Esoteric Lesson

First, it was said how difficult it was that he [Rudolf Steiner] could no longer be with us this winter, but that we only had to feel more intensely at 8 o'clock that we were always united in spirit. Then it was pointed out that if one only did one's exercises seriously and intensively enough, one would also make progress on the esoteric path, even if one did not notice it. One only had to become more attentive to oneself and increasingly get the feeling: It is not I who think, but something thinks me, so that it is not the physical body that thinks, but the etheric body. The physical body is only a mirror or an echo. Just as when you stand in front of a mirror, you only pay attention to your reflection and forget your real form, so too with an echo, you do not pay attention to what you call out, but only to the echo. Thus, you do not notice that thinking takes place in the etheric body and is only reflected in the physical body. The more we make our etheric body independent, the more we experience two things: first, that our I expands into the vastness, and second, that we experience our inner being in isolation, and in the depths we find our other self. The human being in his skin is only like in a shell in which spiritual forces surge up and down stormily; It is as if our thoughts step out of us like figures and surround us. We then experience our good and our evil: our good in such a way that it points to the future and leads a sprouting, plant-like life there; our evil, which must not be allowed to become action, but remains purely thought, so that it may serve as nourishment for the good in the future. The nourishment for our three realms came into being only because the beings who went through their human stage on the old moon consciously experienced their evil in meditation without allowing it to become action. Evil arose on Earth because backward lunar beings, Luciferic beings, meditate on their evil not on the moon but now on Earth and inoculate it into human beings. On the other hand, we must feel our ego spreading more and more in space, not within our physical shell. Experience the environment of the sensory world in relation to the spiritual as air bubbles in water, as spherical nothingness. Experience this often and repeatedly in your thoughts. To this end, we are to be given the following aids: three formulas to meditate on in the morning, evening, and on Sundays. They will help us in the coming period to make the etheric body independent.