Supersensible organs of perception in the astral body, awakened through inner work on the path Steiner set out in How to Know Higher Worlds.
In anthroposophy, the lotus flowers (Lotusblumen, German; Padma, Sanskrit) are supersensible organs of perception that take form in the astral body when a student practices the inner exercises described by Rudolf Steiner. Six primary lotuses sit near the larynx, heart, solar plexus, lower belly, base of the spine, and root of the nose. They open by moral and meditative work, not by physical technique.
In Steiner's Own Words
The organs now to be considered are perceptible to the clairvoyant near the following part of the physical body: the first between the eyes; the second near the larynx; the third in the region of the heart; the fourth in the so-called pit of the stomach; the fifth and sixth are situated in the abdomen. These organs are technically known as wheels, chakrams, or lotus flowers. They are so called on account of their likeness to wheels or flowers, but of course it should be clearly understood that such an expression is not to be applied more literally than is the term “wings” when referring to the two halves of the lungs. Just as there is no question of wings in the case of the lungs, so, too, in the case of the lotus flowers the expression must be taken figuratively.
What it Means Today
The lotus flowers are easy to misread as Tantric chakras dressed in different vocabulary. Steiner himself drew the comparison and then quietly pulled away from it. The Padmas of the older Indian path opened under a guru's transmission, in the climate of an inherited stream of life. The lotus flowers Steiner describes belong to a different historical moment. They are the perceptual organs that a modern person, working in waking thought, builds for the self through repeated moral and meditative practice. The sixteen-petalled lotus at the throat is the organ of Imagination, the first stage of higher cognition. Eight petals were given by old, dreamlike clairvoyance. Eight more open only when a student takes hold of thinking, feeling, and willing with deliberate care.
This is where the Six Subsidiary Exercises do their work. Control of thought, control of action, equanimity, positivity, open-mindedness, harmony. Each one shapes a petal of the throat lotus. The other five lotuses unfold through their own clusters of practice, traced through the meditation curriculum of the anthroposophical esoteric school. A student does not visualise the lotus to open it. The petals turn when the inner life is ordered. This is the difference between modern Western initiation and energy work. The lotus is a record of moral biography in the astral body, not a button to press.
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