. It is not. They do the same thing as the little cake, but when this little cake bursts its shell through its own power, it is like the human being who bursts the shell of the world egg, which he considers to be the world, through his inner power. Then he sees that what the astronomers say about the sun, moon, and stars is nonsense; he sees the world of hierarchies and their workings, but the stars fall down for him and the sun and moon lose their physical appearance. He then steps out into the world of the Father, who is the creator of the world egg that was previously his world. Man enters this world through death, but also through initiation. Christ belongs to both worlds, the world of origin, but also the world of the egg, for he made the sacrifice of entering into it and working in it so that through him human beings might find the inner strength to break the shell and emerge into the world of hierarchies: the world of the Holy Spirit. In Christo morimur means to let one's earthly knowledge die so that heavenly knowledge can shine forth again.

Just as the body reaches the limits of its capacity and then cannot go on, becoming powerless through excessive pain, so too does the soul have limits to its capacity to endure. Then it cannot go on and must do what the spirit of truth demands of it—break the knot.

The soul feels itself within itself as if in its own power, which surrounds it like a shell. It must break through this shell, and Lucifer and Ahriman are immediately at hand.

Record D

The Fall can be relived on the esoteric path, for with every advance of human beings, temptation stands in their way.

Those who become esotericists must be clear that they must take life differently than exotericists. Physically, pain can be numbed, but emotionally, one can no longer numb oneself. One must know that if one speaks untruths, one will have to correct them in a later life, that one will have to speak the truth, but then with a sense of shame. The body can only endure a certain amount of pain, then it faints, one loses control of one's ego. Weak souls can also faint through fear or terror. When an immature soul that is psychically predisposed quickly enters the spiritual world through the exercises, it also falls into a state of numbness there. These are the voices that speak to us in our languages, which Lucifer places before the spiritual world. One must then summon great strength of soul to call out to them: You are lying. Then they stop. In our imagination, Ahriman stands before us. Some see an angel; when they look closely at it, it dissolves into mist and a devil stands in its place. An apparition has a blue color; if you look closely, it turns red and indicates that there is still a desire within us. Human beings sit in the aura of their illusions, including those concerning their physical environment, like a chicken in an eggshell. We must break through this in order to enter the spiritual world. We must first learn to understand the language of the spiritual world. To do this, we must fill ourselves with something that has come to us from there, into our eggshell; we must take this with us when we leave; this is the Christ impulse. Behind the maya of the vault of heaven we then find the hierarchies. In our meditations we have something (a part) that belongs to Lucifer's realm, and we then connect ourselves with Lucifer. When we then switch off meditation, switch off all thinking, we call upon our soul to fight with Lucifer.