The Rudolf Steiner Archive

Second Meditation

The meditator tries to gain a true conception of the elementary or etheric body

[ 1 ] Through the idea which the soul must form in connection with the fact of death, it can be driven into a complete uncertainty about its own being. This will be the case if it believes that it cannot know anything about any other world than only the world of the senses and what the intellect is able to recognize about this world. The ordinary life of the soul focuses on the physical body. After death, it sees it passing over into the natural context, which has no part in what the soul experiences as its own existence before death. It can indeed know (through the preceding meditation) that the physical body also stands in the same relationship to it during life as after death: but this does not lead it further than to the recognition of the inner independence of its own experience until death. What happens to the physical body after death is determined by observation of the external world. There is no such observation for the inner experience. As this soul life is, it cannot look beyond the boundary of death. If the soul is incapable of forming ideas that go beyond the world from which the body is absorbed after death, then it also has no possibility of looking into anything other than the empty nothingness beyond death in relation to everything spiritual. If this were otherwise, the soul would have to perceive the outside world by means other than the senses and the intellect, which is bound to the senses. These are themselves part of the body and decay with it. What they say can never lead to anything other than the result of the first meditation. And that consists only in the fact that the soul can confess to itself: - You are bound to your body. It is subject to the laws of nature, which relate to you like all other laws of nature. Through it you are a member of the outside world, and this has a part in you which is revealed to you most clearly when you consider what it does with your body after death. For life it gives you senses and a mind which make it impossible for you to see how your spiritual experience is beyond the boundary of death. This confession can only lead to two results. Either all further research into the riddle of the soul is suppressed and you renounce knowing anything in this area. Or efforts are made to achieve through the soul's inner experience what the outer world fails to achieve. - These efforts can lead to making the inner experience more powerful, more energetic than it is in ordinary existence.

[ 2 ] In ordinary life, a person has a certain strength in his inner experiences, his sensory and thought life. For example, he harbors a thought as often as an external or internal cause arises. However, any one thought can be taken out of the number of others and, without further cause, be thought through again and again, experienced inwardly in an intense way. One can repeatedly make such a thought the sole object of one's inner experience. And while you are doing this, you can keep all external impressions and all memories that might arise in your soul away from you. One can make such a complete devotion to thoughts, or also to sensations, which excludes everything else, a regular inner activity. - If such an inner experience is to lead to really significant results, it must, however, be undertaken according to certain tried and tested laws. Such laws are recorded by the science of spiritual life. You will find a large number of them given in my writing: "How does one attain knowledge of the higher worlds?" - Through such a procedure one achieves a strengthening of the powers of inner experience. To a certain extent, this condenses. What happens as a result can be recognized by the observations of oneself that occur when the inner activity described is continued for a sufficiently long time. In most cases, however, you need a lot of patience until convincing results are achieved. And if you are not inclined to exercise this patience for years, you will not achieve anything special.

[ 3 ] It is only possible to give one example of such results here. These are manifold. And what is cited here is suitable for continuing the path of meditation, the description of which has been begun here.

[ 4 ] A person can practise the indicated inner strengthening of his soul life for a long time. He may not experience anything within himself that is capable of making him think differently about the world than he was used to. But then the following may occur. Naturally, what is to be described here will not occur in exactly the same way in two people. But whoever seeks to gain an idea of such an experience has enlightened himself about the whole area under consideration here.

[ 5 ] A moment can occur in which the soul experiences itself inwardly quite differently than usual. In most cases, this will initially happen in such a way that the soul awakens from sleep as if in a dream. However, it immediately becomes apparent that the experience cannot be compared with what is otherwise known as dreams. One is then completely removed from the sensory and intellectual world, and yet one experiences as one only experiences in ordinary existence when one faces the outside world in a waking state. One feels compelled to imagine the experience within oneself. We take the concepts that we have in ordinary life for our imagination, but we know very well that we are experiencing something other than what these concepts normally refer to. One regards them only as a means of expression for an experience which one has not had before, and of which one can also know that it is impossible in ordinary existence. For example, you feel surrounded on all sides by thunderstorms. One hears thunder and hears lightning. You know you are in a room of a house. You feel permeated by a force of which you previously knew nothing. Then you think you see cracks in the walls around you. You are prompted to say to yourself or to a person you believe to be next to you: now it is something heavy; the lightning is passing through the house, it is seizing me; I feel myself seized by it. It dissolves me. - When such a series of images has passed, the inner experience passes over into the ordinary state of the soul. One finds oneself with the memory of what one has just experienced. If this memory is as vivid and as faithful as any other, then it also enables one to form a judgment about the experience. One then knows immediately that one has gone through something that cannot be experienced through any bodily sense or through the ordinary mind. For you feel that the description you have just made, which you can give yourself or others, is only a means of expressing the experience. The expression is indeed a means of understanding the thing, but it has nothing in common with it. One knows that one does not need any of one's senses for such an experience - anyone who wants to speak of a hidden effectiveness of the senses or the brain does not know the true form of the experience. He adheres to the description that speaks of lightning, thunder, cracks in the wall, and therefore he believes that the soul has experienced nothing but echoes of ordinary existence. He must regard what he has experienced as a vision in the ordinary sense of the word. He cannot help but think so. He only fails to take into account that the person who describes such an experience means by the words lightning, thunder, cracks in the wall only images for what he has experienced, and that he does not confuse this with the images. It is right that the thing appears to him as if he really perceived these images. In such a case, however, he does not relate to the lightning phenomenon in the same way as he does when he sees lightning with his eye. For him, the vision of lightning is only something that, as it were, extends beyond the true experience; through the lightning he sees something completely different, something that cannot be experienced in the sensory external world.

[ 6 ] It is necessary for a correct judgment to come about that the soul, which experiences such things, then, when the experience is over, relates to the outside world in a completely healthy way. It must be able to compare correctly what it has had as a special experience with the experience of the ordinary outside world. Anyone who, even in ordinary life, tends to get carried away with all kinds of ravings about things is ill-suited to such a judgment. The more a person has a healthy, one might say sober, sense of reality, the better it is when it comes to a true and valuable assessment of such things. One can only have confidence in supersensible experiences if one can say to oneself in relation to the ordinary world that one clearly takes the processes and things as they are.

[ 7 ] If all the necessary conditions are thus fulfilled, and if one has reason to assume that one has not fallen victim to an ordinary vision, then one knows that one has experienced something for which one has not had the body as a mediator of observation. Without the body, one has observed directly through the soul, which has become stronger in itself. You have gained the idea of an experience outside your body.

[ 8 ] It may be obvious that in this field, lawful differences between dreaming or illusion and true observation carried out outside the body cannot be stated in a different sense than in the field of external sensory perception. It can happen that someone has a vivid imagination of taste and feels the same way when he merely imagines a lemonade as when he really drinks one. The difference between the one and the other, however, is the whole context of life. And so it is with the experiences that are made outside the body. In order to arrive at completely convincing ideas in this area, it is necessary to familiarize oneself with it in a healthy way, to acquire the ability to observe the connections of experience and thus to correct the one through the other.

[ 9 ] Through an experience such as the one described, one has gained the possibility of observing that which belongs to one's own self not only through the senses and the intellect, i.e. through the bodily tools. One now not only knows something different about the world than what these tools reveal; one also knows in a different way. This is particularly important. A soul that undergoes an inner transformation comes more and more to realize that the oppressive questions of existence cannot be solved in the sense world because the senses and the intellect cannot penetrate deeply enough into the world. The souls penetrate deeper, transforming themselves in such a way that they can experience outside the body. The messages they can make about their experiences are what can solve the riddles of the soul.

[ 10 ] Now an experience that takes place outside the body is of a completely different kind than one that takes place in the body. This is clarified by the judgment that can be formed in relation to the experience described, if after it the usual waking state of the soul has returned and the memory has come about vividly and clearly enough. The soul feels the sensual body separately from the rest of the world, it perceives it as belonging only to itself. This is not the case with what one experiences in and of oneself outside the body. There you feel connected to everything that can be called the outside world. What is in the environment, one feels connected to oneself as one feels connected to one's hand in sensory life. There is no indifference of the outer world to the inner world of the soul. One feels oneself to be fully integrated, interwoven with what one can call the world. Its effects perceptibly pass through one's own being. There is no sharp boundary between the inner world and the outer world. The whole environment belongs to the observing soul, just as the two hands of the body belong to the physical head. Nevertheless, one can speak of a part of this outer world that belongs more to one's own self than the rest of the surroundings, just as one speaks of the head as an independent member in relation to the hands or feet.

[ 11 ] The soul calls a piece of the sensual outer world its body. The soul experiencing outside this body can just as well regard a part of the non-sensual external world as belonging to itself. If the human being penetrates to an observation of this area that is accessible to him beyond the world of the senses, he can speak of a sensually imperceptible body belonging to him. This body can be called the elementary or etheric body; whereby the word "etheric" should not include the subtle substance called "ether" by physics.

[ 12 ] Just as the mere consideration of man's relationship to the natural outside world gives rise to the concept of the physical body, which corresponds to the facts, so the wandering of the soul into areas that can be seen outside the sensory body leads to the recognition of an elementary or etheric or formative force body.