עברית Through His life in human death, and His death in human life, He gained the power to teach His disciples and impart to them, for the first time in human evolution, this secret: the secret of the 'bridge'.
A conscious, life-preserving, life-giving death!
Ester-Pentecost 2021
The New Experience of the Supersensible
From chapter 2: The Ur-Mystery of Remembrance
He thus planted the seed of His newly created death in life and life in death in the souls of His pupils: a conscious, life-preserving, life-giving death! Through His life in human death, and His death in human life, He gained the power to teach His disciples and impart to them, for the first time in human evolution, this secret: the secret of the 'bridge'.
From that Gethsemane night, through the holy Friday of the passion and crucifixion, the sojourn in Kamaloka in the great Passover Sabbath, up to the visitation of the empty tomb and the first resurrection experiences of the women on Sunday morning, the Christ was livingly and consciously entering the dying life-stream of humanity and the Earth. He thus planted the seed of His newly created death in life and life in death in the souls of His pupils: a conscious, life-preserving, life-giving death! Through His life in human death, and His death in human life, He gained the power to teach His disciples and impart to them, for the first time in human evolution, this secret: the secret of the 'bridge'.
In die coming 40 days He could teach them the most modem of all arts of consciousness: the art of preserving, consolidating and resurrecting self-conscious spirit remembrance, awareness and seeing, over the abyss of death and spirit forgetfulness. This abyss stands mightily before us when we look, together with the bewildered and shocked disciples, into the empty tomb of Sunday morning. It signifies the deepest abyss of consciousness in the whole evolution of humanity and the Earth. On the earthly side we have the physical, external Christ memory of humanity, as preserved in the Gospels. On the other side of the tomb, we have the mysterious Pentecostal event and the Pauline transformation on the way to Damascus. In between, however, we have only unclear, disjointed reminiscences and rumors of resurrection and ascension. A virtual abyss, a tumultuous stream of life's annihilation and spirit forgetfulness, separates everything that went before Easter from everything that came after Pentecost.10 And ever since then, the Death being of our Earth threatens to widen this abyss up to the point where no memory of the bridge will be possible at all.
Only when, through Rudolf Steiner's research, we enter into the souls of those who experienced this abyss as their own do we begin to recreate in our own soul the anthroposophical gospel of knowledge, which is the foundation stone of the bridge of spirit remembrance over humanity's abyss of consciousness, past, present and future. In the events from Easter to Pentecost we have the archetypal model on which alone we can mold our own anthroposophical foundation of spirit remembrance. For in the twenty first century this abyss must be vividly and freely experienced.
Let us, then, place before us in the liveliest way possible the experiences of the close disciples of Christ as described by Rudolf Steiner in his lectures on the Fifth Gospel. Awakening as they did in the event of Pentecost from their special sleeplike state of consciousness to which they had succumbed more and more since Gethsemane night, they had the following remarkable experience. Looking backwards in the stream of time, they saw themselves as they were during the last 50 days since the events of Golgotha. They said to themselves: dining these days we were spiritually in another, dreamlike state of consciousness, in the company of a spiritual Being who taught us something out of the spiritual world. But we could neither recognize Him, nor clearly understand His teaching. On the other hand—so they said to themselves at the moment of their Pentecostal awakening—we have those dream like, earthly memory pictures of our physical life with Him and, as the summation of our physical life with the Christ—gathered and, as it were, condensed—there appears to us the memory picture of the last supper. But only when the two come together—when the purely spiritual Imaginations are fused with the background of the most spiritually potent physical memory picture of the last supper—do we remember and recognize Him as the same one who was with us both before, physically, and after, spiritually, the Mystery of Golgotha.
Anthroposophically understood, this means: through the teachings of the Christ during the 40 days—and in His mysterious acts during the next 10 days of His ascension—a special transformation took place in the organization of the disciples. The two life-streams, that of life without memory and that of memory without life, began to cross and impregnate each other. The death-stream that received the life element of the physical Christ and the life-stream that received His spiritual death element of Golgotha were woven into one coherent stream. We can also say: the dead memory (intellectual) stream was so powerfully penetrated by the lifeblood stream of the Christ that it could begin to illuminate—that is, awaken—the consciousness of the purely spiritual being and essence of the Christ. The dead stream was enlivened while the living stream was deadened. Where they crossed each other—on the inner cross of the disciples' own being—there was born the living, spirit-consciousness, awakening the Holy Spirit of Pentecost.
According to Rudolf Steiner, the Pentecostal awakening had the following stages: first, the realization that the body on the cross was the body of Jesus of Nazareth, with whom they were together in the last short three years; second, that the crucifixion was in reality no ordinary death but a birth, the birth of the cosmic spirit of love into the Earth; and third, that a ray of this spirit was now the consciousness-awakening power of their souls. This threefold recognition is, as Rudolf Steiner pointed out, the first knowledge gained through the Fifth Gospel. Now 'day after day' the whole time between Golgotha and ascension became visible, and with it the ultimate question concerning the identity of the Christ Being could be positively answered—their bridge of conscious ness-continuation was complete.15 'It was a complete streaming together of the memories from that consciousness that was in a state of sleep with the memories of that which had happened before. They experienced it as two pictures that were superimposed on one another: one picture of the experiences after the Mystery of Golgotha, and one from before it, as if shining from the time before their consciousness was clouded. So they knew that these two Beings belong together: the Risen One and He with whom, a relatively short time before, they had wandered about physically ... This is what causes amazement: the invariable coincidence of one picture of an experience of the Apostles with the Christ after the Mystery of Golgotha with a picture of a happening they had actually lived through in their normal consciousness while together physically with Christ Jesus'.
We are now in a position to understand better the meaning of the 50 days between Easter and Pentecost. During this time the Christ completed an initiation of his disciples by not only metamorphosing their higher members but also their etheric life bodies. This means that—after the work of ascension was completed—these specially prepared etheric bodies could reflect back the purely spiritual events into living spirit- consciousness; in the inner light of their etherically reflected, purified egos and astral bodies, they received consciously, for the first time in human evolution, the living picture of the risen Christ and the content of His supersensible teaching. And what is more, they brought it into harmony with the physical world, that is, with the memories of Christ's physical life with them. And this conscious linking of the purely supersensible with the earthly physical is the achievement of the new Christian (today anthroposophical) initiation.
Macrocosmically, the new Holy Spirit was born at the moment of death on Golgotha; microcosmically, in the being of humanity, it was born at Pentecost, as described above. The promise of the last supper was fulfilled: The Holy Spirit—the spirit of consciously gained and freely remembered knowledge of the spirit—was created (in death), was 'sent' (that is, taught in the 40 days), and was received (at Pentecost). The first archetypal, macrocosmic-microcosmic birth, growth, maturation and ripening process of free spirit knowledge was consummated; the first seed of Anthroposophia was planted in humanity and in the Earth.
In order to deepen our study at this point, our exploration must differentiate itself into three main routes that rim their course parallel with each other and are intertwined in the most complicated ways. The one is the evolution of the Christ Being Himself, especially from His earthly birth at the Mystery of Golgotha up to Pentecost. The second is the evolution of the Apostles as a result of His teachings and acts at this time, enabling them, eventually, as we saw, to receive the Pentecostal illumination and remembrance. And the third is the evolution of the being of the Earth, in and through the other two. In the Christ Being we have the active, sacrificing, earthly-becoming Sun-center, that had worked from the moment of His earthly birth on Golgotha directly into the being of His disciples and also into the being of the Earth as a whole. In the disciples we see that which is prepared, in the aforesaid time, to begin to reflect consciously—from Pentecost on—the Sun power of Christ in a direct, human way. And in the Earth, we see the objective planetary results of this interaction between the Christ and humanity; every enhancement and deepening of this process becomes an objective world foundation, transforming the Earth into a new cosmic earthly- human Sun-sphere...
From the point of view of the modem Christ experience and the event of the Second Coming, which it is our task to investigate here, this special preparation and transformation of the etheric bodies of the disciples is especially significant. For reasons that will become clear in Chapters 4 and 5, we must say that this specially prepared etheric body, through which the great illumination and outpouring of the Holy Spirit of Pentecost was made possible, contains the purest archetypal life element of Christ's human lifetime. It serves humanity as the body of spirit memory, the vehicle of the Llr-remembrance of Christ for all ages to come. Today we strive to build and maintain our own bridge of supersensible consciousness over the abyss of death and forgetfulness out of the forces of the Christ in His purely etheric appearance. The penetration into this Ur-body of Christ remembrance, as it might be termed, through the souls of the disciples, as described in Rudolf Steiner's lectures on The Fifth Gospel, is an essential, most powerful practical help on our way. Let us, therefore, present another aspect of the supersensible process by means of which the Christ, in the 40 days of His active teaching, brought about a spiritualization of the forces of memory in the etheric bodies of His pupils.
The New Experience of the Supersensible
From chapter 2: The Ur-Mystery of Remembrance