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The Rudolf Steiner Archive

a project of Steiner Online Library, a public charity

Esoteric Lessons III
GA 266

Lesson 9

Helsinki, 6-1-'13

A lot has to become different than it was before for us esoterics. We must begin to feel that we're living in a big ocean of soul-spiritual beings, and we must know that just as we're physically one with the surrounding world through the air that we inhale, so we spirits with souls are embedded in the spiritual world around us. On waking in the morn we inhale the spirit that we ourselves are in a long breath and we exhale it back to the spiritual world again on going to sleep. Everything around us becomes different. When we see sunlight as esoterics we no longer see it just physically — we know that without sunlight we couldn't feel ourselves as an I, that sunlight has ego-creating power in it. And when we look at the moon with its changing form we know that it's connected with the force that enables us to have descendants. The life that goes through the generations is connected with the moon. We can see this everywhere in symbols. We see the sun rise and set. And we see the moon's four changing shapes and encounter them in the symbol with four roses (or stars) that can be a symbol for the sun's ego-power and the moon's reproductive power. But for this we must be able to read so that we're not just staring at things any more. Then we see the messenger in Mercury and we know that our ego is

Diagram 1

brought into connection with reproductive forces through its power, that the messenger, occult Mercury, is the connection. And so thinking of the sphere from which we come every morning and at every birth with reverence we can feel EDN resounding in us, and then we know that there's a third sun behind the physical and ego-creating ones, the Christ-force with which we can connect ourselves: ICM — and then we may let the PSSR follow full of hope.