עברית In this special Easter time of 2020, while great suffering and pain is experienced by many people, we can also actively cultivate and intensify the forces of new life and resurrection, in a way that wasn’t possible before, if we follow the teachings and example of the newly resurrected etheric Christ.
From the Teaching of the Resurrected Etheric Christ
In this special Easter time of 2020, while great suffering and pain is experienced by many people, we can also actively cultivate and intensify the forces of new life and resurrection, in a way that wasn’t possible before. Here we enter, naturally, the holy of holiest of our human souls, of humanity and Earth; we must tread gently on this holy ground of our etheric hearts, but also joyfully and courageously follow the teachings and example of the newly resurrected etheric Christ.
We will only be able to understand the books, The New Experience of the Supersensible, The Spiritual Event of the 20th Century, and The Twilight and Resurrection of Humanity, if we realize that they contain the new teaching of the crucified and resurrected etheric Christ, after He completed the whole Second Mystery of Golgotha in the etheric world, that started, as Rudolf Steiner said, at the end of the 19th century, and continued until the end of the 20th century.
As Rudolf Steiner said, in the 40 days between Easter and Ascension of the year 33, the resurrected Christ taught His disciples after Golgotha the mysteries of His physical death and resurrection (GA 211, 2. 13. 4. 1922). In the same way, since the end of the 20th century, the etheric Christ teaches his modern disciples the mysteries of His etheric death and resurrection. The knowledge drama of the Second Coming, described in The New Experience of the Supersensible, Christ’s activity and suffering through the apocalyptic history of the 20th century, described in The Spiritual Event of the 20th Century, and the new Michaelic Christ revelation in the 21st Century, described in The Twilight and Resurrection of Humanity, are the summary of the teachings given by the resurrected etheric Christ. He could give this teaching after he completed the century long Second Mystery of Golgotha, as a result of what He experienced in His etheric death and resurrection, from the end of the 19th until the end of the 20th century.
This century long process could be described for the first time in the afterword to my forthcoming book, The Twilight and Resurrection of Humanity: The history of the Michaelic movement since the death of Rudolf Steiner (Temple Lodge, May 2020).
“Rudolf Steiner emphasized repeatedly that the foremost task of Anthroposophy is to pave the way for a fully conscious experience of the etheric Christ, who is the living heart of the school and movement of Michael. But he could only point to a future event, that would begin in the 1930s and 40s and continue over the next 3000 years. As we showed in the third lecture above, he couldn’t continue his work on the earth to help his pupils to develop the spiritual faculties needed to experience and perceive the etheric Christ in the etheric world consciously before 1933. Therefore, this was the foremost task of our work, at the end of the century, to unite spiritual science with the new revelation of the etheric Christ, and the new etheric Christ revelation with spiritual science. I have investigated this impulse since 1975, and this was and is the thread that guides me through all my spiritual scientific research. This thread led me to discover that, since the transition from the twentieth to the twenty-first centuries, and then especially from 2008-10, the appearance of the etheric Christ has changed in a marked way, in comparison to His appearance in the course of the last century. All evolutionary transformations are prepared in a gradual way. Nevertheless, each revelation of a new stage of evolution, appears as a new spiritual event, because its novelty is absolutely real. This applies also to the evolution of the highest and most sublime being of our entire cosmic evolution: to the Christ being Himself.
From 1933 until 1998, His whole etheric appearance revealed how greatly He was burdened, indeed, profoundly wounded, by the fact that He carries in His heart the weight of all the evil deeds that humanity unleashed on the earth since the end of the nineteenth century and throughout the course of the whole twentieth century. This was described in greater detail in the second lecture above. In my book, The Spiritual Event of the 20th Century, I described how the etheric Christ descended in the 30s and 40s into the core of human evil and took it into His heart by uniting Himself with it. I also described the light-filled results of this sacrifice that were revealed in the renewed etheric body of the earth. It could be perceived in the etheric body of the earth, due to the spiritual activity of the human and angelic beings in the School of Michael, who went before Him and supported this sacrifice. I called this new etheric world, that came into being for the first time in human evolution, ‘the earthly-human sun’, because it is the first fruit of the co-creation between human souls and the gods. In this new earthly-human, etheric sun world, an imagination appeared, that showed the reflection of the result of this sacrificial deed. It could be grasped because the etheric consequences of this sacrifice appeared in the etheric body of the earth. It was also possible to experience the results of this sacrifice, from the other side, in the appearance of His individual etheric body, where it became visible in His etheric human-like appearance. In this manner, I could closely follow the etheric results of His sacrifice from both the planetary and human sides. What one could perceive with imaginative perception is an external, etheric revelation of His spiritual being. With imaginative cognition alone, it is not possible to follow the spiritual being of the Christ on His way to this deepest evil place. To begin with, one could experience Him only throughHis planetary etheric body, on the one hand, as described in The Spiritual Event of the 20th Century, and, on the other hand, through His etheric human form, as described in The New Experience of the Supersensible.
In order to understand the meaning of the new revelation of the resurrected etheric Christ in the twenty-first century, we must understand the continuation between His sacrifice in the nineteenth century, that Rudolf Steiner could still describe, and the sacrifice during the twentieth century. The new revelation in the present is the result of the continuous stream of these deeds of sacrifice. For this we have to consider how Rudolf Steiner described the first stage of this sacrificial process, that he called ‘the second mystery of Golgotha’, that took place at the end of the nineteenth century...
Today, in 2019, it is possible for the first time—because Christ’s recent resurrection from this ‘grave of civilization’ makes it possible—to speak about what He experienced in this grave. We can try to understand what actually took place, if we understand fully what Rudolf Steiner said in 1913, that the Christ, after he assimilated the materialistic thinking of the nineteenth century and suffered a spiritual ‘suffocation’ and loss of consciousness in the etheric world, was driven out of this world, into the physical world. We must feel this with our whole human being, and we will be able to do so only when our etheric hearts become robust organs of spiritual perception and cognition. Then we will realize that after the Christ was banished from the etheric world to the Earth, on the Earth, living now entirely among living, incarnated human beings, he had to face a wholly new attack. Now, as an etheric human being, living among physical human beings in the 30s and 40s, he was confronted by the far greater evil forces, unleashed by incarnated human souls, not after their death in the etheric world, but in the physical world.
In the course of the first half of the twentieth century, he had to experience the full impact of the new forces of evil. Let us remember that Rudolf Steiner said that the result of Christ’s death by suffocation and banishment in the second Mystery of Golgotha in etheric world at the end of the nineteenth century, will be the ‘‘resurrection of direct Christ consciousness’ in the earthly sphere in the course of the twentieth century. He said that the angelic being in which the Christ has revealed Himself since the Mystery of Golgotha, will become the bearer of this ‘resurrection of direct Christ consciousness’ on the earth from the 30s and 40s. But what actually took place on the earth in those years after the death of Rudolf Steiner in 1925? What did the angelic being experience, when the time had come for his previous sacrifice to cause this ‘resurrection of direct Christ consciousness’ in the first human souls, that will enable them to perceive consciously His new etheric appearance? What did He really experience in the very moment in which the resurrection of His consciousness could have taken place in human souls in the physical world in this way?...
Forthcoming in Temple Lodge, May 2020:
The Twilight and Resurrection of Humanity
The History of the Michaelic Movement since the death of Rudolf Steiner.
An Esoteric Study.