עברית What must be the real task of the School of Spiritual Science in the twenty-first century? It musst become the place in which the complete cycle of the metamorphosis of love will be experienced, experimented, researched and developed, as the most practical communal soul-spirit art, craft and ritual.
The School of the New Force of Love
The Twilight and Resurrection of Humanity
From Lecture 2
Dear friends, if you survey modern history and the history of the Anthroposophical Society and movement until now, I believe that you would ask yourself this question in the most serious way: what must be the real task of the School of Spiritual Science in the twenty-first century? This school will only become what it should be, namely, the growing edge and experimental pilot of human evolution, if it becomes the place in which the complete cycle of the metamorphosis of love will be experienced, experimented, researched and developed, as the most practical communal soul-spirit art, craft and ritual.
This whole growth and development process of love, from the first freely given deed of innocent love down to its appropriation, reversal, and killing, as well as its healing and resurrection in the form of new forces of robust love, hope, and faith, will kindle again the forces of loving trust among people, but the forces of trust and love will be of a wholly new kind. They have been submitted, repeatedly, to the sacred process of In Christo Morimur, active in the whole cycle of death and rebirth; they have lost their original pure virginity but have won it again as self-less, self-conscious love. This is the essence of the school’s future task.
What must be communicated now requires some extra soul efforts and a great deal of good, courageous will on your part. I have taken a lot of time in my preparations, trying to be as exact as I can be in choosing and forming my words and phrases. In doing this, my purpose was to turn your attention to the next infinitely important future task of the Michaelic stream, concerning which we would wish to feel—if our striving is truly honest—to be the humblest beginners and preparers.
Therefore, I had to travel in my Imagination some long stretches of time to the future, in order to review in the etheric world, the details of this future communal earthly-human sun work. I will therefore use below mainly future terms and references, emphasizing, on the one hand, the distance between our humble beginnings and these lofty goals.
Some human souls at least must be found, who will really accomplish it in the most practical esoteric sense, in real life itself, in their wakeful etheric consciousness, perception, feeling and doing. Let us therefore really learn how to work from the etheric future towards the etheric present! Let us really learn the new art of Michaelic becoming! Learning, by means of this etheric future spiritual science, how to create true love, must however start in the present moment of the present Michaelic age.
We must feel empowered by knowing that in this century we have the best opportunity and support to accomplish this task before 2100, when the etheric heart will be completely released from the physical heart. This fact is what makes everything we are communicating from the future capable of being achieved, esoterically speaking. If such human souls will be found, who would activate their etheric head and hearts, uniting them more and more with their etheric limbs and whole bodies, as we demonstrated in Cognitive Yoga, they will begin to remember their pre- earthly lives in the etheric earthly-human sun, before they descended to their present incarnation in the second half and at the end of the last century. Then this future etheric anthroposophical community could begin to come about—but in no other way.
Dear friends, if you survey modern history and the history of the Anthroposophical Society and movement until now, I believe that you would ask yourself this question in the most serious way: what must be the real task of the School of Spiritual Science in the twenty-first century? This school will only become what it should be, namely, the growing edge and experimental pilot of human evolution, if it becomes the place in which the complete cycle of the metamorphosis of love will be experienced, experimented, researched and developed, as the most practical communal soul-spirit art, craft and ritual. If we were required to characterize in a nutshell what would be the main ‘subject matter’ of this future School of Spiritual Science and its community, we would say that in the future, this school will teach its members, how to develop, in full consciousness, by means of repeated cycles of exact training, the forces of true love. This is naturally the highest, ultimate goal of all spiritual science, art, craft and ritual, not only of the present age of Michael, but of the whole fifth cultural epoch and indeed of the whole future evolution of the Earth. But we must activate and actualize already in the present the prophetic and apocalyptic seeds and forms of these ultimate times.
This will be the real essence of the curriculum of this school, and all trainings will be directed to this all-important centre. In this future school, the students will be led to experience in their lives and destinies, the true esoteric history of love. They will learn how to embody in their hearts, souls and bodies, the whole life cycle of love, from its innocent heavenly birth, to its earthly death and spiritualized resurrection; from the first, still heavenly inspired love, to its reversal and betrayal in the abyss of modern self-love, to the new, tested, resurrected, truly robust selfless future forces of love. This threefold learning cycle must be inscribed repeatedly and intensively in the centre of the new etheric hearts and bodies of the members of the future community of the School of Spiritual Science. It will offer the absolutely necessary training in Christ’s inspired ABCs of the apocalyptic white magic of love, that should have been actualized by Anthroposophy already right there, when the Beast took over the earth during 1933-45, and the practice of black magic became the principal and official power of politics, culture and economy, that controls all aspects of external life in our civilization.
The future students of true spiritual science will learn how to experience, through conscious experimentations, the unavoidable breaking down of the first, freely given love and trust among the closest partners in any real spiritual community. On the new etheric level, in which the etheric hearts are so intimately woven together, the breaking of trust is factually, medically speaking, a breaking of the heart in the most concrete etheric, that is, living, and ensouled sense. It therefore has far more devastating moral soul effects than the common breaking of trust in ordinary physical life, which for many is already too painful to bear. This is the first fundamental reality of the future etheric community: Nothing can be compared with the painful heartbreak that people will experience in the future, as Rudolf Steiner told the young in 1922 in the first youth lecture cycle. He told the young in his infinitely caring and compassionate way, that this kind of heart-breaking disappointment could never be experienced in the past in this way, because the positive force of loving trust among free people couldn’t be experienced either. Only when this trust is broken, can we experience the really modern ‘joy of confidence and the pain of inevitable mistrust’. It is only with the breaking of this kind of trust, that underlies the freely offered deeds of love between intimately connected modern souls, that we begin to experience the new kind of extremely bitter, heart-breaking disappointment.
This is what we mean when we speak about the reality of the modern wound of egoism, this is the true reality that lies behind those historical concepts and symbols, that many people enjoy as spiritual entertainments, like the Grail, Klingsor, Amfortas and Parsifal. But in the future School of Michael, described here, this must become the real substance of practical spiritual life. In the abyss that this egoism opens between closely connected souls, when it tears asunder deep karmic bonds, when all trust breaks down, we experience in full consciousness how all our best moral hopes and goals crash down.
This is the first fundamental and founding experience in the future orientated anthroposophical community, and it will be taught and experimented with in all exactitude in the future School of Spiritual Science. It will also prepare its students to experience with the same heightened consciousness and cognition the further stages of the rapid downward spiral and moral crash. After the breaking down of the original loving trust is fully realized, it is enhanced and deepened, and becomes the fully blown ahrimanic hatred. The original impulse of innocent love and trust, that didn’t yet go through the annihilating and reversing fires of egoism, was still based on the grace of pure and inspired beginnings; it was not yet killed and resurrected love and trust. Now it is fully reversed by Ahriman’s forces of hatred that control us. This hatred prepares the ground for the next decisive stage in the metamorphosis of love.
We must carefully observe and grasp how this hatred is cultivated in a rational manner, by creating inhuman representations of the persons we hate. Now the consciously cultivated hatred has reached and exceeded the strength of the original force of the first love and trust. It reverses it fully and then continues to intensify this reversal down to the next lower level. In the conscious communal building praxis of the future, this step will also be studied, anticipated and confronted consciously and dealt with in each moment in a courageous and healing manner. In this third step, the partners who were united by their Michaelic karma and met each other through the first impulse of innocent, gracefully given, love and trust, are now completely obsessed by the forces of hatred and they kill their brothers and sisters systematically. Because nowadays it is no longer customary to burn people alive at the stake, this killing takes place all the more intensively on the human, social and moral levels.
In the old and new Anthroposophical Society these forces were always working against Rudolf Steiner’s mission, again and again threatening to undermine the continuation of his work. He could overcome them alone until the Christmas Foundation Conference, but not after it, because from now on his main impulse was the new community building, and as we said above, this he can only accomplish together with fully conscious and active partners. This is the reason why he was ‘poisoned’ during the last day of the conference, which means, that he opened himself in full human vulnerability to the Klingsor forces described here. The full intensity of these forces could be realized completely and visibly in the masterfully organized and executed defamation and persecution campaign directed by the Anthroposophical Society against Ita Wegman and her friends, after Rudolf Steiner’s death.125 What took place there was naturally active all the time, but Rudolf Steiner could master it—until the time had come in which this kind of mastering was no longer timely, because it should have been replaced at that time by the awakened consciousness, conscience and responsibility of the members of the new Anthroposophical Society. This new community, the community founded in the Christmas Foundation Conference, should have been based on the new spiritual training, that only now we can begin to actualize. But after Rudolf Steiner’s death, when he could no longer protect the work on earth, the anti-Grail forces of absolute reversal broke out with terrible vengeance. The same forces and processes have since become normalized and encoded to become simply the most ordinary forces and routines that control all aspects of physical anthroposophical life and work exactly as they do in our civilization as a whole. And naturally, dear friends, they are just as active in us and among us, here and now!
This downward spiral into subhuman processes has hindered for more than a century the building of the future Anthroposophical Society and school, community and movement, and must be fully recognized and healed in the course of the first half of the present century, and only then would the age of Michael be able to really begin on the earth. In the future earthly-human sun community, described here, these elementary stages and processes will be studied, named, confronted and healed in real time. This work must be clearly distinguished from what people love to do, who write ‘history’ from armchair hindsight, describing nicely ‘what happened in the past’, while comfortably ignoring the fact that they are repeating the same patterns in the present moment! What must happen in the future school and community is that with the means of true spiritual science, the elephant of egoism, growing more and more gigantic by the day, that has controlled and still controls—from its repressed unconscious corners—all anthroposophical institutions and communities in the first Michaelic century—will be placed gently and lovingly, respectfully, but squarely, on the central table, to be studied and transformed consciously. This is the reason why from the very first day of our work in the School of Spiritual Science in 2009, we placed something entirely different in the centre of our meetings! Instead of the lethargic, passive, common reading and practice of the general percepts about devotion to truth and self-knowledge, given in Knowledge of the Higher Worlds, we placed in the centre of our meetings and practice the absolutely real and concrete experimentation with the two pillars of modern egoism and self-love: the twin laws of reversal and self-exclusion!126 This real practice of devotion to the truth of self-love must become in the future the very breath of daily honest and fresh spiritual life; in this atmosphere of utmost active, practical, honesty, the wound of egoism will be compassionately seen, acknowledged, and healed in the most creative, sacred and uplifting ways. This healing can only take place by means of the infinite deepening of the forces of love that the future school will bring to life.
As we said above, in the future community, the full life cycle of love will be studied in the greatest experimental and experiential detail. The pupils in this school will learn to experience, not through anthroposophical theories and speculations, how in each moment, in their own life and deeds, the young, virgin, gracefully given, deeds and gifts of love and trust are broken down, bitterly disappointed, appropriated and reversed. They will have no need to study the ‘history’ of the Anthroposophical Society and movement in order to discover the bitter truth about this spiritual egoism (and blame others for it, naturally), but simply observe their own hearts and deeds today and yesterday, to realize, with open etheric minds, eyes and hearts, how and why all our original anthroposophical impulses and hopes are reversed to their complete opposites; and they will experience in themselves and in their intimate human and spiritual relations with each other, how these precious forces of love are transferred regularly to the hands of the adversarial ahrimanic-luciferic beings. This will become the fully conscious, robust, unsentimental and objective experience in the future School of Spiritual Science, provided that souls will be found, that honestly and seriously will strive to face in this honest way the first crucial tests offered by the Guardian of the Threshold.
These future comrades of Michael will say to themselves as naturally as we speak today about our next meals or entertainments: ‘Of course, as long as we simply let our egotistic wound control us, we will continue to use spiritual science, as Christianity is used, to transfer the most precious gifts of the gods to the enemies of the gods. We will continue loyally to reverse and transfer them to Ahriman and Lucifer!’ Now, dear friends, this will indeed be the beginning of honest and real self-knowledge, that will become common daily practice and reality in this future school When the wound of egoism will be illuminated consciously by the new etheric light of heart cognition, egotism will no longer be considered as a possible option that healthy people may, or may not, develop, that per- haps with some nice weather and natural food, they will be spared. Let us be reminded what was described above in the first lecture, that the wound of the ego is the sum total of all the dead bodily parts and unconscious soul forces, that are disconnected and separated from the living spiritual world, in which Ahriman and Lucifer build their strongholds in us. This wound will be experienced and perceived consciously as a veritable, poisoning, dark sunspot, in the otherwise gently and warmly radiating light of the etheric body of the earthly-human sun. In the future etheric community, this unconscious wound that is always festering in the unconscious depths of all human bodies and souls, will come to the light of consciousness in the course of an orderly, systematic training. Provided we will be willing to let the Christ’s new etheric sunlight illuminate it with heart- felt and clear consciousness, there will be nothing fatally shameful and unredeemable about it. The wound will be experienced as the positive, stimulating, ahrimanic-luciferic ferment, that if treated spiritually biodynamically, that is, consciously, compassionately, creatively, will become the fertile and well-composted ground of the new etheric community. We will experience how it becomes an incredibly vital and fertile spiritual moral humus, in which we will plant our new, consciously resurrected earthly-human sun seeds and forces of robust, consciously dying and resurrected love; it will become the life-giving ground and atmosphere of the incarnation processes of the earthly-human sun, in which the fullness of the Michaelic school and the being of Anthroposophia will be able to dwell.
This whole process, from the first freely given deed of innocent love down to its appropriation, reversal, and killing, as well as its healing and resurrection in the form of new forces of robust love, hope, and faith, will kindle again the forces of loving trust among people, but the forces of trust and love will be of a wholly new kind. They have been submitted, repeatedly, to the sacred process of In Christo Morimur, active in the whole cycle of death and rebirth; they have lost their original pure virginity but have won it again as self-less, self-conscious love. This is the essence of the school’s future task. The new forces of trust and love, hope and faith, will have been steeled in the burning core of the wounded-wounding modern egoism; they would become the new etheric forces of moral warmth and light, life and nourishment, of the earthly-human sun of the future. The whole etheric life cycle of love’s becoming and metamorphosis, steeled in the bitterest fires and abysses of trustless disappointment and moral death, will bring it back to life from the abyss of egoism; it will be resurrected as the new force of self-conscious love, the fresh and youngest rebirth of the original gift of love on a higher level, as robust love sub- stance, vitality and form.
Read the whole section in lecture 2: The Twilight of Humanity and its Resurrection