The Hidden Spiritual Reality Behind Sensory Perception
GA 266III — 9 May 1914, Kassel
Esoteric Lesson
Record A
Verse for Saturday.
My dear sisters and brothers!
In our ordinary daily consciousness, we know nothing of what lies behind what we perceive, imagine, think, feel, and will. In what is the background of our daily consciousness, in this living, weaving fabric, we are in our dream life. In the chaotic images of our dreams, a part of this world extends into our lives, of which we are otherwise unaware. If we could wake up only halfway from our dreams, we would experience a flood of images surrounding us, in which our soul has lived since the beginning of our sleep. And when we woke up completely, we would bring back to our everyday consciousness a memory of the living, weaving dream experience during our sleep. Physically, it is impossible to wake up halfway as described; we must immediately enter into the consciousness of the senses. That is why we know nothing of that other world. But actually, we are always dreaming. This living, weaving dream world is always around us and we are in it; we just don't know it. It is a peculiarity of dreams that they are very easily forgotten, that we rarely remember them. And we forget these memories much more easily than anything we experience in our daytime consciousness; we cannot retrieve them.
The fact that people dream about things that are only related to their external daytime consciousness is because they do not actually think about anything that goes beyond this daytime life. Only when one fills one's thoughts with ideas, feelings, etc., that go beyond daily life can one also dream of other things, of something that has its origin in the spiritual realm. Human beings know nothing in their daytime consciousness of this spiritual realm, of what lies behind all their thinking, feeling, and willing in physical life.
We can gain awareness of this spiritual realm from another angle as well.
At birth or conception, the spiritual stream pours into the physical, builds up, flows through, and gradually pulsates through the entire organism. Within it, the new soul core forms in the course of life, the seed for the next life, that which lasts beyond death. But we know nothing about the original spiritual essence that flows from previous lives and enters physical existence at birth or conception, nor about the soul core that then forms and constitutes the seed for the next life. So what do we know? Our life is split into two parts: one that goes from birth to the earliest moment we can remember, and the second from that moment until death.
When you are thirty years old and look back to the moment just described, you come to a boundary, the boundary of the spiritual that flows in there.
And you perceive this boundary; by coming up against it, you become aware of it. Such encounters in the course of life remain in our memory and form our memories.
This is where our memories accumulate. And that is our consciousness in physical life.
Just as the seed develops into a new plant in a plant, we work on the forces that will later shape our new life. Blessed are those who have stored up good and beautiful memories! The spiritual elements from our previous life, which flow through and permeate the new body from birth, gradually disappear during our lifetime.
It has often been said that after death, the first thing that appears is the great tableau of memories. When leaving the physical body, one first reaches this boundary where all memories are stored;
which we then see as a large tableau before us. The memory of an experience can be forgotten for a lifetime until it is suddenly brought back into consciousness. It was always there. It is like when you put salt in water and it falls to the bottom, like sediment. It can be brought back up by stirring. Our memories are like “sediment” that we can bring back up again. When we pour seltzer water into a glass, we see little bubbles rising. We don't see the water, which is actually real, but only what is not there, the carbon dioxide bubbles. That is what we see, and it appears to us as reality. Where “nothing” meets “something,” we perceive this ‘nothing’ as “something.”
Thus, we only become aware of the boundary between the new soul core and the old spiritual. Where they meet, we become aware of something. And that is what constitutes our daily consciousness. Consciousness arises through contact between the past and the future.
Now we can approach this spiritual realm from a third angle in order to become aware of it. It is not only human beings who think, and whose thoughts and memories remain as residue, but spiritual beings have also thought and continue to think. What the higher hierarchies thought in times long past, the memories that remain of these thoughts, are what we perceive here as mountains, clouds, streams, in short, as nature around us. The physical sun is the remaining memory of the Sun Leader, the Christ, the Earth Spirit who later entered the Earth during the event at Golgotha. And what the high beings on the moon thought, the memories of that, are the plants, animals, and also the physical body of the human being. The spiritual beings thought the error there—that was appropriate there—but they did not act on it. When we humans think good and noble thoughts, they remain; we see them in the distance, in the future, as imperishable values of existence. But what we think that is false, erroneous, and vicious also remains, and we see it standing before us in the distance as a waste product that serves as nourishment for the germs that emerge from the good thoughts — just as we now feed on the erroneous thoughts of the spirits of the Moon. In itself, this waste product is infertile, but it serves as nourishment for the germs developing from the good, just as the mineral kingdom now provides the soil for the plants, and as always, one nourishes the other. The good nourishes itself from the evil like a sprouting germ that consumes the vicious and remains eternal itself.
But we must only think of the bad, the evil, here (we must not allow it to become action, reality, for this is always Luciferic and Ahrimanic).
Lucifer, who stands on a similar level as the Elohim on the moon, now wants to carry out the thinking of error in the same way as those beings did at that time, as it was appropriate then, but is now wrong. However, he can only let error be thought in human beings. Hence, error and deception; we must become more and more aware of this.
Where there are “memories” of those high hierarchies, we become aware of something. When we strike a wall, which is also “memory,” with our hand, which is also made up of the “memory” of the gods, the boundaries of these realities collide, and we become aware of this object. So where this reality ends and there is nothing, we perceive reality, matter in our everyday consciousness, and the other as nothing. We do not feel our hand or the wall, but only what is between them, the boundary. The table is not reality, but a hole in the spiritual world that is filled with wood. Only we, in our ordinary consciousness, perceive the table as reality.
If, through meditation, we could make ourselves strong enough to suppress this everyday consciousness and become fully aware of the nothingness of the environment, then we would always experience ourselves with our souls in the spiritual world. Three meditation verses were given to us to empower our souls. It is important that we meditate on them in the right way, not simply saying the words, but hearing the expression that must be put into them if they are to have the right effect on our souls.
I turn to things
I turn to them with my senses;—
Senses, you deceive me!—
What flees existence as nothing:
To you it is being and essence;
What must seem futile to you,
Reveal to my tantra.—
In the first verse, the first two lines are descriptive, then defensive. Then descriptive again and finally a request. Beginners can meditate on this verse in the evening after reviewing the day; those who already have practice can do so in any leisure time.—
Warm me with the light of the spirit
Let me feel willing within you.
Good thoughts, true insights
As experienced, shine upon me
Webs of error, evil thoughts
Reveal yourself to the luminous soul
That I may weave within myself.
In the second verse, special emphasis should be placed on the question in the fourth line. At the end is a plea. - For beginners in the morning; for others at any leisurely hour.
A third verse is given to us, as it were, to try out, a piece of advice from time to time to ask oneself whether one already perceives the spiritual world as truth and reality.
Luminous I and luminous soul -
Hover over true becoming
The imagined, the recognized
Now becomes dense spirit being.
And like light pearls of existence
Lives in the sea of the divine-true
That deceives the senses of existence.
(When the doctor received these words, he noticed that the predicate in the second line of the third verse should actually be in the plural. Then he realized that the luminous I and the luminous soul were one and the same, and that it was therefore correct that the word floats was in the singular. When you receive something like this, you often have to learn from it to recognize what is meant.)
These verses have been given in three seven-line stanzas; this is not a coincidence or something the doctor arranged. Rather, everything that is inspired from the spiritual world reveals itself in numbers. The words are merely a means and an opportunity through which the spirits express themselves. The being who inspired these verses has thereby given the promise to help us recognize the difference between the real and the unreal. By allowing these verses to pass through our souls again and again, we give the being who gave these verses the opportunity to speak to our souls; it then helps us to produce the right effect of the verses within us—in each one of us!
These verses are summarized in the Rosicrucian motto:
I = Ex Deo nascimur
II. - In Christo morimur
III. - Per Spiritum Sanctum reviviscimus
All of this is also contained in the words with which we conclude our esoteric reflections:
In the spirit lay the seed of my body ...
In my body lies the seed of the spirit. -
Record B
E.D.N. I turn to things
I turn with my senses;—
Senses, you deceive me!—
What flees existence as nothing:
To you it is being and essence;
What must seem futile to you,
Reveal to my tantra.— I.C.M. Spiritual light, warm me
Let me feel willing within you.
Good thoughts, true knowledge
How I experience you shining
Webs of error, evil thoughts
Reveal yourself to the luminous soul
That I may weave within myself.
P.S.S.R.
Luminous I and luminous soul -
Floating above true becoming
That which is imagined, that which is known
Now becomes dense spirit.
And like light pearls of existence
Live in the sea of divine truth
That deceives the senses of existence.
Nature is the senses, the memory of the divine beings of the sun and moon. Our thoughts, feelings, and perceptions are different from what they seem. Our life between birth and death alternates between sleeping, waking, and dreaming.
Regarding the first stanza: We are actually always dreaming, which is why we so easily forget what we have dreamed. We retain sensory impressions so easily; why not dreams? Because we are always dreaming and can never escape from dreaming.
On the second stanza: What we perceive while awake is not actually there. What comes from previous incarnations enters the physical body, but what we take into our lives now will shape our body in the next incarnation. What we perceive externally is neither one nor the other; it is only the collision of the two when they come together.
Regarding the third stanza: In a glass of seltzer water, we see the carbon dioxide, the gas bubbles, not the water; just as these bubbles are what we perceive externally, so too is reality, which is the essence, hidden from us.
When hatred is present, one encounters something in the spiritual world.