עברית “The paths of gods and men must merge in our time. Michael will be the great mediator between the paths of gods and the paths of human beings. Let us pay heed to his work! Then shall we feel our freedom join forces with the freedom of the gods”.
COGNITIVE YOGA: HOW A BOOK IS BORN, Temple Lodge, London, 2018
Excerpts from Chapter 5: Co-Creative Journey and chapter 2: The Mystery of Conception
"The truly modern, independent and creative spiritual scientist, must learn to no longer expect a fully formed spiritual revelation to flow down to him, bestowed from above and outside, as was customary and beneficial in ancient times. He must instead learn to actively and creatively raise himself upward towards the spirit and not expect the spirit to be given ready made to him in great and powerful imaginations... He must learn to actively create his or her living concepts and imaginations, and to communicate them to the beings of his colleagues and teachers that stand far above him and await until they will be gradually saturated, inspired and intuited from the spiritual world, and will gradually return to you, becoming by degrees- never in any absolute sense- more objective, that is, they will more truly express the real spiritual events, beings, and processes that you want to express.
The spiritual scientist, who conscientiously follows the modern path created by Rudolf Steiner, the founder and pioneer of this wholly new field of human knowledge, must learn to no longer expect a fully formed spiritual revelation to flow down to him, bestowed from above and outside, as was customary and beneficial in ancient times. He must instead learn to actively and creatively raise himself upward towards the spirit and not expect the spirit to be given ready made to him in great and powerful imaginations; he must learn to work on his individual research from below upward or from within outward, until he comes up with a real, pregnant spiritualized problem. He must learn to actively create his or her living concepts and imaginations, and to communicate them to the beings of his colleagues and teachers that stand far above him; he must wait to see if they will take his creations, affirmatively, into themselves and work with them further in the spiritual worlds. In this way, the spiritual scientist, as a pupil of Michael and his collegium, learns the modern art of spiritualizing and transforming human creative thoughts, knowledge, and artistic and social creations, through a co-creative dialogue with the spiritual world. Then- and only then- does the spiritual world come towards you, if you are freely active and creative according to their perception and judgement. You will naturally not accord to the imaginations you create real final objective value, but will await until they will be gradually saturated, inspired and intuited from the spiritual world, and will gradually return to you, becoming by degrees- never in any absolute sense- more objective, that is, they will more truly express the real spiritual events, beings, and processes that you want to express.
Michael, says Rudolf Steiner, doesn't influence the human will; he expects humans to develop their spiritual work in full freedom:
“We carry up into a spiritual world the knowledge of Nature here attained, or again, the creations of naturalistic art, or the religious sentiments working naturalistically in the soul... And as we carry all this upward- if we develop the necessary faculties- we do indeed encounter Michael ... Michael is a being who reveals nothing if we do not bring him something from our diligent spiritual work on Earth . . . Michael will be the true spiritual herald of Freedom; he lets men do, and he then takes what becomes of human deeds, receives it and carries it on and out into the cosmos, to continue in the cosmos what men themselves cannot yet do with it . . . But when man does things out of spiritual activity or inner freedom, then Michael carries the human earthly deed out into the cosmos; so that it becomes cosmic deed. (Lecture from 13 January 1924, GA 233a).
And this applies of course also to Rudolf Steiner, the leader of Michael's stream on earth and the ‘headmaster’ of the human department in his cosmic school. Once human beings have sown, grown, and rightly cultivated a creative, spiritualized and truthful fruit in their human garden, Michael and his partners affirmatively accept it, develop it further in the spiritual world, and invite us to participate in its continuous spiritual development. We must bear this in mind when I describe below the spiritual side of the event of cooperative spiritual fertilization and conception, since this is an attempt to describe such a creative mutual interaction between a human being and the Michaelic school in the spiritual worlds, because, indeed, “The paths of gods and men must merge in our time. Michael will be the great mediator between the paths of gods and the paths of human beings. Let us pay heed to his work! . . . Then shall we feel our freedom join forces with the freedom of the gods.” (Lecture from 22 September 1924, GA 346)".
COGNITIVE YOGA: HOW A BOOK IS BORN, Temple Lodge, London, 2018
Excerpts from Chapter 5: Co-Creative Journey and chapter 2: The Mystery of Conception