Lecture IV

Esoteric development must, of course, go much further if one would really describe all the various conditions on the Moon; but from this you will see the rise of what may lead to such a description. You see that in the student himself there appears something that may be described as the melancholy of his head, and within this frame of mind gradually emerges something like a vision of memory into a primeval past, into the ancient Moon period. And it would be desirable if from descriptions such as have just been given, you were to judge how esoteric development really proceeds, how beginning from some particular experience, the student first learns to recognise this experience (in this case as a remembrance of a primeval past, which he has carried along the stream of time with him into the present), and learns to unroll again, as it were, that which has once been lived through. Judge from this that the occultist is truly not speaking of visionary fancies when he sets forth that construction of the universe which goes back to the ancient periods of Moon, Sun and Saturn, but that if the hearer will only wait patiently, he will be able—through the analysis of the discovery of these things—to gain an idea of how it is possible gradually to live into those great, mighty cosmic pictures which truly belong to a far-distant past, but can be called forth again from the life of the present; we need only reach the point of development at which we can experience and then unfold the past phenomena of time which are involved, wrapped up within us.