עברית The actual knowledge drama began after the birth of my Higher Self at the age of 20. Then I read Rudolf Steiner’s book The Philosophy of Freedom. For the first time, I could experience the same spiritual light, until then known to me only as the spirit light illuminating my spiritual experience, as part and parcel of my thinking activity.
The Experience of the Birth of the Higher Self
Why did you later call this supersensible experience "the knowledge drama of the second coming”?
Kindly consider that I experienced the birth of my Higher Self I was 20 years old, and I experienced it without any previous concepts. I had no pre-conceived mental images to think in the normal way what I went through. The only texts that supported me during this week was a first time reading from the Old and the New Testaments, especially certain passages from the Prophets and Chapters 13-17 from the Gospel of St. John. I was led to read these passages by the Being referred to in them. I could recognise the same Presence coming to meet me out of them as the One I experienced. This gave me the only mental hold and grounding that I had in order to grasp the otherwise purely supersensible experiences. The Biblical passages and the purely spiritual experiences supported and complemented each other. Consider also that before this event I never got to know these passages at all, because as I told you, I had been raised in a secular Israeli Kibbutz where all Jewish religious (as well as Christian) traditions had been omitted.
After the spiritual I-birth described above, I lived in two separate realities: in the physical and in the spiritual. It was like living in one house on both of its two storeys at the same time, between which self-conscious bridges were not yet built. While being on the one floor, the memory of my identity on the other was indistinct. I had to build “stairs” or a “bridge” of consciousness and cognition in order to link my “two Selves” together.
This bridge-building process was and is for me the knowledge drama as such, of anthroposophy as such. And anthroposophy is alive today if it also becomes a path of knowledge that creates real spiritual-scientific foundations for understanding the becoming process and deepening identification of humanity with its Higher Self. This is the true reality behind the often misunderstood and misused concept of the “Second Coming” among Christians, the “Messiah” among Jews, and the “Imam Mahadi” among Muslims.
The actual knowledge drama process in my life began a year later after the birth of my Higher Self, which occurred at the age of 20. Then, as part of my anthroposophical studies, I read Rudolf Steiner’s book The Philosophy of Freedomfor the first time. This was the second decisive life-transforming event for me. What was so striking was the fact that, for the first time, I could experience the same spiritual light, until then known to me only as the spirit light illuminating my spiritual experience, as part and parcel of my thinking activity. Then I knew what my spiritual task would be from that point onward: to create a bridge from this thinking spiritual activity to the supersensible Higher Self experience. Obviously at that time I did not know that this would require more than fifteen years of daily anthroposophical labour, research, obstacles, struggles, and hard trials on so many levels of my life.
Through the intuitive activity of my thoughts that lit up in my soul I could for the first time in normal, daily consciousness develop, by means of my own spiritual activity, the same spiritual light that up to that point I had known only as supersensible light in another, supersensible state of consciousness. Now I was able to kindle it through my self-conscious activity in the physical world. From that point on, I could work alternatively from each floor to the other, from both sides of the “tunnel” towards each other, until I could bring the two ever closer. Finally, when I was thirty-five or thirty-six, the supersensible bridge or tunnel construction work “met in the middle” and the working parties from both sides could meet and celebrate the completion of the bridge. Only then could I think it through to the end and begin to write it down in physical words on physical paper.
This “bridge-building work” is described in this book.This spiritual-scientific work enabled me to enter the supersensible realm independently and “recapitulate” consciously what I experienced as a young man. This research work led me also to investigate some central supersensible problems of the history of the 20thcentury that enabled me to show the power of transformation within the history of humanity as a whole. This is what I put down in my first little published book, The Spiritual Event of the Twentieth Century(Temple Lodge, London, 1993, second printing 1997).
From Spiritual Experience to the Path of Knowledge
Can you characterise the method of your spiritual research?
It is important to abolish positivistic and materialistic notions of spiritual experience and spiritual research. One can never “possess” them. A true spiritual experience is only present in its full actuality: in its living process of incarnating, becoming realized spirit presence in the living present, excarnating, and disappearing. Otherwise, it is merely a shadowy and dead concept, an empty shell, a corpse of its true being. Also, one cannot wilfully “command” the comings and goings of such experiences. It is always a grace and a gift, offered by the supersensible being that one meets. Such a being comes to meet one if this beingso wishes, if this is part of the will of the spiritual worlds. The earthly-human participant can only strive to prepare a suitable, potential meeting place, to which he or she can humbly and joyfully invite the other, and then await the advent of the real spirit event.
I developed in the course of my research various ways to do this, differentiated according to the specific needs of my investigation or practical social work. For the moment it will suffice to indicate that only in the purity of actively created nothingness and in the purposefully established state of “un-knowing” could I expect a renewal and recapitulation of true supersensible experience. I have to be very active and precise in order to create the “immaculate” virginity that is the uncontaminated, non-intellectual place, to which I may humbly invite the supersensible other. This is a strict scientific requirement if we are to be able to approach the spiritual.
Supersensible beings cannot be grasped by our brain-bound intellect because it is simply too coarse, too hardened, too proud and loveless. Of course, we should strive to learn, to think, and to understand the world as deeply as we can. For the purpose of conducting spiritual research, however, we must, in freedom, free ourselves from this acquired knowledge. What is essential in learning is not the remembered sum of concepts preserved in memory, but rather the creative soul forces and faculties developed throughthe activity of study. The creative faculties developed through study cannot be retained in memory but can be reactivated if memory is intentionally suppressed. No true supersensible event, process, or being would come to meet me as long as I block its way by means of my already existing concepts and mental pictures, habits, and routines.
If we develop our thinking in a living, creative way, giving-up and forgetting its results, thinking will come back to us from our spirit outside. Because we freed it from our possession, because we have demonstrated our loyalty and love to its true being, selflessly releasing its from its bondage- in us- to Ahriman, the spirit begin of thinking shows its thankfulness in a remarkable manner. While we lose it intentionally, it comes back from the world and finds us! That is, if we learn to hold back the finished, formed results contained in the intellect, we discover that we are richly rewarded: the supersensible may reappear fresh and alive, and at the same time fully irradiated and transparent with an inner light of cosmic thinking. This thinking that shines through our imaginations is “our” cosmic thinking, or better, the revelation of the thinking of the Higher Self. That is to say, the giving up of intellectualism allows true thinking to be resurrected as a supersensible cosmic-human, human-cosmic process. Truly modern and spiritually-scientific imaginative perceptions and pictures are always “thoughtful.” We don’t have to supply them with external interpretation in order to understand them in the actual event. They explain themselves much better then we would ever be able to do, and yet, the light of thinking that irradiates them is our own freed and redeemed thinking. We feel our true Self active therein; it is a living immanence free from any transcendental residues of external spiritual or metaphysical elements.
For me this method became the foundation of developing research and creativity in spiritual science and art and in social life, as I pointed out above. Anthroposophy may become in this manner a path and a method, in order to actualise the spiritual. No actualisation of a real event is possible unless we learn to practice spirit-remembering, spirit-faithfulness(called spirit-awarenessin the second verse of the Foundation Stone Meditation), and spirit-beholding, as stages of actualising the etheric meeting with the Higher Self of humanity.
Through the Moment of Death to the Powers of Resurrection in Thinking
Can you elaborate further on the “die and become” process that you describe at length in your book?
In the short space of this interview it is hardly possible to give more than a couple of characteristic indications. First, I have to bring my soul-condition into a kind of “threshold-condition.” This happens through the transformation of thinking indicated above. I have to start at that point at which I actively experience how thinking dies in my everyday cognition. I actively seek and actualise the place and time where thinking dies. This sought-after “cross” and “tomb” of thought is a pictorial expression for this process of bringing to consciousness the sacrificial death process that the living being of thinking undergoes in order to become available for our daily, normal, modern cognition. Any so-called “living thinking” that does not originate in this stage is but a Luciferic self-enjoyment of sorts. For me, this is a sacred place of the knowledge drama of true spiritual science. I really have to learn how to “put myself in this grave,” in order to become inwardly identified with thinking's passion. In so doing, I gradually learn to love death as I would love a good teacher and helpful friend of the path - as paradoxically as this may sound. Death is my helper and teacher because it teaches me how to free myself from the unconscious - and hence given - thinking, feeling and willing. For only out of death comes the resurrection of the spiritual soul, cognition, higher consciousness and new social capacities. Therefore, not only do I avoid “overcoming” death by any wilful act on my part, but I actually invite its presence and action. I experience death within the region of my own soul and life forces and learn to actualize it within myself and on myself. I learn to be active there, at the grave of cognition, wide awake, alert, and poised; I gratefully acknowledge and accept the death process of my soul and the tired, old, used, habitual self that it harbours. Death then is my helping master teacher and it shows me a way to the threshold that only it knows. Only there does the true, lucid, supersensible life begin to emerge.
And now one has to imagine that one awakens gradually at dusk, into the twilight between worlds, and increasingly draws near to one’s “night-being.” This being is indeed a being that dwells in another dimension of reality. This reality, in comparison with ours, is “super real,” so intense and full of life and substance that our daily consciousness immediately fades away, sinking into deep unconscious sleep, when we encounter it. (This happens, after all, each night). The living being of death is the only power that can transform the power of cognition and can awaken far deeper forces of awareness than we possess in ordinary consciousness. Now, because one has befriended death, one can intensify one’s powers of wakefulness, while at the same time lowering somewhat the intensity of this “super-reality” of the spiritual, and thereby consciously wake up withinthe abysmal depth of supersensible reality. There one experiences a birth of one’s Spiritual Self that, as Steiner put it, “comes to meet you from the grey abyss of the spirit.” Yes, this place is indeed grey-black to begin with, if thought, discovered, and explored consciously. Later it lights up and the great celebrations can begin. But the way there is difficult and somewhat hazardous.
Obviously, like in the earthly world, a new-born spirit baby needs grownups to tend for it, feed it, and serve as living examples of the faculties it has to develop as its matures. This is also the case in the supersensible realm. Thus, in the spiritual world we find the Higher Self, in its etheric (living, radiant) garment, as mother-father-midwife and teacher. As the “firstborn” of all humans to achieve the ultimate goal of earthly evolution, this Higher Self being is the one who can best teach us what we are going to become. He/She is the great teacher of future becoming, and an expert master of the mysteries of the “die and become” processes. In and through him/her, our new-born baby Spirit Self can safely learn to stand up and walk, talk, think, and learn to experience and gradually come to regard itself as an independent “I” in the midst of supersensible reality.
Now it will be our no less difficult task to learn how to bring together and bridge both sides of our two selves - the “day-self” and the “night-self” - to coordinate and link them into relations of mutual recognition, help, and co-operation, because we want to realise a new cultural life, new communities, and a tri-sector social order on the earth as humans in the age of the consciousness soul. The Higher Self is the model of all true future community, and the centre around which already in the course of this age, human beings will learn to come together in the spirit of true cooperation, love, and freedom.
In Search of the Appropriate Language of the Spiritual
How can spiritual experiences and results of spiritual research be adequately communicated?
You touch here on one of the most painful wounds of a spiritual scientist! Spiritual research is a living, most dynamic, initiatory process. But then it must be communicated… If communication is done via living talk - dialogue – in a suitable soul atmosphere of true love and trust between humans, it is still possible to convey something of the true experience and reality involved. When it comes to the written text, however, things become difficult indeed. Texts, as Paul and Steiner said, kill the spirit. This is, of course, necessary as I indicated above, because transforming death in our age is a prerequisite of wide-awake spiritual cognition. And, of course, writing is still necessary as a means of keeping records in memory. However, the written, dead word must be constantly resurrected, and this can occur only if social life becomes actualised as living event, in the intimate, dialogic sharing of life experiences. That which is most important can only be communicated from one human heart to another, and what is written should only function as a reminder: “there, see, there’s a new possibility for experience, dialogue, event. Now forget the book and begin to live the true life…”.
We are ripe enough today to be able to experience how inter-human dialogue in itself is already a spiritual reality. But we are still afraid to go to the place of uncovering our true voice, because we know that if this develops, we may enter into true initiation processes and events. Many still fear this, although they may write or speak a great deal about it! I am actively engaged in the problem of how dialogue can become an essential life-giving element of spiritual research and the various applications of anthroposophy in social and cultural life. In particular, my endeavours in the field of creating appropriate forms for the School of Spiritual Science have showed me again and again how far we are from the true community-building practices of the near future.