The Threefold Heartbeat of Michael

The Twilight and Resurrection of Humanity

The History of the Michaelic Movement since the death of Rudolf Steiner

An Esoteric Study

From Lecture 5: The Etheric Form is Alive

The Threefold Heartbeat of Michael

This is the most important anthroposophical task since the end of last century: to connect these three etheric streams and forces together on the earth. The etheric forces streaming from the Middle of the Earth and the Mystery of Golgotha, the etheric forces flowing so purely from the Northern Spirit, the future life forces of Vidar and his Asgardian family; and the etheric forces burning in Middle Europe, wounded through humanity’s wound and transformed in the etheric world into the future forces that must be about humanity’s healing. This is what we call, as will be will described in greateer detail below, The Threefold Heartbeat of Michael. This is only possible through the etheric forces of the etheric Second Coming. If we succeed in merging the spiritualized essences of these three etheric streams, and connect them with the North American stream, we will be repeating, by means of our conscious, earthly human deeds, what was and is suffered and accomplished in the etheric world in the spiritual School of Michael during 1933-45, up till today and on into the far future, and prepare its next major incarnation of the Earth.

Dear School Friends,

Since Easter 2017, the meaning of our work in the School of Spiritual Science went through a significant transformation. You can compare it to what the child undergoes with the birth of his free etheric body around the seventh year of life. The forces that build the physical body in the first seven years become now free and he is ‘ripe for school’, because he can use the freed etheric forces to think, feel and will in a way he couldn’t do before. He also has become part of a greater community of his school and is led from now on by his teachers to learn the basic knowledge that he will need for his life on the earth. The same process, on a higher, communal level, happened to our work as well. After more or less seven years of ‘physical’, that is, basic, down to earth, spiritual preparations, from 2009 until 2016, we are ‘ripe for school’, which is the real School of Michael. This is the reason why we could experience the birth of our communal etheric body as a real conscious event. This happened in Easter 2017 in Israel, and since then, this free etheric body continues to develop and receives an intensifying stream of spiritual revelation, inspiration and knowledge from the Michaelic school in the etheric world. This new revelation forms the substance of what we could share in Israel in 2017, in Germany in 2018 and now in 2019 in Sweden.

I sent two letters of invitation to prepare our present meeting. I want to include some updated parts of them here.

The first one was sent in December 3, 2018:

Dear School Friends, when we shall meet again in Sweden in February, it will be our third meeting in the stream that started in Israel in Easter 2017 and continued to Germany in February 2018. Now it arrives to the North, and we wish to be able to connect to the Spirit of the North as we tried to do in Israel and Germany. Our stream strives to become a conscious earthly reflection of the stream of Michael in the etheric world. Becoming conscious on the earth of this stream cannot happen as a passive reception of new knowledge about it, but is based on a creative action. As long as it exists only in the etheric world, we can be informed about it; but from the moment that it must begin to incarnate on the earth, it becomes a practical communal task of the whole school community. Our real future task begins now, and the meeting in Sweden is dedicated to it. The task demands greatest seriousness, courage, enthusiasm and joy, because it is to create an etheric pathway and chalice on the earth, to prepare the way for the incarnation of the main Michaelic impulse in this century.

On the earth our work seems often to be isolated, surrounded by opposition and misunderstanding. But in the spiritual world we are most welcome in the company of our spiritual teachers and partners. If we continue to strive, loyally, to listen to what they tell us, we will discover that they are encouraging us to develop the courage to listen to the voice of our true self—because this voice is their voice as well! Let the pharisees and doctors of spiritual science of our time continue to reject what the spiritual world says today, but we can be assured that if we dedicate ourselves to our task in all humility, loyalty, and perseverance, more and more people will find the way that leads to the present Michaelic revelations streaming with such abundance from the spiritual world.

If we listen to this voice, we will become aware of the past, present and future goals and tasks of the stream of Michael, and we will direct our work on the earth accordingly. I suggest that each one of us will try to create a distillation and extract from the essences of the most important experiences we had during the school meetings in Israel and Germany. We can then bring these extracts with us to the North. Furthermore, let us also work with everything that we experienced in our previous global school meetings in Sweden, which was the home of the global school in its infancy. Let us remember that the new impulse of Michael and the School of Spiritual Science tried to incarnate since 1980 in Israel, but was rejected again and again; it couldn’t find its physical home there, though spiritually, it is always welcome in the sacred aura of this land. Nor was its home found in Germany. Its first home was finally found here, thanks to the special grace of the Northern Spirit. Here we could meet every year since 2009, in a protected and supportive atmosphere. From now on, we will be able to experience this home in each place and each time in which we can do our work.

If we carry the essence of our experiences in Israel and Germany, and the connection between them, and connect it to what we have experienced here since 2009, we will experience in our meeting in Sweden the force and significance of this threefold extract: First we will bring the spir- itualized essence of what we experienced in Israel and Germany, which we experienced together in the last two years, and we will add to it a spiritualized extract made from what we experienced in the earlier years of the global school meetings in Sweden. The three spiritualized extracts taken together will help us prepare what we would strive to experience together when we meet in Sweden again in February 2019.

Try to work with your spiritualized experiences as we learned to work with the meditations of Knowledge of the Higher Worlds. In the recent annual school meetings in the North America, Sweden, Germany and Israel, we carefully read the relevant texts and focused our attention on the way Rudolf Steiner describes the meditative process. He points out how we can penetrate to the essence of the object of our meditation, by deepening our experience of it step by step, leading it from thinking to feeling and will, gradually merging with its essence and becoming conscious of its inner spiritual being. If we do the same with the essential experiences that we had in our recent global school meetings in Israel and Germany, we will be able to harvest much substance that is of the essence of our spiritual task.

An extract from our experiences in Israel in Easter of 2017 could include a new feeling concerning the meaning of the Mystery of Golgotha, the central event of the whole evolution of the earth, and its connection to the present revelation of the etheric Christ. We will be able to experience it not only as past history and religious tradition, or as an anthroposophical tradition, but as it is working today and becoming alive again through our experience of the etheric Second Coming. The extract from our global meeting in Germany 2018 could carry with it the essential meaning of the Spiritual Event of the twentieth century. Combined together, the two extracts from Israel and Germany make up powerful meditative stuff, connecting us to what really concerns Michael and his true followers in the etheric world in our time, and bring clarity and assurance concerning the meaning of our task. Then we can add to the Israeli-German synthesis also the Nordic extract, which points to the future. The coming meeting in Sweden in February 2019 will be the first meeting of the global school in the North, after our shared experiences in Israel and Germany. And in the greater context of human evolution, the Northern impulse is the source the future forces that flow to humanity only gradually in the course of the fifth post-Atlantean epoch. In our work, this future source must become an immediate, actual present influence.

If we will learn to actualize this threefold stream consciously, we will begin to experience it as a fact of the greatest spiritual significance. Going to the North will mean that we are expanding our etheric body as it is facing the future etheric forces, that didn’t incarnate until now on earth. From the still purely youthful etheric forces of the future, we will learn to bring new seed forces to the present. On the other, polar side, travelling to Israel is experienced as contracting our etheric body and grounding it. This enables a deeper spiritual penetration into the forces of the Christ impulse in the Earth, and the ability—this must be first learned as well—to gather the spiritual treasures of the past and spiritualize them in the present. To work fruitfully, together with Michael as the Time Spirit in Germany, is possible only if we learn how to harmonize actively the swinging pendulum between these two poles. This will become a creative etheric breathing in and out of the ‘new will of yoga’ of Michael. In the work of the school in the future, we will learn how to experience the etheric forces of the Middle, no matter where we are living physically on the earth. It will become our innermost etheric, ever moving, circulating, heart organ. We must learn to create a fully conscious communal etheric breathing and experience its source in the living spiritual event of the present century. In this central etheric heart organ and activity, we will learn how to grasp and regulate the dynamic oscillation and essence exchange between the super-earthly etheric forces of the North and the deep spiritual and etheric forces of Israel. This will allow us to find the pulse of the self-transforming and constantly changing rhythm, holding sway in the present between the future oriented etheric youthful forces flowing from the North, and the etheric forces flowing out of the resurrection of the old earth in Israel. This will enable us to gather the spiritual forces from the North and South, East and West, and activate them in the etheric centre of our communal heart. If such a community will be formed in the coming years, it will become a chalice through which also the etheric Christ, the Higher Self of humanity, will be able to unite His forces with a growing and expanding community of intimately connected spiritual partners.

The future community of the School of Spiritual Science will become in this manner real and actual, not only ideal; its esoteric life will become part of our newly released etheric hearts and bodies. We will experience, from a Michaelic point of view, the etheric forces of humanity’s past, pres- ent and future. The spiritual forces of the East, South, North, West and middle can only be found in and through each other, not in isolation in themselves. Therefore, only in their meeting and synthesis is the true mid- dle formed. The etheric forces of Israel, Germany, and Scandinavia—to which the forces of North America are related—strive to come together today in each human middle, in the really living etheric hearts all over the world. Our task is to bring them together and unite them with Michael’s living heartbeat, that pulsates in the middle of each country and continent. If we make it alive in the middle of our etheric hearts, we will find it in the heart of North America, Scandinavia, Europe and Israel; we will find it in the North and West, East and South, in the heart of the North in Scandinavia, in the heart of the Middle of the Earth in Israel and in the heart of Europe in Germany. If it will be possible to achieve this in full etheric communal consciousness and activity: the bringing together of the etheric forces from the Middle of the Earth, working through Israel, into Middle Europe, unite them with the spiritual forces working through Germany, and join both with the forces flowing from the spirit of Scandinavia, enhanced and augmented by the active will forces of North America, then we will be able to really experience the Michaelic karma of humanity and the earth as a whole, as Michael and Christ wish humans to experience them in this age...

This is the most important anthroposophical task since the end of last century: to connect these three etheric streams and forces together on the earth. The etheric forces streaming from the Middle of the Earth and the Mystery of Golgotha, the etheric forces flowing so purely from the Northern Spirit, the future life forces of Vidar and his Asgardian family; and the etheric forces burning in Middle Europe, wounded through humanity’s wound and transformed in the etheric world into the future forces that must be about humanity’s healing. This is only possible through the etheric forces of the etheric Second Coming. If we succeed in merging the spiritualized essences of these three etheric streams, and connect them with the North American stream, we will be repeating, by means of our conscious, earthly human deeds, what was and is suffered and accomplished in the etheric world in the spiritual School of Michael during 1933-45, up till today and on into the far future, and prepare its next major incarnation of the Earth.

Let us take up this task most energetically and enthusiastically when we gather soon in Sweden and bring with us the fertile and potent etheric extracts and essences, distilled and spiritualized from our previous, present and future work!

From lecture 5 of the forthcoming Book (Templed Lodge, Spring 2020)

The Twilight and Resuurection of Humanity

The History of the Michaelic Movement since the death of Rudolf Steiner.

An Esoteric Study