Esoteric Lessons I
GA 266
Number 4
Retain the preceding exercise and add the following at the place where “He wills” streams over the whole body. Create streams from the body's surface and draw them to the body's surface and draw them to the heart as the center. One should do the whole thing slowly as one quietly rests one's consciousness on the happenings. During this process meditate on the words from Light on the Path: Seek out the way.
Then I ask you to rest quietly with the whole feeling in your heart while meditating on: Seek the way by retreating within.
Then one guides the stream back towards the body's surface while meditating one: Seek the way by advancing boldly without. You'll soon be able to perceive the indicated rays as real warmth streams.
These exercises prepare for the union on one's personality (microcosm) with the great world and its secrete (macrocosm), just as the exercises given before prepare for the awakening of one's individuality.
Later on, a man will have a much more intimate connection with the world's lawfulnesses than now. An esoteric pupil anticipates this intimacy in this development The head with its brain is only a transition organ for knowledge. The organ that will look deeply and powerfully into the world has its germ in the present heart. To become an organ for cognition the heart must be transformed in many ways. But this heart is the source and fount of a future human stage. When the heart becomes its organ, cognition will be warm and intimate as only the feelings of love and compassion are today. But the feelings will struggle out of the dullness and darkness in which they just grope today and through to the brightness and clarity that only the finest, most logical concepts of the head have today. A real pupil is preparing himself for such things. And it's only a correct preparation if he does it with the indicated sentiment in his soul. These sentiments are the mother of the perspective that he needs. I ask you to note that we'll only attain what we should attain through our meditation and concentration exercises if we do them permeated by the great, sublime goals in bright, complete clarity.
I ask you to always look at and do the exercises in this sense. Thereby you fit yourself into the community of spirits in current incarnations who are supposed to be come seers and helpers of the futures. We can do no better for the world's further development than to develop ourselves. But we must do that. And once we've seen the truth about our own being and the connection of this being with the world we don't doubt for a moment that we must do this. But this can only gradually be known. It's a child of will and patience.
Please try to connect the various indications given this winter with “Before the eyes can see ... ear can hear ... voice can speak ... the soul can stand” in Light on the Path.
You'll find these four sentences contain a great deal, and that the most important theosophical teachings about the world and self-knowledge will gradually appear before your soul intuitively if you live in these sentences completely. These sentences are not just sentences, but forces that awaken truth and strength and life when one devotes oneself to them.
Please write me about every four weeks or as often as you like if something special happens in your spiritual life in the way of progress, ideas gained, etc. My answers may then lead you further.
Peace.