עברית As Christ is continuously crucified in our daily thinking--and is resurrected through the liberated will being of thinking - so He is objectively, as world-human self, also crucified in every ordinary sense-impression and resurrected in the process of its spiritualization.
The meaning of the Michael impulse as the way to the etheric Christ can only be understood if we actualize Rudolf Steiner’s path with our most intense selfless love and devotion, to perceive, confront and experience, and transform, the Ahrimanic death forces controlling our thinking, feeling and will in the present age. This practice is also the foundation of the knowledge drama and Michaelic cognitive yoga in our time.
"Sense-perception can be understood as a fine interaction between the external and inner ether; as enlivening of the outer ether that is killed in the sense-organs by the inner ether. In this way what the senses kill from the ether of our surroundings, is inwardly made alive again through the etheric body, and we come in this way to the perception of the external world". (GA 66, lecture of 17 March 1917).
“If you were living in an etheric sea as etheric being, you would have never come to that human consistency which you actually have in the world between birth and death. How do you reach this consistency? In that you are organized to suppress and kill this etheric life. And with what do we suppress it? With what do we kill it? Through the counter-thrust of ideas! ... We would have had an etheric world around us if we had not killed it and brought it down to physical form through the world of ideas.'(GA 198, lecture of 10 July 1920.)
“When the Sun ray penetrates our eye and things become visible, on the Sun ray the place is to be found where our Angel lives. But it is so: in the oscillations of sounds, in the radiance of light and colors, in the other sense-perceptions, lives the being of the Angel. Only, because man must transform his sense-perceptions into mental pictures, the Angel cannot enter into them, and man does not know how he is surrounded by the being of the Angel ... Through this fact we are exposed, in the time between birth and death, to the penetrating attacks of the ahrimanic forces in our intellect”. (GA 176, lecture of 14 August 1917)
“We only have dead light today. However, the Christ once drew in on the rays of this dead light and fulfilled the Mystery of Golgotha. If we have dead light outside ourselves today, then we can enliven the Christ in ourselves. With the Christ in ourselves in the right way, we enliven all light on the Earth around, carry life into the dead light and have ourselves an enlivening effect on the light”. (GA 218, lecture of 23 October 1922)
From the Knowledge Drama of the Second Coming
The New Experience of the Supersensible, chapter 5
When we bear in mind that since the Mystery of Golgotha the Christ lives in the form of an Angel in the hierarchy of the Angels, and that in the etheric world he undergoes his renewed etheric death and resurrection in the ahrimanic thinking forces of our time, then it immediately clarifies the experience of the transformation of sense-experience, described above. As Christ is continuously crucified in our daily thinking--and is resurrected through the liberated will being of thinking - so He is objectively, as world-human self, also crucified in every ordinary sense-impression and resurrected in the process of its spiritualization. This is truly the real, in our time absolutely necessary, Michaelic practice: “'When we learn to receive in nature the soul element in sense-perception, then we will have the Christ-relation to external nature. Then this Christ-relation to external nature will be something like a spiritual breathing process”. (GA 194, lecture of 30 November 1919).
Preserving and bearing the living light of the formative, cosmic love as the source of world thinking, the etheric Christ is experienced as infinitely narrowed and condensed, nailed inside out and upside down, and fixed as a dead picture on the human physical retina. Ordinary sight is revealed as a continuous crucifixion, in order that man might consciously see a dead world-in freedom. This is the shattering experience at this stage of the transformation of sense-perception.
The place of the cross in sense-perception, and the second, etheric Mystery of Golgotha in this sphere can, therefore, in imaginative observation, be exactly grasped. In ordinary consciousness it enables, working from out of man's unconscious soul life, the objective process of sense-perception.
When the point of killing the external ether is consciously seen, the etheric Golgotha in perception is seen; when it is consciously grasped, we go through it livingly, uniting the inner and outer etheric streams through life in death and death in life in conscious imaginative 'I' activity, and experience the etheric resurrection of Christ in the etheric world as man-world united resurrection in joyful expansion into the macrocosmic worlds of living light, colours and sounds.
Without advancing in sense-perception to this etheric crucifixion and resurrection, man cannot, in our time, achieve conscious, voluntary imaginative sight. He will remain a dreamy, 'auric' visionary clairvoyant, or intellectual materialist. But then he would have missed Christ's etheric resurrection in the imaginative planetary life-and-light sphere, woven out of humanity's Christ-permeated perceptions, livingly crystallized around the fiery core of the new earthly-human Sun. But here, as in the case of the transformation of thinking, the etheric crucifixion experience is what enables us to create the living/dead/resurrected bridge of remembrance over the river of our released-and livingly annihilated-life-time, that as the abyss of the greatest disharmony ever to exist in the being of man' continuously threatens to destroy any conscious knowledge of the interrelationships between the spiritual and the physical worlds.