The Six Subsidiary Exercises
The six subsidiary exercises are the basic training of the soul that anthroposophy asks of anyone who takes up meditation: control of thought, initiative of will, equanimity, positivity, open-mindedness, and the harmony of all five. Steiner gave them in An Outline of Occult Science, in the chapter on knowledge of the higher worlds, and in Knowledge of the Higher Worlds and Its Attainment, where they are the six qualities that form the twelve-petalled lotus flower in the region of the heart. He also gave them to his esoteric pupils in the instructions collected as Guidance in Esoteric Training. They are called subsidiary because they accompany the main meditative work, but Steiner's instruction is that without them the main work is unsafe: meditation strengthens the astral body, and an astral body that has not been steadied by these six brings the pupil's one-sidedness to the surface along with everything else.
The six
Each exercise is taken up for a month, and the previous ones are kept going as the next is added. After six months the cycle begins again.
- Control of thought. For at least five minutes a day, thinking is held to one object of one's own choosing, as ordinary and uninteresting as possible, a pin, a pencil, a button, and everything that can be thought about it is thought in order, without wandering. The point is not the object but the fact that thinking, for those minutes, goes where the I directs it and nowhere else. Steiner adds that a feeling of firmness and security should be allowed to arise, and should be felt as streaming from the forehead down through the back of the head into the spine.
- Initiative of will. A small action, chosen by oneself and of no use to anyone, is performed at a set time every day: turning a ring, watering a particular plant at three o'clock, touching a doorframe. Because nothing in the world asks for it, the only thing that carries it out is the will. The feeling that accompanies it is one of inner impulse, felt in the region of the heart.
- Equanimity. The swing between elation and dejection, exultation and despair, is brought under the I. Feeling is not suppressed; grief is still felt and joy is still felt, but the person is no longer swept off by them. A feeling of calm is allowed to arise and is sent out from the heart into the arms and hands, and then outward into the world.
- Positivity. In every thing, person, and event, what is good, true, and beautiful in it is sought first, before the fault. Steiner illustrates it with the legend of Christ and the dead dog: where the disciples saw only a carcass, he pointed to the beauty of its teeth. This is not the denial of the bad but the discipline of finding what is there to be affirmed.
- Open-mindedness. The readiness to learn something new from every thing and every person, and to let any opinion, however settled, be revised by experience. Whatever is said, however it contradicts what one has always held, is met with the thought that it might be so.
- Harmony. In the sixth month the five are practised together, and their balance is the exercise: a thinking that is controlled but not rigid, a will that acts but is not driven, a feeling that is calm but not cold, a positivity that is not naivety, an openness that is not credulity.
What they develop
The exercises work on the astral body. Thinking, willing, and feeling are its three activities, and in ordinary life they run together and run away: thoughts arrive unbidden, the will is moved by circumstance, feeling is at the mercy of events. The first three exercises separate the three and bring each under the I; the fourth and fifth turn the purified feeling and thinking outward toward the world; the sixth reunites them at a higher level. Knowledge of the Higher Worlds describes the result as the forming of the twelve-petalled lotus, the organ of the heart region through which the pupil perceives the inner nature of other beings, in particular their warmth and coldness of soul. The lotus flower is a real organ of the astral body, not a figure of speech, and the six exercises are its food.
In practice
The exercises are done daily, briefly, and over years. Steiner's word for the attitude is that they are to be taken up like a physical training: without expectation of quick results and without discouragement at failure, since the failure and the return to the exercise are themselves the exercise. A person new to the path is often advised to take up the six before any other meditation, and a study group or a Waldorf teachers' college will often work through them together. Each temperament finds one of the six hardest, the choleric equanimity, the sanguine control of thought, the phlegmatic initiative, the melancholic positivity, and the tradition's finding is that the hardest is the one to hold to.
The subsidiary exercises are neither secret nor a rite. They appear in Steiner's own revised written works, and anyone may take them up.