עברית Michael firmly rejects all half backed and premature advances, and constantly points back to the free human ‘I’ in the physical world, indicating that the love of freedom- that he so loyally protects- must be gained on the earth below, and that one must come fully equipped with these forces to the threshold if one wants to meet him.
The Three Meetings
From Chapter 5
The Meeting with Michael
A deeply moving spiritual experience takes place after the knowledge drama of the Second Coming has reached a certain stage, and the modern Christ experience is individualized and recapitulated consciously. We feel that we draw ever closer to the spiritual being of Michael, the source of spiritual science. But when we try to approach Michael, we find out that the path that leads to him must be distinguished not only from the given meeting with the Christ, which was after all an event of pure grace, but also from the knowledge drama that led to the second, voluntary, meeting. Strange as this may seem, the truth is that to meet Michael it is not enough to transform the given Christ experience into the knowledge drama of the Second Coming. That is, the path that leads to the second meeting with the Christ, described above, doesn’t of itself leads to Michael. This seemed to contradict the fact that the drama of knowledge is based on spiritual forces of cognition, developed only by means of our own free activity. Again and again, when we used these forces, that portal remained closed. But the reason for this had to be found, it was also not simply given.
On one hand, we certainly felt that the knowledge drama of the Second Coming was a result of our free spiritual activity. The individuation and recapitulation of the ‘I’ gift, is a free spiritual deed. But, on the other hand, it was based on the forces the given Christ experience. We realized that the fact that the non-given spiritual activity was based on the given experience, made it unacceptable by Michael. This means that also the second meeting with the Christ was partially based on His forces, and Michael wouldn’t accept anything given, not even the non given created out of the given. Or, in other words, the unreachable meeting with Michael indicated the nature of the path that must be first accomplished. We must be able, so we felt, to disregard everything we gained and developed by means of Christ’s gift of grace. But how can one disregard the forces acquired in the knowledge drama?
It was not so clear how one should carry through this task, because to suppressed real forces acquired by inner labor over decades, is not as simple as disregarding mere ideas and concepts. It means to suppress actively real forces of soul and life, which are already deeply embodies in our entire being. I continued to struggle with this dilemma until I entered my 40’, but it required some more years, before I could feel that I found the path that leads to Michael. [1]
An important step towards this solution- only one aspect can be shared here- was that if I suppress the originally given as well astransformed given forces, they are not really lost. I could experience that to the forces I develop independently, the previously given and acquired forces join later. As a matter of fact, in each stage of gaining wholly free supersensible cognition- starting from pure thinking- a complementary force, gained previously, is resurrected, unites with, and empowers it. In this way, our full freedom is preserved, and at the same time the fruits of the previous achievements fertilize the fruits of freedom, and together they become the formative forces of the mature supersensible faculties.
From the point of view of the modern Christ experience and the knowledge drama of the Second Coming, Michael appears, to begin with, as a stern Guardian of the Threshold, and we had to prove that we can cross this threshold in free spiritual activity. He firmly rejects all half backed and premature advances, and constantly points back to the free human ‘I’ in the physical world, indicating that the love of freedom- that he so loyally protects- must be gained on the earth below, and that one must come fully equipped with these forces to the threshold if one wants to meet him. In other words, this means that we must freely decide to sacrifice everything we received as a gift from the spiritual worlds, and actualize freely what we would call, ‘the abyss situation and event on the Threshold.
The spiritual ideal and aim that we set before our spiritual path in these years, indicated by Rudolf Steiner when he said that ‘this must be a strong, determined decision of the will, to root out, to forget the memory of what we have been, in all its detail… one stands in the fullest sense of the word at the abyss of existence when one makes the decision in true freedom and energy of will, to blot out and forget oneself... to stand in the spiritual world as a nothing on the edge of the abyss of nothingness. This is the most shattering experience one can have; one must approach it with great confidence that the true Ego will he brought to us out of the cosmos’. And this confidence proved indeed to be the only thing that one is allowed to bring with oneself from the given and gained Christ experience, that the true Ego- Christ’s given Ego- will come to meet us again ‘out of the cosmos’. And only then we find out that ‘this is indeed the case…. out of a yet unknown world… our real Ego.... comes toward us. Only now do we meet our true Ego... the perceiving of a completely new world at the edge of the abyss, the receiving of the true Ego from this world. [2] And this means, as we shall see below, that one is the Ego of Christ approaches us again, that was given as pure grace in the etheric world on the earth, through the beings of Michael and Anthroposophia in the spiritual world. Then man find ‘that abyss... between the sensory world and the spiritual world... where he is shown a kind of bridge which leads over to a completely different world, at the entrance of which lies the threshold to knowledge and to the spiritual world’. [3] And this bridge, constructed in the knowledge drams of the Second Coming, must be created anew, as pure spiritual activity, actualized on the threshold, and Michael supervises and directs this construction.
[1] The breakthrough in this regard, described below, took place at the beginning of the new century and millennium, and was developed through the first decade of the 21stcentury.
[2] Lecture of 30 August 1913 (GA 147).
[3] Lecture of 3 April1924 (GA 170c).