עברית "From now onwards there is a new revelation of Christ; we will be ready to acknowledge it; we will belong to the few who will help it to become more powerful, to become lasting; we will base ourselves upon the inner strength of such a revelation, so that it may spread among mankind, for this knowledge will gradually be shared by all."
From the Work on the New Edition of The New Experience of the Supersensible
The New Experience of the Supersensible
The Anthroposophical Knowledge Drama of our Time
From the Preface
"From now onwards there is a new revelation of Christ; we will be ready to acknowledge it; we will belong to the few who will help it to become more powerful, to become lasting; we will base ourselves upon the inner strength of such a revelation, so that it may spread among mankind, for this knowledge will gradually be shared by all. This is what we call wisdom, and some may call folly. To stand firm we need only remind ourselves that this is the time of the second Michael revelation, and remember what was said by one of the early Initiates at the time of the former Michael revelation: What often seems folly to man, is wisdom in the eyes of God."
Rudolf Steiner, Lecture of 2 May 1913 (GA 152)
Rudolf Steiner repeatedly pointed out that the greatest spiritual event of our time that will start in the 30’ of last century, is the appearance of the etheric Christ. The spiritual perception of his etheric appearance will be the result of the natural emergence of new, conscious, supersensible faculties of perception. The modern 'Damascus Experience' will be, as was the in the case of Paul, a naturally given initiatory event. Those human beings who undergo this initiation "will not require documentary evidence in order to recognize Christ, but they will have direct knowledge as is today possessed only by the initiates". This development is a result of the inner law that underlies the spiritual evolution of human consciousness. This law states that "all the faculties that today can be acquired only by means of initiation will in the future be universal faculties of humanity. This condition of soul, this experiencing of soul, is called in esotericism the ‘Second Coming of Christ’”.
Since the Mystery of Golgotha, the Christ has lived inside the earthly sphere and is unceasingly active therein. But during the greater part of this period humanity was still in the epoch of the mind (or intellectual) soul, or in its after-effects. Its approach to the Christ was conditioned by this fact and was based mainly on the religions and mystical paths of the Middle Ages. Thinking, as well as self-conscious supersensible experience and research, had to humbly retire before such direct knowledge, and in the age of the mind soul this was done for entirely necessary and justified reasons. However, in the age of the Consciousness Soul, and especially since the beginning of the new Michael age and the new age of light, Christ's being and activity can for the first time become the goal of fully individualized human experience and research. Anthroposophical spiritual science is precisely this: the freely acquired human knowledge of a thoroughly Christ-permeated and transformed universe, nature, and human evolution and history. The more the epoch of the Consciousness Soul develops and the more it emerges out of the intellectual residues of its immediate past, the more this soul will be recognized in its true nature. And its true nature is indeed already highly spiritual. But spiritual means sovereign, creative and active, inwardly aflame with the fire of love and enthusiasm for the mysteries of the world and of man, and thoroughly irradiated and penetrated with the forces of clear, precise and living thinking and Imagination. It experiences any passivity, givenness and obscurity only as the resistance on which it can unfold and strengthen its independent cognitive and moral forces. These characteristics of the Consciousness Soul, if they are truly developed, are those that enable it to come to grips with the new, naturally developing faculties of supersensible perception, which bring about the modern Christ experience as a natural initiation event, because it finds in this event an infinite source of possibilities for the future strengthening and spiritualizing of its innate spirit forces.
It is, therefore, the nature of the unique spiritual development of the human soul at the threshold of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries that determines not only the content of the present book but, above also its form. On the one hand, we start from a given supersensible Christ experience; but then we make it into an object of spiritual scientific research. We therefore weave together the given and non-given, the exoteric and esoteric sides of the modern Christ experience. As was mentioned above, Rudolf Steiner characterized this experience as a naturally given event, through which man will have a direct knowledge of the Christ, that only the initiate could gain in the past. This will give such a person new spiritual faculties and capacities, which he and she can apply to different aspects of life. The task of spiritual science is to apply these given capacities to the investigation of the being that offers them to humanity: to the etheric Christ Himself. In this way, the task of spiritual science is to transform this given initiatory fact into anthroposophical initiation science, as it transforms the sense-perceptible appearance of the plant into the spiritual scientific investigation of the plant’s being and becoming.
From an anthroposophical, spiritual-scientific point of view, every experience, be it sensible or supersensible, is a given and therefore, as such, an external fact. So long as it is not thoroughly penetrated and transformed by the active and independent thinking and imaginative forces of the consciousness soul, it remains a personal, subjective event that, notwithstanding its personal value, cannot become in this form a matter of scientific study. For spiritual science, therefore, such an experience must first become an object of anthroposophical research, as described in this book.
This means that through spiritual science we can establish a two-way connection with the given Christ experience and the spiritual faculties that it awakens in the human soul. As we shall show below, the new faculties that grasp the etheric Christ, that are given by Him, and the spiritual activity of spiritual science, mutually intensify and enhance each other, because both come from the same source. The one is a gift of grace given according to karma, the second is a fully conscious and intentional spiritual activity, that depends on our present freedom. Each one brings to the other its specific faculties and forces, and is in turn enriched, deepened and strengthened by the other. We spiritualize the conscious activity of spiritual science through the gift of Christ’s experience and the spiritual faculties that it offers, and we investigate the Christ experience with the means of renewed and spiritualized spiritual science. The modern Christ experience and the new spiritual faculties that perceive it, and the conscious activity of spiritual science, mutually enhance each other. The two streams grow more and more intimately with each other. The Christ reminds us that originally, Rudolf Steiner developed spiritual science from his direct meetings and co-working with the Christ, Michael and Anthroposophia in the spiritual worlds. When we use Christ’s given forces to spiritualize spiritual science on the earth, we do this by means of the forces by means of which Rudolf Steiner created spiritual science at the beginning of last century. But the modern Christ experience connects us to the source of the present stream of Michael and the real being of Anthroposophy in the etheric world. And the task of our work has been, through the years, to transform the old Anthroposophy with the help of the new Anthroposophy, directly at its presently active spiritual source, until the two became increasingly one earthly-spiritual stream. Therefore, we can say that the mutual crossings, fertilizations and transformations between earthly and supersensible Anthroposophy, is the subject of this book. And the middle in which old and new Anthroposophy meet, is the modern Christ experience. Through the modern Christ experience, earthly Anthroposophy is constantly resurrected, renewed and rejuvenated and unites with its actual spiritual being in the etheric world, and at the same time, the Christ experience becomes ever more conscious and illuminated by the spiritual knowledge of spiritual science on the earth.
This book tries to answer two questions that arise out of the modern Christ experience.
First, what is the essence of the modern Christ experience? And Second, what spiritual scientific method of research should be developed, to investigate it?
In the preface we outline our answer to both questions.
The modern Christ experience is the central Event in the present and future spiritual evolution of humanity, called in spiritual science the etheric Second Coming, that begun in 1933 and continues in the next 3000 years. According to Rudolf Steiner, the esoteric significance of this Event is the offering and reception of an Ego-copy of the Christ by the free human ‘I’.
The method that was developed to investigate the Ego giving and receiving is called ‘the knowledge drama of the Second Coming’, described in this book.
The Meeting with the Etheric Christ
The first important aspect of the meeting with the etheric Christ in the etheric world is that it is a gift of grace, because it is initiated and given by the Christ. Rudolf Steiner emphasizes the fact that there is a “tremendous difference” between this meeting and the way an initiate perceives the Christ in the spiritual world:
“There is a tremendous difference between what trained clairvoyants experience and what is described here as something that will come about in the natural course of events. Since time immemorial the trained clairvoyant experienced the Christ by means of certain exercises. On the physical plane, if I meet a man, he is there is front of me; with Clairvoyant vision I can perceive him in quite different places and we do not actually meet. It has always been possible to see the Christ clairvoyantly. But to meet Him, now that He stands in a different relationship to humanity, that is, that He helps us from out of the etheric world, is something which is independent of our clairvoyant development. From the twentieth century onwards, in the next three thousand years, certain people will be able to meet Him, meet Him objectively as an etheric form. That is very different from experiencing a vision of Him through inner development”.(GA 130, 17.9. 1911. My italics).
This meeting, is, therefore, a meeting face to face, and as we can also experience when we meet another person face to face, through the face, the whole being of the other person is revealed and experienced. And in the meeting face to face with the Christ, a most sacred event is experienced, in which the human “I” and the Christ “I” face each other and experience what occurs between them. What usually remains unconscious in the ordinary human meeting, becomes fully conscious in the etheric meeting with the etheric Christ. Naturally, this meeting has many, indeed, infinite aspects that could be described. But if we search for the Ur-Phenomena of the modern Christ experience- and this is the task of the knowledge drama of the Second Coming- we will have to describe what happens in the meeting in the following way.
The Gift of the Ego-copy of Christ
During the meeting we realize that the Christ offers us a graceful gift, the seed power and essence of His own Self. The mystery Event that transpires between Christ’s Self and the human self in the face-to-face meeting, can only be brought to full light of spiritual consciousness and cognition, through Rudolf Steiner’s investigations of this event. And the reason that spiritual science is the source of the light that can illuminate this meeting with the clearest and intimate light of spiritual knowledge, is the fact that the original light of spiritual science was created by Rudolf Steiner’s experience of the Christ. Real Anthroposophy is a gift of the Christ, and the light that creates the way to the knowledge of the Christ is the light of His wisdom, the Sophia of Christ. When His ‘I’ gift is individualized and the event of the gift is recapitulation in the free human ‘I’, man himself gives birth to the being of Anthroposophia, the being of our true humanity.
About this event, Rudolf Stiner said that those experiencing it ‘will know the mystery of the Christ-Ego through seeing the Holy Grail, the eternal ego into which any human ego can be transformed… they can receive the Christ-Ego at the sight of the Holy Grail. At a future time when people will be increasingly well-prepared to receive the Christ-Ego, it will imbue the souls of human beings to an ever-increasing degree so that they can strive upward to approach the position where their great model Christ Jesus used to be.
Lecture of 11 April 1909 (GA 109).
Continue reading from the preface to the first edition