The Rudolf Steiner Archive

2. Esoteric Development and Super-sensory Knowledge

[ 1 ] Today I would like to speak to you about an extension of the topic we discussed the day before yesterday: inner or esoteric development and supersensory knowledge. In doing so, it will be necessary for us to take what we considered the day before yesterday as a given and, so to speak, build upon what touched our souls at that time. You have seen from what we discussed there that human development is not something to be taken, shall we say, lightly or in jest; it is not something to be taken lightly at all. On the other hand, however, it must be emphasized again and again that one must not speak in the usual, trivial way about the dangers of occult development. The dangers are great, but the way these dangers are usually discussed is not correct, and there are many things that will have to become clear to us. Let us first form a clearer mental image for ourselves of what happens to someone who has developed through certain exercises—let us say, exercises along the lines indicated in the last lecture—and let us compare them with a person who is not undergoing such training and lives like anyone else in everyday life. We arrive at a conscious understanding of this when we start, for example, from what we know about the ordinary state of sleep.

[ 2 ] From the previous lecture, you have learned what the human astral body actually does during the ordinary state of sleep at night. When a person sleeps, the physical body and the etheric body lie in bed; the so-called astral body, together with the “I,” has emerged from them; it has lifted itself out and left them. And when this astral body is not inside the physical body, when it is not observing and perceiving the external world through the physical body’s instruments—the sense organs—and when it is not occupied by the movements and work of the physical body, then the astral body can take on an entirely different task. It relieves both bodies of their fatigue. The removal of this fatigue is its task, and the seer can observe how this astral body works on the physical and etheric bodies from the outside throughout the night to restore them, so that in the morning the person feels the renewal of their strength as a refreshment. That is why sleep is such a good healer, and why a person who does not have healthy and sufficient sleep loses so much. Many things that appear to be illnesses are, in fact, merely disturbances in the physical and etheric bodies. These disturbances persist when the astral body is unable to eliminate them. However, it is capable of eliminating these disturbances not when it is within the body—as in the waking state—but when it is outside the body.

[ 3 ] Where, then, does the astral body obtain those powers and abilities through which it, so to speak, repairs the physical body? Already in my last public lecture, I compared this departure of the astral body from the physical and etheric bodies to a mass of water in a glass. If you have a thousand drops of water in this glass and these drops all form a single mass, that is different from taking a thousand little sponges and having each one absorb a drop of water individually; in that case, you have individualized and separated those drops. So it is with the astral body at night. If all of you here were to fall asleep now, the same thing would happen as if you were to squeeze out the sponges and form a mass of water. Your astral body would step out and unite with the others. But by uniting, human beings come into contact with those great, harmonious events that take place in the universe. At night, our souls return to the harmony of the spheres, and from these the astral body—together with the “I” (which is the soul)—draws the power necessary to restore the physical body.

[ 4 ] What happens to a person who is assigned an occult teacher and undergoes occult training? He is given certain tasks. One can only speak of these in general terms. He is given tasks involving meditation, concentration, and so on. What is the purpose of the tasks the teacher assigns to the student? - Its purpose is to gradually make the astral body perceptive when it is outside the physical body at night. In the case of the ordinary person, when the astral body is outside the physical body, it is unconscious in the astral world, just as you would be unconscious in the physical world if you had no senses. If you have no senses, then the world does not exist for you. The moment a person is given instructions to awaken the powers slumbering within their soul, their astral body acquires spiritual or soul-level sense organs—those organs known as lotus flowers. — These are not flowers, any more than the lungs are wings; everyone knows that a hawk has wings that look different from the lungs. - Lotus flowers are organs that perform a kind of circular motion. One such organ is located beneath the forehead, one centimeter below the meeting point of the eyebrows, within the brain. When one concentrates intensely on this point while simultaneously uttering a specific word, a kind of flash occurs—a brightening—and this is visible to an outside observer. The sensory organ enters into a kind of circular motion. It is said that the wheel turns; it comes to life. In the ordinary, average person, such an organ is not present at this location, or at most is only hinted at; through training, this flash occurs when the astral body is outside the physical body. It gives the impression of a wheel turning, which a seer can observe from the outside. This wheel is called the swastika. - Like all genuine symbols, this sign cannot be explained speculatively. They are not arbitrarily invented, but are actually seen on the mental or astral plane. The swastika is a representation of this sense organ, and all the more or less ingenious explanations in theosophical writings are nonsense. One should not explain things allegorically or symbolically in theosophy. That is precisely what one must first learn to avoid: all speculation. One must break the habit of endlessly speculating about how things might be; the only thing that matters is penetrating the world of facts itself. Near the larynx is the sixteen-petaled lotus flower, an organ on which a great deal depends in human evolution. Near the heart is the twelve-petaled one, further down the ten-petaled one, and so on.

[ 5 ] These faculties develop through the exercises the teacher gives the student, just as the senses of the physical body are developed through practice—for example, through exposure to light and sound. Consider one of these as a physical process and the other as a spiritual process of exactly the same duration. You must not believe that any tumultuous processes, magic, or the like can lead a person to develop these sense organs. These are merely inner processes—a learning that takes place within the thoughts—which possess the power to develop such organs. In this process, it is always and repeatedly essential that the person learn which thoughts these are and that the person think of a specific organ of the body, for example, a point in the brain that lies one centimeter below the midpoint between the eyebrows. When a person thinks of this point, using a very specific combination of words, they awaken certain abilities within their astral body. It is all systematic and, one might say, technically determined.

[ 6 ] Some people find this extremely unsuitable for themselves. Time and again, one hears phrases that are utter nonsense to the true occultist: “I don’t need a teacher; I must find my teacher within myself.” - Such statements reveal, first and foremost, the greatest possible selfishness; they are also nonsense. If someone were to view geometry from this perspective, what would come of it? Anyone can discover all the principles of geometry through inner development: it will take many thousands of years, but they can discover them. But is there really any reason to “rediscover” geometry? Should we not build upon what humanity has discovered through centuries of work, and continue to build upon it, bringing benefit to the humanity that has given us so much knowledge? Humanity has a right to this. What hardships might we spare humanity through our devoted love for the teachers of past generations! In the same way, when it comes to inner development, we do not seek it for ourselves, but as workers in the great service of humanity. There have always been people who have gone before us; we have much to learn from them, and if we fear submitting to authority, that is heartless nonsense. Working in the spirit of humanity’s teachers, seeking out those who can guide us—that is what is first and foremost absolutely necessary for both the occult teacher and the student. These things, which the teachers tell us and which have been tested and known for centuries, draw the senses out of the astral body.

[ 7 ] If anyone teaches occult doctrines—a true teacher would not do this—it is easy for them to give the student instructions on how to have perceptions in the astral world. One can observe that the student begins to work on his astral body, bringing out the sense organs, but that as a result he exhibits much worse habits and temperamental traits than before he became an occult student. People have wondered why, in the early days of Theosophy, many made incomprehensible missteps regarding their character. Even the slight development of the astral body—brought about by theosophical teachings as “elementary science” when they first began to gain recognition—gave rise to quite peculiar phenomena. For example, one student who served as treasurer embezzled the funds, while another engaged in entirely different misdeeds; even people who had previously been peaceable became quarrelsome. This is connected to the fact that, with the little occult development that flows from theosophical concepts, the negative aspects of one’s character are brought to the fore if nothing else happens. Yet no one should be afraid because of this. Such things simply require attention; they should be taken seriously. We must simply strive, through the strength of our character, not to succumb to such temptations. The situation is different, however, when a student undergoes genuine, systematic occult training. In that case, the work on the astral body is much more extensive, and it is then absolutely necessary to provide compensation for the physical and etheric bodies.

[ 8 ] How does one replace what is taken away from the physical and etheric bodies? To do this, it is necessary for very specific qualities to be developed in the human being. It is possible to develop qualities in human nature and being that make it unnecessary for the physical body and the etheric body to be repaired to such an extensive degree. Imagine that during the “day” you do something to strengthen and restore the physical and etheric bodies so that, through their own sense and rhythm, they resonate in harmony with the great universe; only then will you be able to use the forces for the astral body itself. And this is what must be done; it need not be done immediately, but the time will come when it must be done. When the teacher says, “You must concentrate your thinking”—this does not refer merely to ordinary thinking. When it is said: “You must sit down, take an ordinary thought, and allow no other thought to intrude; think it as intensely as possible while rejecting all other thoughts”—then one must exert a certain inner effort; this effort is what matters. It is not the object itself that should be of interest or hold one’s attention. For example, it is easy to think of Napoleon, but very difficult to think of a match, say, continuously for a longer period of time. That is the very essence of the matter. Then you will see how, after some time, you gain a certain inner strength and confidence. You will then sense through an inner experience whether it has had its effect.

[ 9 ] Then one must move on to taking proactive actions that one would otherwise certainly not have taken. It may be a completely insignificant action. The significance of the action does not matter, but it must be one’s own action, one taken entirely on one’s own initiative. A gentleman to whom I said this told me some time later that he had taken seven steps forward and seven steps backward every day in his office, while creating a mental image of evolution and involution. Excellent—it is not the magnitude of the action, but one’s own initiative that is necessary.

[ 10 ] I also talked to some friends about this and, to give an example, mentioned that you could water flowers even if you’d never watered them before. And what did I find? When I visited my friends, I found them all watering flowers. That was the very opposite of what they should have done, for they were not to imitate my action, but rather perform one that was entirely their own, born of their own ingenuity. If you do this over a long period of time, you will see what an inner effect it has. These things harmonize and balance everything in the physical and etheric bodies to such an extent that both continue to resonate on their own and no longer require so much correction, so that the astral body can draw some of its strength from them.

[ 11 ] Then a person must exercise self-control with regard to pleasure and suffering. In ordinary life, they are subject to the slavery of their emotions. They laugh when presented with something particularly ridiculous; they cry at any sad occasion. The student, however, must keep themselves in check; they must not allow themselves to be controlled, but must instead control their own pleasure and pain. Many believe that doing so would make them numb, but the opposite is true. In this way, we overcome pleasure and pain—that is, what constitutes selfish pleasure and selfish pain. We must find the way to, as it were, crawl into other beings, to feel with them. No one should allow themselves to be deterred from this exercise out of fear of becoming numb; they will come to feel more keenly.

[ 12 ] A fourth exercise is the one I most like to illustrate by recounting a legend. This legend is from the life of Jesus Christ; it cannot be found in the Bible, like so many others; it comes from Persia. Once, as the disciples were walking through the countryside with Jesus Christ, they saw the half-decayed carcass of a dead dog lying on the path. “What a hideous carcass—” said the disciples, turning away in disgust. But Jesus Christ alone stopped, looked at the carcass, and after a moment said, “What magnificent teeth that animal had.” — — He still saw the beautiful teeth in the ugly, decaying carcass. This gives us a hint that we should—and must—learn to see the grain of beauty in everything ugly, the good in the bad, and the truth in error. This quality of positivity must be practiced over time; it brings inner harmony and inner rhythm.

[ 13 ] The fifth point is that a person must cultivate a certain degree of open-mindedness toward everything new that comes their way in the world. One could also say that they must never allow their past habits to influence the future. The phrase, “I don’t believe that”—must disappear completely from one’s mind, and if someone comes to you and says that the church tower has become crooked overnight, you must find a corner in your heart where you consider it possible that truly anything can happen. This does not mean, however, that you should become uncritical; it simply means that nothing should seem impossible to you. Whoever can do this can exert a very significant influence on the physical and etheric bodies, and through this, these bodies enter into such a rhythm that the astral body is provided at night with what gives it meditation and concentration. For it is only gradually that this will lead people toward true, real Theosophy—so that they come to understand everywhere why everything happens this way and not otherwise. Anyone who understands the mechanism of sleep also knows why such exercises must be performed.

[ 14 ] When a person follows these steps on the occult path for a while under appropriate guidance, many things become visible, tangible, and experiential to them that would otherwise have eluded them. You must not believe that the dangers one encounters do not exist elsewhere in life. But one does not see them beforehand; one goes through life without seeing them. One only begins to see what surrounds us in the spiritual world when one is able to penetrate the higher realms. For example, what a person must encounter—and will always encounter—at a higher level, and what they must endure and prepare themselves for, is the Keeper of the Threshold. People usually have quite strange mental images of him.

[ 15 ] What is this Guardian of the Threshold? — Today, let us draw attention to this experience, so to speak, while setting aside various other matters and experiences. You must be clear about what a person generally does throughout their entire life. Let us take, in its true sense, the kamaloka life—the life after death—where a person still has, so to speak, a certain inclination toward physical-sensual existence, and let us compare this life with what takes place immediately before the kamaloka life begins. A vast tableau of memories unfolds before the soul of the one who has just left the physical body. Then the kamaloka life begins.

[ 16 ] This is very peculiar. First of all, it has the peculiarity that a person relives their past. In fact, they relive their entire previous life in reverse, experiencing the events that preceded their death all the way back to their birth. One relives all these events in this way and is done with them once they reach their birth. One arrives at every point one has experienced. Let’s say you lived to be sixty years old, and in your fortieth year you slapped someone. When you reach this point in your memory during the backward experience, you are drawn to that person, and a mark is imprinted on you, so to speak—which is something remarkable: you feel the pain you caused. Throughout your life, you may have been driven by feelings of revenge; now you feel what the person felt—the one on whom you took revenge or sought to take revenge. In the backward experience, you relive the sensations and emotions you have scattered around you. Everything you experience there reveals to you a great deal of what hinders your further development in human history. And without this imprinted mark of pain, you would move forward more easily, for this inhibiting mark remains with you as a force. And as you absorb these forces in reverse in Kamaloka, karma will once again guide you in your next life to use those forces to atone for your guilt, to make amends, and to achieve balance. Thus, the longing begins there to make amends for what you have failed to do, and you will be drawn to set things right when that person lives with you again. This is how karma plays out.

[ 17 ] Here is another example. Four Femer judges sentenced someone to death and carried out the sentence. Why did this happen? When they traced back the lives of all these men, it turned out that in a previous life, the condemned man had been a kind of chieftain and had sentenced these four to death. In fact, the very bond that brought the five of them together had formed during their kamalokaleben. Thus, during his kamalokaleben, a person always has the opportunity to absorb those forces as “inhibitory markers” that will lead him back into life to settle his debt.

[ 18 ] Once a person has passed through Devachan and is about to re-enter physical life, you have the opposite of what happens immediately after death. Now you have a kind of foresight, a kind of preview of this life that now lies ahead of you. Of course, unless one is trained in the occult, one forgets what one perceives there. There are documented cases in which people were so shocked by this preview that they did not want to enter this life. It turned out that, in fact, the etheric body did not fully enter the physical body. In such cases, the etheric body of the head remained quite a bit outside the physical body, resulting in a very specific form of mental retardation.

[ 19 ] But you mustn’t think that karma works in such a way that we can immediately pay off everything we caused in a previous incarnation in the very next one. It’s not that simple. Sometimes one must go through many, many incarnations. If, at any moment, you could look back and see all the imprints in your astral body that must be balanced before you can ascend to certain heights of the occult, you would see your entire debt account.

[ 20 ] This now confronts the student and must appear to him in a symbolic and tangible form—that which we still have to work off, that which still holds us back: unresolved karma. This is the Keeper of the Threshold.

[ 21 ] It can also confront us in a completely abnormal way. I know of a case where someone incarnated at the end of the 18th century and was, at that time, afflicted on the physical plane with an extraordinary craving for certain actions, so that after death he had to undergo a strange fate. He died; after a very long time, he shed the last remnant of his astral body. — Usually, the astral body falls away after one-third of the time spent on Earth has elapsed and remains as an astral corpse until it decays. Such astral corpses constantly hover around us and exert a harmful influence on people. — He could not remain long in the spiritual world either, but soon felt the urge to descend back into the physical realm. Now a misfortune has befallen him—one that, however, occurs very rarely. For it can happen that when a person returns to physical existence, he still finds his astral corpse there. This is very terrible for him, for his current astral body becomes, as it were, permeated by his former astral body—which is a dreadful fate. He then has it constantly beside him as a doppelgänger, and this is the abnormal form of the Keeper of the Threshold. This can occur in very exceptional cases.

[ 22 ] However, for one who is on the path of occult development, it is necessary that at a certain point in time he see his ordinary astral body with all the marks of his unbalanced karma, and he must seek to balance his unresolved karma through the means available for that purpose. This is the true encounter with the Keeper of the Threshold. All this is not meant to frighten you, but to give you an idea of what is called self-knowledge in the true sense of the word. This is twofold: First, it is the realization of what the true self must work through. Second, it is the realization of the higher self. But here, “knowledge” means something entirely different. You can read in the Bible: “Adam knew his wife.”—This is an expression for fertilization. “Know thyself” means: fertilize yourself with the wisdom within you; regard the soul as a female organ and fertilize yourself. If you wish to attain self-knowledge, look within yourself; there you will recognize all your faults. If you wish to recognize your higher self, then look outside yourself, for there, knowledge of the world is self-knowledge. Everything is in the sun, for everything is the sun. We must detach ourselves from ourselves. People say to me: “You tell us about evolution and such things; but we want the elevation of the soul and of the emotions.”—Those who speak this way are their own enemies. It is not by gazing inward at ourselves, but by getting to know the world in all its parts, piece by piece, that we become selfless and can find knowledge of the self and of God.

[ 23 ] There is no worse phrase than this: “One need only look within oneself.” — But there one finds only the lower self. One should seek outwardly with love, and one will find. I have known people who said: “What do I need? I need nothing at all, for I am Atma.” — And even if they keep saying “Atma, I am Atma” over and over, they do not bring it into their consciousness, because they know no more about Atma than that the word has four letters. Looking within oneself only leads to isolation. We are nothing but a part of this world. A finger is a finger only because it remains attached to the organism; detach it, and it is no longer a finger. The finger does not separate itself from the organism; but human beings are so “clever” as to believe that they can separate themselves from the Earth, even though one would only have to lift them a few kilometers above the Earth, and they would perish. Human beings belong to the Sun; in terms of their etheric and astral bodies, they belong to an entire solar world. It is the greatest error to seek the Self within oneself. Detaching oneself from the self by immersing oneself in all the details of the world—that is the right path. Those who nourish themselves with love and humility find godliness, while those who seek God within themselves become hardened. So you see that there is much to learn if one truly wishes to come to know the esoteric path. And it is essential that we have the right attitude toward such matters. You do not need to think about it from morning till night, any more than it is necessary for you to constantly repeat your own name to yourself. It is enough that you are aware of the thought. There are thoughts without which the esotericist cannot be an esotericist. If he possesses them just as he has his instincts and motives in ordinary life, then these thoughts represent steps that lead him upward onto the plane of supersensible knowledge; they signify for him a penetration into the wisdom of the worlds, an advance in knowledge toward love.