עברית During my 20’ the gap between the experience of the etheric Christ and spiritualized thinking has indeed narrowed considerably from above downward, and the bridge construction was progressing successfully. However, the crucial problem concerning the spiritualization of ordinary consciousness in the physical world remained unsolved, and therefore only half of the bridge could be completed.
How the book Von Seelnerätseln Changed My Life
The Three Meetings (Forthcoming in Temple Lodge 2022)
From Chapter 3
The Platonic-Aristotelian Essence Exchange at the end of the 20th Century
At the end of my 20’ and the beginning of my 30’ this became an existential situation, in which ‘cognition’ was experienced on the etheric side as life-giving, because it connected me with the source of life, but on the earthly side also as full of riddles and obstacles. I was in the position in which I could say to myself: During my 20’, the gap between the experience of the etheric Christ and spiritualized thinking has indeed narrowed considerably from above downward, and the bridge construction was progressing successfully. However, the crucial problem concerning the spiritualization of ordinary consciousness in the physical world remained unsolved, and only half of the bridge could be completed. While I found it relatively easy to unite my imaginative cognition with pure thinking, I could not find a way to spiritualize the brain bound forces of physical cognition, in which earthly self-consciousness is created in the first place. And this didn’t allow me to construct that part of the bridge that must lead also from below upward, from physical consciousness to imaginative consciousness. I could experience pure thinking directly in my etheric body, bypassing ordinary physical cognition, while I experienced great difficulties (for example in my studies of natural science in 1976-1979), to master formal intellectual thinking and remember the concrete isolated details of sensory perception. It was excruciatingly difficult to solve basic school problems of elementary math and physics that my comrades accomplished without any effort, nor fix in physical memory the results of the experiments in the lab and grasp them with clear-cut conceptual contours and limits. But on the other hand, I intuitively grasped the essential ideas of each scientific discipline, that my comrades were not at all interested in. That I could kindle in each moment my spiritualized thinking and unite it with my imaginative cognition, was due to the influx of the etheric forces from the given Christ experience in the etheric world. But now I was searching for a way to develop the opposite force, that will allow me to incarnate property into the physical sense-and nerve system and spiritualize it. But I couldn’t for this purpose simply let this etheric stream flow over into the brain. Between etheric cognition, and spiritualized thinking allied with it, and the physical brain, there was an unbridgeable abyss. Though this must appear paradoxical, it is still a fact, that I needed help in achieving, first, ordinary intellectual and sensory cognition, and then, secondly, to spiritualize it. Of course, ideally speaking, my ideal was to realize the Pauline method, ‘to assimilate death into life’, experienced as the essence of the modern Christ experience. It was not an abstract phrase or idea, but actual life riddle and existential probation. But I didn’t find the way to generate the forces to confront and transform the forces of the physical brain, by means of which Ahriman controls modern thinking and sense-perception.
I realized that my intuitive thinking was constantly enlivened ‘from above’ and was experienced in the etheric body, without passing through a fully conscious incarnation in the nerve-sense system, and without confronting, consciously, the death forces that control modern consciousness. In other words: The spiritualized thinking that I used to bring my imaginative perception to fully conscious supersensible cognition, was not flowing from the etheric to the physical world; it remained active in the etheric body in etheric world; and I couldn’t bring my imaginative faculties to penetrate the physical brain and transform its intellectual forces from within. I knew that in some way, I must voluntarily ‘de-spiritualize’, ‘devitalize’, ‘downgrade’ and indeed, also kill some of these etheric forces, and part of the consciously acquired imaginative faculties. And I knew that I would have to generate the forces that would allow me to enter consciously into the physical brain and senses and ordinary consciousness based on them, and spiritualize them from within upward.
This must be distinguished from the ability to work from above into the etheric body, because in this way, one reaches down only so far as to imprint in the etheric body the etheric correlates of the spiritual experiences that one investigates; but one cannot confront and overcome from above the Ahrimanic forces of death in the brain, that dominate modern thinking in the physical body and world.
Therefore, the problem that I faced in the second part of the first period of my life, beginning with my 30’, was no longer how to connect spiritualized thinking with imaginative cognition, but how to bring down the imaginative forces and condense them to such an extent that they become a force of cognition inside the physical body. What was required was a specifically suitable method of thinking to develop such intensive spiritual force, that would be able to de-spiritualize and condense the given imaginative faculty, that- as radically transformed spiritual force- it will penetrate the physical brain. As far as this difficult and deepest abyss was concerned, I remained in my divided soul and life situation, without being able to advance the bridge construction work essentially further.
This changed after I read again, in the light of this situation, Rudolf Steiner book Von Seelenrätslen from the key year 1917, dedicated to the recently deceased Franz Brentano, the fine thinker and commentator of Aristotle. Von Seelenrätslen added something new, that I couldn’t find in what Rudolf Steiner wrote and said up to 1917.
In my repeated contemplations of Von Seelenrätslen, I experienced for the first time an inkling a new cognitive force, an active, far more intensive, and penetrating force. When I read the book with the forces of the Mind Soul, I experienced again an inner illumination, like the one I experienced 14 years earlier reading the Philosophy of Freedom for the first time. But the meaning and direction of the two illuminations was exactly the opposite. Reading the Philosophy of Freedom, I experienced that by means of my free spiritual activity, I produce the same etheric light experienced in the etheric world, that illuminated the etheric Christ. Reading Von Seelenrätslen, on the other hand, the illumination was experienced from the opposite direction. It was experienced as ‘condensation of the light’, followed with certain darkening of its astral and etheric radiance. I realized that with the new forces of Rudolf Steiner from 1917, I could begin to condense, devitalize, despiritualize, and ‘kill’ consciously, part of the etheric and imaginative experiences, forces, and faculties, and in this de-spiritualized form bring them all the way to the physical brain and ordinary consciousness. I felt that for the first time, through this new cognitive force, I would be able to enter dead intellectual thinking and the formation of brain bound mental pictures, representations, and concepts. This was a real revelation, with whose darkened light one could penetrate all the way to the nerve-sense system, or more precisely, in the first stage, as far as the etheric body could be extended to this system. After one was well established in the etheric-physical border of earthly consciousness, one could take another step. One could let go of the etheric altogether and enter the physical brain as it were naked and alone, and confront its death forces face to face, as they suck in and destroy the etheric body in each act of physical thinking and perception. And then, if this confrontation is successful, one could ‘turn around’, so to speak, and spiritualize these death bringing forces; one would be able- so I said to myself on reading Von Seelenrätslen- to resurrect them and let them work ‘upward’ from the grave of the brain to the etheric body and world...