עברית ‘The human head had already entered a retrogressive evolution... The processes that run parallel to sense perception and thinking are breaking down processes, processes of destruction'.
The Second Mystery of Golgotha and the Knowledge Drama of the Second Coming
‘We are here pointing to the abyss of nothingness in human evolution which man must cross when he becomes a free being. It is the working of Michael and the Christ-impulse which makes it possible for him to leap across the abyss’.
Let us be reminded that the knowledge drama of the Second Coming, is based on the second Mystery of Golgotha, caused by the fact that modern humans, through their materialistic thinking, feeling, and doing, expand and spread the forces of death from the physical to the etheric world and cause the death of suffocation of the etheric Christ. Into the living etheric world, human dead thoughts penetrate as dark, suffocating cloud, creating the ‘black sphere of martialism’ that burns the living, green and sprouting tree of life, and turn it into the black cross. The faculties of modern thinking and perception are therefore bought at this high spiritual cost, and we feel that we would do whatever we can, with our weak forces, to carry this cross with the etheric Christ and rise with Him from the etheric grave, with the forces of ‘direct Christ consciousness’. But this direct consciousness can only be achieved if it is resurrected step by step, through the spiritualization of dead ahrimanic thinking.
This process was still livingly experienced by the neophytes in the Mysteries of Eleusis. The first dawn of philosophical thinking, in Plato, and logical thinking and scientific sense-perception, in Aristotle, externalized this drama and made it into man's individual drama of knowledge. Then humanity fell gradually, century after century, into the abyss of materialism, and could only begin to emerge again out of it through modern spiritual science. Today we stand at the ascending arc of the dawn of spiritualized Aristotelian-Platonic anthroposophical stream, and the knowledge drama is returning to its rightful imaginative place in the new Mysteries of Michael. What Orpheus had to sacrifice in his descent to the 'Underworld' was the atavistic Euridice-Persephone forces, called Baldur in the Nordic Mysteries, the living and ensouled forces of the soul and bodies, the source of the ancient imaginative clairvoyance. This part of the human soul and bodies is resurrected through the Ego gift of the etheric Christ, that gives the imaginative force of Persephone and Baldur back to man. Christ in us becomes the redeemer of Persephone and Baldur in the human soul because the Christ is the Ego giver, the new, true Dionysius, through whose resurrected etheric body the new and fully conscious Imaginative perception and cognition is resurrected and born again.
In order to prepare the ground for this spiritual work, not theoretically, but in real spiritual praxis, we must start from the elementary forces of daily consciousness. We shall have to explore, as we noted above, in detail, the causes of the limitation of modern thinking and sense-perception. To do this, we shall turn to Rudolf Steiner's philosophical-anthroposophical investigations concerning the nature of modern consciousness. However, before we start to review these investigations, we must make sure that we experience the full meaning of the ahrimanic death forces that dominate the human head, brain, nerves and senses. In the lectures about the Mission of Michael, in which he outlined the new Michaelic path of ‘the will of yoga’, that serves as foundation of the knowledge drama of the Second Coming, Rudolf Steiner characterizes the nature of modern consciousness in such a way, that must be felt and experienced intensively, because this experience underlies the second Mystery of Golgotha and the knowledge drama of the Second Coming. Therefore, we must contemplate this passage, not only to think about it, but to feel its importance.
‘The human head had already entered a retrogressive evolution. That which in earlier states of evolution was full of vitality and life is, in the human head, already in the process of dying... If we think, if we perceive with our senses, there takes place in our head, in our nervous system and its connection with the sense organs, a process that is the opposite of an ascending process of life and growth. For if such a life process took place there, we would fall into deep sleep, we would never be able to think clearly... The processes that run parallel to sense perception and thinking are breaking down processes, processes of destruction. The organic, the material, must first be broken down, must first be destroyed; then above the organic process of destruction the thinking process arises...You see, this is the tragic phenomenon accompanying a real knowledge of the activity of the head: there is no unfolding of organic processes in the head to be enjoyed by the clairvoyant when he thinks, when he perceives with his senses; on the contrary, he has to familiarize himself with a process of destruction’.
In the second Mystery of Golgotha, we experience intimately ‘the tragic phenomenon accompanying a real knowledge of the activity of the head’. Based on this experience and knowledge of death, we are well prepared to contemplate some of the fundamental results of Rudolf Steiner investigations of the nature of ordinary human consciousness, which can be described as follows.
The fully incarnated organization of modern man, in body, soul and spirit, functions in such a way that we suppress all spiritual connections to the etheric, astral, and spiritual worlds. When we confront physical reality through our senses, we grasp the naked physical corpse of the world, from which all life is taken away. Without being aware of it, man achieves his wide awake, physical consciousness in the physical world, by unconsciously reducing a former, pre-physical, etheric state of consciousness, to an earthly one. This is done so as to create the proper conditions for the coming into existence of his wide- awake, sense-and brain-bounded thinking. Thus our given daily consciousness is truly a result of a far reaching unconscious transformation. When we wake up each morning, we find this state of consciousness as a given mental fact, and we don’t remember how it came into being. We cannot recall and follow backward what we experienced before awakening in the physical body, because the transition from the supersensible to the physical world, is steeped in deep unconsciousness. The real spiritual world, in which we spent the night in sleep between falling asleep and awakening, is simply not there, and the sensory light of ordinary consciousness lights up as an absolute sole reality. But if one returns to the physical body from the etheric world, as one does after the given meeting with the etheric Christ, or develops the higher stages of spiritual cognition, by means of the meditations described in the books, Knowledge of the Higher Worlds and Occult Science, he can follow consciously at least the last stages in the formation process of ordinary consciousness. Then we learn to wake up in the etheric body before we are fully incarnated in the physical body. We make halt, so to say, in the etheric body, before we plunge in all the way through the senses and brain and begin to perceive with the physical senses. In this intermediary etheric state, between the astral and physical worlds, one experiences and perceives consciously, how ordinary external sense-perception comes about; one participates consciously in the coming into being of ordinary consciousness out of imaginative etheric consciousness.
From a higher, imaginative state of consciousness, man sees and follows the process of its physical incarnation, which for most modern people is a spiritual death. One dies out of a state of etheric consciousness and is born into dead physical consciousness, and experiences, step by step, how it happens. What is more, one discovers that the same process doesn’t happen only in the moment of awakening from sleep, in our return to the physical body in the morning, but that it also occurs, very rapidly, in each ‘blinking of an eye’, that is, in each flickering second that passes, when we close our eyes, between each act of perception. In daily life as well- this will be shown in greater detail below- this ‘sensory breathing’ takes place, as the astral body and ego perpetually exit, to lesser extent than in the night, the physical and etheric bodies, and reenter fast into them. Because this exhalation and inhalation of perception happens so quickly, that we don’t notice it in ordinary consciousness. But in the Michaelic yoga this is clearly perceived in imaginative cognition. We experience that in each moment- in each blinking of an eye, to be exact- our ego and astral body slightly exit and reenter our etheric and physical bodies, and in the split moment of night inserted between the two states, when we cease to perceive with the senses for a split second, the etheric world lights up. Imaginatively, this is experienced as a real 'fall from Paradise’ in every opening of the eyes and in every act of conscious seeing and of forming mental pictures of the seen.
In Rudolf Steiner's fundamental book, Philosophy of Freedom, this existential situation and event, that underlies ordinary consciousness, is described as follows:
‘Nowhere are we satisfied with what nature spreads out before our senses. Everywhere we seek what we call the explanation of the facts. The something more which we seek in things, over and above what is immediately given to us in them, splits our whole being into two parts. We become conscious of our antithesis to the world. We confront the world as independent beings. The universe appears to us in two opposite parts: I and world’.
And further:
‘It is not due to the objects that they are given to us at first without their corresponding concepts but to our mental organization. Our whole being functions in such a way that from every real thing the relevant elements come to us from two sides, from perceiving and from thinking. The way I am organized for apprehending the things has nothing to do with the nature of the things themselves. The gap between perceiving and thinking exists only from the moment that I as spectator confront the things’.
This is a most significance discovery, because we begin to experience, even if only in the first rudimentary inner sensing, touching, feeling, a central mystery of human existence that will be brought to ever higher and clearer states of cognition; namely, that each moment of awakening to daily consciousness, has already ‘split our whole being into two parts’, and created a gap between us and the world- and between our conscious and unconscious life- a gap whose existence lies wholly outside ordinary consciousness. The becoming aware of the splitting process between thinking and sense-perception, is perceived by imaginative cognition, and leads to the most significant results in the anthroposophical study of the problem of knowledge as a whole. It is to this 'moment' ('the gap between perceiving and thinking exists only from the moment that I, as spectator, confront the things'), where the standing over-against things is generated, that we must direct our spiritual gaze: if we could hold it fast (for example, hold fact the first moment of opening the eyes in awakening from sleep), we should be able to see how this split is created out of our 'whole being', to know what our whole being really is, and how this whole being causes the dualistic division of modern consciousness; that is, we would see how out of the pre-personal, pre-birth etheric ocean, in which we dwell as primordial world-man wholeness, an abyss of dualism between man and world is generated, and how it occurs in every moment of wakeful sense-perception and thinking. And this discovery will wholly transform our experience of man and world, perception and thinking, body, soul, and spirit.
This fundamental mystery and starting point of the knowledge drama is described by Rudolf Steiner further:
‘Our mental organization tears the reality apart into these factors. If our existence were so linked up with the things that every occurrence in the world were at the same time also an occurrence in us, the distinction between ourselves and the things would not exist. But there would be no separate things at all for us. All occurrences would pass continuously one into another. The cosmos would be a unity and a whole, complete in itself. The stream of events would nowhere be interrupted. It is owing to our limitations that a thing appears to us as single and separate when in truth it is not a separate thing at all... for us, however, it is necessary to isolate certain sections of the world and to consider them by themselves... this separating off is a subjective act, which is due to the fact that we are not identical with the world process, but are a single being among other beings’.
This splitting of man's whole being into two parts is man's basic process of modern individuation. In the gaining physical knowledge of external sense-perceptible things, we believe that we overcome this gap by reuniting, post actum, our thinking with our sense-perceptions. But we have achieved by this union of thinking and perception, is only an external representation of a dead world, solid and secure enough to enable us to understand and master the physical world and build our technological civilization. But at the same time, we have lost any inkling of the true nature of man and his relations to the spiritual universe.
This man-and world picture is, therefore, totally lifeless. The living, ensouled and spiritual worlds, in which also the whole being of man is rooted, are suppressed and concealed behind this picture; the real spiritual being of man and the world, is destroyed in each act of physical knowledge, because we kill and condense, splitting the whole human-world being into two dead halves; on the one hand, we create an objectified physical world, which appears as consisting of distinct, separated physical objects and fixed, and a physical human being, consists of the same physical matter and processes. And our thinking, that was living and streaming cosmic flow before our birth and before waking up in the body in the morning, has being degraded to well-cut, dead mental concepts, that we combine mechanically with each other.
The active suppression of the living reality of the world and of the human soul in each act of conscious perception was described again by Rudolf Steiner seven years later, in his book, Mysticism at the Dawn of the Modern Age, in the following way: 'Sense perception closes off [schalted-aus] in the things everything that is not sensible. The things are thereby stripped of everything that is not sensible. When I proceed then to the spiritual, ideal, content, I only bring back what sense-perception previously obliterated [in the things]'. This is true, however, only for spiritualized thinking. In ordinary thinking, what I bring back to the things is also killed thinking, because the thinking, that is reflected from the physical brain, is as lifeless as the sense-perceptions that it represents.
It is Rudolf Steiner's most essential creative transformation of the science of epistemology to discover this underlying dramatic-knowledge process, which creates the ground for the dualistic split of modern consciousness, and which alone produces both an individual self- consciousness as well as the objective scientific foundations of natural science.
In the final chapter of his book fundamental The Riddles of Philosophy (1914), Rudolf Steiner describes this dramatic process in greater detail. Let us follow him, therefore, further:
‘At a certain stage of his development [man] must give a provisional form to his ego in order to suppress from his consciousness the forces that unite him with the world. If these forces exerted their influences in his consciousness without interruption, he would never have developed a strong, independent self-consciousness. He would be incapable of experiencing himself as a self-conscious ego. The development of self-consciousness, therefore, actually depends on the fact that the mind is given the opportunity to perceive the world without that part of reality which is extinguished by the self-conscious ego prior to an act of cognition.
The world forces belonging to this part of reality withdraw into obscurity in order to allow the self-conscious ego to shine forth in full power. The ego must realize that it owes its self-knowledge to a fact that spreads a veil over the knowledge of the world. It follows that everything that stimulates the soul to a rigorous, energetic experience of the ego conceals at the same time the deeper foundations in which this ego has its roots’.
This unconscious, supersensible, concealment of the real and living, whole man-world being, so as to create an objective world picture that can be experienced in full self-consciousness and self-possession, is a process that prepares, and therefore precedes, the conscious act of physical knowledge:
‘The human soul does not deviate from reality in its creative effort for knowledge, but ... prior to any cognitive activity the soul conjures up a world that is not real. Man is so placed in the world that by the nature of his being he changes things from what they really are ... the unreal character of the external sense world is caused by the fact that when man is directly confronted by things of the world, he suppresses something that really belongs to them ... it is due to the nature of the soul that, at its first contact with things, it extinguishes something that belongs to them. For this reason, things appear to the senses not as they are in reality but as they are modified by the soul. Their delusive character (or their mere appearance) is caused by the fact that the soul has deprived them of something that really belongs to them’.
Three years later, in 1917, in his book The Riddles of the Soul, Rudolf Steiner brought this idea to a higher, more explicit anthroposophical formulation:
‘[The soul] must suppress its own life, in order to have the conscious soul experience of the ordinary consciousness. This suppression takes place through every sense-impression. When the soul receives a sense-impression, there comes into being a suppression of the life of the mental pictures [eine Herablahmung des Vorstellungsleben]; and it is the suppressed mental picture which the soul experiences consciously as the carrier of knowledge of external reality. All the mental pictures that the soul relates to an external world are inner spirit-experiences whose life was suppressed. With everything that man thinks about an external sense-world, he has to do so with deadened mental pictures.
The real world gives man something living. He kills from this that part that enters his ordinary consciousness. He does so because he would not have awakened to self-consciousness in the external world if the relation to this world was experienced in its full vitality. Without the suppression of this full vitality, man would have to be a member in a wholeness far greater than himself; he would be a member of this greater organism’.
As we showed in third chapter of The Three Meetings, the epistemologically most concise and systematic anthroposophical study of the process of sense-perception and of thinking is given in the dissertation of W.J. Stein, written under the personal guidance of Rudolf Steiner. It is connected to Rudolf Steiner's book, The Riddles of the Soul, published in 1917, dedicated to Franz Brentano, of whom Rudolf Steiner says that 'if Brentano had recognized the mirror-nature of ordinary consciousness he couldn't but continue his work and lead it towards Anthroposophy, instead of remaining at the gates to Anthroposophy'; and that 'Brentano is a personality destined to work further in the spiritual evolution of humanity’. This statement about the future mission of the Aristotelian thinker, must be connected with the saying 'Had he [Schröer] attained intellectuality' and united it with the spirituality of Plato, Anthroposophy would have come about'. As we showed in The Three Meetings, with such a spiritualized anthroposophical Aristotelianism the Platonic spirit of Anthroposophy can readily and energetically unite itself, to create the Platonic-Aristotelian synthesis, required for the knowledge drama of the Second Coming.
Seven years later, in the Letters about the Michael Mystery, Rudolf Steiner described the process of man's individuation in a way that brings us directly to the cliffs of the abyss that is opened in our time inside the building processes of self-consciousness:
‘Thus, in his momentary ideation or forming of ideas man lives not in an element of real being, but only in a mirroring of being-in picture-being. In this fact, the possibility of the development of freedom lies inherent. All that is being in consciousness has power to compel. But a picture cannot compel. If anything is to be brought about through the impression that the picture makes, it must happen quite independently of the pictures. Man becomes free through the fact that with his consciousness soul he rises out of the ocean of being and emerges in the picture-existence which has no being ... We are here pointing to the abyss of nothingness in human evolution which man must cross when he becomes a free being. It is the working of Michael and the Christ-impulse which makes it possible for him to leap across the abyss’.
With these words, we have the stage set for the development of the knowledge drama of the Second Coming. It contains all the elements experienced in the drama of the second Mystery of Golgotha, described above. We can now begin the active investigation of this process, beginning with the gradual spiritualization of thinking, and observe closely each step on the path of its transformation. After this, we shall actualize the spiritualization of sense-perception. When we have at our disposal the spiritualize forces from thinking and sense-perception, we can begin to use them the construction of the threefold bridge over 'the abyss of nothingness in human evolution', because we will have individualized the ‘working of Michael and the Christ-impulse which makes it possible... to leap across the abyss’.
Forthcoming in the second edition of The New Experience of the Supersensible