Overcoming Desire and Self-Deception in Esoteric Development
GA 266III — 23 November 1913, Stuttgart
Esoteric Lesson
Record A
Why is it that esotericists, even after years of concentration and meditation, still cannot see into the higher worlds? To answer this question clearly, let us first imagine what meditation actually is. When we want to meditate, we have the will to turn away from external things; we want them to no longer influence our thoughts; we do not want them to disturb us in our devotion to the spiritual. But external events and thoughts about them constantly intrude upon our meditating soul, seeking to distract us from our meditation and resisting our devotion, so that we must fight against them with all our willpower. If we want to examine who it is that is actually resisting our better will, the following example may perhaps shed some light on the matter. Let us assume that a stranger approaches us and says: “You are a flighty person.” In ninety-nine cases out of a hundred, we would be very upset by this, because we had always thought of ourselves as a very good esotericist who had seriously searched our own inner being for faults, and now a stranger comes along and claims the opposite.
Just as the stranger stands before us, so too, in all the thoughts that intrude upon our meditation, something appears before us that we think we do not know, and yet it is our own self that reveals itself in all these thoughts and shows us how fickle we really are and how little we can detach ourselves from our daily concerns and desires. For what always intrudes upon us during our meditation, when we have the desire to separate ourselves from external things and connect with the spiritual, is our flowing life of desire. In the images of our daily life, it flows incessantly into our thinking and resists when we want to connect with the spiritual realm.
That this is the case may be for our own good, since we get to know ourselves in all these images and thoughts in our constantly flowing life of desires; it must lead us to self-knowledge, which we have practiced very fleetingly until now. But most of the time we will still look for all kinds of excuses, because we do not want to accuse ourselves, and that is why the view into the spiritual world remains closed to us; our desire-ego draws a veil over it. If we would turn our attention away from the events and experiences of our life of desires, if we would turn our ego toward the spiritual and focus all our devotion on it, then we would have succeeded long ago. To use a trivial example, if we devoted as much attention to our meditation as we do to all kinds of conversations in society or to news about our loved ones, we would quickly advance in our knowledge of the higher worlds and we would then be able to push back our resisting ego.
What are our thoughts but memories of past events, and these events are nothing but the desires we have felt. If they had not given us pleasure, we would not have kept them in our memory. Just examine your memory, and you will find that everything you have enjoyed most is engraved in it. Everything that has remained indifferent to us, that has not particularly interested us, that we have not enjoyed, so to speak, has disappeared from our memory, just as a child who goes to school does not remember the little details of what he learned in class in later years, because during our school years we are usually not very interested in the subject matter, and therefore it does not impress itself so deeply on our memory.
What we also need to apply for our esoteric development is devotion. It is not the method we use in meditation that is important, nor should we be guided by the desire to meditate a lot so that we will have many experiences in the spiritual world; none of this should affect us, for then we would only see our own desires, and Lucifer would gain dominion over us. We cannot so easily leave this world of Lucifer and Ahriman. If we believe that we have practiced thorough self-knowledge, but still look for excuses, then it is Ahriman standing beside us. It is just as much Ahriman when we look for excuses when someone tells us that we have done this or that badly. We love Ahriman and Lucifer too much; they accompany us throughout our entire lives precisely because we love them so much. And why do we love them so much?
Let us try to clarify this with an example. How does a mother calm her crying child? By caressing it and stroking its little face, which in any case causes a pleasant physical sensation in the child. Now we need to know how Ahriman and Lucifer reveal themselves to human beings and make themselves popular, namely by bringing us into contact with the things of the world around us, the world in which we seek enjoyment and whose satisfaction is so pleasant to us. Through the rays of light that they cast upon objects, which are then reflected back to us by those objects, we feel a pleasant stimulus, just as the crying child felt when caressed by its mother. Lucifer and Ahriman caress us through the magic of the rays of light on the things of the world, and our eyes become aware of things through contact with the rays:
These forces are particularly evident in contemporary science and philosophy, as in a conversation between one of Schopenhauer's students and Nietzsche. Deussen asserts to Nietzsche that the denial of will determines life, while Nietzsche said that the refinement of life leads to life. If one were to take a close look at the first statement and think about it, one would have to say that it (the denial of will) does not lead to life, but to death, because a drunkard, a vagabond, who lives out the denial of will in his desires and does not keep them in check, who affirms every pleasure that life offers him, will not attain life, but will meet an early death, while the person who strives for the ennoblement of the will radiates the forces of a healing germ with which his rays connect; he will agree with life in health. With this philosophical statement by Deussen, scholars thought they had looked through sharp glasses, when in fact they had only looked through glasses with wooden lenses. Here too we see that Ahriman stands before human beings, for we ourselves do not let him go in all matters of life, so dear is he to us. It is necessary to make all this clear to ourselves, for we must recognize Lucifer and Ahriman with open eyes in all that we do and leave undone, and especially where these two powers want to stand before our meditation in order to prevent us from seeing into the spiritual world, for the moment has come when we must strive to develop spiritual knowledge by forming spiritual organs of clairvoyance within ourselves, so that these organs do not wither and consume themselves. Slowly and gradually we must grow in the spiritual realm from which we were born: Ex Deo nascimur.
At the beginning of our life, which has its origin in the Godhead, we were still permeated by the divine-spiritual forces; they still work in children until they lose their teeth, they still work in the milk teeth. At the age of seven, the change of teeth is complete, and the new teeth destined for this life emerge. Thus, everything in humans is renewed, the old is rejected by the new, hair falls out and new hair grows in its place, nails are cut off and grow back again. With the loss of the first teeth, or milk teeth, in children, the spiritual forces that have worked on the child's development and growth have reached their end, and now other forces or beings begin: the work of building up the present incarnation. But with the building up, decay and the dying of the organs also begin immediately. They gradually approach death, for even every thought that a person thinks causes destruction in the brain cells, or rather, the material is doomed to a slow death: In Christo morimur.
Slowly we grow toward the spiritual. Our hair turns white, all our organs slowly pass into the spiritual realm, our entire body strives toward spiritualization, it will be resurrected in the spirit: Per Spiritum Sanctum reviviscimus.
Record B This struggle takes place around the human being during his first year of life. If we observe the child, we see that it only becomes similar to its ancestors at a later stage, and it becomes similar to the extent that the inherited, that is, what comes from the spirits of the will, triumphs over the individual, over what the spirits of the personality represent.
The occultist must become increasingly aware that the world is complicated. When a human being enters the physical plane, something happens in his first year of life that we can compare to the struggle that beings fought before Saturn so that Saturn could come into being, namely, the struggle between the spirits of personality, which worked from within, and the spirits of will, which worked from without. In the first year of their life on the physical plane, human beings must fight and overcome what they have inherited; they must therefore fight against the spirits of the will and their own personality.
Caressing, enjoying oneself, that is what we love. Ahriman caresses us as we caress a child; it makes the child feel good. It is Ahriman who excuses what we do, whispering: “You couldn't have done otherwise, it's not your fault,” etc.
Lucifer strengthens our egoism. There is a third party who approaches us, the unknown, who approaches us and says, “You are a fickle person,” which annoys us. What we experience in meditation as disturbing thoughts is precisely the unknown who tells us this, and indeed it is ourselves. But it is uncomfortable for us to discover what we are like! People go to church and pray to the beings they love. We often have the name of Christ on our lips, but we mean Ahriman.
The first teeth and the second teeth: only through the first teeth are we immortal. The pushing forward, the pushing forward of the divine human being brings forth the second teeth. All memory is egoism that has become fluid. We remember what once aroused our desire. The stronger the desire, the better the memory. In meditation, nothing arouses our desires, which is why the nature of desire, which wants to be caressed and is not in meditation, revolts. Children learn a lot at school that does not arouse their desires, which is why they soon forget what they have learned. Everything about the mysteries of our existence lies in the Rosicrucian saying:
We are born of the divine
In Christ we die
In the Holy Spirit we will rise again
E.D.N.: predisposes the divine human being
I.C.M.: so that the divine can be born
P.S.S.R.: the power that carries it upward.