Meditation, Etheric Contraction, and the Will's Development

GA 266III — 11 January 1914, Bremen

Esoteric Lesson

As soon as one begins to meditate, the etheric body contracts. This creates an inner warmth, because it is the warmth ether, the lowest ether—above it comes the light ether, sound ether, and life ether—that contracts. If you pay attention to what you have outside yourself, you will perceive that it is something like flowing, [like] a kind of religious devotion, like moral warmth in the world ether. And one becomes aware that what one has within oneself is something else: like a feeling of shame towards this moral warmth of the world. Human beings do not like this; they do not like to feel ashamed, they avoid it. And so they say they are not making any progress. They hide from themselves.

Only by developing his will can he make progress. And when he says, “I cannot,” it only means, “I do not want to! I do not want to develop my will.”

One should often look within oneself and listen to one's physical body and seek to hear the murmuring and rustling within it in holy silence. All attention must be diverted from the outside, i.e., one must still be attentive. But one must direct the power of attention entirely inward, [for] simply not being attentive to what is going on around us is harmful even to the physical body.

In the non-attention that is important here, one hears everything, everything makes an impression, but the consciousness must not come into play; it must be completely focused on meditation. In the physical world, however, the consciousness must come into play, otherwise it is not good.