The movements in the etheric body are very different and versatile. It is significant, however, that the movement which takes place in the flowing of ether always develops to its expression in the polarity of dying and rising up.
These three exercises, alongside other observational exercises, which will be introduced later, can represent a first aid for spiritual perception. The exercises are conceived in such a way that they enrich the normal, previously automated and learnt sense process through an awareness new to the soul and corresponding to spiritual law. The thinking and feeling of someone who wants to learn spiritual seeing must attain a transformation. Were the practitioner to observe a plant with his usual patterns of thought, and wanted to see in it the ether, he would overly strain both his will to think and also his senses. However, by becoming increasingly conscious in the soul of the laws in world creation as they are truly given, and on the strength of this raising his thoughts to a new level, the person establishes in his soul-constitution the foundations on which he can surmise, sense and ultimately actually perceive those processes which work free from body and matter.
The usual sensory-experience does not really perceive the death process and the resurrection process, and that is why this polarity of etheric growth or etheric flowing are so difficult to think. For all observational exercises, therefore, the thinking must be trained to that level in which it becomes conscious of apparent contradictions between movements and counter-movements, between centring and streaming out, between ascending and falling, between peripheral action and depth effect.
The drawing shows on the one hand a point, a centre, on the other hand a burgeoning periphery. The periphery contributes to the point and the point, without coming into contact with the other lines, contributes to the burgeoning dynamic.
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