עברית Working on the Second Edition of the New Experience of the Supersensible
'Perceiving the spiritual in this finest distillate of the brain is the real mission of our time'
Working on the Second Edition of the New Experience of the Supersensible
From Chapter 5: the Knowledge Drama of the Second Coming
A fully modern bridge of spiritual memory and continuation of consciousness can only be built with the soul forces gained through the transformation of thinking and sense-perception. As we showed in Cognitive Yoga and The Three Meetings, this is the origin of the Michaelic yoga and Paul’s method of investigating and actualizing the Christ experience. In this chapter, we demonstrate the results of applying, practically, Rudolf Steiner’s indications, how to spiritualize Goethe's work with sense-perception and the Philosophy of Freedom, and bring the two to an intimate and intensive interpenetration, mutual exchange and fertilization. In this way alone can the given Christ experience be thoroughly individualized and become an anthroposophical 'I' experience, in accord with the requirements of the development of the Consciousness Soul in our time. Rudolf Steiner pointed out that the modern Christ experience must take place ‘in a powerful way, consciously... in a wakeful state- through what the souls strive for out of their "I" nature; the power of the human "I" and the forces of human knowledge should be connected with the Christ-impulse’. Only if such souls will be found, that can ‘plant the Christ-impulse in the astral body and in the "I"’, only then can that come about for a future culture that must come about.' And the modern human ‘I’ can only develop its fullest self-consciousness and freedom, if its activity is ground in pure thinking and sense-perception, the two forces that emerged only recently, in the present fifth post Atlantean cultural epoch, during which the Consciousness Soul develops. For this reason, we don’t want to begin to individualize and recapitulate the modern Christ experience through other soul forces and faculties, but solely by opening the gates of thinking and sense- perception. And when we try to do so, we are immediately confronted by the fact that these two faculties are strictly limited to the physical world of the senses. But we are also conscious of the fact that precisely due to this limitation, we can achieve only through them the state of clarity and exactitude of thinking and perception, that we want to have in Imaginative cognition. Furthermore, as Rudolf Steiner often emphasized, the limitation of human consciousness in relation to the outer and the inner spiritual worlds, is necessary to develop human freedom and therefore true human love, that would not have been possible without this limitation.
To this we must add the following. The given modern Christ experience takes place in the same clarity and freedom, as the most wide-awake experience of thinking and sense-perception in the physical world. Naturally, because we experience this clarity and exactitude in both states of consciousness, in the physical and etheric world, we will not wish to develop our individual supersensible faculties differently. We have two lucid examples of the state of consciousness we want to develop, in the given experiences in the physical and etheric worlds. In the ordinary clarity of thinking and perception, and in the Imaginative perception of the Christ we find our archetypal examples of what true supersensible perception and cognition must be. And since in this state of consciousness alone we can develop true freedom and love, we feel absolutely no desire to give it up and return of atavistic, nebulous, dreamy clairvoyance, confused thinking and lack of freedom. We want to experience the same soul forces, capacities, and moral qualities in our volitionally formed spiritual practices and experiences. Therefore, clear, and precise thinking and sense perception are chosen as the only legitimate gates of entrance into the sought-for land of the Etheric Christ. The spiritualization of the forces of pure thinking and sense-perception, constitutes the task of spiritual science in the present age of Michael and through the whole fifth post Atlantean cultural epoch. As Rudolf Steiner emphasized, from many different points of view, ‘our task today is to grasp the occult forces in Manas, the purest element of thought. Perceiving the spiritual in this finest distillate of the brain is the real mission of our time. To make this thought so powerful that it has something of occult power, that is the task given to us in order to be able to fulfill our mission for the future’. And this is, in a nutshell, the task of the knowledge drama of the Second Coming, because the bridge to the etheric Christ in etheric world must start from the spiritualization of the head, nerve-and senses system, in which ordinary thinking and perception are rooted. ‘This will begin in an ever-increasing number of human beings in the course of the twentieth century. Progress will only be made in this direction when men not only develop a heightened intellect for themselves but also lift it up into the astral world. The human being who has advanced to intellectual clairvoyance in this way can and will approach the etherically visible Christ more and more clearly in the course of the next three thousand years’.
In this way, the obstacles and limitations, caused by the cession of the old forces of clairvoyance, prove to be of the greatest positive value to the future evolution of humanity, because we can spiritualize the clear modern self-conscious thinking and sense perception, from the ground up, without their help. This means that the new supersensible faculties will be develop not from the old atavistic clairvoyance, but from the best modern thinking of natural science and philosophy. And these faculties are transformed into the new fully conscious spiritual scientific faculties of supersensible cognition. ‘We have now reached a stage in human development where the study of spiritual matters must be based on the same foundations as the study of nature was three or four centuries ago. Spiritual science intends to achieve similar things for knowledge of the spirit as Copernicus, Galileo, and Giordano Bruno did for the understanding of physical nature in their own time. Of course, the systematic exploration of the spirit in our age encounters the same kind of resistance and hostility as the study and the concepts of the natural sciences did then. Spiritual science will be assimilated into our culture as slowly and with just as much difficulty as the natural sciences were’.
Since we start our spiritual scientific life and work from a given supersensible event, described above, we experience modern consciousness from the perspective of the supersensible world. And from this point of view, life is a given, while death is the greatest riddle that stands before us, when we wish to start the spiritualization of thinking and sense perception. We are confronted by death when we experience, from the etheric world of eternal life, our physical consciousness. Then we must ask ourselves these questions: how is this limitation of consciousness generated in the first place? Why doesn't man see, hear and participate consciously in the totality of life around him and within him? These questions, as we shall presently see, are not theoretical questions. They can only be answered out of an modern supersensible research that investigates the origins of the limits of cognition, and discovers their spiritual source. This is the needed ‘turning of the front towards natural science’, about which Rudolf Steiner spoke, that Goethe pioneered, preparing the ground to the anthroposophical transformation of Aristotelianism and Thomism. This ‘turning of the from towards natural science’, however, means also to confront the ahrimanic forces of death, that dominate nature science, especially since the middle of the 19th century. In the knowledge drama of the Second Coming, therefore, it is a fundamental experience that, in following the modern natural scientific stream, we follow ‘a commandment of Christ Jesus himself to overcome natural science, that the Christ Jesus lives among us precisely because of this, and that we realize his mission to overcome natural science when we connect with him’. In other words, the forces given by the Ego gift of Christ can be individualized in full freedom in each act of conscious thinking and sense-perception, if we follow as exactly as we can in the steps of Rudolf Steiner, as he transforms and spiritualizes natural science in the creation of modern spiritual science, and create for the first time in human evolution, a fully conscious paths to the highest and deepest mysteries of existence.
This is the reason why, if we wish to approach the etheric Christ in the right way today, it can only be done through consciously opening the closed gates of ordinary consciousness; because we can then control voluntarily the way in and out of the physical and etheric worlds, and bridge the abyss between physical, objective consciousness and the higher levels of supersensible experience. This means, therefore, that the spiritual investigation of the limits of consciousness, and their overcoming, is the necessary beginning and foundation of the knowledge drama of the Second Coming. But the limiting power of physical consciousness in the physical world is the power of death.
Let us be reminded that the knowledge drama of the Second Coming, is based on the fact that modern humans spread this death from the physical to the etheric world and cause the death of suffocation of the Christ with their dead thinking. Into the living etheric world, human death has penetrated and caused the living, green and sprouting tree of life to turn into burned down black cross. The free modern thinking and sense-perception is bought by this high spiritual price and the passion of the etheric Christ is necessary, to bring it to resurrection on earth.
When a self-conscious bridge is to be built between the normal, wide-awake and rational modern state of consciousness and the inspired and intuited imaginative appearance, speech and acts of the Christ in His Second Coming, so must the Consciousness Soul itself become our only solid ground of construction. For this purpose, therefore, there are two tightly closed gates that must be opened: the gate of thinking and the gate of sense-perception.