Vegetarianism without spiritual striving leads to disease. It's not a matter of back to nature but of through nature to the spirit.
It's true that meditation and concentration exercises will be the main thing for our spiritual striving, but when the elaboration of the astral body begins, the food that an esoteric eats will be of some importance.
It's especially important to avoid alcohol in every form. The bad effect of alcohol on the brain function has been scientifically shown, and knowledge of spiritual things is made completely impossible through its use. It's inadvisable to eat meat and fish.
Mushrooms are very harmful; they contain hindering lunar forces, and everything that arose on the old Moon signifies rigidification. Likewise legumes aren't very advisable because their nitrogen pollutes the etheric body. Proteins make mastery of sexual passions difficult. Sugar promotes independence, and should be avoided by egotistical people.
People who tend towards envy, deceit and bad will should avoid cucurbits and vine plants in general. The sweet, intoxicating aroma of melons darkens clear, intellectual consciousness and should be avoided by emotional people. Apples intensify the urge to dominate in some people and often lead to rudeness and brutality. The high iron content in cherries and strawberries isn't good for everyone.
If someone wants to undergo training in thinking, he mainly needs a well-constructed, healthy brain apparatus. Since present-day parents seldom give their children such well-built brains, one needs help to strengthen one's brain apparatus. And here it's mainly filberts that supply the brain-building substance. All other nuts are of less value and peanuts should be avoided altogether. Milk butter is the best fat. Coffee supports logical thinking, but doesn't make one a logical thinker by itself. Drinking too much coffee leads to hysteria in people who don't think much. One can get good ideas by drinking tea or by doing special exercises.
It's especially important for an esoteric to lead a life of moderation. An ancient sage said: Moderation purifies feelings, awakens ability, cheers one up and strengthens memory; the soul loses most of its earthy weight and thereby enjoys greater freedom. A man wouldn't be able to generate productive thoughts if he ate too much and too often, because his forces would be used in digestion, and there wouldn't be any left for thinking. Schiller, Shakespeare and many other writers lived on very little food. The mind is never so clear as after long fasting. The greatest saints lived on fruit, bread and water, and no miracles were ever done on a full stomach.
When a man works on himself he harmonizes his temperaments, but until then a melancholic pupil should eat fruit, so that its sun forces permeate the solidifying and rigidifying element in melancholics. Phlegmatics shouldn't eat black roots (Schwarzwurzel) because they would only increase his inner love of ease. Whereas a sanguine would benefit by eating root vegetables. One could almost say: A sanguine must be fettered to his physical body by food, otherwise he might fly away. The ego is predominant in cholerics, so they should avoid hot spices and stimulating food.
A master doesn't need solid food, and temperaments no longer influence or control him. He uses the choleric temperament to do his magic deeds, he lets the things of the physical world pass by him like a sanguine, he'll behave like a phlegmatic in his enjoyment of life and he'll brood about his spiritual findings and experiences like a melancholic. But it'll take us awhile to get that far, so we should try to bring our whole life into harmony with our spiritual striving. You only get as much out of life as you put into it.
WHEN Isis was published, Vera Jelihovsky became very concerned about her sister Helena, who was writing in a manner that would have been impossible some years previously. She could not understand how HPB had acquired such knowledge, which had led to high praise from the American and British Press. There were rumors that the source of knowledge was "sorcery", and this terrified the family. Indeed, Vera wrote her sister imploring an explanation. HPB answered:
"Do not be afraid that I am off my head. All that I can say is that someone positively inspires me – ... more than this: someone enters me. It is not I who talk and write: it is something within me, my higher and luminous Self, that thinks and writes for me. Do not ask me, my friend, what I experience, because I could not explain it to you clearly. I do not know myself! The one thing I know is that now, when I am about to reach old age, I have become a sort of storehouse of somebody else’s knowledge... Someone comes and envelops me as a misty cloud and all at once pushes me out of myself, and then I am not "I" any more – Helena Petrovna Blavatsky – but someone else. Someone strong and powerful, born in a totally different region of the world; and as to myself it is almost as if I were asleep, or lying by not quite conscious, – not in my own body but close by, held only by a thread which ties me to it."
-Letters of H.P. Blavatsky, Letter I
In 1865, while living in the Caucasus, HPB had also undergone a similar experience. Sinnett told how Madame Blavatsky described the process:
"Whenever I was called by name, I opened my eyes upon hearing it, and was myself, my own personality in every particular. As soon as I was left alone, however, I relapsed into my usual, half-dreamy condition, and became somebody else (who, namely, Mme. B. will not tell). (...) When awake, and myself, I remembered well who I was in my second capacity, and what I had been and was doing."
-Sinnett 1886, 147-8
HPB also described to her sister the process by which this "somebody" inhabited her body. She explained that this duality had been taking place since the time when her leg had almost been amputated, when she had been completely healed by a negro, at the request of his "Sahib":
"He has cured me entirely. And just about this time I have begun to feel a very strange duality. Several times a day I feel that besides me there is someone else, quite separable from me, present in my body. I never lose the consciousness of my own personality; what I feel is as if I were keeping silent and the other one – the lodger who is in me – were speaking with my tongue. (...) But what’s the use of talking about it? It’s enough to drive one mad. I try to throw myself into the part and to forget the strangeness of my situation. This is no mediumship, and by no means an impure power; for that, it has too strong an ascendancy over us all, leading us into better ways. No devil would act like that. ‘Spirits’, maybe? But if it comes to that, my ancient ‘spooks’ dare not approach me any more. It’s enough for me to enter the room where a séance is being held to stop all kinds of phenomena at once, especially materializations. Ah no, this is altogether of a higher order! But phenomena of another sort take place more and more frequently under the direction of my No. 2."
-Letters of HP Blavatsky, Letter I
To her aunt Nadya, she reaffirmed both the cure and the duality that she was experiencing:
"When my leg had to be operated (they wanted to operate when the gangrene was developing), the "host" healed me. He was all the time standing near an old negro and he put a little white dog on my leg. Do you remember I wrote to you about this incident? Now he will soon take me and Olcott and several others to India forever, only we must first organize the Society in London. Whether he occupies some other bodies than mine, I do not know. But I know that when he is not here – sometimes for many days – I often hear his voice and answer him "through the sea"; Olcott and others also often see his shadow, sometimes it is solid like a living form, often like smoke; still more often not seen but felt.
"I am learning only now to leave my body; to do it alone I am afraid, but with him I am afraid of nothing."
-HPB Speaks I, 224
John King – HPB’s "Sahib"
It is important here to note that HPB told her aunt and her sister that this "somebody", "host", "No. 2", or "Sahib" – the one who entered her body, that made her lead a double life, that taught her to leave her body, and in whose presence she was "afraid of nothing" – had also been responsible for curing her leg!
Therefore, the "host" or "Sahib" was John King – her "only friend", to whom she was indebted "for the radical change in my ideas of life, my efforts and so on", the one who "has transformed" her (Solovyoff, 247). When we see John King in the role of HPB’s instructor, in charge of her training and development of her powers, we begin to understand better the debt Madame Blavatsky recognized.
In addition to being a member of the Hierarchy with this specific role of training and instructing HPB in the Occult Sciences, John King was to a great extent the author of the message HPB was bringing to the world, at least during the initial phase of her public work. As quoted above, HPB said that "It is not I who talk and write: it is something within me (...) The one thing I know is that now, when I am about to reach old age, I have become a sort of storehouse of somebody else’s knowledge".
-Letters of HP Blavatsky, Letter I
Phillip Ball-
The more we get to know about the molecular machinery of the cell, the more we realise that it could not function in any liquid except water. No other liquid has a structure as subtle as that of water (even though some other compounds can form hydrogen bonds), and this structure seems to be essential for the kind of delicate chemistry that makes life possible. Even if alien organisms use molecules other than proteins and DNA, it's hard to see how they could avoid being comparably complex - and how, therefore, they could relinquish the need for an active, sympathetic solvent and mediator like water.
In the early twentieth century, an American biochemist named Lawrence Henderson argued that water seems so beautifully and uniquely suited for supporting life that it is hard not to perceive it as designed for this purpose. Henderson did not know about the fine details of how water gives a helping hand to the molecules of life (although he would have been quite delighted if he had). But he could see that the many 'anomalous' properties of water already known made it an incomparable 'matrix' for life. The large heat capacity, which helps the oceans maintain a steady temperature, does just the same thing for organisms (which are, remember, mostly water)- it is perfect for temperature regulation. Lawrence pointed out that another method of heat regulation is evaporation: when liquid water changes to water vapour, it imbibes a great deal of energy (more than other liquids). This provides a way to prevent overheating, and it is why we sweat. Lakes can stay at a constant temperature under intense sunlight for the same reason: as water evaporates from the surface, it is rather as if the lake is sweating.
Henderson collected together many other examples of the way water seems fine-tuned to support life. Its unusually large surface tension, for instance, means that water is pulled up through the empty pores and channels in soil by capillary action, making it accessible to plants growing at the surface even if the water table is several feet lower than the roots. Henderson believed that water was uniquely 'fit' in Darwin's sense: it was perfectly adapted to sustain life. Thus he believed that evolution of organisms - survival of the fittest, as the rather crude caricature of those times expressed it- takes place in a 'fit' environment. 'Water, of its very nature', he said, 'as it occurs automatically in the process of cosmic evolution, is fit, with a fitness no less marvelous and varied than that fitness of the organism which has been won by the process of adaptation in the course of organic evolution.' Henderson considered that carbon compounds are also remarkably and uniquely attuned to serve as the building blocks of life- that carbon in some sense makes life inevitable. 'The biologist', he concluded, 'may now rightly regard the universe in its very essence as biocentric.'
“Know thyself.”....the most dangerous thing in the realm of knowledge is to grasp these words erroneously and today this occurs only too frequently. Many people construe these words to mean that they should no longer look about the physical world, but should gaze into their own inner being and seek there for everything spiritual. This is a very mistaken understanding of the saying, for that is not at all what it means.
We must clearly understand that true higher knowledge is also an evolution from one standpoint, which the human being has attained, to another which he had not reached previously. If a person practices self-knowledge only by brooding upon himself, he sees only what he already possesses. He thereby acquires nothing new, but only knowledge of his own lower self in the present meaning of the word. This inner nature is only one part that is necessary for knowledge. The other part that is necessary must be added. Without the two parts, there is no real knowledge. By means of his inner nature, he can develop organs through which he can gain knowledge. But just as the eye, as an external sense organ, would not perceive the sun by gazing into itself, but only by looking outward at the sun, so must the inner perceptive organs gaze outwardly, in other words, gaze into an external spiritual in order actually to perceive.
The concept “Knowledge” had a much deeper, a more real meaning in those ages when spiritual things were better understood than at present. Read in the Bible the words, “Abraham knew his wife!” or this or that Patriarch “knew his wife.” One does not need to seek very far in order to understand that by this expression fructification is meant. When one considers the words, “Know thyself,” in the Greek, they do not mean that you stare into your own inner being, but that you fructify yourself with what streams into you from the spiritual world. “Know thyself” means: Fructify thyself with the content of the spiritual world!
-Lecture 12, Gospel of John, Rudolf Steiner
There are seven degrees in the holy sphere
That girdles the outer skies;
There seven hues in the atmosphere
Of the Spirit Paradise;
And the seven lamps burn bright and clear
In the mind, the heart and the eyes
Of the Angel-spirits from every world
That ever and ever arise.
There are seven ages the Angels know
In the courts of Spirit Heaven;
And seven joys through the spirit flow
From the morn of the heart till even;
Seven curtains of light wave to and fro
Where the seven great trumpets the Angels blow,
And the throne of God hath a seven-fold glow,
And the Angel hosts are seven.
And a spiral winds from the worlds to the suns,
And every star that shines
In the path of degrees for ever runs,
And the spirit octave climbs;
And a sevenfold heaven round every one
In the spiral order twines.
There are seven links from God to man,
There are seven links and a threefold span,
And seven spheres in the great degree
Of one created immensity.
There are seven octaves of spirit love
In the heart, the mind, and the heavens above,
And seven degrees in the frailest thing,
Though it hath but a day for its blossoming.
- Thomas Lake Harris
