Meditative Exercises: Piercing the Veil of Maya

From the notes of a participant in an Esoteric Lesson given by Rudolf Steiner:
     When we examine our exercises, we will find that they are so formed that they never call on human egotism. Many people find this unpleasant. We do not meditate on "love" or "truth," because that would only foster egotism. However, in spite of that, such concepts like "light," "warmth"--which are found in our exercises--are things of the physical world which we know at first only through the physical senses. All of this is a gift from Lucifer. For this reason, after the meditation we should drop the content--empty the soul completely of these impressions. By doing this we refuse everything that comes from Lucifer and Ahriman, and we prepare ourselves for the purely spiritual world. Then the world of the senses disappears, and the spiritual world opens up before us. This spiritual world has nothing in common with the physical world.
     Ordinary human beings are like the chick that would regard its eggshell as the real world. If the chick could see within its eggshell, this eggshell would not look small to the chick, but quite enlarged; it would look as large as our world looks to us. The content within the shell would look like the whole world. This is the way we see our eggshell: our aura that is spread out around us as the blue vault of the heavens. If we break through our shell, then the Sun and Moon become dark, the stars fall to the Earth, and in their place the spiritual world spreads itself out.
     Human beings live in their eggshell--their aura. The Elohim gave us our aura, and through the Fall this aura became like a shell around us. We are within it, just like the chick is in the egg. The sky and the stars are our boundary, and we must use our soul strength to break through the boundary, just as the chick has to use its own strength to break though its shell. Then we achieve entrance in to a new world, just as the chick has a new world before it when it has crawled out of the egg....
     The eggshell is: Ex Deo Nascimur. In order to break though this shell and also take something with us into the spiritual world, we must bring with us what penetrates into our shell from the outer world--that is, from the spiritual world--and what is common to us all. This is Christ. Thus, we speak: In Christo Morimur and hope that, when we have broken through the shell with Christ's help, we will be resurrected again: Per Spiritum Sanctum Reviviscimus.





Source: Esoteric Lessons 1913-1923, pp. 163-164