Additional Requirements

The following rules should be understood in such a way that every esoteric student arranges his life so that he continually observes and guides himself to see whether he is living up to the corresponding requirements, especially in his inner life. All esoteric training, especially when it ascends to the higher regions, can only lead to disaster and confusion for the student if such rules are not observed. On the other hand, no one need shrink from such training if they strive to live in accordance with these rules. Nor need they despair if they have to say to themselves, for example: “I still fulfill the requirements very poorly.” If he has the sincere inner desire not to lose sight of these rules in his entire life, that is enough. But this honesty must above all be honesty toward oneself. Many people deceive themselves in this regard. They say: I want to strive in a pure sense. But if they examined themselves more closely, they would notice that a great deal of hidden egoism and a refined sense of self-importance lurk in the background; it is precisely such feelings that very often put on the mask of selfless striving and lead the student astray. It cannot be examined seriously often enough through inner self-examination whether one does not have such feelings hidden in the depths of one's soul. One will become increasingly free from such feelings by energetically following the rules to be discussed here. These rules are:

First:

No unexamined mental image should be allowed to enter my consciousness.

Observe how many mental images, feelings, and impulses live in a person's soul, which he absorbs through his life situation, profession, family ties, ethnicity, contemporary circumstances, etc. Such content of the soul should not be understood as if its eradication were a moral act for all people. Human beings derive their stability and security in life from their ethnic background, the circumstances of the times, their family, their upbringing, etc. If they were to recklessly cast such things aside, they would soon find themselves without support in life. It is particularly undesirable for weak natures to go too far in this direction. In particular, every esoteric student should realize that observing this first rule must go hand in hand with acquiring an understanding of all the actions, thoughts, and feelings of other beings. It must never happen that following this rule leads to licentiousness or to someone saying to themselves, “I break with everything into which I was born and into which life has placed me.” On the contrary, the more one examines, the more one will understand the justification of what lives in one's environment. It is not a matter of fighting and arrogantly rejecting these things, but of becoming inwardly free through careful examination of everything that stands in relation to one's own soul. From the power of one's own soul, one will then spread a light over one's entire thinking and behavior, one's consciousness will expand accordingly, and one will acquire the ability to let the spiritual laws that reveal themselves in the soul speak more and more, and no longer place oneself in blind allegiance to the surrounding world. It is obvious that the following objection to this rule will be raised: if human beings are to examine everything, they will have to examine in particular the occult and esoteric teachings that are given to them by their esoteric teachers. The point is to understand examination in the right sense. It is not always possible to examine something directly; in many cases, one must examine it indirectly. For example, no one today is in a position to directly examine whether Frederick the Great lived or not. One can only examine whether the path by which the information about Frederick the Great came to you is a trustworthy one. This is where the examination must begin. The same applies to all so-called belief in authority. If someone tells you something that you cannot immediately verify yourself, you must first and foremost use the material available to you to check whether they are a credible authority, whether they say things that give you an inkling or a feeling that they are true. This example shows that it is important to start the verification process at the right point.

A second rule is:

There should be a living obligation before my soul to continually increase the sum of my mental images.

Nothing is worse for the esoteric student than to want to remain with a certain number of concepts that he already has and to want to understand everything with their help. It is infinitely important to acquire ever new mental images. If this does not happen, then the student, should he attain supersensible insights, would have no well-prepared concepts with which to meet them and would be overwhelmed by them, either to his disadvantage or at least to his dissatisfaction; the latter because, under such circumstances, he could already have had higher experiences without even realizing it. The number of students who could already be completely surrounded by higher experiences but are unaware of them is by no means small, because their poverty of imagination leads them to have expectations of these experiences that are completely different from what they really are. Many people are not at all inclined toward comfort in their outer lives, but in their imaginations they are directly averse to enriching themselves and forming new concepts.

A third rule is:

I only gain knowledge of those things toward which I feel neither sympathy nor antipathy.

An old initiate repeatedly impressed upon his students: You will only know about the immortality of the soul when you accept just as readily that this soul will be destroyed after death as that it will live forever. As long as you wish to live forever, you will not gain any mental image of the state after death. As in this important case, so it is with all truths. As long as a person still has the slightest desire within themselves that things should be one way or another, the pure, bright light of truth cannot shine upon them. For example, if a person has even the slightest desire during self-examination that their good qualities should prevail, this desire will deceive them and prevent them from gaining true self-knowledge.

A fourth rule is this:

It is my responsibility to overcome my fear of the so-called abstract.

As long as an esoteric student clings to concepts that take their material from the sensory world, he cannot attain any truth about the higher worlds. He must strive to acquire mental images that are free from sensuality. Of all four rules, this is the most difficult, especially in the living conditions of our age. Materialistic thinking has largely deprived people of the ability to think in terms that are free from sensuality. One must strive either to think very often of concepts that are never completely present in external sensory reality, but only approximately, for example, the concept of a circle. A perfect circle does not exist anywhere; it can only be thought, but this thought circle lies at the basis of all circular structures as their law. Or one can think of a high moral ideal; this too cannot be fully realized by any human being, but it underlies many human actions as their law. No one can advance in esoteric development who does not understand the full meaning of this so-called abstract for life and enriches his soul with the corresponding mental images.