Esoteric Lesson

We will easily be exposed to misunderstandings if we think that the sound that descends to us from the spiritual East and signifies the name of God manifests itself in tones and articulated sounds as we hear them in the physical world. But it is a completely different sound, a completely different tone, which has not the slightest resemblance to anything in the physical world. The student must therefore be extremely careful in his discernment, but especially in his self-knowledge. For it is a fact that when someone begins to perceive colors, forms, sounds, or even words from the spiritual world, these come from the spiritual world in very few cases. They mostly come from the physical world, namely from the human being themselves, often simply because the human being is animated by a burning desire to experience something in the spiritual world themselves; Then phenomena and sounds and so on appear from our own world. But in a certain sense, these phenomena are based on truth—and this should be carefully considered—insofar as they are part of our thoughts and the nature of the human character. What is expressed in colors and so on is therefore not usually from the spiritual world, but is often caused by physical discomfort, or can also be caused by the following. If a person has become a vegetarian but has not yet lost the desire to eat meat, this craving for meat will torment him on the astral plane where he dwells at night, and this discomfort manifests itself there in sounds or words which he then believes he hears coming from the spiritual world. This is what is called the “croaking raven” in occultism.