עברית The Formation of Spiritual Self-Consciousness in the Meeting with the Etheric Christ
The Three Meetings: Christ, Michael, Anthroposophia
Prelude to the 2nd edition of The New Experience of the Supersensible
From Chapter 4: The Meeting with the Etheric Christ
part I: The Given Christ Experience
The 2nd edition of The New Experience of the Supersensible becomes much bigger than I thought, so I decided to write a shorter prelude, to introduce it in a more accessible way. This I plan to do in my next book, "The Three Meetings, Christ, Michael, Anthroposophia".
The passages below is from Chapter 4: The Meeting with the Etheric Christ, part I: The Given Christ Experience. It tries to describe an important aspect of this meeting, in which a new state of consciousness is formed: Spiritual self-consciousness.
Let us first place before us the first paragraph from chapter 4 of the New Experience of the Supersensible, called: The Modern Christ Experience - The Meeting with the New Initiator. In this chapter, the given Christ experience is described, in which the Christ offers the human ‘I’ the seed essence, or ‘copy’’ of His ‘I’, that contains three golden spiritual seeds of future transformation, planted in spirit, soul and body. But the Christ doesn’t only give a copy of His ‘I’ and goes away; He accompanies the giving of the sacred gift with an exemplary demonstration of what man can do with it, if he would freely choose to individualize this ‘I’ in his free ‘I’ and recapitulated its giving reception process, in his free spiritual activity.
‘There are three basic elements or stages that accompany the gift of the ‘I’ in this meeting, which, while forming a unity in the actual experience, will be described here separately for the sake of clarity.
The first stage plants a spirit seed of resurrection and awakening in the forces of death that dominate humanity in the present age. This happens through the imagination of Christ's etheric appearance. The second spirit seed contains the forces that can heal the wounded human soul, and it is planed through the Inspiration of His living words; The third spirit seed is a living spirit flame, that kindles and nourishes of the eternal fire of ‘I’ inside the physical body. This happens through the Intuition of His active presence and deeds’.
One important aspect of the modern Christ experience, from this point of view, can be described as follows.
What awakens spiritual perception and cognition during the giving of the ‘I’ of Christ and its reception by the human ‘I’, is the fact that it combines the two separated sides of ordinary consciousness. In our daily life, we have self-consciousness as a given fact in the physical world, but we have no consciousness of our spiritual 'I'. When we incarnate in the physical body we develop physical self-consciousness, and give up our spiritual consciousness, that remains in a state of deep unconscious sleep during earthly life. In the moment the human ‘I’ faces Christ’s ‘I’ in the etheric world, and an imprint of Christ’s ‘I’ is implanted in man’s ‘I’, these two separate stats become one. Our physical self-consciousness is raised from the physical body and world to the etheric body and world, but doesn’t dissolve there, as happens in sleep and after death. Through the power of the given ‘I’ of Christ, it becomes spiritual self-consciousness, and man experiences his ‘I’ as an independent spiritual self in the etheric world.
We must imagine, therefore, a wholly new spiritual situation and event, in which we find ourselves in this meeting. This new situation is an intensive etheric event, and the world in which it is constituted and grounded is the etheric world. Supersensible self-consciousness is the new situation and reality constituted in this event. That is, in this meeting, the two states of consciousness are fused together, that are mutually exclusive on earth, and create a third and wholly new state of consciousnesses: self-conscious spiritual consciousness. The ordinary fully awake self-conscious and the unconscious spiritual consciousness, entirely separated from each other in modern life, merge with each other, and their essences are mutually exchanged and transformed. The unconscious spiritual consciousness becomes self-conscious, and physical self-consciousness becomes spiritualized. As the ‘I’ of Christ and the ‘I’ of man interpenetrate, also both stats of consciousnesses penetrate each other, and each is transformed through the other. This essence exchange occurs in the giving and receiving of Christ’s Ego-copy, and the light that brings it to full spiritual self-consciousness is the ‘light of the Grail’, the light of modern spiritual science. [1]
The spiritualization of self-consciousness also radically transforms our perception and understanding of what the ‘I’ really is. Because the knowledge that the ‘I’ is an independent being is spiritualized. In the physical world, I know about my ‘I’ only what the body and senses reveal to me, and I know that this ‘I’ is but an illusory reelection of the body and will perish with the body at death. But now one becomes conscious of the fact that the true ‘I’ is a universal, indeed, cosmic, spiritual being; and the true spiritual ‘I’ is part of a new spiritual world. And as the physical world, with its forces and substances, build and shapes the physical body, through which we gain our ordinary self-consciousness, do does the etheric world regarding our etheric body and the new state of spiritual self-consciousness. That is, in this event, an objective supersensible reality- the spiritual being of the Christ revealed in the etheric world- is experienced as the formative force of spiritual self-consciousness that, until now, could individualize itself in the physical world alone.
As the physical world gives us physical self-consciousness as a given gift, the etheric Christ in the etheric world give us spiritual self-consciousness as a given gift. This etheric, imaginative, self-consciousness is a newly given state of consciousness, gracefully offered by Christ’s imaginative appearance, words and deeds, and this is the reason why the giving and receiving of His Ego takes place in the most lucid, clear, and self-conscious imaginative cognition. And the knowledge drama of the Second Coming is our active individualization and recapitulation of this offer of the Ego and spiritual self-consciousness.
If we want to portray this situation and event accurately, from the point of view of modern spiritual science we must say: In the imaginatively perceived world a Being appears- the only one of this kind in our world- through whose etheric appearance and becoming process, that takes place between His ‘I’ and the human ‘I’, the totality of the Idea, the divine archetype of man, in spirit, soul and body, is experienced directly. We experience and see, through the appearance, words, and deeds of the ‘I’ of Christ in our own ‘I’, the future wholeness and fulness our divine nature; it appears spread out in everlasting time, as an entire stream of becoming, from the remotest past to the far future.
Therefore, in this meeting, Ego giving and receiving, we aren’t external onlookers as in the physical world; Because our true ‘I’ is given to us, we participate inwardly and actively in this event; it is a dynamic, breathing, and reciprocal event between the divine ‘I’ of Christ and the human ‘I’; we know that the Being who appears in the external, objective, etheric world, is our own Higher Self, the representative of humanity. We are lifted at this moment out of our physical body and ordinary self-consciousness and are taken gracefully into His being, and at the same living time we take in- etherically speaking- His Ego, offered through His etheric appearance, words and deeds. As shown also in chapter 10 of Cognitive Yoga, this is a mutual becoming: He takes the essence of our earthly being into His divine ‘I’ and we take the essence of His ‘I’ into our earthly being. In our newly kindled spiritual self-consciousness, we become part of His eternal being and becoming; and through His ‘I’ in our earthly being, He becomes an eternal part of us. And we know that this event is not a mere personal event; we experience it as a cosmic happening, and we realize that we become active and creative etheric participants in the becoming process of the cosmos, in the wide-open etheric world. We feel that the whole universe participates with us and through us in this human-world becoming process, and we know: Through the given ‘I’ of the etheric Christ we have been given a precious goldarn spirit seed, and if we nourish and cultivate it properly, individualize and develop it through spiritual science, we can realize the infinite becoming process of our future humanity, because this ‘I’ embodies the divine archetype and fullness of our human-cosmic becoming.
[1] ‘Through seeing the Holy Grail, to get to know the mystery of the Christ-Ego... [and] receive the Christ-Ego at the sight of the Holy Grail’. (Lecture of 11April 1909, GA 109). As we shall see below, the source and nature of this light becomes known only later, during further spiritual scientific investigations, and is revealed as the supersensible ‘human being Anthroposophia’. To begin with, however, this light, that illuminates the event, is given as an integral part of the given event, and we don’t distinguish it from the whole occurrence and don’t know where it is coming from.