עברית How the Etheric Christ Impulse United with Spiritual Science
The Decisive Anthroposophical Breakthrough at the end of the 20th Century:
How the Etheric Christ Impulse United with Spiritual Science
The breakthrough to new spiritual scientific knowledge at the end of last century, was a result of a long and hard struggle with the Ahrimanic forces of death, with the brain bound intellect, and the hard and cold traditions and habits of the last century. It made possible the resurrection of anthroposophy from the grave of civilisation at the 20th century, and make it ready to receive the new impulses streaming from Michael in the first part of the 21st century
What made this possible was the new etheric Christ impulse. It is to Him and to Him alone that all our gratitude and devotion are due, because without His help, this decisive battle and breakthrough at the end of the century, would not succeed.
If such souls will be found, who can honestly connect on the earth, in their etheric hearts, the light of spiritualized intelligence, conquered from Ahriman and returned to Michael, with the light of love of the etheric Christ, this will become the spiritual praxis of the future community of the school of spiritual science. These souls, active in this future school, will realize that because the etheric Christ has become our intimate companion, in our moral and cognitive life, and because we could have become His pupils, learning from Him the most modern of all arts, the art of fully conscious resurrection, we apply it to anthroposophy, bringing Her back to new spiritual life and raising Her to new social life in the present century.
I would like to invite you to enter with me into the place of this battle, that made the anthroposophical breakthrough from the 20th to the 21st century possible at the end of last century. It is this deep and solid spiritual scientific foundation, that we are now transforming into the basic practice in our communal work in the school of spiritual science.
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In my book, "The New Experience of the Supersensible", I tried to transform what I received through Christ’s etheric appearance, words and acts, into such a cognitive force, that would allow me to spiritualise the fundamental knowledge praxis of modern spiritual science, created by Rudolf Steiner exactly a century before, in the 80’ and 90' of the 19th century. In the book I described this process in detail and called it "the knowledge drama of the second coming". It opens the path to a fully conscious imaginative perception and investigation of the etheric Christ, using for this purpose the living forces received from His etheric appearance. My task at the end of last century was to return to the Christ His gracefully given life forces, as a human answer, in the form of free human thinking and Imagination. I was also conscious, while I was doing this work in the 80’ and 90', that I am fulfilling a century long expectation of Rudolf Steiner, that at the end of the 20th century his work will begin to be individualised and actualised by ordinary human beings, who are empowered to do so through the graceful forces of the etheric Christ.
This book was written, admittedly, Sub specie aeternitatis, as it encompasses an essential part of the anthroposophical knowledge process that must be achieved not only in the present Michaelic age but also in the course of the whole 5th post-Atlantean epoch.
This work, accomplished during 1975-1995, is the deep foundation, the living spiritual root and trunk, that allows us to accomplish the resurrection of the old being of anthroposophical, and connect it to the new stream of Michael that begins in the 21st century.
As one example of the battle with Ahriman at the end of the century, and the role of the new Christ impulse in this battle, we can study one passage from Chapter 5 of The New Experience of the Supersensible, entitled: The Knowledge Drama of the Second Coming:
"However, before we continue our research deeper into Life, we must feel ourselves wholly at home in Death". Anthroposophy is truly modern spiritual science, not a warming up of atavistic visionary clairvoyance, or freezing the soul in theoretical-intellectual imitation of academic thinking. It is born out of the real forces of the consciousness soul, which means that one must come to terms, most energetically, first of all with the forces of death, that bind it to the physical body, brain, and sense perceptible world. Therefore, "We must strengthen our ability to stand consciously poised in the present momentary core of our life's destruction and resurrection". This happens all the time, unconsciously for us, right behind our conscious thinking and perception, feeling and will impulses. We are not only born and die at the beginning and end of our physical life. We are constantly, continuously, born and die, in subliminal, minuscule, measure, in each second and moment of our daily life. Spiritual science becomes real spiritual activity, only if we become fully conscious of this event of "die and become" in its actual happening. Only through actualising this activity we become fully present, as self-conscious, thinking, feeling, willing humans, wide awake as modern people must become, in the physical world, and we can spiritualise this wakefulness and take it up with us to the spiritual world. And this is what we said above, that since the end of the century, the etheric Christ becames our intimate companion, in the moral and cognitive life, and we became His pupils, learning from him the most modern of all arts, the art of resurrection. Now this was and is Rudolf Steiner’s art, but he could practice I on the highest levels of modern initiation. His task was to transfer it to his uninitiated pupils, because the path of spiritual science is a modern path, opened to all humans that have the good will to practice it.
However, this anthroposophical path could only be actualized- for the first time- thanks to the help of the new life forces given by the etheric Christ. Between the initiate of our age, Rudolf Steiner, and the ordinary soul-and spirit capacities of modern people, the new etheric Christ experience intervenes, offering at the end of the century a crucial all saving, birding link, between the two. It let us to use spiritual science today in the way outlined here:
"There we have to build a provisional-but essential bridge, or rock, at the moment of being born, dying and becoming. We must steel our newly awakened consciousness in the midst of that annihilation of our life-time, because here we begin to practice and experience our own, always present, event of etheric crucifixion, death and resurrection as the mystery of modern cognition. The act of knowledge becomes Christ's Mystery Place of the second, etheric coming. Let us, therefore, hold fast to this Mystery Place of time and explore in greater detail some of its basic features...".
This became possible only since the new experience of the etheric Christ could be connected with spiritual science, and the forces of resurrection- that the etheric Christ demonstrates in His appearance, words and acts- can spiritualize our thinking, feeling and will forces, and let us overcome the death of modern cognition and consciousness, so that indeed, “The act of knowledge becomes Christ's Mystery Place of the second, etheric coming”.
The whole chapter 5 of The New Experience of the Supersensible, is dedicated to the gradual development of the knowledge drama of the second coming, which is the foundation of all present and future spiritual scientific research in all fields.
Let us read some parts of the whole passage together:
"It can be asked: why is the new Christ experience, described above, 'modern' at all? We might now propose the following answer: precisely because it appears within our living and deadened life at the boundary of consciousness. It appears, in other words, at the modern abyss of reflectivity, or at our intellect's blind spot of rationality, and therefore remains 'occult', unseen, by most of our contemporaries. This means, however, that the Christ takes on Himself today the fate and destiny of self-conscious thinking. That is, He is continuously crucified at the place where we continuously kill our living time in order to know that which we have killed, consciously and freely. Whenever we link two concepts with one another-or an objective sense-impression with its related concept-we structure a firm, objective, rational ground on which to stand mentally. Behind that firmness is concealed humanity's ever-active, pulsating logos of life: the etheric Christ...
"It seems to be immediately evident that, before such an inner veiling and concealment of the creative present, no self- consciousness would be possible, otherwise the self would only experience the world in thinking and not himself as self over against the world and over against himself. But how is this self /world occultation generated? What suppresses the experience of the future 'I- being, darkens the presently active and living present and illuminates its dead past alone? From the experience of the will in thinking this can be answered as follows. There 'is' (the real, living 'is' is precisely what is annihilated) a freezing and preservation of the difference of time that has elapsed, a stretching and spacing of time-a killing of time and a temporal immortalization and preservation of the killed time-in every act of ideation and perception. We see a continuous transformation of the concentrated, non-spatial being of the active living present into a dead time-being that endures as past. That is, there lights up into conscious, clear perception that which was and 'is' no longer (living now) and darkens down into an unconscious sleep that which creatively is. Every moment of our life-time that is raised into self-consciousness is in this way always split in two, into a living and creative unknown element that is immediately concealed and suppressed, pushed back and preserved as future potentiality, and into something that is fixed, made non-living and, hence, remains as an available element for later recollection.
Before reflection was historically born in ancient Greece, biographically, in early childhood, there could be no consciousness of this negativity of elapsed time; there could only be the experience of an untimely and universal ever-present, non-broken duration, a flowing stream of positive reality, in which thinking could never have become our inner personal possession. Thinking would have remained similar to digestion or biological growth- an unconsciously regulated activity as an expression of an integrated organism- environment wholeness... In this splitting of our life we awaken to objective reflection. We construct on its objectified and devitalized time the foundation of daily separate identity and rational behavior....
However, before we continue our research deeper into Life, we must feel ourselves wholly at home in Death. We must strengthen our ability to stand consciously poised in between the divided halves of our life, that is, in the present momentary core of our life's destruction and resurrection. There we have to build a provisional -but essential- bridge, or rock, at the moment of splitting and division. We must steel our newly awakened consciousness in the midst of that annihilation of our life-time, because here we begin to practice and experience our own, always present, event of etheric crucifixion, death and resurrection as the mystery of modern cognition. The act of knowledge becomes Christ's Mystery Place of the second, etheric coming. Let us, therefore, hold fast to this Mystery Place of time and explore in greater detail some of its basic features...".
The second edition (2008) of the book is avilable in Amazon