Esoteric Lesson

If we succeed in achieving complete peace of mind after our meditation, we may be overcome by a feeling as if we are rising above ourselves and coming into contact with spiritual beings around us. This feeling is accompanied by a sense of expansion, of spreading out into a sphere above us. But we can also come out of ourselves and come into contact with other spiritual beings. This is accompanied by a feeling of constriction; we descend deep into ourselves, we feel it becoming tighter, and then we come out of ourselves on the way down, as with the other feeling on the way up. This stepping out of ourselves and the accompanying feeling of becoming wider gives a feeling of bliss; it is as if we are rising up to spiritual beings who are coming toward us. If we descend, we encounter spiritual beings who make us deeply aware of our shortcomings, and we become one with these beings. But we then also realize that the sphere in which we find ourselves in this way is connected to the sphere above us, and that now, in the recognition of our shortcomings, we feel the spiritual beings coming toward us as the avengers of the angels who come to judge and punish us, the archangels with their fiery swords. In contrast, we feel the beings of the lower sphere as mourning our mistakes, and we feel deeply that it is not we alone who are affected by our mistakes, but that spiritual beings, the messengers, the angels, mourn our mistakes. We can experience this either only inwardly or as a colored imagination. In the latter case, the sphere spreads out above us in red and red-yellow colors and below us in blue and blue-violet colors, in which the spiritual beings reveal themselves. But the two spheres connect with each other, and we feel ourselves moving within them, looking back at our bodies as something we have left behind. We can have these experiences if we meditate in the right way on the “It thinks me”; and if we could be conscious at night of the working of the good gods, we would be able to see these imaginations.