עברית The great discovery that we make at this stage is, that when this organ has reached a certain degree of formation, it becomes movable. That is, we realize that we can use the two streams of etherization, flowing from the heart to the pineal, to rotate and move it at will. We learn how to imprint it so strongly in the etheric body, that its roots the organ between the eyes are loosened, and we transfer its pure etheric vortex to other parts and centers of the body.
How the Etheric Body Becomes an Organ of Imaginative Cognition
More from the work in progress on the fifth chapter of the new edition of The New Experience of the Supersensible
To take the next step, and prepare the etheric body further, we must resolve to give up our desire to move on and expand into the inviting cosmic etheric spaces. We must fulfil an act of creative resignation: instead of expanding joyfully, wider and higher into the light filled etheric worlds, we hold on to the spiritualized forces of perception, and start afresh from there. We gather together all our etheric forces, from the wider periphery of our previous experiences, inhale them sink into our bodies and let them be totally erased from consciousness. This is not an easy task, because the experiences in the etheric world are very powerful. What helps us is the fact that we are not suppressing the forces that cause and sustain these experiences, but only the imaginative pictures, by means of which we brought them to imaginative cognition. The forces remain embodied in the etheric body, while the pictures are deleted from consciousness, until they are wholly forgotten. This practice of active spirit forgetting, drinking consciously from the stream of Lethe, is one of the faculties that must be mastered, before the bridge of spiritual memory and continuation of consciousness can be built. We let the unconscious forces of spiritualized habit assimilate and potentize the etherized forces in the depths of the etheric and physical bodies, and we know that they will become available for the new meditative practices, according to the spiritual requirements of eachreal situation. [1]
In the spiritualization of thinking and perception alike, we use the forces extracted from the etherization of the blood. We accomplished an essence exchange between the two etherized streams of growth and decay, seed and plant, harvested and extracted them, to gain highly potentized formative etheric force. We showed how it was further used by the free being of the will to separate and coordinate the three soul forces. From this formative extract the organ of imaginative perception and cognition between the eyes was formed. This organ consists of a miniaturized, microcosmic, individualization and recapitulation of the second Mystery of Golgotha, through which the forces of life, death and resurrection are merged, as Rudolf Steiner says, ‘as chemical combination’. [2] And the great discovery that we make at this stage is, that when this organ has reached a certain degree of formation, it becomes movable. That is, we realize that we can use the two streams of etherization, flowing from the heart to the pineal, to rotate and move it at will. We learn how to imprint it so strongly in the etheric body, that its roots the organ between the eyes are loosened, and we transfer its pure etheric vortex to other parts and centers of the body. It becomes thus a movable, transferable spiritual eye. This happens through the intensive strengthening of the meditative exercises of Knowledge of the Higher Worlds and Occult Science. From a certain stage, the formative spiritual forces, that form this supersensible organ between the eyes, can be gradually transferred to the larynx, breast, and limbs, and to the etheric body as a whole. And this faculty becomes an essential preparatory stage for the bridge construction.
We have already referred in the first part of the introduction to the fact that every crossing and inversion point of the process of Umstülpung, when consciously grasped, becomes an etheric openness, gate and supersensible 'eye'. We drew attention to Rudolf Steiner's characterization of the method developed by Paul's pupil, Dionysius the Areopagite, that taught in Paul’s esoteric Christian-Platonic school in Athens. But in truth, as Rudolf Steiner points out, it was the Christ Himself how taught in this school. And what Paul and Dionysius learned from His teaching, became the first version of the new Michaelic yoga. At the crossing point of the so dreadfully-intellectually called ‘positive and negative theology’- which was nothing intellectual or theological, but Christ’s demonstration of the rhythms of His spiritual being and becoming- in this crossing point, the living being of the resurrected Christ was perceived and grasped. The same process was demonstrated in the first part of this chapter, in the Umstülpung and essence exchange of thinking with the willand applied also to the etherization of sense-perception. This practice, let us be reminded, has three stages: first, to confront, overcome and etherize the death forces, second, to resurrect thinking and perception from the dead gave of the brain, and third, to enter ‘with open eyes’ into the etheric world, and learn how to regulate the outstreaming life forces of our etherized perception and cross them with the etheric forces of the external etheric world.
Because common intellectual misrepresentations of spiritual science abound aplenty, it must be emphasized again, that the concept, representation and word, ‘organ’, taken from the physical body and used to designate spiritual organs of perception, is irredeemably misleading. In the astral and etheric bodies, we only have pure supersensible activities, events, streams, and vortexes of becomings. A spiritual organ of perception, like the one referred to here, that is formed between the eyes, means, therefore, an individualized spiritual activity of the birth, death and resurrection of cognition and knowledge. And this activity, that exists only as it is actualized and can be only actualized in active spiritual praxis, cannot be ‘remembered’ or ‘retained’ in consciousness in any passive way. It must be actualized in each living moment of spiritual research-again and again.
This ‘to do it again and again’ seems tiresome and prosaic to our lazy, passive earthly consciousness. But we don’t find it so tiresome when we joyfully satisfy again and again our hunger and breath again the life-giving air! When our dead, intellectual, cognition and knowledge are spiritualized and resurrected from their daily grave in our brains, they becom living beings, events, and processes, and we experience much more intense passion and enthusiasm, joy, and satisfaction, to actualize and fulfil them ‘again and again’, because supersensible cognition is a life giving, nourishing, refreshing, redeeming activity. Therefore, we spiritualize again our sense-perceptions and harvest, extract and potentize, in our meditations, the forces we gain. We prepare robust etheric extracts in this way, that can be applied to each spiritual task.
Because our task in this book is to demonstrate that spiritual science is an empirical, practical, spiritual art and craft, we again choose few concrete examples, taken from a wide and complex filed of spiritual praxis.
We direct and focus- again- our attention solely on the crossing point of the Umstülpung process between the physical and etheric eyes and physical and etheric perceptions and worlds, described above. All the spiritualized forces of our etheric body, created in the above-described meditations on growth and decay, seed, and plant, are intensifed and their potent spiritual forces are extracted. After we repeat these meditations, enliven, warm, fire and actualize them in the living present, we procced to the next step.
When we focus the wide-awake etheric perception on the point of Umstülpung, in which space turns into living time and time into living space, we discover something of great importance to this part of the knowledge drama of the Second Coming. As we saw, the center created between the eyes, leads, on the one hand, to the conscious ability to control and regulate consciously the resurrection and killing, devitalization and revitalization of sense-perception. On the other hand, it leads to the development of the creative imaginative forces, used in the practical creation of the Earthly-Human Sun, as we show in chapter six below. We emphasized above that in supersensible consciousness, the perceptive and active, knowing and creating faculties, separated in ordinary consciouses, become one. For this purpose, we place at the center of our meditation the etheric crossing, essence exchange and breathing of life and death, time and space, inside and outside. We fire this point and process until it burns so intensively, that the dead intellectual concept and representation that we made of our sense-perception, arise as living imagination from its brain grave, and light up in imaginative perception. Right there, in this abyss of sense-perception and across the threshold of etheric man-world becoming, we consolidate acognitive stronghold made from more robust etheric consistency, on which our etheric cognition and the bridge will be henceforth grounded.
Notes
[1] Spiritual memory has two sides that originate from one center. Remembering on one level of consciousness is forgetting in the other- and vice versa. This applies however not only to the alternation between ordinary and supersensible consciousness, but also, more subtly, to the transitions between various levels of supersensible consciousness, where the terms ‘remembering’ and ‘forgetting’ must acquire somewhat different meaning.
[2] The formation of this organ between the eyes, that becomes like a ‘third eye’, is the two petalled lotus flower, in which the true ‘I’ is formed, and the home base of the bridge is consolidated.