The meditation leads us through the elements and bodies to the warmth ether, where the ‘I’ acts in the will, and moral ideals enliven the organism. The meditation offers an opportunity to explore the etheric in Goethean research and to make the good effective as a creative force.
Rudolf Steiner gave the “Warmth Meditation” as a personal meditation to the young doctor Helene von Grunelius in the spring of 1923. Later, he gave it to individual doctors and medical students who wanted to further their education in anthroposophic medicine, deepen their esoteric knowledge, and gain access to additional sources of healing etheric forces. After the first medical course in 1920,1 the young doctors still had doubts about the spiritual scientific method of healing. They had difficulty combining the spiritual scientific view of human beings with the commonly taught natural scientific view. They had questions about diagnosis and therapy and how to apply this new knowledge in practice. Their desire for certainty is understandable in one who is responsible for sick people, but has perhaps only participated in two courses on medicine given by Rudolf Steiner. Madeleine van Deventer, a physician and later long-time director of what is now known as Klinik Arlesheim, organized—and inwardly, deeply supported—two medical courses in Dornach in 1924 (together with Helene von Grunelius). Decades later, van Deveter wrote down what Rudolf Steiner said to Helene von Grunelius before giving her the meditation: “That doesn’t matter; you will correct yourselves over time. You can also send me your notebooks. But if you want more ‘certainty,’ I can give you a meditation.” It was a “chain meditation,” not a “circle meditation.” He described it as the path the physician takes “to see the etheric Christ.”2
The physician and founder of the Camphill movement, Karl König, also gave this meditation to his collaborators, who were not doctors themselves but therapists and curative educators, in order to deepen their shared work. Even after Ita Wegman took up the leadership of the Medical Section after the Christmas Conference, she always asked Helene von Grunelius, with sincere respect and seriousness, for her permission when it came to passing on the meditation to someone else. This practice continued up until 1999, when the meditation was published for the first time. Today, it is available to the world in a booklet by Peter Selg that includes a description of its historical background. It has since been published in various places.3
Warmth Ether
The meditation begins with a preparatory question: “How do I find the good?” The contemplation then proceeds through the elements and bodies of the human organization. Ultimately, we find goodness only in the warmth ether of our body, where the ‘I’ works and realizes itself through the will. Only in the will can we find the good. And when, through this preparation, we find the good, this moral ideal enkindles the warmth organism in such a way that its stimulation and enlivening lead to further enlivening in the other levels of the human organization. This leads to changes of the light ether in the air organization, to changes of the sound ether in the fluid organization, and ultimately to changes of the life ether in the solid organization of the human being.4 “When the etheric body is re-enlivened, one sees the Christ.”5 This means that we become the supporting organ of the Christ experience “in his etheric body.”6
In certain contexts, this meditation can also help an esoterically deepened Goethean scientific approach. The ethers, with warmth as their starting point, have been a core question in the Natural Science Section of the School of Spiritual Science from the very beginning. However, in contrast to the Medical Section, the work of the Natural Science Section is to study life in outer nature, not inside human beings. To investigate the etheric in nature in a differentiated and, at the same time, deeply experiential way, we are called upon to see Christ in the etheric. To get there, we must discover the moral impulses behind the etheric in nature. This path was also described by Rudolf Steiner in the cycle The World of the Senses and the World of the Spirit.7
The Warmth of Moral Ideals
Our moral ideals, in particular, are of essential importance for the evolution of the Earth and the cosmos:
Here you can sense what life that is poured out into the world actually is. Where are the sources of life? They are present in what moral ideals stimulate us to say—when we allow ourselves to be imbued with moral ideals today, we carry life and sound and light out into the world and become world-creating. We perform the world-creating, and the source of this world-creating is the moral.8
According to the meditation, the good can only be found in the will, which proceeds from the human ‘I’ and works in the warmth ether of the human being. In Occult Science: An Outline,9 we read how warmth stands at the beginning of the whole evolution of the human being, the Earth, and the later-developing kingdoms of Nature. Warmth was poured into the physical world as a sacrifice of higher hierarchies, out of good intentions, from their moral sources. In our Goethean work, we need to reconnect with warmth in order to achieve good for the world today—including in the significance of natural scientific work for the world. But how? Those who practice a Goethean scientific approach must develop an intensity of will to empathize with another being, to immerse oneself in listening to the being and its development, to consciously observe this being with interest and devotion as it undergoes metamorphosis, and to arrive at a differentiated etheric view of its nature. Then we can become an instrument for seeing the etheric Christ in living nature.
The “Warmth Meditation” can be found in Rudolf Steiner, Mantric Sayings: Meditations 1903–1925 (Great Barrington, MA: SteinerBooks, 2015).
Translation Joshua Kelberman
Illustration Design team of the Weekly
Footnotes
- Rudolf Steiner, Introducing Anthroposophical Medicine, CW 312 (Hudson, NY: SteinerBooks, 2010), lectures in Dornach, March 21–April 9, 1920.
- Madeleine Van Deventer, Die anthroposophisch-medizinische Bewegung in den verschiedenen Etappen ihrer Entwicklung [The anthroposophical medical movement in the various stages of its development] (Dornach: Verlag am Goetheanum: 1992), p. 24.
- Peter Selg, The Warmth Meditation: A Path to the Good in the Service of Healing (Hudson, NY: SteinerBooks, 2016); see also Medical Section at the Goetheanum School of Spiritual Science, Rudolf Steiner Meditations on Warmth (Dornach: Verlag am Goetheanum, 2017).
- Rudolf Steiner, Universal Spirituality and Human Physicality. Bridging the Divide: The Search for the New Isis and the Divine Sophia, CW 202 (Forest Row, East Sussex: Rudolf Steiner Press, 2014), lecture in Dornach, Dec. 18, 1920.
- Rudolf Steiner, The Occult Movement in the Nineteenth Century and its Relation to Modern Culture, CW 254 (London: Rudolf Steiner Press, 1973), lecture in Dornach, Oct. 19, 1915.
- Rudolf Steiner, The Christ Impulse and the Development of Ego-Consciousness, CW 116 (Forest Row, East Sussex: Rudolf Steiner Press, 2015), lecture in Berlin, Feb. 8, 1910.
- Rudolf Steiner, The World of the Senses and the World of the Spirit, CW 134 (Forest Row, East Sussex: Rudolf Steiner Press, 2014), lectures in Hanover, Dec. 27, 1911–Jan. 1, 1912.
- See footnote 4.
- Rudolf Steiner, An Outline of Spiritual Science, CW 13 (Tiburon, CA: Chadwick Library Edition, 2021).
