The New Art of Community Building

Some notes From the Current Work in Progress

 “We must so attune our speaking, our feeling, our thinking, our impulses of will to a spiritual purpose, avoiding the pitfall of the abstract, that we can feel a real spiritual being hovering there above us, looking on and listening. We should divine a super-sensible presence, invoked by our pursuit of anthroposophy. Then each single anthroposophical activity can begin to be a realizing of the super-sensible. A real community spirit is similarly attracted by our common experiencing when we study anthroposophy together, though it is obviously not a group soul active in the bloodstream. If we are able to sense this, we can form true communities”.

Rudolf Steiner, lecture of February 27 1923, GA 257

 According to Rudolf Steiner’s indications in his lectures about the new art of anthroposophical community building given in 1923, the new community can only be created if we succeed in raising our human, social and spiritual becoming together to the spiritual world. Then the spiritual being that is related to this community, its new soul-and spirit group being, can descend and unite with our shared spiritualized cognition, consciousness and life. We create in this manner a new community-and group chalice. It is made from our spiritualized life, soul and spiritual forces, and this chalice can open up as a flower to the rays of the spiritual sun, to receive the inspiration and guidance of a spiritual being that seeks to embody himself to become part of the positive evolutionary forces of humanity in the present time. In February 1923, Rudolf Steiner described this process also as a “reversed cultus”, in comparison to the religious cultus of the Mass, the Eucharist or Sacrament, which few months before, in October 1922, was adapted and renewed for the foundation of the Christian Community. He called it Menschenweihehandlung, the Act of Consecration of the Human being. He explains that in the religious cultus the contents and form are brought down to the earth from the spiritual worlds by the Initiate and implemented in the cultus. It is an exact copy of the existing, eternal, Mass of the Gods themselves, with the Christ impulse in its center. The reversed ritual can also be called the creative, independent sacrament of the consecration of the human being. In comparison with the given religious cultus, the only “given” we have in our free human community is a potential; a potential that contains all that has first to be actualized, in a free spiritual activity of independent and mutually supporting people.

This potential is our communally shared bread and wine, because it harbors creative future possibilities, and its actualization requires that we freely activate our individual and communal forces in forming a totally new community. The potential is not physical object, concept or representation, nor an already existing way of working and handling personal and social affairs. On the first level, it is etheric, on the second it is astral and eventually it is also a spiritual potential. These potentials are not given, perceived or accomplished by our physical senses, intellect, social conventions, norms and habits. Potential is an open possibility of becoming, and becoming includes activities and processes, for which all given objects and concepts are actually a hindrance, which must be first acknowledge and named as such, and then gradually, creativity, transformed. For the reversed ritual, therefore, everything given is a dead thing- and it doesn’t matter how “spiritual” and “holy” it is called. As a matter of fact, the more profound and holy it is, the more an obstacle it becomes, because mentally, psychologically, ideologically, anthroposophically, we will be more attached to holy givens then to ordinary things. 

But names should not deceive us. Names are Maya, illusion, as are the formed objects around us and inside us.  We must first of all realize that everything given outside us- all the objects, beings and things of nature, cosmos and culture, are part of the already finished world. They exist and subsist, at least for some time, regardless of any further creative activity. In the past they were part of a spiritual creative process, out of which they have been created. Now they are finished and complete, but what is finished is in reality dead. It’s the presently still lingering corpse of a previous spiritual living activity. As I have showed in detail in my book, Cognitive Yoga, all our representations, habits and norms are dead, given things. And our creative activity must start there, in this daily valley of death. There we have to perform the miracles of resurrection and becoming, if we succeed in lifting what is finished and dead to the worlds from which it came in the beginning.

Prominent among the most common and given, habitual and forgotten things, are our partners in the community. Therefore, everything that we do together in enlivening and transforming the given common things, we do together with and to each other. We don’t demand this from each other, but because we strive to do it with ourselves, it becomes part of what we are. Because it makes us more grounded in our independent selves, we can offer it to our partners, simply because this is what we are becoming, and we receive from them the grace of their becoming freer. And we share together the creative joys and pains of independent co-creation. The new community can only be a community of strong independent individualities, mutually empowering, awakening and challenging each other. This community can only become if it is happening as a creative event anew in each moment, meeting, and deed; it must always grow anew from the fresh innocent beginnings, but this innocence is also the ripest fruit of its cognitive and moral maturity; it is a living being that must be constantly nourished, to become gradually a chalice for the higher spiritual beings.

 The building of the future orientated spiritual community, the seed of which Rudolf Steiner created in the Christmas Foundation Conference 1923-4, can only take place by means of this fully consciously actualized reversed cultus. The building of the future orientated spiritual community, the seed of which Rudolf Steiner created in the Christmas Foundation Conference 1923-4, is a scientific and artistic,  sacred and festive communal process. It must be enacted as exact spiritual scientific operation, as artistic and sacred dramatic processes, in real and spontaneous creative life, with all the ups-and downs, joys and pains, hopes and disappointments, revelations and illusions.

This happened only once before in human history, but in a very different state of consciousness, during the first century after the Mystery of Golgotha. When the early Christians came together, some of them could still perceive or feel the presence of the living Christ among them, and this experience fired their holy enthusiasm and will for sacrifice, that -at least for a short historical time-could create a real spiritual community. But in the new spiritual community, as Rudolf Steiner said, speaking about it in 1915, Christ must be individualised within us, and then we will be able to experience the spirit of the community above us. And then, only after eight years, in 1923, he already said that if the Christ’s fire inside us can burn intensely enough, the spirit of the community will descend and fill the community chalice that we consciously create to receive it. And this was said almost 100 years ago! We must imagine how much more urgent, intense and enthusiastic we have to become today, in the 21st century, in the first century of the new revelation of the etheric Christ. How much more creative and active must we become today, because we can- if we so choose- experience, research and make it real by means of conscious, individual-and community spiritual scientific work, and celebrate it as the spirit of the new community.

And this is what must fill our hearts with the most devoted feelings, that what was still possible in the first century after Christ by means of the last and rapidly vanishing remnants of the old forces of clairvoyance, can be accomplished today for the first time in human evolution by means of the first rudimentary beginnings of the new forces of self-conscious clairvoyance.

We must feel the greatness as well as responsibility of this moment in which we live: it is the first time that ordinary mortals can create a conscious bridge, a conscious spiritual link and communication between the earth and the spiritual worlds in real time. It is happening now for the first time in a fully conscious manner in human evolution.

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