The Goal of Yoga: To Become Anthroposophia

 

Rudolf Steiner:

... Let us assume that someone really takes the Yoga path. He will rise at length from his ordinary consciousness to a higher state of consciousness, which includes not only the ego that lies between the limits of birth and death but what passes from one incarnation to the next. The soul wakens to know itself in an expanded ego. It grows into a wider consciousness. The soul goes through a process that is essentially an everyday process but that is not experienced fully in our everyday life because man goes to sleep every night. The sense world fades out around him and he becomes unconscious of it. Now for every human soul the possibility exists of letting this world of sense vanish from his consciousness as it does when he goes to sleep, and then to live in higher worlds as in an absolute reality. Thereby man rises to a high level of consciousness. We shall still have to speak of Yoga, and also of the modern exercises that make this possible. But when man gradually attains to where he no longer, consciously, lives and feels and knows in himself, but lives and feels and knows together with the whole Earth, then he grows into a higher level of consciousness where the things of the sense world vanish for him as they do in sleep.

However, before man can attain this level he must be able to identify himself with the soul of his planet, Earth. We shall see that this is possible. We know that man not only experiences the rhythm of sleeping and waking but other rhythms of the Earth as well — of summer and winter. When one follows the path of Yoga or goes through a modern occult training, he can lift himself above the ordinary consciousness that experiences the cycles of sleeping and waking, summer and winter. He can learn to look at himself from outside. He becomes aware of being able to look back at himself just as he ordinarily looks at things outside himself. Now he observes the things, the cycles in external life. He sees alternating conditions. He realizes how his body, so long as he is outside himself, takes on a form similar to that of the Earth in summer with all its vegetation. What material science discovers and calls nerves he begins to perceive as a sprouting forth of something plant-like at the time of going to sleep, and when he returns again into everyday consciousness he feels how this plant-like life shrinks together again and becomes the instrument for thinking, feeling, and willing in his waking consciousness. He feels his going out from the body and returning into it analogous to the alternation of summer and winter on the Earth. In effect he feels something summer-like in going to sleep and something winter-like in waking up — not as one might imagine, the opposite way round. From this moment onward he learns to understand what the spirit of the Earth is, and how it is asleep in summer and awake in winter, not vice versa. He realizes the wonderful experience of identifying himself with the spirit of the Earth. From this moment he says to himself, “I live not only inside my skin, but as a cell lives in my bodily organism so do I live in the organism of the Earth. The Earth is asleep in summer and awake in winter as I am asleep and awake in the alternation of night and day. And as the cell is to my consciousness, so am I to the consciousness of the Earth.”

The path of Yoga, especially in its modern sense, leads to this expansion of consciousness, to the identification of our own being with a more comprehensive being. We feel ourselves interwoven with the whole Earth. Then as men we no longer feel ourselves bound to a particular time and place, but we feel our humanity such as it has developed from the very beginning of the Earth. We feel the age-long succession of our evolutions through the course of the evolution of the Earth. Thus Yoga leads us on to feel our at-one-ment with what goes from one incarnation to another in the Earth's evolution....

 

Source: The Occult Significance of the Bhagavad Gita. Lecture 2

http://martyrion.blogspot.com/2010/12/occult-significance-of-bhagavad-gita_09.html



At-one-ment

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Ultimate Mystery