Spiritual Development Through Rhythm and the Lotus Flowers

GA 94 — 9 July 1906, Leipzig

Lecture XII

Every person must be absolutely free to begin the occult development of the soul's powers. But anyone who wants to undergo higher spiritual development must also observe the necessary conditions and submit to them.

Sleep is the starting point for the consideration of the development of the spiritual senses. In sleep, the physical and etheric bodies are in the realm of consciousness, while the astral body and I are outside of them. When a person begins to develop clairvoyance during sleep, the body is deprived of the forces that previously restored the physical and etheric bodies for a certain period of time. These forces must be replaced in some other way if the physical and etheric bodies are not to be seriously endangered. If this does not happen, they will lose a great deal of their strength and amoral entities will take possession of them. Therefore it may happen that people develop astral clairvoyance but become immoral beings. How long the preliminary exercises take depends entirely on the individual. It depends entirely on the level of development the person has already reached by the time he begins his training. Therefore the teacher must first see through the inner state of soul of the pupil. The preparation time is therefore often very different.

The following sentence is important: The more rhythm one has introduced, the more one can leave an entity and a thing to its own devices. Thus, the secret disciple must also develop a certain regularity, a rhythm, into his world of thoughts. To do this, it is necessary:

Firstly, control of thoughts, that is, the disciple may only allow those thoughts to enter into himself that he himself wants. These exercises require a lot of patience and perseverance. But if you do them for only five minutes a day, they are already of importance for the inner life.

Secondly: initiative in actions. These should be things that originally come from one's own soul.

Thirdly: inner composure. This helps one to develop a much finer sense of compassion.

Fourthly: to look for and find the positive side in all things and processes. I recall the beautiful legend of Christ and the dead dog.

Fifthly: to be impartial and unprejudiced. One should always keep the possibility open to recognize new facts.

Sixthly: inner balance and inner harmony.

When a person has developed all these qualities within himself, a rhythm comes into his inner life that the astral body no longer needs to perform regeneration during sleep. Because of these exercises, such an equilibrium comes into the etheric body that it can protect and restore itself. Those who begin occult training without developing these six qualities run the risk of being exposed to the worst entities at night. But once you have practised these six qualities for a while, you may begin to develop your astral senses and then you start to sleep consciously. Your dreams are no longer random, but they gain regularity; the astral world rises before you. Now you have the ability to perceive everything of a soul nature in your surroundings in pictures. You develop a relationship to the reality of the soul. This pictorial consciousness is called imagination. At first the pupil acquires imagination in sleep, but later on he must be able to evoke this state at any time of the day. He learns to transfer the experiences of sleep into the waking consciousness. But this ability is only valuable for the occultist when he can see the auras of living beings fully consciously.

The first step is therefore imagination. The development of the so-called lotuses, the sacred wheels or chakrams, which lie at very specific points on the body, is connected with this. There are seven such astral organs. The first, the two-petalled lotus flower, is in the region of the root of the nose; the second, the sixteen-petalled, is at the level of the larynx; the third, the twelve-petalled, is at the level of the heart; the fourth, the eight- to ten-leaved, near the navel; the fifth, the six-leaved, somewhat lower down; the sixth, the four-leaved, which is connected with everything that is fertilization, is even further down; the seventh cannot be spoken of without further ado. These six organs have the same significance for the spiritual world as the physical senses for the perception of the sensory world. An image for this is the so-called swastika. Through the above-mentioned exercises, they first become brighter, then they begin to move. In today's human beings they are immobile, in the Atlanteans they were still mobile, and in the Lemurians they were still moving very actively. But in those days they turned in the opposite direction to that of those who have occult development today, where they turn in a clockwise direction. An analogy to the dream-like clairvoyant state of the Lemurians is the fact that even today, with atavistic clairvoyance, the lotus flowers still turn in the same direction as they once did in Atlantean and Lemurian times, namely in an anticlockwise direction. The clairvoyance of mediums is unconscious, without thought control, but that of the genuine clairvoyant is conscious and precisely monitored by the thoughts. Mediumship is very dangerous, but the healthy secret training is completely harmless. (See appendix.)