"I am the light of the world"

 

"I am the light of the world: he that followeth me shall not walk in darkness, but shall have the light of life."

—John 8:12

Rudolf Steiner:

But much more significant than all this is the experience which the student has during his esoteric or theosophical development with respect to his sense organs. Now we know that these sense organs must really be stripped off when the pupil undergoes an esoteric development; they must be silent, as it were. The physical sense organs thereby feel that during esoteric development they are condemned, as it were, to inactivity; they are disconnected. Now when they are disconnected as physical sense-organs, something else comes in their place. The student first becomes gradually conscious of the sense-organs as distinct worlds which penetrate him. He learns to feel the eye, the ears, even the sense of warmth, as if they had been bored into him. But what he thus learns to feel are not the physical sense organs, but the etheric forces, the forces of the etheric body, which act constructively upon the sense organs. So that when he shuts off the activity of the senses, he sees the nature of these sense-organs appearing as so many etheric organisations penetrating him. It is extremely interesting.

To the extent that during his esoteric development the student shuts off his eyes, for example, and no longer thinks of physical sight, to that extent does he learn to recognise something that penetrates his own organisation like organisms of light, he then really learns to recognise that the eyes have gradually come into being through the working of the inner forces of light upon our organism. For during the time that he withdraws from all the activity of the physical eyes, he feels the field of vision to be permeated by the etheric light-forces which organise the eyes. This is a peculiar phenomenon: when one shuts off the eyes themselves, one learns through them to know the forces of light. All physical theories are nothing as compared to the knowledge of the inner nature of light and its activity which the student experiences when he has accustomed himself to eliminate the physical seeing-power of the eyes, and gradually becomes able, in place of the physical use of the eyes, to perceive the inner nature of the etheric forces of light.

Footnote on pp. 64-65 of the 1997 Anthroposophic Press edition of The Effects of Esoteric Development:

Cf. Anthroposophy (A Fragment), Anthroposophic Press, Hudson, NY, 1996, p. 141f: "For an interpretation of the sense of sight, the inversion of the experience of taste should be considered.... Unlike the effect of an outer substance that we experience as taste, the situation here would have to be such that this being would radiate taste toward itself, from within the human being. Just as the human being brings about a change in the substance in the case of taste, so this outer entity would have to undertake a change in the human interior. Such a change, however, is present in inner life processes, in the process of warming, for example....

"However, this warming would not proceed like an outer warmth process, because its substance is not outer warmth but something identical in content to the sense experience of sight. We see that in this warming, occurring through the activity that radiates outward from within the human being and founded in the color of the presumed entity, there lives the inner nature of light itself. Not the experience of sight, but, lying behind this experience of sight, the inner nature of light kindles a warming that lives in the organ-forming force of the sense of sight, just as the substance, interacting with the sense of taste, lives in the experience of taste."

Source: March 22, 1913

The quintessential Maha-Vakya: "ES IST ICH"

Rudolf Steiner: "In older languages the self was not specifically designated, for it was contained within the verb. The ‘I’ was not directly mentioned. The verb was used to show what one was doing, and this was what indicated that one was speaking about oneself. There was no name for the self. It only came about in later times that the human being gave his self a name, and in our German language that name [ich] contains the initials of Jesus Christ, which is an important symbolic fact." [Iesus CHristus: ICH]

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