The Four Stages of the Reversed Cultus

The Four Stages of the Reversed Cultus

From Chapter 4: The Etheric Form is Alive

The Twilight and Resurrection of Humanity

The reversed cultus practiced in the School of Spiritual Science has four stages:

1 Creation of the gospel of the physical world, by etherization of dead ordinary consciousness.

2 Offering of the etherized communal forces to the higher worlds.

3 Transubstantiation of the raw astral forces and healing the wound of egotism.

4 Celebrating the new cosmic cultus and spiritual communion of humanity with the spiritual worlds.

 Our young heart will say: Infinitely great, sublime and immeasurable are the mysteries of the universe and of humanity that modern anthroposophical spiritual science opens before me, yet, unfortunately, all this becomes so fast—in my own being and consciousness—frozen and dead and inert, in the moment I grasp it with my ordinary intellectual consciousness. You must be really young, quick and aware, to grasp this, because it happens instinctually, immediately, in each moment you grasp the world and its wonders with your old and cold intellect, reflect upon what you see, hear and feel, and analyze, explain and represent it in your all-killing intellect. Then you discover—if you are fast and awakened enough—that the spiritual wonder of the universe is not at all simply ‘given’ to your consciousness and cognition ‘as it really is’, that is, in its infinitely creative stream of becoming, but rather, in your intellect it has been already transformed into the dead forms of your dead mind, which makes everything appear as it is, dead, frozen and finished. This will be the youngest mature experience in the first stage of the reversed cultus: In my ordinary consciousness and cognition, the sublimely wonderful, creative universe dies; this is the first really living spiritual experience that we must have, if we truly take the first step on the spiritual path. We must experience: the living spiritual wisdom taken from the real spiritual worlds is buried in so many dead books and traditions of old Anthroposophy which I accumulate in my brain-bound intellect. You only need to read the introductions to The New Experience of the Supersensible and the first chapters of Cognitive Yoga, to realize what this actually means in the real practical spiritual path.

 But in describing this experience, we have already begun to describe the laying of the foundations for the reversed cultus. It means to experience the ahrimanic forces of death that in the present age dominate our consciousness and life in the physical world. We must first of all use spiritual science in such a way, that it will help us to recognize, confront, acknowledge, resurrect and spiritualize these ahrimanic death forces. We call this process the creation of the ‘Gospel of the physical world’. We must be able to begin the reversed cultus by creating—in each time anew—a renewed variation of this active, earthly-human Gospel, as a true creation that is possible for the first time in this Michaelic age....

 Therefore, we must apply real energy to the transformation of the most recent and modern forces of the Consciousness Soul and delve much deeper to experience the full intensity of the death forces of modern materialistic thinking, as I did in The New Experience of the Supersensible and Cognitive Yoga. We have to do it in such a thoroughly energetic and persistent way, because without it, we can easily become nebulous mystics and visionaries. This will happen already if we enter even the next supersensible world, the etheric world, without clear thinking and sense perception and forces of sound judgement. Real spiritual science can be created only out of the best clear-cut, precise thinking and sense perception, which can only be learned in the physical world. We must experience with the greatest intensity the fact, as Rudolf Steiner says, ‘that part of the brain assigned to scientific thinking is moving toward a slow death... Galileo taught people to think in an entirely new way, but in a way implying that the world is a mechanism; and the reason for this is that those portions of the human brain, of the thought apparatus, which constitute the organ of scientific thinking, are already so shriveled as to be no longer able to infuse new life into concepts, with the result that the latter become more and more poverty-stricken.’

This is what Cognitive Yoga is really all about, the actualization of the new will of yoga of the Michaelic age. It starts, very carefully and precisely, with this etherization of ordinary, earthly consciousness. Because Michael is the true herald of freedom, he doesn’t influence the human will, but lets us unfold our free spiritual activity in the physical world. He only receives from us the spiritualized fruits of freedom and love, that we have cultivated on the earth, and then he works further with them. Then he returns to us the transformed results of our spiritual labour, as I could show in detail in my book, Cognitive Yoga: How a book is born. In this way our offer is received in the second stage of the reversed cultus, the offering, and is reciprocated in the third stage, when spiritual transubstantiation occurs, as we shall presently see. Then real spiritual communion may be experienced, in which we begin to live consciously together with the beings of the spiritual worlds. In each of the four stages of the reversed cultus, we will have to offer something that we ourselves produced, otherwise the Michaelic beings cannot become our creative partners.

The real gospel of the physical world, the real gospel of spiritual science, must be created individually and communally as a real cognitive and moral deed. We must do what Rudolf Steiner actually did, humbly, of course, but honestly; we must not endlessly continue to repeat what he said and feel happily satisfied until the next quotation will be repeated, but practice what he practiced, spiritualize the ahrimanic forces and harvest from them the most fruitful fruits and seeds that only the fully incarnated human soul in the physical world can harvest in the whole universe. We must fully experience this fact, that, as Rudolf Steiner says further, ‘in the human brain there is a part that is withering and this is the part that in our time functions in scientific thinking. The reason for this is that the portion of the human etheric body which should animate this shriveling brain has as yet not grasped the Christ-Impulse. No life will flow into science until the Christ impulse enters the portion of the human brain that is intended to serve science.’ We must grasp inwardly, in real soul experience, this dead-end of ordinary brain- bound science and thinking. And only if this death becomes our heart-felt experience, in our freed etheric hearts, will we be able to resurrect dead science and create really living spiritual science.

Then we will say to ourselves, humbly, but also sincerely, because we have accomplished and actualized some small—but authentic pieces of real spiritual science: ‘We now have an Anthroposophy, and this Anthroposophy will increasingly clarify the Christ-Impulse for mankind, thereby imbuing the etheric body with ever more life—with such a wealth of it, in fact, that the etheric body will be able to restore flexibility to that rigid portion of the brain which is responsible for the present trend of scientific thinking.’ Then we will understand the real esoteric meaning and essence of the first two stages of the reversed cultus: ‘That is an illustration of the manner in which the Christ-Impulse, having in time laid hold on mankind, will reanimate the dying members of the body. The future of humanity would see the withering of more and more members; but the flowing in of the Christ-Impulse will increase proportionately with the dwindling of each part; and by the end of the Earth evolution all the parts that would otherwise have perished will be revivified by the Christ-Im- pulse, which will have saturated the whole etheric body: the human etheric body will have become one with the Christ-Impulse.’

We must truly experience what we do when we create and consolidate each sentence, passage and chapter of the new gospel of the physical world. We must really learn to experience what happens in our physical and etheric bodies when we ‘write’ this gospel with the etherized blood of our hearts, developing etheric thinking out of dead thinking, etheric sense perception out of dead representations of the physical world, using our devotion and love of truth. Only then will our fiery will and feeling forces accomplish this etherization. When this is accomplished to some degree at least, we will be able ‘to put on the incorruptible body and become permeated by an etheric body capable of rendering it immortal’. This we must be able not only to think about, but experience, in full consciousness, ‘what Christ brought mankind, this pervasion of the etheric body with life’. But it must be experienced how it is resurrecting the death forces inherent in the physical and etheric bodies. All the soul experiences and forces that we harvested on the earth by overcoming death, are possible only thanks to this absolutely unique and mortal physical body, that will not be available to us in the not at all so far future. In the first and second stages of the reversed cultus, therefore, we must experience that ‘the transformation of the human physical body that would otherwise be doomed to death, its preservation from corruption, its ability to wear the incorruptible—all this is connected with the Christ. Life was infused into the human etheric body by the Christ impulse—new life, after the old had been spent.’

This will indeed be the finest result of the first two stages of the reversed cultus—creating the gospel of the physical world and offering it to the higher world—if we will be able to say to ourselves: ‘When my etheric body will ultimately have emerged from my physical body, I should have developed in such a way that it is wholly saturated by the Christ. The Christ must live in me. In the course of my earth development, I must by degrees completely permeate my etheric body with the Christ’.

In the second stage, the Offering, the etherized fruits of the gospel of the physical world are offered to the gods, as a loving free offering. The etheric offering of the physical harvest brings the community one step higher, and it allows us now to spiritualize our individual and communal astral bodies and soul life. This is where the third stage of transubstantiation occurs. In the first and second stages, we spiritualized the death forces rooted in our physical and etheric bodies. In the third stage, we confront the source of these forces in our astral bodies. In the astral bodies, that determine naturally the soul life of each individual and the soul relationships in the community, are also found the egotistical instincts, desires, drives and inclinations of our modern human nature. This is the place where the ‘wound of egotism’ burns most fiercely, and it can be clearly recognized, confronted and healed, to produce the new forces of tested, robust love, described in the first and second lectures. The trans- formation and spiritualization of the etheric body must be performed with the astral body as well. When this is accomplished—the process cannot be described further here—and we have practically transformed our basic emotions and feelings, drives and instincts, and the human relations in the community, then true transubstantiation can take place. It is our raw astral matter that must be spiritualized and join the stream of spiritualized forces from the physical and etheric bodies. The etherization of the blood cannot be complete, indeed, it cannot really happen, if the lower astral forces of the blood are not spiritualized in this way. And the blood carries the spiritual forces of the Ego as well. Therefore, based on the consciously healed—transubstantiated—astral forces and bodies, we can experience how our spiritual companions turn their gaze gracefully down to us, and how they return to us, in a transformed and spiritualized form, the forces that we offered them. A mutual exchange between humans and gods begins, which is the future communion, the actualization of the future impulse of the Christmas Foundation Conference.

From Chapter 4: The Etheric Form is Alive

The Twilight and Resurrection of Humanity