What do we do then when we meditate?

Building the New Etheric Body and Individuality

"What do we do then when we meditate? We form something new, we create something new in the cosmos. We imprint a new etheric body upon the cosmos".

 (Rudolf Steiner, notes from Esoteric Lessons, GA 266c)

"We must go forward to a time when we find, first of all, Christ as an Etheric Being, and in His train, more and more etheric realities. These etheric realities will then have the strength still to make true individuals out of us".

(Rudolf Steiner lecture of 7th November 1915, GA 254)

Through decades long spiritual work, which started at the end of the 70' of last century, it was possible to use the instructions given in the Philosophy of Freedom and Knowledge of the Higher Worlds to build the new etheric body, and the emerging being of Spirit Self through the transformation of the astral body, following Rudolf Steiner's esoteric guidance.

InChapter 7 of my book, Cognitive Yoga, ‘Birth of a new etheric body’, I describe how the mutual exchange between the etheric world and etheric body liberates the purest and most productive etheric forces preserved and protected since the earliest childhood of humanity. The fructification between the purest etheric forces of the world and the body conceives a new etheric offspring, which becomes the foundation of an independent spiritual life in the etheric world.

In this chapter we can read, for example, the following passage:

If we put it in more pictorial language, we can say that the guardian of the lower world (the ever-awake dragon the keeps vigil over the dormant eternal, youthful fountain of life) demands a key or password from the whole upper etherization process streaming down from the head and heart. It demands this key to safeguard us and the treasure alike from a premature crossing of the threshold and a misuse of the most precious forces of humanity and the cosmos. Not only are the highest and purest forces protected from our misuse there, but we are also protected from our wildest desires and evil inclinations that lurk in the same depths and from which our daily consciousness is protected. When the dragon is pacified it can for the first time go to sleep, having fulfilled its mission, while the sleeping beauty (the virgin, paradisal, life forces) and the fountain of eternal youth (the forces of resurrection), can wake up to new and conscious etheric life.

The result is a harmonized, regulated ‘mutual agreement’ between the real etheric world forces flowing into the body through the etherization of the sense-breathing and inhalation, and the pure forces of the lower bodies. This agreement works through and beyond the bodily threshold of egotistic individuation. Once this mutual exchange of etheric forces and mutual etheric conversation is established, the previously purified and extracted world forces flowing through the higher middle senses of sight, hearing and warmth and the lower middle senses of smell, touch and taste, find their counterparts in the pristine bodily organs and processes. The merging together of all the forces extracted from the purification of the higher and lower sense perceptions, with the etheric support of the etherized thinking, now resonate with these pristine bodily forces, increasing the world-human power to achieve maximal bodily impact. Due to the moral purification we have undergone, the danger of their egotistic misuses has been sufficiently overcome. Thus this ‘mutual agreement’ means that the inhibiting luciferic-ahrimanic barrier can be lifted and can become transparent, and the pure forces coming up from the lower body can meet and merge with their cosmic equivalent from the world, through the transformed senses, brain and heart.

Cognitive Yoga: Making Yourself a New Etheric Body and Individuality

From Chapter 7: Birth of a New Etheric Body