עברית Because you lose the force of thought In the stream of time's annihilation: At the Portal of the Knowledge Drama of Spiritual Science
“Feeling foreign
In the soulless void of space
Because you lose the force of thought
In the stream of time's annihilation”.
The spiritual experience indicated in the last part of the opening mantra of the 1st esoteric class of the school of spiritual science, can open the portal to explore the deeper meaning of the Christ impulse in our time. It can allow us to delve deeper into some of the greatest mysteries and riddles of present life and cognition. Since the end of last century, it became possible to bring about a mutually fructifying relation between the new stream of life, that flows from the unique etheric body of the Christ, and the spiritual stream of anthroposophical esoteric life. In the 21st century, it is essential that more and more human souls will be found, that would wish to unite these two streams in their hearts, minds and deeds.
Among the first experiences that one has using the meditative exercises given by Rudolf Steiner in his book, Knowledge of the Higher worlds, is the experience of ordinary consciousness from the other, etheric, side. Some of these experiences are described in the beginning of chapter 5 of the book, The New Experience of the Supersensible, and in chapter 2 of Cognitive Yoga.
The first fundamental supersensible experience that you have is that your ordinary consciousness is actually a dead corpse of this etheric consciousness. What we know in ordinary life as your ordinary sense-and brain bound thinking and sense perception, appears complete and firm once we open our eyes in the morning on waking up. If you have really strengthened your soul forces, thinking, feeling and will, through a meditative practice, you will begin to experience what takes place before you know what you perceive, recognize and name what you confront in the external world and represent to yourself consciously the things you look at. That is, you are able to observe, from outside, what otherwise happens very fast, instinctively and unconsciously, in the formation process of ordinary consciousness. When we wake up out of sleep, this stage of consciousness is already well established and formed, with its conscious sense perceptions, representations, and other soul experiences. But now you become conscious of the fact that this state only looks stable and firm. You discover that it is constituted all the time also during your wakeful daily life. The unbroken flow of ordinary consciousness begins to appear, from the other, etheric, side, as something that is created again and again, out of the supersensible, by our higher members.
In other words, the first result of strengthening your soul forces is that you begin to experience how this formation and consolidation is realized, before it is actually taking place. Ordinary consciousness ceases to be something that is simply given, and you begin to experience it’s becoming process. You experience how it devolves from a higher, pre-conscious, etheric state, down to the common physical state. Only then you begin to draw near to the above-mentioned portal of true anthroposophical esoteric life and work, when you begin to experience this great mystery and riddle: that our ordinary consciousness is constantly reduced and sedimented out of our etheric, living, vibrant, state of consciousness. You begin to have the first experience of the threshold, and this is also the first true supersensible experience that one can have in the course of a fully conscious, freely accomplished spiritual scientific schooling process, which must be distinguished from any gracefully given supersensible experience that one may receive as a gift.
Then we begin to experience the meaning of the closing sentence of the opening mantra of the first class:
“Because you lose the force of thought
In the stream of time's annihilation”.
The Mystery of Death as the Mystery of Consciousness
Now we begin to experience this process, livingly, that is, consciously, that we lose the force of thought, that was living not only in the etheric world before we incarnated in the physical body through conception and birth, but we realize now that it is still living at present, and that it is only hidden from us in each moment in which we activate our ordinary consciousness by means of our physical brain and senses.
In the language of The New Experience of the Supersensible, (NES) we can say that “The most fundamental result of Rudolf Steiner’s anthroposophical investigation in this regard can be described as follows: the fully incarnated organization of the modern human being, in body, soul and spirit, achieves his awakening in the physical world by reducing a former, pre-physical state of consciousness to an earthly one. This is done so as to create the proper conditions for the coming into existence of his wide- awake, sense- and brain-founded thinking. Thus, the given daily consciousness is truly 'given' only as regards its limits. From a higher, imaginative consciousness, man can see and follow the process of its consolidation out of a state of pre-physical, etheric consciousness. This is a real 'fall’ in every opening of the eyes and in every act of conscious seeing and of forming mental pictures of the seen”. The experience of this fall from paradise, from the unconscious life in the etheric world to the conscious life in the physical world, is the portal of entry into the real anthroposophical esoteric practice. Only through this portal can we develop the fully conscious, clear, thoughtful, spiritual cognition that characterizes modern spiritual science.
Losing the pre-physical experience of the etheric world, means to lose the force of living, real, etheric thinking, and the ability to grasp living spiritual realities in the higher worlds. When this is sufficiently experienced and grounded in our meditative practice, we begin to experience consciously also the force that causes this fall. We realize that this force works in us all the time of our life, since early childhood, and that it gradually depletes our etheric body until it causes our physical death. But this partial, incremental, death, takes place, so we experience now, in each moment of wakeful, conscious physical life, in each time in which you perceive with your senses and represent to yourself something consciously. The final physical death means only that all those partial moments of everyday death are gathered together in one moment, in which we can experience death in its outmost intensity and totality. But it will only come to full consciousness 3 days after death, in the “second death”, when the etheric body dissolves and we experience ourselves for the first time as a purely soul-spiritual beings, observing our departing etheric body from outside. And then, provided that you prepared this in your past earthly life, you will experience the meaning of the Mystery of Golgotha, individualized, as the resurrection your spiritual consciousness in the spiritual world, and you will see and know that this spiritual resurrection is possible only through the Christ impulse. What we describe here belongs to the sphere of those insights concerning death, that otherwise can only be experienced when the physical and etheric bodies are laid aside. The modern path of spiritual science begins with these experiences, and today, strengthened by the new revelation of the etheric Christ, we can actualize them in a way that was not previously possible for ordinary, uninitiated, people.
The Mystery of Death and the Riddle of Memory
A more advanced stage in our meditative process is reached when we begin to lift the veil that covers the mystery of memory. In NES we find the following imaginative picture that tries to characterize what we experience at this stage: “This capacity of the Higher Self to imprint on the living flow of the Logos the seal of dismemberment means also that it begets, and begetting devours, and in devouring preserves, its dead time-children. The living, non-broken flow of world creativity is broken down by the Higher Self in each cognitive activity, thus begetting logic out of Logos, continuously creating dying, light-irradiated and thought- transparent 'dead spirit children', as Rudolf Steiner’s calls them (in the lecture of 16 July 1914, GA 155), which, as such, remain bound to the self (lecture of 12 April 1909, GA 110). They supply our ordinary self with the solid foundation of identity, being always ready to obey its voluntary control of thinking, feeling and willing in the physical world”.
In NES I was particularly interested to describe this process from the point of view of the experience of the unique etheric body of the Christ. In this experience, one actually experiences oneself, as a higher, world self, to be the source not only of the will to incarnate at the beginning of earthly life, but as the source of ordinary consciousness in each moment of wakeful life. But this ordinary consciousness depends on our capacity to remember and recall what we experienced in ordinary consciousness. We are well aware that ordinary consciousness can exist only thanks to the gift of memory. Memory enables us, in a mysterious manner, to recall our previous sense impressions, representations, feelings, will impulses, and picture them again, in a latter physical time, in our daily consciousness. But how this is taking place is unknown to us, because we are aware only of the beginning and the end of the process of memory. What takes place between the conscious perception and its recollection is not taking place in ordinally consciousness. The strengthening of the etheric cognition that brings to consciousness the unconscious formation of our ordinary consciousness, lead us also to experience consciously the unconscious supersensible activity that underlies the formation of our memories. As a matter of fact, the two processes belong together and make up, from a certain point of view, two sides of one process. Let us review now both as a whole, the formation of ordinary consciousness and the formation of memory.
As we pointed out above, the formation of ordinary consciousness is seen as if the living stream of life and time- with which our Higher Self is connected- is really “lost in the stream of time’s annihilation”. I have also called it the 'abyss of time annihilation'. This is not only a picture, but a fully saturated reality, in which all the soul forces come into movement and are deeply shaken, because in real spiritual life, everything that we experience in the world “outside” in actually happening in us and to us. We must understand that already in the etheric body and world, we are immersed in purely supersensible life, and we have become identified with this external life, because we have become part of the real etheric world. In the etheric world there are no fixed boundaries between the body and the world as we have between the physical body and the physical world, a separation that determines our ordinary consciousness; in the etheric world, body and world constitute one continuum, and flow in and through each other constantly.
The abyss, or the stream of time’s annihilation, where life is constantly annihilated, is the esoteric expression used to denote the physical and etheric process taking place in the nerve-sense system when our ordinary consciousness is created. It appears, imaginatively, in the form of an abyss which is also, in reality, a powerful stream of life-, time- and substance-destroying forces. Rudolf Steiner described this abyss from the most varied points of view. The following one can help us understand what we experience at this stage: “In the human being, his head formation actually annihilates his cosmic past ... so that we can say: in the head extremity the human being annihilates his past. Thereby he becomes, as a being of nerves and senses, the carrier of pictures, has a picture experience; a picture experience that weaves in the [devitalized, dead] etheric”. (lecture of 30 October 1921, GA 208) Because the living past in annihilated during each perception and creation of a mental picture, this perception and mental picture become conscious in our physical consciousness. We have our physical consciousness in this dead part of the etheric and physical bodies. While the living physical and etheric substance is perpetually killed in the human being, something happens in the living part of the etheric body which escapes ordinary consciousness. While the sense perception kills part of the etheric body, and allows us to experience a conscious mental picture, it also imprints itself in the living part of the etheric body, that belongs not to the nerves-and sense system but to the metabolic-limb, unconscious, system. What was imprinted in this living part becomes the sources of recollection, that enables us, magically, to remember something that happened in physical life in the past. But both the imprinting of the present impression as well as its recalling later on, happen above and below our ordinary consciousness, in the etheric world and body.
Rudolf Steiner describe the memory formation process in this manner:
“When the human being works over external impressions, make them into a memory pictures, and in doing so thrusts them into his ether-body, how does it happen that he actually brings down into the ether-body what the astral body [and ego] has first worked over and what now presses against the ether-body? How does he transfer it?”. Supersensible cognition discovers that our astral body and ego experience what we call in ordinary consciousness, “external sense perceptions”, outside the physical and etheric bodies. This experience is purely spiritual, that is, wholly unconscious and naturally spiritual red, as I showed in my book, Cognitive Yoga, is something altogether different from the mental representation of the red that we perceive by means of our senses. From all the spiritual experiences that we undergo, unconsciously, outside our bodies, we retain only those that our astral body and ego imprint in the physical and etheric bodies. The impulse to imprint them causes a transformation in the whole structure and movement of the etheric body: “We see currents developing everywhere in the ether-body, taking a very definite course, as if they would join the blood flowing upward from the heart to the head. And in the head these currents come together [around the Hypophysis]”. At the same time, the stream of the supersensible experiences, flowing from the astral body and ego, is concentrating itself around the Epiphysis. And the two currents, one flowing from the lower body and heart upward to the head, and the other from the outer spiritual world downward, face each other and create a field of tension between the Hypophysis and Epiphysis, “in about the same way ... as do currents of electricity when they rush towards a point which is opposed by another point, so as to neutralize the positive and the negative. At this point [the two kinds of] ether-forces are compressed as if under a very powerful tension: those ether-forces which are called forth through the [external] impressions [and flow from the whole etheric body upward] [and those ether-forces] that now desire to become definite concepts, memory-pictures, and to stamp themselves upon the ether-body”. And now Rudolf Steiner drew on the board the picture of the two streams that face each other in this manner:
“I shall, therefore, draw here the last out-streaming of these ether-currents, as they flow up towards the brain, and show their crowding together somewhat as this would actually appear. We see here a very powerful tension which concentrates at one point and announces: 'I will now enter into the ether-body!' ... thus, we have in the brain, whenever a memory-picture wishes to form itself, two ether-currents, one coming from below and one from above, which oppose each other under the greatest possible tension ... If a balance is brought about between these two currents, then a concept has become memory-picture and has incorporated itself in the ether-body”. (GA 128, lecture of 23 March 1911. And compare also the lecture of 24 March 1920, GA 312;- the picture below will help us locate the two glands in the structure of the brain as a whole).
This offers us a more concrete representation of the “the stream of time’s annihilation”, because it is precisely there, between Hypophysis and Epiphysis, that the cosmic, living, etheric time, coming from above, is destroyed, and our earthly time is born, that is the basis of our memory capacity which make possible our ordinary consciousness. The death of the one, cosmic stream, is the birth place (and time) of the second, earthly stream of remembered time. As I show in detail in chapter 5 of NES, if we continue our meditation energetically, we would be able to experience what Rudolf Steiner described above, and this will become the portal through which we may develop our imaginative cognition in a fully conscious way:
“The time-place we described above as the place in which the human life-time organism is continuously broken and divided in each moment of dying time is precisely this workshop of the making of memory. For ordinary consciousness, this time abyss is tightly closed and concealed. Its unity is given and natural, because it does not consciously experience the process of it’s becoming through the forces of living Death. It knows only its last and finished result in the form of the faculty and contents of remembrance. This blessed unknowing is the necessary condition for the daily experience of a solid and continuous, always unbroken and remembered, self- consciousness. But the very first enhancement and transformation of thinking through the will unveils the hidden, self-protecting veil of forgetfulness that is spread over the process of the making of remembrance and lifts it into consciousness”.
This experience became for me the portal and foundation of what I called “the anthroposophical knowledge drama” of our time, which is also the knowledge drama of the second, etheric, coming, because it is the appearance of the Christ in His unique etheric body that become this portal and foundation. In all my meditations, that I do in order to start up and fire my spiritual research since my early 20’, I always strive first of all to represent, as accurately as I can, this unique etheric body, and concentrate all my forces on this representation, until it begins to lighten up and become alive. Then it guides me in my further research, providing both template and source of the future forces that I will need as I wander on this particular spiritual path. The peculiar nature of this unique etheric body, as I described it in NES, is that it reveals this process in a living, imaginative way. In NES I describe it thus, and when we read this description, we must imagine, at the background, this unique etheric body as the overall guiding and illuminating etheric script:
“When we succeed in cancelling the instinctive engraving process of memory, we are able to stand etherically fast between the poles of the normally tightly closed circuit of our flowing etheric currents. Then we can consciously space its hidden time difference out, as we showed above, precisely at the most intensive point of its inwardly sealed tension. We then break down and overcome the intense mutual attraction holding sway between the two main poles of our astral-etheric activity in the head center-physically seen between the epiphysis (pineal gland) and hypophysis (pituitary gland)”. In the more advanced stages of this process, says Rudolf Steiner, “When the hypophysis surrounds the epiphysis with golden streams, it will be the point of time when the transformation of the astral body to Spirit Self, Manas, has been carried so far that the etheric body can be transformed into Budhi” (GA 264, lecture of 7 January 1908), while in the far future this process will densify itself to new physical formations: “The heart organ of the future will be the hypophysis and the future creative eye will be the epiphysis”. (GA 93a, lecture of 30 September 1905). In NES we can further read that “if we have come thus far, it will mean that we actually separated the higher (astral and ego) organization of man from his lower organization (physical and etheric bodies) That is, in the moment we cancel at will the ordinary activity of sense-perception, reflecting and memorizing, we free our astral body from its commitment to the destructive engraving process of sense-perceptions and thinking in the etheric body. A lightening of excarnation is then experienced, and our physically hardened cognition dissolves in the nothingness of its own, now powerfully surfacing, empty abyss. We consciously enter, in other words, the empty grave into which the etheric corpse of our normal objective consciousness- our deadened life-time-has disappeared, and out of which the resurrected, consciously molded new body of resurrected Christ consciousness emerges”.
We can understand this experience better through Rudolf Steiner’s words in the lecture he gave in 16 May 1920 (GA 201): “Christianity will not be understood until we can say: precisely in the realm of warmth there takes place in man a transformation through which [living, original] matter is annihilated and mere picture-being is pressed out of matter. But this picture-being is made into new reality through the uniting of the human soul with the Christ substance.” (This is, from another point of view, the inner process of the etherization of the blood, described in GA 129, lecture of 25 August 1911, and GA 130, lecture of 10 November 1911). This new Christ substance is flowing today to the earth through the above mentioned unique etheric body. In this substance, life and death are mutually changed into each other, first cosmic life into earthly death, and then earthly death is resurrected to new cosmic life. But the first form of life was unconscious, and the second life, that comes out of death, is conscious, that is, the sources of spiritual, imaginative cognition. This process begins with brining to full imaginative consciousness “the stream of time’s annihilation”, in which we lose the living power of our thought, and continuous in making its dead corpse alive again. But the resurrected corpse of cosmic thinking is resurrected as imaginative thinking and perception. This is, therefore, again, the portal to real anthroposophical esotericism, and the very first step of the real practice of the 1st class, because we begin to experience, that in us it is the etheric Christ Himself that makes everything dead alive again: In Christo Morimur.
In NES it is expressed in this way: “In the inner calendar of man's supersensible soul life, the arriving at this 'abyss of time' in soul- seeing of past death in life and future life in death is the seasonal, spiritualized inner recurrence of the Easter experience celebrated through the autumn festival of Michael. It is - at the same time- the mutually penetrated Michaelmas-Easter time, the beginning of the inner, always recurring celebration of the Christ-Mysteries of the future”. In my research this became the fundamental starting point, the portal, grounded and made firm through the years, becoming a recurrent, daily, mutually enhancing Michaelmas-Easter experience.
This inner experience was described by Rudolf Steiner as follows:
“The man of the future has before him two possibilities. The one possibility is this, that he will look back in memory to the time when he had experiences in the physical body and will say to himself: only that was real ... man will then look at the forsaken physical body as on a grave, and what he will see in the grave is a corpse-but for him the corpse will represent reality. This is one possibility. The other possibility is that man will look again at what he experienced in the physical world as on a corpse, but so that he feels it deeply and will be able to say to those who believe that the physical alone is truly real the following words of truth: 'The one ye seek is not there.' The empty grave and the resurrected Christ: this is the mystery of prophecy; and so, we have in the mystery of Easter the mystery of prophecy”. (GA 102, lecture of 13 April 1908).
This weaving of the spring-Easter Raphael Mysteries and the autumn-Michael Mysteries is described by Rudolf Steiner also thus: “Easter thought: he is laid in the grave, he is resurrected. Michaelmas thought: he is resurrected and can peacefully be put in the grave”. (GA 223, lecture of 1 April 1923). And further: “So that man must find through the resurrection of Christ the strength to die in Christ, that is, to receive the resurrected Christ into his soul during earthly life, so that he can die in Him. That means that man dies not as a dead being, but livingly”. (GA 223, lecture of 2 April 1923.) And also: “Easter festival: first death, then resurrection. Michael festival: first resurrection of soul, then death”. (GA 223, lecture of 1 October 1923), because “For the investigator in the realm of spiritual life, they [life and death] are getting ever closer ... Man sees how death weaves itself into life, how the dying and the sprouting process merge with one another ... And so, man learns in this way of spiritual research to know death already in life, and life in death”. (GA 234, lecture of 22 August 1924.)
In this reflection on the mystery of the last sentence of the opening mantra of the 1st class, I tried to turn attention to the fact that since the end of last century, it became possible for the first time to connect the esoteric stream of anthroposophy with the revelation of the etheric Christ. Out of this mutual fructification a new anthroposophical stream was born, endowed with new life forces, by means of which anthroposophy can be resurrected and become a future oriented, living force in life.