עברית Few people in our time understand to what extent real spiritual scientific research, if it follows loyally Rudolf Steiner's method, demands a careful, living, active, schooling of all aspects of our modern cognition. This can be realized if you read again the 1st chapter of my first book published 25 years ago, in 1993: "The Spiritual Event of the 20th Century", in which I shortly outlined the cognitive preconditions demanded by real anthroposophical research.
THE SPIRITUAL EVENT OF THE TWENTIETH CENTURY
An Imagination
The Occult Significance of the 12 Years 1933-45 in the Light of Spiritual Science
Chapter 1: Anthroposophy as Living Language of our Time
Our present times may be said to embrace the end of the twentieth century and the beginning of the next. They may also be considered as belonging to the whole time span of the twentieth century, which is the first century of the new age of light begun in 1899. In order to be the living language of the present, Anthroposophy must learn to speak directly out of the deeper supersensible events of our time as a whole. In the context here, this means the investigation of the occult significance of the Imagination of the century's spiritual Event which took place behind the curtain of the world catastrophes of the years 1933- 45. However, before studying this Event, we should explain, at least in outline, our anthroposophical method in approaching the greatest occult riddle of our time.
Our method is determined by the fact that, since the beginning of the Michael age and the end of Kali Yuga, two central spiritual influences stream increasingly into the consciousness of man. The first is the Michael power, which guarantees the new human faculty of pure, living thinking and individual experience of freedom, and the second is the new supersensible perception that has enabled man to perceive the appearance of the Christ in the etheric realm since 1933. Now the Michael and Christ streams have to be integrated through spiritual science. The whole of Anthroposophy is the result of this integration. And out of the different anthroposophical ways to achieve this integration we shall emphasize here one that begins with the spiritual path based on the Philosophy of Freedom. (1)
This path aims to transform thinking into an active, creative force, and to penetrate the active will with the peace and stability of thinking. That is to say, to cross thinking and will in and through each other, so that thinking will be thoroughly willed and the will thoroughly thought. (2)What is normally polarized is thereby reversed, inside-out for the will, outside-in for thinking. The hidden will element in thinking is spiritualized and becomes the periphery of thinking; the hidden thought of the will is condensed and becomes the centre of will. ‘Freedom' is the result of the first, ‘love' the result of the second transformation. (3) And when the two results are also crossed, the cognitive and moral foundation is formed for human life in the present and future stage of human evolution. Through the love of freedom and the freedom of love, the consciousness soul- the soul flower and spirit-seed of modern man- grows healthily, matures and provides nourishing, life-giving cultural and social fruits. It also provides the best soil for the flourishing of anthroposophical spiritual science and its development in the human soul. (4)
That from which Anthroposophy can suffer the most is prevented only in this way. For Rudolf Steiner, Anthroposophy was, is and shall be the living and creative expression of the human being in his wholeness, uniting in a free manner his divergent soul forces and faculties in the concrete experience and action of life. The Ego of modern man comes to itself as free self only in this way. In any other way the consciousness soul shrivels and dies, and the lower soul parts degenerate or grow wild. The intellectual soul takes over thinking for itself, materializes it and deadens its living being, and the sentient soul is either overwhelmed by uncultivated feeling and will impulses or withers altogether. The warm life of feeling and fellow-feeling, the true foundation for the cultivation of Anthroposophy, remains undeveloped, and anthroposophical practice and thinking become one-sided and antisocial. And in our anthroposophical life and work this has not been unknown in the twentieth century.
This living grasp of Anthroposophy is not only good for human relationship, it is also the most healthy and balanced foundation for the fully self-conscious entry of the consciousness soul into the spiritual worlds. For independent, thoroughly individualized supersensible experience and knowledge require the development of freedom and love no less than true social life on Earth requires them. For an anthroposophical pupil, who experiences what man in our times can experience through deep participation in the inner and external events of the twentieth century, it can become an inner necessity to base his endeavors on this foundation of the Philosophy of Freedom. He knows that such a foundation enables the most clear and secure entry into the higher worlds. (5)
As a matter of factual experience, it can be discovered that when man approaches the supersensible element purely subjectively, in inner soul and spirit life- even before the encounter with objective spirit reality- the experience varies considerably if he has prepared himself beforehand through the transformation of thinking into will and will into thinking according to the Philosophy of Freedom, as indicated above. And the main difference consists in the fact that, through such a preparation, the transition from daily consciousness to supersensible consciousness, as well as the maintaining of self-consciousness in supersensible experience, is much closer in essence and practice to the nature of the preparation itself, namely, to the actual transformation of thinking and will into one another. In other words, here the way and goal of spiritual training are essentially the same from the very beginning, because man lives already in the spiritual world in the true experience of freedom and love. The heightened state of consciousness, the soul and spirit awakening out of the normal daily consciousness, which is the true achievement of the schooling in the Philosophy of Freedom, is then raised further upward. In this way a continuation of consciousness is realized that guarantees a great measure of freedom and self-consciousness in supersensible experience, and thereby also a greater capacity of memory in spirit of earthly identity and, back in earthly consciousness, of the spiritual experiences. (6)
This anthroposophical way becomes especially necessary when we consider those ‘entirely new faculties' described by Rudolf Steiner (see the next chapter), which have begun to make their presence felt naturally in the soul of man in an ever-growing measure since the second third of this century. Here we have to do with a direct streaming of spiritual events, processes and experiences into the naturally endowed human soul. Such experiences, justified and beautiful as they are, must still be thoroughly spiritualized if we want to make use of them in the service of anthroposophical spiritual-scientific research and daily living. Otherwise, precisely the best in them might be turned into its opposite and lead to a growing social and intellectual chaos, instead of into a deepened human social life and free thinking. And the best results in this sense are gained when these natural capacities and experiences are penetrated by the living and clear thought developed through the Philosophy of Freedom.
As Rudolf Steiner indicated, what we experience today as our pure thinking and individual freedom was experienced only after death in the former cultural epoch. It is an important secret of human evolution that the supersensible is increasingly streaming into the normal, wide-awake consciousness of humanity in the physical world. (7)
Now the Being and Advent of Christ Himself belongs to this secret, and is, from a certain point of view, at its heart.
Therefore, the Christ Event of the twentieth century, and of the whole future of the consciousness-soul age to come, falls together naturally with the growing of the human personality towards rationality and freedom. The two events are essentially the same event, viewed from different perspectives. Both are symptoms of the growing spiritual maturity of the human soul, which comes gradually through its natural development to the point where its inmost spirit being on the one hand and conscious soul faculties on the other permeate one another increasingly in full self-consciousness.
When we bear in mind that the center and source of the new supersensible soul faculties and experiences is the modern, Michael-Christ Event, and further that Rudolf Steiner repeatedly pointed to the inner, deep mutual relation between the Philosophy of Freedom and the Pauline Christ experience, then what we said above is seen in its true light. Paul created, as the pioneer of the modern Christ experience, the ‘Pauline method' of investigating the Christ Event, (8) which, carried in our time to its uttermost perfection for the age of the consciousness soul through Rudolf Steiner, remains the foundation for all future spiritualization of these faculties. The cognitive and moral freedom which man develops today naturally in the course of his daily life must come together more and more with the naturally given, and therefore also somewhat materialized, new supersensible soul forces and faculties. In this meeting spiritual science must rightly and increasingly intervene, because otherwise the new supersensible faculties are corrupted by the intellectual-materialistic way of thinking of the present epoch. But also, the opposite occurs: the best that is achieved through modern logical and free thinking can be destroyed by the new supersensible faculties running wild. This double aberration becomes a vicious circle, from which humanity will hardly escape without spiritual science. Truly living and creative Anthroposophy is the only way to bring these two naturally given aspects of modern consciousness together into a fruitful, mutually upbuilding and strengthening interplay. This transformation of the naturally given sensible as well as supersensible consciousness is one of the most urgent spiritual-scientific missions at the end of this century and the beginning of the next.
Anthroposophical spiritual science can fulfil this mission to some extent by becoming the truly living language of the present- albeit, to begin with, in a rather limited though vital field of spiritual-scientific work. It is possible to build the bridge from the Philosophy of Freedom to the Christ spirit, said Rudolf Steiner. (9 )It is not our aim here to con- struct this bridge (this is done elsewhere) (10)but we are going to use it here in order to describe in some detail the Imagination of our century's greatest spiritual Event.
Notes to Chapter 1
1 The name Philosophy of Freedom is used here in a broader sense to denote the whole of Rudolf Steiner's philosophical- anthroposophical life work. The main stations on the way are as follows.
First are three philosophical works: A Theory of Knowledge Implicit in Goethe's World Conception (1886, GA2); Truth and Knowledge (1892, GA3); and The Philosophy of Freedom (1894, GA4). These must be studied together with the introductions and comments to Goethe's natural-scientific writings (1883- 97,GA1a- e).
Second are some lectures of 1908 (14 and 20 March, 20 and 28 October, 8 and 13 November, in GA 108), and the article Philosophy and Anthroposophy (GA 35). These mark a step forward in bringing together philosophy and Anthroposophy.
Third is the last chapter of The Riddles of Philosophy (1914, GA18), entitled "A Brief Outline of Anthroposophy" ,and with it the linking of this theme to the problems of modern natural science in The Riddle of Man (1916, GA 20), and modern philosophy and psychology (in connection with Brentano) in The Riddles of the Soul (1917, GA 21), in which also the first and fundamental relation is established to the threefold picture of man and the problems of the 12 senses.
Fourth, one should mention the whole series of the School of Spiritual Science lecture cycles, beginningin1920 with the new linking of philosophy, Anthroposophy and Goetheanism in, The Boundaries of Natural Science (GA 322) up to the last course given in December 1922 and January 1923, The Origins of Natural Science (GA 326). The whole was then crowned in the letters to the members in Anthroposophical Leading Thoughts of 1924/5 (GA 26). All in all, Rudolf Steiner's work in the field of the theory of knowledge and the philosophy of science and its relation to Anthroposophy was his life's work, extending over more than 40 years.
2 See the lecture of 6 February 1923 in Awakening to Community (GA 257) where this process is described as the forming of new thinking and new willing.
3 See the lecture of 19 December 1920 in The Bridge Between Universal Spirituality and the Physical Constitution of Man (GA 202).
4 In the lecture mentioned above (note 2) Rudolf Steiner describes how the inner spirit and soul awakening through the Philosophy of Freedom is the only guarantee that man will be able to develop an inner sovereignty and independence in experiencing and representing Anthroposophy. He points out that, because of the failure to achieve this so far, the development of the Anthroposophical Society strays behind the development of the living anthroposophical stream.
5 This problem is one of the essential themes of my book The New Experience of the Supersensible (Temple Lodge,1995), in the main chapter entitled: :The Knowledge Drama of the Second Coming".
6 In Occult Science (GA 13) Rudolf Steiner characterized the unique position of The Philosophy of Freedom among the ways of spiritual training as follows: :These writings stand at an important point intermediate between cognition of the sense world and that of the spiritual world ... Whoever permits these writings to act upon his entire soul nature, stands already within the spiritual world... He who feels himself in the position to permit such an intermediate stage to act upon him travels a safe path, and through it he is able to gain a feeling toward the higher worlds that will bear for him the most beautiful fruit throughout all future time".
7 See the lecture of 30 January1923, in Awakening to Community (GA 257).
8 See the lecture of 27 May 1914 (GA 152).
9 See the lecture of 4 September 1917, The Karma of Materialism
(GA 176).
10 See my book The New Experience of the Supersensible.