Understanding Disturbances in Esoteric Meditation Practice

GA 266III — 9 December 1913, Munich

Esoteric Lesson

Record A

In order to progress in our esoteric life, we must become more attentive in observing things that usually escape our everyday consciousness. We must also form different mental images of what we will initially experience. For example, we complain that thoughts rush into our meditation, disturbing and distracting us. If we think about it more closely, we would have to recognize that it is progress that we have become more sensitive, because we notice that these thoughts are something stronger than ourselves. They cause us to expend more energy in our meditation, because they are Luciferic beings that bring our own thoughts to the surface. These Luciferic beings are always within us; they are only drowned out by the turmoil of everyday life. When we walk through a quiet forest at night, we can hear the soft falling of leaves, animals scurrying across the ground, and footsteps coming from afar. But in the hustle and bustle of the big city, such quiet sounds are completely imperceptible. It is the same with our meditations. The silence we create allows us to notice what goes unnoticed in the turmoil of everyday life. All kinds of things can come into our consciousness, for example, physical pains that we would not otherwise feel. We can concentrate on our body—but this is only good in very special cases—and search it for pain. You start somewhere above your head, switching off all other thoughts and concentrating your attention on this one point; then you move down, concentrating on a part of the brain, and so on. You will notice how you can feel pain in different parts of your body. And the more selfish a person is, the more and more clearly they feel pain here and there. But we must not become hypochondriacs and let ourselves be frightened by this; instead, we must keep our heads up.

We must also do this in some other areas, because strange things can happen to us that may baffle us, but which we must get to the bottom of. Our entire constitution, the relationship between our bodily organs, changes through meditation. Even if we do it poorly or clumsily, we still pull the ego and astral body and part of the etheric body out of the physical body, and as a result, we can have strange experiences in our etheric body in the minutes after meditation. This is a faithful keeper of everything that has happened to us in life, both consciously and unconsciously. For example, we may have witnessed a dog being hit by a train in our childhood. Over the years, we have overcome the whole terrible scene. The etheric body has preserved it, and thirty or forty years later, through our development, we may suddenly hear the barking and whimpering from within ourselves. It may even be that the person concerned actually makes sounds like barking and is then naturally very frightened. This is because the memory preserved in the etheric body suddenly emerges with particular force as the etheric body loosens during development and acts on the physical body.

A second example: An esotericist may suffer pain as a result of a middle ear infection, which leads to visions of a terrifying scene whose origin he cannot explain. The connection is as follows. The pain is not located in the physical body, of course, but in the astral body. We know this as theosophists and therefore understand how fundamentally wrong it is when Maeterlinck claims in his last book that a soul that no longer has a body cannot feel pain. We know that the bodiless soul—in Kamaloka, for example—can suffer great pain. The pain in the astral body is now reflected in the etheric body. The esotericist experiences the vibrations produced in the etheric body, but at the same time also the vibrations of a similar nature that were produced in his childhood by mental pain when he experienced the gruesome scene. He had long since forgotten this, but through esoteric development and the external cause of the pain, the experience emerges from the etheric body.

Something even more peculiar is possible. We need only have lived next door to a family who liked to read and tell stories about robbers. Our physical ear did not hear them, but our etheric body picked them up. And with spiritual development, it can happen that we experience them in our etheric body. Such things can frighten us if we do not understand them.

Let us assume that someone falls asleep out of boredom during an esoteric lesson, or rather during a public lecture. However, their ego and astral body are still present. When they wake up, their physical body may not want to adapt to what the returning astral body and ego have absorbed. This then leads to the person concerned falling into a state of disintegration, reproaching themselves severely, or even feeling physical pain. Or it may happen that someone listens to esoteric teachings with great attention and also does their exercises well, but then has to be among people who either silently reject theosophy and esotericism or express this openly. This then affects the esotericist, and it may happen that after meditation voices come out of him saying, “This is all nonsense!” or much more terrible things that torment him greatly. But these are just the thoughts of those around him, which he may not have heard with his physical ears; he is, as it were, possessed by them. By elevating the ego, we take everything that is good in us, our good manners, and refine them more and more; we push down the bad habits in us, and these take on a kind of independent life. So it can happen to us that we begin, as if mechanically, to swear and use expressions for which we are actually too well-educated in ordinary life. This fills us with astonishment and horror, and we may say to ourselves: “That's not me at all; I'm too decent a person for that.” But we should admit to ourselves that we are like that, because such things only disappear when we have finally cast them out of ourselves.

And yet all these experiences are progress, and it is only important that we recognize their meaning. Above all, it is necessary that we realize that it is our own fault that we find it so difficult to penetrate the spiritual worlds. But when we do ascend, we encounter the one who took our guilt upon himself through the mystery of Golgotha. He took our weakness upon himself: this is a true word of the Bible, as everything in the Bible is true. And anyone who refuses to have their guilt atoned for by Christ has not penetrated the depths of this truth, any less than someone who believes in it as a “good Christian” but finds the matter very simple. The development of the world is very complicated and contains mysteries in every atom, and every atom can become a world. The example of middle ear inflammation can teach us this. What is experienced in the etheric body is like a world arising from something very small.

Inspiration for the material world can also come to us from the higher worlds. One thing that is given far too little attention, which so many people overlook when they read about the life of Wallace, friend of the famous naturalist Darwin, is that he himself recounts that the idea that led to one of the most important discoveries in relation to physical heredity came to him in a fever dream. The fact that this thought came to him in a state in which his physical brain was incapable of thinking should give materialists, who regard thinking as a function of the brain, much food for thought. Darwin also traveled extensively in the tropics, and it is quite possible that he too made some discoveries relating to physical conditions while in a fever. In our materialistic age, such things will only be taken seriously when, in such abnormal states as through inspiration, things are found that can be exploited materially, when, for example, someone invents something in this way that can make him rich. Until then, everything of this kind will be considered the product of a sick imagination.

Let us continue our meditation with diligence, perseverance, and energy, for we will always be met with the help of the one who brought his impulse into the development of the earth. This help¹ is always there!

Record B

Disturbances during meditation are actually signs of progress. They can have many causes. These are often very complicated. For example, a previous middle ear infection can later evoke images of painful processes in the etheric body. Or perhaps stories about robbers were read in the neighboring house. You did not hear them physically, but they were picked up by the etheric body. This can manifest itself as if you were experiencing such stories about robbers in a state of meditation.

Forgotten experiences emerge from the subconscious, for example, a dog that was run over by a train barks from within you because the shock is still stuck in the etheric body and then resurfaces subconsciously during meditation. Even if one sleeps during a lecture, what one hears penetrates the physical and etheric bodies and may later resurface during meditation as a vague mental image. The same applies to ugly or theosophy-hostile conversations in one's surroundings, even if one does not hear them oneself, but only lives in the atmosphere of these conversations. Ugliness pushes down into the loosened physical and etheric bodies and often has an automatic effect there, while the finer soul movements are more active in the higher soul and spirit realms.

This is why theosophy often seems unpleasant in a different environment.