Moral Essence of World Ether and Ahrimanic Influence

GA 266III — 12 November 1922, London

Esoteric Lesson

In addition to our knowledge of nature, we have moral obligations and a religious consciousness, i.e., we feel that our entire being rests in a spiritual world. Human beings have this religious consciousness while awake only because they are in their physical bodies. There, they are together in their physical bodies with spirits of higher world orders. And he lives in his etheric body together with what these spirits mean by morality. Religious life depends on physical life, moral life on the etheric body.

The world ether from which our etheric body is taken has two parts. One part of this world ether is heat, light, chemical ether, and life ether. Underlying all of this (as the second part) is a moral essence of the world ether. However, this moral essence of the world ether only exists in the vicinity of the stars and planets. So when you live on earth, even though you are not aware of it during the day, you are also present in the world ether as a moral essence (i.e., in both parts). Between the stars, however, the moral essence is driven out of the ether by sunlight; sunlight itself is, for us humans, the very source of the moral ether. But as the sun shines, its light drives out the moral essence of the ether. And so, when we look out into the world through our eyes, we see flowers, springs, etc., without perceiving anything moral in them, because the sunlight kills the moral essence.

When we leave our physical and etheric bodies, we leave behind the religious and moral. And because the moral world order is outside the ether, the Ahrimanic entity has access to this ether. It speaks to humans during sleep, and this spirit of lies presents good as evil and evil as good to humans. — In a good person who has a good conscience, who is a sincere person, a deeply moral person, the moral sense is so deep that it carries over into sleep. Ahriman whispers to them that good is evil, and they sleep badly because they believe they have done much evil, while evil people often sleep so well because they are so satisfied by the Ahrimanic whisperings.