עברית Now we are in a position to also unveil one of the most hidden ‘open secrets’ of Anthroposophy since the end of the last century. It is about the most unspoken, yet also the most important contemporary spiritual fact, mentioned above, which has the greatest significance for those who want to gain a true understanding of the development of Anthroposophy in the present age of Michael.
The Twilight and Resurrection of Humanity
From Lecture 4: The Anthroposophical Movement in the Present.
Initiates, Mortals and the New Initiation through the Etheric Christ as the Bridge Between Them
Now we are in a position to also unveil one of the most hidden ‘open secrets’ of Anthroposophy since the end of the last century. It is about the most unspoken, yet also the most important contemporary spiritual fact, mentioned above, which has the greatest significance for those who want to gain a true understanding of the development of Anthroposophy in the present age of Michael. Therefore, I would ask you to contemplate it seriously in your individual meditations and share it with one another, in the appropriate Stimmung and feeling, in your intimate school meetings. Also, kindly remember that it is an organic continuation of the previous lectures and that it can be understood as a whole only after we shall give our fifth lecture tomorrow...
If you allow yourself to honestly join our school work, and do what we half-jokingly, and yet also very seriously call our AA program (Anthroposophists Anonymous), and practice these rehabilitation processes for some years, purifying your etheric body by the thoroughly cleansing studies of the Philosophy of Freedom and the basic conditions of Knowledge of the Higher Worlds, then you can really transform and heal your old anthroposophical or any other spiritual and ideological habits, conventions, norms and biases. Then you can joyfully accept the fact that you are mortal from beginning to end, that you’re not an initiate, that you are just beginning to do spiritual work honestly, basing yourself on the real capacities that karma gave you in this life; and if you do this work, you will fulfil exactly what you would choose and expect from yourself in this Michaelic age in building the real community and School of Spiritual Science.
This is what Rudolf Steiner expected from all the anthroposophists around him then and today. But nobody understood it, not even his closest, most venerable partners. Nobody was even close to this realiza- tion, let alone started to practice it. They didn’t understand that from the moment when Anthroposophy came of age in the Christmas Foundation Conference, it became an absolutely real community, sister- and brotherhood, and that its only real task became creating together the community of spiritual science, the temple of the future community of humanity, and what is more, they didn’t understand—then and today—that Rudolf Steiner couldn’t just go on teaching them as before, after this moment had arrived. From this moment on he could not simply continue to commu- nicate his spiritual research, as long as his partners were not doing their part. From that moment on, it becomes an absolutely serious give-and- take on both sides, his and ours. We are not babies who receive and thank and thank again, and devotionally follow our teacher, imitating him in a passive manner. But the serious, sobering fact prevailed then and today: from all those who were expected, even among those that he summoned personally to his Vorstand, no worker appeared on the burned down site of the old Goetheanum and society, to start humbly and freely to build the Christmas Foundation Conference community. For many are called, but only very few choose themselves.’ (223)
Having made clear this aspect of the fundamental distinction between the initiate and mortals in our time, we must also say to ourselves: this distinction, true and necessary as it is in order to clear the air of so many spiritual delusions and egotistical ambitions, can also inspire a certain sense of resignation and helplessness. One could say also that the history of the last century demonstrated that the difference between Rudolf Steiner, as the initiate of our age, and even his best pupils, is unbridgeable. The gap between the two seems to be so enormous, that the hope of bridging it in the next short Michaelic centuries grows weaker with time, not stronger. One could also add that if what we said above is true, that we can only rely on humans working from below upward, basing our anthroposophical work only on the ordinary soul forces in our time, then the short-term goal of the Michaelic age is rather unrealistic. Now, if we take these objections seriously, we will find out that they point to the above-mentioned significant and until now ignored, ‘open secret’ of our present Michaelic age. This ‘open secret’ is precisely the missing link and bridging link between the initiates and mortals in our present age, and it alone can bridge the otherwise truly unbridgeable gap between them. It is truly imperative that at least we, if we honestly wish to understand our work, should pay close attention to this mystery.
According to Rudolf Steiner’s predictions given in 1910, from the 1930s onward, we must expect one extraordinarily important exception to the above described clear-cut demarcation between initiates and ordinary humans. This fact is something that in our work in particular, must be grasped with the greatest seriousness and clarity. Rudolf Steiner pointed out that beginning in the 30s of the last century, a few people will begin to experience the Christ in His etheric appearance, by means of naturally developing etheric perception. The most important thing in the context of our considerations now, is that he also characterized this experience as a kind of natural initiation, insofar as, by its means, these people will gain direct spiritual knowledge of the Christ that until now only the initiates could have. Those human beings who undergo this exceptional 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’’.’ (224) This is a remarkably new situation. Through the natural-spiritual progress of humanity in the next 3000 years, that is, until the middle of sixth cultural epoch, increasing numbers of people will be endowed with higher soul and spirit faculties, without undergoing—in this life— the otherwise required spiritual training. We must imagine, therefore, that such people will be, in a certain sense, that must be sharply delimited, initiated, and will possess spiritual faculties by means of which they can acquire real initiation knowledge, for example, first-hand knowledge of the etheric Christ, that only initiates could have previously. Now, let us also imagine that such a naturally initiated person finds his way to spiritual science, and that he uses his natural spiritual faculties also to deepen and intensify the anthroposophical spiritual path. He will be able to get much further on this path than ordinary people that use only the ordinary soul forces, because he brings with him the above-mentioned, given spiritual forces and faculties, that otherwise must first be acquired by means of prolonged spiritual practice. This fact requires us to review again the clear-cut demarcation between initiates and mortals and ask ourselves if it is not after all possible to find a middle, bridging stage between them in our time.
In order to understand this properly, we must form a balanced cognitive and moral judgement about it as we demonstrated above in the struggle with Ahriman and Lucifer. We can say: Such a person is indeed initiated, in so far as he does experience consciously, some supersensible aspects of the etheric Christ, and often also other forces and elements related to the etheric world. But does it mean that because of this he should be considered as an initiate in the sense of spiritual science? Not at all! One can certainly experience something that previously only an initiate could experience, without being fully initiated oneself. Let us remember that to real, full initiation belongs the total transformation of the whole human being, in body, soul and spirit, the fully conscious meeting with the lesser and greater guardians of the threshold and the overcoming of egoism, and the development of the faculties of Imagination, Inspiration and Intuition. This is naturally not the case of the natural initiation discussed here. We can imagine such a person as one who has a specific ‘corridor’, or ‘window’ through which he can enter and explore consciously the etheric world. Adding to this, he can also develop these naturally given spiritual faculties further by means of conscious spiritual schooling. But all this belongs only to the very first, preliminary, stages of real initiation. This means that our exceptional, naturally endowed person, is really a spiritual amphibian; with one leg or fin, he is firmly rooted in the murky waters of mortal human life, but at the same time he also places the other leg on solid land and steps on the firm spiritual ground and breathes the new clear etheric air. This double nature is what allows him to create the bridge between the mortals and the spiritual world in this age, over an abyss that otherwise is really unbridgeable. And this is the new and important fact that has the greatest significance for the question about the chances of the future development of the stream of Michael in the present century. Because he is, essentially, closer to the mortals, he can really work as an ordinary person from the ground up, and truly bridge the gap to the leadership of the Michaelic stream in the etheric world, as required by mortals in our time; and because he has also partially crossed over the threshold and has experienced some realities of the spiritual world, he can create the bridge also in the other direction, from the leadership of the School of Michael to the mortals, which the real initiate will not do, because this is exactly the work that mortals must learn to do in the age of the Consciousness Soul. Such a person will know what it means to start as a helpless, imperfect, struggling human, if one is honest about oneself, but having experienced Christ in etheric consciousness, he will also be able to connect the two worlds in a wholly new way.
Who is this amphibian in reality? Is he more of a fish or a mammal? He is definitely still mortal in many essential respects, yet he is also not simply an ordinary mortal either; we may, perhaps, baptize him as a wholly unique kind of human, an immortal-mortal hybrid, that could never exist before the beginning of the Second Coming in 1933, let alone in previous ages, because through the fully conscious, supersensible expe- rience of the etheric Christ, he experiences his immortal self as reality. He is pioneering the next evolutionary step of humanity, that began in the 1930s, and will become increasingly more common, as Rudolf Steiner predicted, during the next 3000 years. He is a firstborn representative of a new emergent human being, capable of experiencing supersensible, immortal things, and one of his most important tasks will be to use them to create the bridging pathway, that will connect our ordinary human faculties with the spiritual world and will allow mortals to develop their capacities much faster.
He will be able to transform spiritual science into a praxis that ordinary people will be able to use and create the new community of the School of Spiritual Science. This community together will then be able to cre- ate for humanity this exceptional etheric bridge between the immortals and mortals and then establish the fully conscious etheric connection and communion with the Michaelic school in the etheric world, before the year 2033 will have arrived. (225)
Naturally, such a new initiation and the spiritual faculties that make it possible, must have their karmic background and foundations. The people who will experience this naturally given initiation, did prepare
themselves for this task in the past. The spiritual and karmic background of those souls who today develop the new faculties of supersensible perception, and experience thereby the etheric Christ as a modern Damascus event, was given by Rudolf Steiner in Oslo in 1910:
‘All the souls who in the Middle Ages cultivated in themselves the Christ-im- pulse, who experienced the deep Christian Mysteries of the Middle Ages, will then experience the Christ-impulse in the sense of Paul: “It is not I who lives, it is not I who works, it is the Christ in me.” They will see their own inner life illuminated by the light of Christ. This is the important fact that must be pointed out by spiritual science. Spiritual science predicts this fact with the same certainty that sun and moon eclipses are predicted by astronomy. Those who received the Christ-impulse into their souls then, who permeated their will, feeling and thinking with this impulse in the Pauline sense, will come again. And the fruits of their rebirth will show themselves in such a way that what they lived through then will come to life again as a force in their souls. How will it come to life again?’ (226).
This was the all-tipping, saving spiritual event in the karma of the anthroposophical movement at the end of last century. Indeed, again, in a paradoxical way, we can say that when all hopes were lost, concerning the fulfilment of the ’culmination’ and ’Michaelic prophecy’ in the development of Anthroposophy in the twentieth century, this naturally given initiation event—and its anthroposophical assimilation and transformation— became a substitute, a miniaturized and potent, ‘seed culmination’. But in one smallest point, in one seed, as it were, the culmination nevertheless did happen! This new initiation and these new capacities, absolutely necessary to accomplish the bridging work between the spiritual worlds and human- ity, between the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, became possible in this manner at the end of the last century. We must therefore pay close attention to the development of these new faculties and the new possibilities that they open to all honestly striving people in our time, because only here can we find the source and foundations of the anthroposophical path that humanity needs today and tomorrow...
The Twilight and Resurrection of Humanity
The History of the Michaelic Movement since the Death of Rudolf Steiner