General Rules
“All meditation, concentration, and other exercises will be worthless, and in a certain sense even harmful, if life is not regulated in accordance with these conditions” (cf. p. 55).
General requirements that everyone who wants to undergo occult development must impose on themselves (so-called preliminary or subsidiary exercises):
The following describes the conditions that must underlie occult development. No one should think that they can make progress through any measures of external or internal life if they do not fulfill these conditions. All meditation, concentration, and other exercises will be worthless, and in a certain sense even harmful, if life is not regulated in accordance with these conditions. One cannot give people powers; one can only bring out those that already lie within them. They do not develop by themselves because there are external and internal obstacles to them. The external obstacles are removed by the following rules of life. The internal obstacles are removed by the special instructions on meditation and concentration, etc.
The first condition is the acquisition of completely clear thinking. To this end, one must free oneself, even if only for a very short time during the day, about five minutes (the more, the better), from the wandering of thoughts. One must become master of one's own thoughts. One is not master when external circumstances, one's profession, traditions, social conditions, even belonging to a certain ethnic group, the time of day, certain tasks, etc., etc., determine what thoughts one has and how one develops them. During the above-mentioned time, you must therefore, of your own free will, empty your soul of the usual, everyday train of thoughts and, on your own initiative, place a thought at the center of your soul. One need not believe that this must be an outstanding or interesting thought; what is to be achieved in occult matters is even better achieved if one initially strives to choose a thought that is as uninteresting and insignificant as possible. This stimulates the self-acting power of thought, which is what matters, whereas an interesting thought carries the thinking away. It is better to fulfill this condition of thought control with a pin than with Napoleon the Great. One says to oneself: I will now start from this thought and, through my own inner initiative, string together everything that can be appropriately connected with it. At the end of the period, the thought should still be as colorful and vivid in the mind as it was at the beginning. Do this exercise every day for at least a month; you can take up a new thought every day, but you can also hold on to one thought for several days. At the end of such an exercise, try to bring to full consciousness the inner feeling of firmness and security that you will soon notice when you pay subtle attention to your own soul, and then conclude the exercises by thinking of your head and the middle of your back (brain and spinal cord), as if you wanted to pour that feeling into those parts of your body.
After practicing in this way for about a month, add a second requirement. Try to think of some action that you would certainly not have taken in the normal course of your life up to now. Now make this action a duty for yourself every day. It will therefore be good if you can choose an action that can be performed every day for as long a period as possible. Again, it is better to start with an insignificant action that you have to force yourself to do, for example, you decide to water a flower you have bought at a certain time of the day. After some time, add a second similar action to the first, then a third, and so on, as many as you can manage while maintaining all your other duties. This exercise should again last for a month. But you should also continue with the first exercise as much as you can during this second month, even if you no longer make it your exclusive duty as you did in the first month. However, it must not be neglected, otherwise you will soon notice how the fruits of the first month are quickly lost and the old routine of uncontrolled thoughts begins again. One must be careful never to lose these fruits once they have been gained. Once one has completed this act of initiative through the second exercise, one becomes aware of a feeling of inner drive within the soul in subtle attention and pours this feeling into one's body, allowing it to flow from the head down to the heart.
In the third month, a new exercise should be brought to the center of your life: the development of a certain equanimity toward the fluctuations of pleasure and pain, joy and sorrow. The “high in the sky, low in the ground” should be consciously replaced by an even mood. One must take care that no joy overwhelms one, no pain depresses one, no experience carries one away into excessive anger or annoyance, no expectation fills one with anxiety or fear, no situation renders one helpless, etc., etc. One should not fear that such an exercise will make one sober and lifeless: you will soon notice that in place of what is going on through this exercise, more purified qualities of the soul will appear; above all, one day you will be able to feel an inner calm in the body through subtle attention; pour this, as in the two cases above, into the body by letting it radiate from the heart to the hands, the feet, and finally to the head. Of course, in this case, this cannot be done after every single exercise, since one is not dealing with a single exercise, but with a continuous attention to one's inner soul life. One must call this inner peace to one's soul at least once a day and then perform the exercise of letting it flow out from the heart. The exercises of the first and second months should be performed in the same way as those of the first month in the second month.
In the fourth month, a new exercise called positivity should be taken up. It consists of always seeking out the good, the excellent, the beautiful, etc. in all experiences, beings, and things. This quality of the soul is best characterized by a Persian legend about Jesus Christ. Once, when he was walking with his disciples, they saw a dog lying by the side of the road, already in an advanced state of decay. All the disciples turned away from the ugly sight, but Jesus Christ remained standing, looked meaningfully at the animal, and said, “What beautiful teeth this animal has!” Where the others had seen only ugliness and repulsiveness, he sought beauty. Thus must the esoteric student strive to seek the positive in every appearance and in every being. He will soon notice that beneath the shell of ugliness there is hidden beauty, that even beneath the shell of a criminal there is hidden goodness, that beneath the shell of a madman there is somehow hidden the divine soul. This exercise is related in some way to what is called abstaining from criticism. One must not understand this to mean that one should call black white and white black. However, there is a difference between a judgment that proceeds solely from one's own personality and judges sympathy and antipathy according to that personality, and a point of view that lovingly places itself in the position of the foreign appearance or being and asks itself everywhere: How did this other come to be or act this way? Such a point of view naturally leads one to strive more to help the imperfect than to merely reproach and criticize them. The objection that the living conditions of many people require them to reproach and judge cannot be made here. For then these living conditions are such that the person concerned cannot undergo proper occult training. There are many circumstances in life that make such occult training impossible to a large extent. In such cases, people should not impatiently demand progress that can only be made under certain conditions. Anyone who consciously focuses on the positive in all their experiences for a month will gradually notice a feeling creeping into their inner being, as if their skin were becoming permeable on all sides and their soul were opening wide to all kinds of secret and subtle processes in their environment that had previously escaped their attention completely. This is precisely what it is all about: combating the inattention to such subtle things that is present in every human being. Once you have noticed that this feeling described above asserts itself in the soul like a kind of bliss, try to direct this feeling in your mind toward your heart and let it flow from there into your eyes, and from there out into the space in front of and around you. You will notice that this gives you an intimate relationship with this space. You grow, as it were, beyond yourself. You learn to regard a part of your surroundings as something that belongs to you. This exercise requires a great deal of concentration and, above all, recognition of the fact that everything stormy, passionate, and emotional has a completely destructive effect on the mood indicated. Repeat the exercises from the first months as indicated for the previous months.
In the fifth month, try to develop the feeling of approaching every new experience with complete impartiality. What confronts us when people respond to something they have just heard or seen by saying: “I've never heard that before, I've never seen that before, I don't believe that, that's a deception,” the esoteric student must completely break with this attitude. He must be ready to accept a completely new experience at any moment. What he has previously recognized as lawful, what has seemed possible to him, must not be a hindrance to the acceptance of a new truth. It is radical to say, but absolutely true, that if someone comes to the esoteric student and says, “Hey, the steeple of the X church has been completely crooked since last night,” the esotericist should leave himself a back door open for the possibility that his previous knowledge of the laws of nature could still be expanded by such an apparently unheard-of fact. Those who direct their attention to this in the fifth month will notice that a feeling creeps into their soul as if something were coming to life in the space mentioned in the exercise for the fourth month, as if something were stirring there. This feeling is extremely delicate and subtle. One must try to attentively perceive this subtle vibration in the environment and let it flow in, as it were, through all five senses, namely through the eyes, ears, and skin, insofar as the latter contains the sense of warmth. At this stage of esoteric development, less attention should be paid to the impressions of those movements in the lower senses, taste, smell, and touch. At this stage, it is not yet possible to distinguish the numerous bad influences that interfere with the good ones in this area; therefore, the student leaves this matter to a later stage.
In the sixth month, one should then try to systematically repeat all five exercises over and over again in a regular alternation. A beautiful balance of the soul gradually develops. One will notice in particular that any dissatisfaction with the appearance and nature of the world disappears completely. A mood of reconciliation with all experiences takes hold of the soul, which is by no means indifference, but on the contrary enables one to work in the world in a truly improving and progressive manner. A calm understanding of things that were previously completely closed to the soul opens up. Even a person's gait and gestures change under the influence of such exercises, and if one day they notice that their handwriting has taken on a different character, they can say to themselves that they are about to reach the first rung on the path upward. Once again, two things must be emphasized:
First, that the six exercises discussed paralyze the harmful influence that other occult exercises can have, so that only the beneficial remains.* And second, that they alone actually ensure the positive success of meditation and concentration work. Even the mere conscientious fulfillment of conventional morality is not enough for the esotericist, for this morality can be very selfish if the person says to himself: I want to be good so that I will be considered good. The esotericist does not do good because he wants to be considered good, but because he gradually realizes that good alone advances evolution, while evil, unwise, and ugly things place obstacles in the way of this evolution.
[*] The “harmful influence” is explained in the audience notes from the lecture in Leipzig on July 9, 1906 (in GA 94 “Cosmogony”) as follows:
Sleep is the starting point for the development of the spiritual senses. When a person is asleep, their physical and etheric bodies are in bed, while their astral body and ego are outside of it. When a person begins to see in their sleep, forces that have previously been responsible for restoring the physical and etheric bodies are withdrawn from the body for a certain period of time. They must be replaced in some other way, lest a great danger arise for the physical and etheric bodies. If this does not happen, their powers decline greatly, and amoral entities take possession of them. This is why it can happen that people develop astral clairvoyance but become immoral. [...].
The following sentence is important: The more rhythm you bring into something, the more you can leave a being or a thing to itself. Thus, the student of occultism must also develop a certain regularity, a rhythm, in his thoughts. To do this, it is necessary to:
[a description of the six supplementary exercises follows].
When a person develops all these qualities within themselves, a rhythm enters their inner life such that the astral body no longer needs to carry out regeneration during sleep. For these exercises also bring about such a balance in the etheric body that it can protect and restore itself. Those who begin occult training without developing these six qualities are in danger and are exposed to the worst entities at night. But those who have practiced the six qualities for a while can begin to develop their astral senses, and they then begin to sleep with consciousness. Their dreams are no longer random, but become regular; the astral world rises before them.