The Meeting with the Etheric Christ, part I: The Constitution of Self-Consciousness

The Meeting with the Etheric Christ, part I: The Constitution of Self-Consciousness

From the work in progress on the Introduction to the Second Edition of the New Experience of the Supersensible.

The New Experience of the Supersensible

The Anthroposophical Knowledge Drama of our Time

 From the New Introduction

Above we described Paul’s Christ experience at the gates of Damascus as the beginning of the Christianization of thinking, that spiritualized western thinking in the last 2000 years. The same applies to the modern Pauline experience of the Second Coming. Thanks to the spiritual scientific investigation of this event, it is possible to explicate some of its central aspects.

 To do so, let us first place before us the first paragraph from chapter 4, The Modern Christ Experience - The Meeting with the New Initiator. In this chapter, the given Christ experience is described, in which the Christ offers the human ‘I’ the seed essence, or ‘copy’’ of His Self, and plants it as a seed of future transformation in spirit, soul and body, and at the same time, also demonstrates its future development:

  There are three basic elements or stages in this meeting which, while forming a unity in the actual experience, will be described here separately for the sake of clarity.

The first stage might be described as a resurrection and awakening from the death of the soul through the Imagination of Christ's etheric appearance.

The second is the soul's healing and transformation through the Inspiration of His living words.

The third stage might be characterized as the kindling and nourishing of the eternal fire of the self, inside the physical body, by the Intuition of His active presence.

 The phenomenological study of the 3 stages is described in chapter 4, and individualized and recapitulated in chapter 5, by means of the knowledge drama of the Second Coming. For the knowledge drama of the Second Coming, the Ego-copy offered and received in the Christ experience serves as an archetype and template, according to which the spiritual scientific investigation of this event proceeds, that enables us to understand its unique nature.

  The most significant aspect of the modern Christ experience, from this point of view, can be described as follows. 

  When we bring to the light of spiritual knowledge what transpires in this event- during the offer and reception of the ‘I’ of Christ in our own ‘I’- we find out that it combines in one event two aspects of human life that are wholly separated from each other in ordinary consciousness: the unconscious reality of the spiritual world and the self-conscious experience of the ‘I’ in the physical world. The earth is the only place in the universe in which we can develop self-consciousness, because we are incarnated in a physical body. When we incarnate in the physical body, we give up our spiritual consciousness, that remains in a state of deep unconscious sleep during earthly life. In the moment in which the human ‘I’ and Christ’s ‘I’ meet face to face in the etheric world, and an imprint of Christ’s ‘I’ is implanted in man’s ‘I’, these two separate stats of consciousness become one state of consciousness in the etheric world. Our physical self-consciousness is raised in this moment from the physical body and world to the etheric body and world, but doesn’t dissolve there, as happens in sleep and after death. Rather, it becomes spiritualized self-consciousness, experienced as an independent part of the etheric world.

 We must imagine, therefore, a wholly new spiritual situation and event, in which we find ourselves in this meeting. This new situation is an intensive etheric event, and the world in which it is constituted and grounded is the etheric world. Supersensible self-consciousness is the new situation and reality constituted in this event. That is, in this meeting, the two states are fused together, to create a third and wholly new state of consciousnesses: self-conscious spiritual consciousness. The ordinary fully awake self-conscious and the unconscious spiritual consciousness, that are entirely separated in modern earthly life, merge with each other, and their essences are mutually exchanged and transformed. The unconscious spiritual consciousness becomes self-conscious, and physical self-consciousness becomes spiritualized. Both stats of consciousnesses penetrate each other, and each is born again, spiritualized, through the other. This essence exchange event occurs in the giving and receiving of Christ’s Ego-copy, and the light that brings it to full spiritual self-consciousness is the ‘light of the Grail’, as Rudolf Steiner said. (‘Through seeing the Holy Grail, to get to know the mystery of the Christ-Ego... [and] receive the Christ-Ego at the sight of the Holy Grail’. As we shall see below, the source and nature of this light becomes known only later, in the course of further spiritual scientific investigations, and is revealed as the supersensible being of Anthroposophia. To begin with, however, this light, that illuminates the event, is given as an integral part of the given event, and we don’t distinguish it from the whole occurrence).

 The spiritualization of self-consciousness also radially transforms our perception and understanding of what the ‘I’ really is. Because self-consciousness, the knowledge that the ‘I’ is an ‘I’, and has an independent existence in the world, is spiritualized, one becomes conscious of the fact that the true ‘I’ is a universal, indeed, cosmic, spiritual being; and the true spiritual ‘I’ is part of a new spiritual world. And as the physical world, with its forces and substances, build and shapes the physical body, through which we gain our ordinary self-consciousness, do does the etheric world in regard to our etheric body and the new state of spiritual self-consciousness. That is, in this event, an objective supersensible reality- the spiritual being of the Christ revealed in the etheric world- is experienced as the formative source and force of new spiritual self-consciousness that, until now, was capable of individualizing itself in the physical world alone. As the physical world gives us physical self-consciousness as a given gift, the of the etheric Christ in the etheric world give us spiritual self-consciousness as a given gift. This etheric, imaginative, self-consciousness is a newly given state of consciousness, gracefully offered by Christ’s imaginative appearance, words and acts, and this is the reason why the giving and receiving of His Ego takes place in the most lucid, clear and self-conscious imaginative cognition.  

 If we want to portray this situation and event accurately, from the point of view of modern spiritual science we must say: In the imaginatively perceived world a Being appears- the only one of its kind in our world- through whose etheric appearance and becoming process, that takes place in and through the human I, the totality of the Idea, the divine archetype of man, in spirit, soul and body, can be directly experienced. We experience and see ourselves, through the indwelling ‘I’ of Christ in our own ‘I’, in the light of the future wholeness and fulness our divine nature; it appears spread out in everlasting time, as an entire stream of becoming, from the remotest past to the far future. But in this meeting and essence exchange we aren’t external onlookers as in the physical world; we participate inwardly and actively in this event; it is a dynamic, and indeed- as we shall presently see- reciprocal event; we know that the Being who appears in the external, objective, etheric world, is our own Higher Self, that we are lifted at this moment out of our physical body and ordinary self-consciousness and taken gracefully into His being, and that at the same living time we take in- etherically speaking- His etheric appearance, words and act, and through them, we receive His ‘I’ into our “I”, soul and body. As shown in chapter 10 of Cognitive Yoga, this is a mutual becoming: He takes the essence of our earthly human being into His divine “I” and we take the essence of His “I” into our earthly human being. In our spiritual, self-consciousness dwelling in His being, we become and eternal part of His Being; and in His dwelling in our being, His being becomes and eternal part of us. And we are aware of the fact that this event is a cosmic happening, and that we become active and creative etheric participants in a world becoming process, taking place in the wide-open etheric world. We feel that the whole universe participates with us and through us in this human-and world becoming process, and we know: through the given ‘I’ of the etheric Christ we realize the infinite becoming process of our future humanity, because this ‘I’ embodies in each time the divine archetype and fullness of our human-cosmic becoming...

The New Experience of the Supersensible