עברית A talk during a meeting of the Global School of Spiritual Science in Scandinavia, 20-23. 9. 2018
In this talk I commented on our work with the 3 basic elements of the spiritual path: deepening and enlivening of the study of spiritual science, developing active devotion to truth, beauty and goodness, and meditation, as a foundation for the future community.
Anthroposophy should never become a matter of the head and feelings alone but must from the very first encounter be embodied in the active, creative will forces, that flow and work through the whole body. Only then it becomes a real force of life, embodied in the whole soul active through the whole body, not only in the head and its emotional echoes, it can create the necessary future life stream, wisdom, healing and blessing, and become the future community building force.
Meditation can only become real if it is based on such living, deep study of spiritual science, and on developing the two fundamental conditions in life itself, active devotion to truth, beauty and goodness coupled with deepening self-knowledge. Then Meditation will be the practice through which we create the substance and rhythm of life itself and become co-creators in the evolution of the real world. When we begin to think, feel and will all the way to the big toe, as Rudolf Steiner loved to say, then we begin to become creative in real life and then we can invest our whole human being in the central task of the present Michael age: the true community building.
The result of real study, devotion to truth and self-knowledge, forged in real meditation, is a new embodied force, in which the whole human being takes part: the force of community building, the real mystery of the present age.
This is the mystery of our time, which is the mystery of the Grail, provided we don’t take it as a symbolic legend or esoteric theory but as real living community practice.
This must be our real contribution to the present and future development of humanity in the 21st century: to create a self-intensifying living stream between an older generation, that embodies spiritual science as a whole human creative force, which means becoming younger again, and a physically younger generation, that can experience the older as truthfully young. And if this living mutual exchange between the two kinds of young souls will begin, we can create the foundation of a living intensification of anthroposophy through time, from one generation to the next, from one decade to the coming one.
The Grail community mystery of our age is celebrated in this manner as the central community practice. This begins only in the 3rdstage, which is really the first stage, because the first two stages are given stages. In the first stage the founding gift of free love is given as a free offer; in the second stage it is torn apart, reversed and appropriated through the natural egoism of modern people, the ego war of all against all is burning in full power and the wound surfaces; only then the real conscious work can begin. Both first stages are a given fact: The free founding act of love as a spiritual gift from the higher world is for us a given fact, and so is its egotistical counterpart coming from below, from the ordinary, lower self; the two polarities belong together in the same given spiritual and sub-human reality. But the creation of the middle fully human reality, that encompasses the whole human being, the higher and lower in the middle, this is our real task.
In the hundred and more years of the existence of the anthroposophical movement and society it was not possible to even start the real work of stage 3. In this stage, in and through the wound of fierce egotism, we must resurrect the original gift of love to wholly new life, individualized and shared, which means to build real human, individualized, and robust brother-and sisterhood, that goes repeatedly, routinely, through the fire of self-love through self-knowledge, that burns so strongly, that all previous efforts to build this community have collapsed here. But if we persist, and steel our love in this fire, the wound will become our most creative and sacred source of healing forces, and a community will begin to be formed, which grows and matures over time, up to the middle of this century and beyond.