עברית After some 45 years, I feel that perhaps the time is ripe to make a new edition of the New Experience of the Supersensible, because now I have all the time in the world, without any deadline, to tell the real story of the construction of the bridge of spiritual memory and continuation of consciousness over the modern abyss of life’s annihilation, soul destruction and spirit forgetfulness.
The Construction of the Bridge of Spiritual Memory and Continuation of Consciousness
From the new edition of chapter 5
The construction of this bridge is a very complicated and many-sided spiritual task, comparable to the construction of a physical bridge, with all the engineering and technical difficulties and challenges that must be solved. If I count the time that passed from the moment in which the concept first came to my consciousness, I must confess that I am guilty of doing it for 45 years! Of course, many people will say that this is a proof that I am extremely retarded in my development, which I gladly admit. When I decided to publish the New Experience of the Supersensible in 1995, I knew very well that I can only present a very condensed and, in many parts, strongly abbreviated summary of the whole process. Nevertheless, despite its unfinished form, I believed that it should be made available to serious students of spiritual science at the end of the century. But I always continued to work on this construction, as you could gather from my various books, especially Cognitive Yogaand Cognitive Yoga: How a book is born.
After some 45 years, I feel that perhaps the time is ripe to make a new edition of the New Experience of the Supersensible, because now I have all the time in the world, without any deadline. And therefore, I begun last year to try to tell the real story of the construction of the bridge of spiritual memory and continuation of consciousness over the modern abyss of life’s annihilation, soul destruction and spirit forgetfulness...
From the new edition of chapter 5
The first part of the chapter describes what it takes to bring the spiritualization of thinking and sense-perception to a certain stage, required to begin the bridge. Then this work is gathered up and transformed, to prepare the forces required for the actual construction.
Presently, the Stages of Preparation are:
1 Merging cosmic thinking and human will through perception
2 Etherization of the blood
3 Making the etheric body into an organ of imaginative perception
4 Spiritualization of memory
5 Formation of the true ‘I’.
The stages of the actual practical construction are:
6 Construction of the etheric-cognitive layer of the bridge from head to heart
7 Construction of the astral-soul layer in the heart and astral world
8 Construction of the spiritual- physical layer in the lower body
9 Formation of the Phantom and Foundation Stone
Preparations
Before the actual construction of the bridge can start, some preparations are required.
First, we must harvest the best forces developed from the previous spiritualization of thinking and perception, and wield them tightly together, to form a powerful cognitive instrument.
The second preparation uses the forces extracted from the etherization of the blood. These forces served us from the beginning of the work but were fully committed to this work. After we bring them to imaginative cognition, their unique etheric fibers and ligaments are used to form the etheric foundation of the bridge.
Third, the etherized etheric forces from the blood are used to make the whole etheric body into an organ of imaginative perception, whose precise and exact perceptions are necessary to the seamless construction of the bridge.
Fourth, as ordinary memory is embedded in the unconscious activity of the naturally given etheric body, the bridge of spiritual memory and continuation of consciousness is built with the forces of the consciously etherized blood and spiritualized etheric body.
The fifth preparatory task consists in developing further the being of the ‘true I’. The free spiritual activity of the ‘I’ was the stronghold and basis of the knowledge drama of the Second Coming from its first moment. A new stage of spiritualization must be actualized before the ‘I’ takes into its firm spirit hands the complicated and multileveled task of constructing the bridge.
Based on this fivefold preparation, the three layers of the bridge are built. The first is an etheric-cognitive layer, that extends in the etheric body from head to heart. The second is astral-soul layer, located in the astral and etheric heart and its relationships to the human soul in the astral and spiritual worlds. The third layer is composed of the spiritual forces that underline the physical body.
Physically speaking, the first part of the bridge is based on the spiritualization of the nerve-senses system, centered in the head, the second on the spiritualization of the rhythmic system, centered in the heart and lungs, and the third is on the spiritualization of the metabolic-limb-reproductive system, centered in the lower body. When the threefold bridge is constructed in this way, from head to foot, the resurrection body, the Phantom, can be formed, and it becomes the spiritual soil, in which the threefold cosmic human being, represented by the Foundation Stone Meditation, can be planted and cultivated in our time.