Meditation, Moral Purity, and Spiritual Perception

GA 266III — 7 February 1914, Hanover

Esoteric Lesson

Verse for the day: Saturday.

Every esotericist makes progress if he performs his exercises with the necessary perseverance and intensity. If he does not make progress, it is because he does not pay enough attention to what comes from the spiritual world. This is very intimate and subtle. One must live completely in the words given for the exercise, etc.; Everything else must be absent for the meditator, who must be completely detached from the physical body. He must be conscious only of his ego. At the end of the meditation, the content of the meditation should also be erased, and only the awake ego with its empty content should remain. These are the most fruitful moments when the spiritual world can flow into the meditator. Or even during the day, one suddenly has the feeling of something passing by, so that one knows that something from the spiritual world was just there. A feeling of deep piety then takes hold of one.

The content of what flows to the meditator when he empties himself after meditation—including the aftereffects of meditation—depends on his merit. It will never be the same one time as another. This content depends on our morality, our love of truth, how we have lived and been since the last meditation. If we have not remained completely true in any way, or if we have allowed anger and annoyance to arise within us, then nothing from the spiritual world can flow into us. It is therefore as we deserve. If we look closely, we will always find the reason why we are not blessed with spiritual gifts in some untruth, in a surge of anger or something similar.

When an exoteric person who knows nothing about theosophy says a prayer, for example the Lord's Prayer, they easily feel a sense of warmth and pious devotion right from the first words; but this comes from a personal feeling. The esotericist will first feel a sense of coldness in his prayer; he must not bring anything personal into his prayer, but only allow its spiritual content to take effect. The inner, real warmth then comes from the spiritual itself, not from the personal.

If, during concentration, the first supplementary exercise, you occupy yourself entirely with the one object you have chosen for this purpose — the more everyday, the better — stringing thought after thought together, and then, when this exercise is over and you do not immediately throw yourself back into your busy activities, leave at least a quarter of an hour to pass, then you will feel—not immediately, not after a week or a month, but after some time of continued serious practice—as if something were entering your head, your brain, in waves, as if the etheric body were returning to the brain in wave lines.

In the second supplementary exercise, the initiative exercise, in which you tense your will at certain, specific times to perform some activity, you will feel, after the exercise, as if you had been active in your etheric body; you have the feeling: I have felt myself in my etheric body. A feeling of deep reverence and piety then fills the soul of the meditator.

In the third supplementary exercise, balancing joy and sorrow, we should find ourselves completely immersed in and at one with everything that is happening. Then our etheric body will gradually expand into the vastness of the heavens.

We will then no longer feel ourselves inside our bodies and the whole world around us, but we will feel our bodies spread out into the whole surrounding area; we will feel expanded and poured into the spiritual worlds. We feel ourselves in the spiritual world.

In these three supplementary exercises, we experience the first two sentences of our Rosicrucian motto: how we were completely embedded in the divine-spiritual forces and came down from them, and how, in the third exercise, we pour ourselves into the spiritual world, into Christ. For Christ is now in the earth's aura, in the earth's atmosphere; we must let him reign in us, so to speak beside us, within us.

In the fourth supplementary exercise, positivity ... [text gap] Per Spiritum Sanctum reviviscimus.

We will reach the point where, just as when we walk across a meadow and see blue and red flowers and know that these flowers are blue and red, we will experience just as real the truth of our Rosicrucian motto:

Ex Deo nascimur
In Christo morimur
Per Spiritum Sanctum reviviscimus. The seed of my body lay in the spirit ...