Originally posted in German on 9th April 2021
For meditation a specific practice that is filled with thought content can be chosen, or an unspecific, purely calming focus that aims more at the goal of becoming empty and free from all intellectual and emotional influences. Today, the term meditation often means relaxation exercises and sometimes uses music or given verbal formulae so that the mind finds peace. However, a careful distinction must be made between relaxation, establishing concentration and meditation because if this distinction is missing individuals only enter a kind of comfortable inner-spectrum of their existing, unconscious body-soul relationship. Without clearly chosen content they do not experience a real expansion of the consciousness with spiritual possibilities.
The meditation proposed here is therefore based on very carefully contemplated thought content. It is spiritually evident thought content, not intellectual, quickly chosen guiding principles. Through this the meditation becomes concrete, and objective with regard to the thoughts. A becoming free from all subjective unrest, emotional moods and collective suggestions should and must be increasingly pursued while developing a concentration on one thought, as the goal of this objective, thought based meditation leads to an in-depth bringing into being of a real spiritual content.
The following sentences can serve as meditation content:
“People are capable of logical and independent thinking. Reason1)The modern definition of Vernunft: “The mental ability to recognise, judge and oversee correlations and thus to behave sensibly and appropriately” DWDS
Etymological interpretation of the term “Vernunft”: The noun in old High German firnumft (9th century), “activity of examining, hearing, comprehending, sensual perceiving, understanding, insight, cleverness”, is an abstract development of the prefix verb “vernehmen” (examine) in its old meaning “To conceive, to understand”, means “the right way to comprehend, grasp, assimilate.” DWDSThe word Vernunft can be translated into English with the words (in order of frequency): reason, sanity, prudence, rationality, faculty of reason, common sense.
The word “reason” in the Oxford English Dictionary is interpreted as: 1: a cause, explanation, or justification for an action or event or 2:the power of the mind to think, understand, and form judgements logically. as a capacity in contrast to fear and instinct is its essential characteristic. I observe people according to their potential for object-related, fear-free and rationally oriented thinking. That dimension, which finds its human expression in rational and objectively logical thinking, is a small copy of the universal logos or the universal-cosmic reason. It appears like a sun in greenish tones in the aura.
It is unreasonable to force vaccination on humanity when its effects cannot be assessed and its efficiency appears questionable. Completely voluntary action without restriction and disadvantageous classification for those who choose not to be vaccinated is essential for the preservation of civil peace. Humanity supported by reason will prevail and not the non-humanity with its grotesque manifestation of unreason.”2) “For every moral judgement (including Religion) people need reason and cannot rely on statutes and established customs.” Immanuel Kant, Anthropology from a practical point of view. 3) “These laws, which govern the development of the higher organs of the spirit, are none other than the laws of sound reason and morality of the physical world. The spiritual self matures in the physical self as a child in the mother’s womb. The child’s health depends upon the normal functioning of natural laws in the mother’s womb. The constitution of the spiritual self is similarly conditioned by the laws of common intelligence and reason that govern physical life. No one can give birth to a soundly constituted higher self whose life in thought and feeling, in the physical world, is not sound and healthy.” Rudolf Steiner, Knowledge of the higher Worlds. How is it achieved? GA10. Classic translation by Rudolf Steiner Press p.156
A meditation generates energy, when it carried out in pure and free thought
The secret of meditation lies in the purity of its content and in the way this is thought, and advocated with certitude. Pure thought is like a sun that emits warmth and light, out of itself, without outer influence. This ideal corresponds to the dimension that in yoga is termed buddhi,4) Buddhi is one of the three spiritual levels of consciousness manas, buddhi and atman. In general one can speak of buddhi when the thinking penetrates to deeper perceptions and soul feelings, and recognises real connections. Buddhi is not based on spontaneous revelations that are without connections rooted in the consciousness, but on comprehensive, integral insights that do not stand alone. In general, it is already a very high level of knowledge and it transcends ordinary reasonful thinking. higher wisdom and intelligence. The thought or the content of the thought shines in fully conscious wisdom without disturbing distractions, irritations and emotionally bound desires. It comes to existence, to a given, real and conceived actuality, to presence, and thus to reality. The human being elevates the thought content to a pure, freely available and effective radiance.5) “In general buddhi consists of the already developed thinking with the strength to differentiate, the ability to judge, more deeply founded intelligence and opens up insights into the spiritual world. It is a limb of humanly developed consciousness on the path to spiritual integrity and wholeness.” Heinz Grill, Die 7 Lebensjahrsiebte und die 7 Chakren, Synergia-Verlag, S. 196-198 (not translated)
The pure and effective content of meditation, that leads to a successful radiance, can be understood more easily if a person studies an opposing or, so to speak, unsuccessful form of meditation and through wisdom learns to eliminate it. Sentences like the following cannot lead to successful radiance, because they are tainted by the fixed will-component and its emotional attachment:
“I want people to come to reason and stop vaccinating”
This sentence is tainted by the emotionally bound and ultimately vain volition of the ego. Although it is a natural reaction of the human consciousness to conceive a corrective opposite to misguided actions, through intellectual opinions all too quickly this consciousness becomes polarised and with this emotionally entangled. It is very strongly taken over by non-thought and bound experience as well as by the impulses of the will and also tends to be one-sided. At the same time a strong arrogance is visible in this sentence because one’s own I-self is led into a higher and better position than that of the other. By saying, “I want…”, the will becomes fixed and by saying, “…people to come to reason…” one puts oneself in a better and superior position and by saying that people should stop vaccinating, one states that it is fundamentally bad, one moralises or preaches.
The sentence, “People have the ability to think logically and independently”, is free from wilful grasping. One perceives a person as a spiritual creation and remains free from emotions. Also the following part of the meditation content is free from fear and wilful grasping, it shows instead solely a picture of what it is possible to observe:
“It is unreasonable to force vaccination on humanity when its effects cannot be assessed and its efficiency appears questionable.”
The distinction between pure thought and wilful or emotional grasping is very important for meditation
The Mote and the Beam
Another phrase that is often used today and that exhibits a typical fixation of the will without a real raised and clearly ordered pure thought is the following:
“I go to demonstrations because I want to wake people up.”
In this sentence what superior and arrogant position is hidden in relation to others, who, when the words are exactly analysed, are secretly made to look as if they do not recognise reality. Meditation must be free from judgments and positions. The content must reveal a reality that is completely free from the personal.
The following well known sentence out of the Sermon on the Mount shows the relationship of the unconscious bound will, which prevents objective thinking and far-reaching perception:
Or how can you say to your brother, ‘Let me remove the speck from your eye’; and look, a beam is in your own eye? Hypocrite! First remove the beam from your own eye, and then you will see clearly to remove the speck from your brother’s eye.
(Matthew 7,4-5)
For as long as the impulses of the will and personal emotions dominate the person, they carry, in a pictorial sense, a kind of darkening in their consciousness, and their eyes like to cling to the mistakes of others. Yet the relationship from person to person remains concealed. The real positions are shadowed, and the will impulse, which holds back the possible individual position of the consciousness, impedes the spiritual efficacy. For this reason people cannot meditate because they want something in the wrong way and thereby hold captive the actual object of their wanting, that is, the object of the meditation, the clear thought content.
Those who with good conscience identify the mistakes of the time, precisely through their beam that they still carry in their eye, in the sense of a spiritual position, remain as if without existence or without their own enduring and sustainable centre in the self. They are founded too much in the earthly and not in a spiritual thought-content. For this reason the gospel passage should not seem like a moralising evaluation, that essentially wants to deny individual people the right to give correction, but much more to warn of and characterise the conditions of the will in the inner structure. The beam in the eye pictorially shows that without a greater overarching, freer and purer view it is impossible for individuals to be able to correct their fellow human beings. It is a kind of karmic reality that arises through the involvement of the intellect with the impulses of the will and therefore does not grant a pure thought existence in the consciousness.6) Another example: The words of the doctor Winfried Stöcker, who developed an antigen vaccine, come across as distinct and relatively powerful. For example, he says in an interview:
“When the danger threatens and 100,000 human lives are threatened, one must not measure against the standards that were used in the past.”
“If you have laws like this that prevent people from getting a vaccine for this dangerous epidemic quickly enough at the right time, then you should immediately create a new law to make that possible.”
“You (Paul Ehrlich Institute) disregarded the doctor’s right, that allows me to treat my patients as I want without interference. I also didn’t put any drugs on the market, I only intended to conduct a study.” Stern-TV
Meditation therefore requires certitude, trust and a complete clarity towards a thought. After a certain period of engagement, practitioners experience with certainty that the thought content, which they think, free from a grasping of the will and rising emotions, expresses a real reality and this actually generates a warm light over their heads and moreover for their fellow human beings.
What force lives in this generated spiritual reality? As a rule people only accept the visible forces of the world as realities and believe only to the most extremely limited degree in those spiritual, fine radiating forces of thought. But these would be the most important creative forces, because they carry in their centre a life and a very enduring existence. In comparison people who have built up a good muscular strength only temporarily bring a strength into their actions and this can only be brought into effectiveness in the specific form in which they are active. The radiating force of the thought, by contrast, enables the resurrection of a sun-full consciousness and not only those that generate it experience finest changes in the room but even the fellow human beings soon notice a subtle truth-light and a subsequent subtle truth-soul-feeling.
When one thinks of a person and that they ought to come to reason, one thinks of them out of one’s wanting and to a certain extent oppresses them. When one observes them however and is accompanied by a still thought, that they are creatures gifted with reason, one leaves them free and experiences them with their counterparts in a fine light of truth. The spiritual world when one observes it as a great overarching entirety, rejoices in this activity.
Practical foundations for meditation
The thought-content for meditation must be taken literally, because following one’s whimsical inclinations one does not study this content objectively enough and tends therefore to inaccuracies and ultimately emotional evaluation. It is best if one learns the meditation sentences by heart, so that they are not only an exercise that lasts for ten minutes but are available throughout the whole day.
It may be beneficial to carry out a meditation like this at a specific time, for example at 9 p.m. Greater forces can be realised when a number of people direct themselves to this thought and even bring it forth at the same time by intensely thinking it with focused concentration.
For a successful meditation activity, the practitioner in any case, ought to make the distinction as to whether the thought is thought in purity and sun-full availability, or whether emotions and secret graspings of the will reflect into it. One could, for example, ask what the counter statement would be:
“It is reasonable that all people are vaccinated, because then there should not be any more corona infections.”7) The statement of Federal President Frank Walter Steinmeier can also be examined in a similar way with regard to the internal conditions of the will: “Vaccination is the most important step on our path out of the pandemic. So take advantage of the opportunities. Get involved!” AFP Germany
Practitioners, however, let this sentence, as it is, work on them. With sustained analysis they will inevitably notice that it is not a well considered and objectively valid thought, but an act of will motivated by fear.
Very often thoughts seem to appear at first glance to be very reasonable and even very humane and morally agreeable. They ought, however, to be closely scrutinized by those who meditate. In unseen ways fear creeps out of the vegetative regions of the organ realm of human existence up into the consciousness and secretly takes possession of the reason. The fears that develop from suggestion, take ways that creep in as quietly as cats who, on the twilight paths of their hunt, choose their victim. Human reason is the victim and it is because this has already occurred that the corona epidemic can infinitely unfold in many scenarios.
Therefore, it can in no way be said that it would be reasonable if all of humanity had to be vaccinated. Into the consciousness, which has to be formed from objective thoughts, unreason has already crept in, in the sense of a fear-impulse. Therefore, precisely because the capacity of the conscious power of reason is lacking, will-full desire with its fear-emotions can make use of reason and overturn it. Pictorially, one could say the dragon has gained the upper-hand.
When objective thoughts come into play, with a pure and natural radiation, better and worthier relationships develop among people. The difference is very large as to whether one regards one’s fellow human beings as unreasonable, insane, foolish or ignorant, or whether, in conversation, one naturally grants them a whole state of existence in the quiet of their souls and despite all shortcomings, attributes the quality of reason to all. One should not perceive people as they appear in a moment of crisis, but one ought to quietly think of them as they want to be or can become, according to their original dispositions and their education. Missionary grasping or self-righteous corrections must become restrained for this path of meditation.
Anmerkungen
| ⇑1 | The modern definition of Vernunft: “The mental ability to recognise, judge and oversee correlations and thus to behave sensibly and appropriately” DWDS Etymological interpretation of the term “Vernunft”: The noun in old High German firnumft (9th century), “activity of examining, hearing, comprehending, sensual perceiving, understanding, insight, cleverness”, is an abstract development of the prefix verb “vernehmen” (examine) in its old meaning “To conceive, to understand”, means “the right way to comprehend, grasp, assimilate.” DWDSThe word Vernunft can be translated into English with the words (in order of frequency): reason, sanity, prudence, rationality, faculty of reason, common sense. The word “reason” in the Oxford English Dictionary is interpreted as: 1: a cause, explanation, or justification for an action or event or 2:the power of the mind to think, understand, and form judgements logically. |
|---|---|
| ⇑2 | “For every moral judgement (including Religion) people need reason and cannot rely on statutes and established customs.” Immanuel Kant, Anthropology from a practical point of view. |
| ⇑3 | “These laws, which govern the development of the higher organs of the spirit, are none other than the laws of sound reason and morality of the physical world. The spiritual self matures in the physical self as a child in the mother’s womb. The child’s health depends upon the normal functioning of natural laws in the mother’s womb. The constitution of the spiritual self is similarly conditioned by the laws of common intelligence and reason that govern physical life. No one can give birth to a soundly constituted higher self whose life in thought and feeling, in the physical world, is not sound and healthy.” Rudolf Steiner, Knowledge of the higher Worlds. How is it achieved? GA10. Classic translation by Rudolf Steiner Press p.156 |
| ⇑4 | Buddhi is one of the three spiritual levels of consciousness manas, buddhi and atman. In general one can speak of buddhi when the thinking penetrates to deeper perceptions and soul feelings, and recognises real connections. Buddhi is not based on spontaneous revelations that are without connections rooted in the consciousness, but on comprehensive, integral insights that do not stand alone. In general, it is already a very high level of knowledge and it transcends ordinary reasonful thinking. |
| ⇑5 | “In general buddhi consists of the already developed thinking with the strength to differentiate, the ability to judge, more deeply founded intelligence and opens up insights into the spiritual world. It is a limb of humanly developed consciousness on the path to spiritual integrity and wholeness.” Heinz Grill, Die 7 Lebensjahrsiebte und die 7 Chakren, Synergia-Verlag, S. 196-198 (not translated) |
| ⇑6 | Another example: The words of the doctor Winfried Stöcker, who developed an antigen vaccine, come across as distinct and relatively powerful. For example, he says in an interview: “When the danger threatens and 100,000 human lives are threatened, one must not measure against the standards that were used in the past.” “If you have laws like this that prevent people from getting a vaccine for this dangerous epidemic quickly enough at the right time, then you should immediately create a new law to make that possible.” “You (Paul Ehrlich Institute) disregarded the doctor’s right, that allows me to treat my patients as I want without interference. I also didn’t put any drugs on the market, I only intended to conduct a study.” Stern-TV |
| ⇑7 | The statement of Federal President Frank Walter Steinmeier can also be examined in a similar way with regard to the internal conditions of the will: “Vaccination is the most important step on our path out of the pandemic. So take advantage of the opportunities. Get involved!” AFP Germany |