עברית "Our heart has changed; we no longer bear the same heart in our chest. Our physical heart has grown harder, and our etheric heart, more mobile. We must find access to our supersensible hearts". (Rudolf Steiner, Lecture to young people, 20.7. 1924, GA 217a)
"The more the rhythmic etheric cognitive activity is expanded and transferred from the head to the heart, the more we can use the heart as an organ of imaginative cognition as well. Then in certain graceful moments we can actually experience, through the etheric heart, how the etheric world's pulse and breathing becomes human. This is one of the most beautiful and rewarding experiences in modern spiritual research. In one and the same moment of life, we experience how the human breathing, pulsing and circulating rhythmic system synchronizes in real time with the etheric world's heart pulse and breathing".
Cognitive Yoga: Making Yourself a New Etheric Body and Individuality
From Chapter 6: Etherization of Smell
7th step: Etheric heart work
The more the rhythmic etheric cognitive activity is expanded and transferred from the head to the heart, the more we can use the heart as an organ of imaginative cognition as well. Then in certain graceful moments we can actually experience, through the etheric heart, how the etheric world's pulse and breathing becomes human. This is one of the most beautiful and rewarding experiences in modern spiritual research. In one and the same moment of life, we experience how the human breathing, pulsing and circulating rhythmic system (that includes all the rhythmic processes and functions of the whole body), synchronizes in real time with the etheric world's heart pulse and breathing.
As described above, it is first through the liberation of the etheric brain from the physical brain that world consciousness and human self-consciousness light up in an intensive etheric essence exchange. The two-petalled lotus flower with its etheric extensions becomes the centre of the new etheric human-world brain, through which the united human-world `I' lights up in the most lucid world-self- consciousness. Through this etheric essence exchange, the world becomes self-conscious through the human and the human becomes world conscious through the world. The repeated rhythmizing of this essence exchange makes the etheric brain into an organ of etheric rhythmic cognitive breathing: the knowledge-creating organ of the new yoga. When this organ matures and becomes fully operative, with the third eye as its cognitive centre, it interacts and converses with the radiations streaming upward from the whole body on the one hand, and with the etheric world on the other. It answers the bodily radiations by connecting them with the macrocosmic etheric stream and lets the macrocosmic stream descend deeper towards them, and in this descent, it meets them halfway and focuses its activity in the etheric heart region.
There, in and around the physical heart and lungs and the chest as a whole, a new rhythmic function is established in the etheric body. This organ connects and regulates the inhalation and exhalation of the world- human life streams through it rhythmical movements, streams, and radiations. It becomes a conscious rhythmic system of forces, responsible for the vibrantly living and mutually enhancing breathing relationships between the etheric world and the human etheric body. (This occurs via the astral centre and etheric forces of the larynx, which have an important formative function, that help consolidate and form the etheric currents that flow from the head to the heart and back, about which more will be reported later.)
The more the rhythmic etheric cognitive activity is expanded and transferred from the head to the heart, the more we can use the heart as an organ of imaginative cognition as well. Then in certain graceful moments we can actually experience, through the etheric heart, how the etheric world's pulse and breathing becomes human. This is one of the most beautiful and rewarding experiences in modern spiritual research. In one and the same moment of life, we experience how the human breathing, pulsing and circulating rhythmic system (that includes all the rhythmic processes and functions of the whole body), synchronizes in real time with the etheric world's heart pulse and breathing. (We can only experience it consciously for single moments; otherwise we would be totally overwhelmed, set ablaze and consumed by these divine fires. But physical minutes are eternities for real etheric experience and cognition.) We can also say: the etheric world of living and formative cosmic forces in-breathes us and takes us out and over into itself, while it out-breathes its etheric heart pulse and breathing rhythm and embodies them in our subtle bodies. In our own subtle bodies, we experience how the etheric world expresses its heart pulse and breathing rhythm when it builds, shapes and organizes the human body from conception, pregnancy and birth (and especially in the 2nd seven-year period, between the ages of 7 and 14), from the whole living, ensouled and spiritual cosmic circumference. And becoming part of the etheric world's heart pulse and breathing rhythm, outside the physical body, we experience how the human heartbeat and human breathing, to the extent that it has been liberated from the luciferic-ahrimanic influences, synchronizes and harmonizes with the etheric heartbeat and breathing of the cosmos, and we feel that we are drawing closer to the spiritual heart source (the etheric Christ) of universal life. When we look back at our body from outside, we realize that this body- in its true, always pulsating, vibrating, breathing, etheric life and form- is an individualized embodiment and formation of the world's etheric heart pulse and breathing. Its forms and functions are embodiments of the all- embracing, pulsing, surging and weaving cosmic life, that remains unconscious in daily life and cognition, and come to consciousness through cognitive yoga's etherized sense- and thinking breathing. Furthermore, we experience that now, breathing in and out the real living world forces, being breathed ourselves in and out of our body through the world's etheric heart pulse and breathing rhythm, our whole being becomes a singular heart and pulse beat in the circulation and pulsation of the cosmic heart, and we begin to individuate it closer to their source. And while an actual merging with the cosmic source of life must remain at this stage a future goal, a devoted feeling of loving trust imbues us, carried by the pulsating forces of the life source itself, that such merging is essentially attainable by the human being in our time.
At the same time, when we experience this nearness to the cosmic source, we also feel the awakening of the same forces of life, healing and resurrection in the depth of our own body. We feel that, working from the centre of our etheric being, and intensifying the mutual breathing with the etheric world, will make it possible to merge the cosmic Christ forces from the whole cosmic circumference with the pristine forces of life and resurrection active in the deeper unconscious regions of our soul and body. Now, since the etheric body is liberated and integrated with the etheric world from the head to the heart, it gives us the needed etheric forces to cross this lower bodily threshold in a fully conscious way and fully unite the etheric Christ forces that work in the universe with those in the depth of the human etheric and physical bodies.