עברית The head however will look to the heart and will find there the mysteries of the human riddle, will learn to fathom in the heart the actual being of man.
'The head however will look to the heart and will find there the mysteries of the human riddle, will learn to fathom in the heart the actual being of man'.
From the Fourth Lecture, 15 February 2019
The Twilight and Resurrection of Humanity
The History of the Michaelic Movement since the Death of Rudolf Steiner
Dear School Friends,
As Rudolf Steiner said, to become younger in old age is the miracle of our present age, and the reason it is not taking place is ‘because men do not keep the inner livingness their heart grows cold; the heart warmth does not stream up to the head; love, which comes from the rest of the organism, does not fructify the head. The head-knowledge remains cold theory. There is no necessity for it to remain cold theory, all head-knowledge can be transformed into heart-knowledge. And that is precisely the task of the future: that head-knowledge shall gradually be transformed into heart-knowledge. A real miracle will happen if head-knowledge is transformed into heart-knowledge! ... man will learn... to say to himself: inasmuch as I become more and more heart-man, inasmuch as I remain young, I view in later years through what my heart gives me, that which in childhood and youth I learnt through my head. The heart gazes up to the head and will see there an image of the whole starry heavens. The head however will look to the heart and will find there the mysteries of the human riddle, will learn to fathom in the heart the actual being of man...There is something in me as man that is only to be found in me as man; I have to await something. Very much lies in these words and it means very much when man is so educated that he says: I have something to await. I shall be thirty, forty, fifty, sixty years old, and as I grow older from decade to decade, there comes towards me through grow- ing older something of the mystery of man. I have something to await from the fact that I live on.’ (GA 180, 12.1.1918)
I think that thanks to our recent community building, we can really experience from one day to the next, from one year to the next and the older people among us can experience it also from decade to decade, that we can feel the growing of something living in and through us. You can have a feeling that a community of people which can be as diverse and spread out in space and time as this one is, can become a real living organism that develops according to its own rhythm, according to its own laws, that this is a living being that is developing; that it’s not something inorganic and artificial, theoretical and intellectual, but has its own life. If in the beginning you feel yourself in certain way more like a parent who has to grow this child or to be a gardener of the young shoot, eventually you realize that the best gardening and fostering of this unique living plant is to grow together with it; not so much growing ‘it’ but growing together with it. And eventually, after some years, we begin to feel that it grows us. You continue to grow with it, but now from the other direction. You were growing it in the beginning, as you gave it your life and helped it to enter rightly into its new life, now the roles begin to change. You have noticed maybe, that at a certain point on the path you could say, ’Oh my God, now it is growing me.’ Now it is mothering and fathering me, and I am growing through and with it.
This experience is very true for our time. We also spoke in the first lecture about biography in our time and about the ‘Erwartungsstimmung’ (mood of expectancy), the feeling one can have in modern life of growing younger and more human the older you become physically, and that you can say to yourself, ’I am in my forties, but inwardly, in truth, I feel still so old! I must expectantly wait for my fifties to become younger’; then in your fifties you say – ’Yes, it has indeed become a bit better, I’m younger than I was in my thirties...but I’m looking forward to my sixties because the sixties—ach, only there begins the great youngest stuff!—there I can start to become really young, that is, truly human.’ And you know that the older you are becoming physically, the younger you become spiritually and, as we said in our previous lectures, you approach death with a feeling of approaching birth, of getting ready to be born spiritually, with your whole being now, for the first time in your entire life. The same process can be viewed also in another way.
The more you grow younger in older age, the more you will be able to move forward by going backward and experience the spiritual side of your younger physical ages! You will indeed experience what Rudolf Steiner said, that ‘There is something in me as man that is only to be found in me as man; I have to await something. Very much lies in these words and it means very much when man is so educated that he says: I have something to await. I shall be thirty, forty, fifty, sixty years old, and as I grow older from decade to decade, there comes towards me through growing older something of the mystery of man. I have something to await from the fact that I live on.’ In this way, you will be able to go backward and resurrect the unconscious spiritual forces that worked in and on you in your 40s, 30s, 20s and teenage years, but now on a higher level of consciousness and maturity; and then you will be able to go so far forward-backward that you will experience—of course, to begin with we can only start to feel it, but this feeling is already of the greatest value—the deeply unconscious spiritual forces of your childhood and babyhood, on a conscious level, and when you come to your physical birth you will be truly ready to die, that is, to experience your spiritual birth in the approaching physical death! This means to begin to experience ‘the mystery of man’, because the more you get physically older and approach the gate of death, the more you experience backward the spiritual force that worked behind your physical youth; then you would be so young and awake—spiritually speaking—when you go through the opening and widening portal of physical death that approaches you, and when you die you will be born as a healthy and kicking spiritual baby in the spiritual world, in order to start and grow there into your full spiritual stature between this death and the coming new physical birth. The moment that you have resurrected all your past physical life backwards, in the time stream that flows from the future to the past, and have reached your physical birth, you are ready for your spiritual birth, namely, physical death. You become ever younger inwardly and spiritually until you die physically and are born as a spirit baby at death and start your spiritual life as a new born spirit baby; but you were growing this baby all your life as you became younger and younger until your spiritual birth at death.
Let’s say, you have really worked hard 30 or 40 years to resurrect forward-backward in this way your youth, adolescence, childhood, and infancy, and that you would truly go back through your mother’s womb to the life in the spiritual world before birth. Then indeed, you would be able to approach in full consciousness also your physical death and experience your entry into the spiritual worlds as a spiritual birth! Because when we are born physically, let’s face it, we are pretty old. We come from long centuries of life between the last death and this birth, in which we prepared the karma that awaits us in our coming earthly life. When you bring all this karma, which when you’re born is still waiting for you, it is still heavy on you, you are so terribly old despite all the wonderful natural spiritual forces of childhood. The youthful spiritual forces of the child aren’t his presently active forces, but part of his previous life in the spiritual world before birth and in his previous earthly lives, working together with the highest spiritual forces of all the hierarchies. It’s not yet what he himself created on the earth in this lifetime. It belongs to the past. You can see it today and will see it more in the future on the faces and in the eyes of the newborn babies, many of them are so mature and bright, that they know very well what they have before them in this lifetime, they saw it very clearly in the pre-life vision in the etheric world just before conception, and many of them will not forget it so completely as we have done in our time; and they will feel the fact weighing on them, that they have brought so much karma to work through.
Only slowly can we grow into and face this karma. We have to experience and suffer this karma until we are 49, but, indeed, as I showed in the first lecture, in the most inward sense, you may still have to come to terms with the spiritualized essence of your karma in the third moon node in the age of 56. The more you resolve and make peace with your past karma, the more you heal some of it, the more you understand that you will have to continue to carry some of it through the gate of death, as a result, you become younger and lighter (while spiritually-morally speaking this means becoming heavier), and the more you can approach the blessed youth of old age. And then after 63, the Nirvana plane experience awaits you and the Paranirvana plane after 70...
So, if you will bear with me in the coming years, I will continue to broadcast from the Nirvana plane every now and then, and I think you will feel that it is assuming a new form, that there’s a new feeling about, coming from someone who is speaking from a higher point of view—which I think is pretty natural, it’s not forced; it is the natural-spiritual result of the further development and refinement of all the previous work. When you complete the 9x7 cycle, rounding off the development of the members of the whole human constitution in our age, you progress further, as Rudolf Steiner said, beyond the limits of the solar system and enter, spiritually, qualitatively, speaking, in your soul experience, the cosmic regions of the fixed stars, the zodiac, from which you can look down and survey earthly life as a whole from a higher perspective. Therefore, after the age of 63, what is possible for you, if you have developed your youthful forces through your entire life, in spirit, soul and body, as I described in my first lecture, you may indeed experience a growing measure of intensi- fication and qualitative, exponential acceleration, of the essence extracted from the fruits and seeds cultivated and harvested during the last 42 years of anthroposophical work, which now, strongly spiritualized, can be born to new life on a higher level.
You would then feel also as I feel that this is actually a grace of karma that we can grow and become more mature and therefore younger in the life of the global community of the School of Spiritual Science and the true anthroposophical movement. And this makes the fact of longer physical lifespan into a real gift. Because for people who are not maturing in a creative way, not becoming spiritually younger when they become physically older, this longer lifespan for them is experienced as an unsettling purgatory, with its torments of purification; and if people don’t develop spiritually, the longer their physical life becomes, the more meaningless or painful this purification and suffering can become. Many people who invested their forces in remaining physically young, when they experience the pain of getting old, prefer to end their life voluntarily when it becomes physically unbearable or unworthy, from their totally materialis- tic point of view. This is the other side of this longer life; we all know this side too as we see it everywhere among family and acquaintances. But I want to emphasize the creative, positive, side of longer physical life that is given to humanity nowadays and how we can really make it fruitful, not in the physical materialistic way, of seeking more amusements, consumption and earth-destroying tourism the older we become. Because for people who love the spiritual life on the earth and love humanity, nature and the earth and have a mission to fulfil here, physical life will become longer because they will passionately wish to be able to do more work here, and the time of the life between death and rebirth will grow shorter, because they will begin to do part of the work during physical life that previously could be accomplished only after death...
The Twilight and Resurrection of Humanity
The History of the Michaelic Movement since the Death of Rudolf Steiner