עברית From the forthcoming new edition of The New Experience of the Supersensible
Chapter 5: The Knowledge Drama of the Second Coming.
The Third Decisive Moral Decision
From the forthcoming new edition of The New Experience of the Supersensible
Chapter 5: The Knowledge Drama of the Second Coming.
As we showed above, the third stage of the knowledge drama of the Second coming begins when we decide to return to the body, after completing the second stage, that took place in the higher worlds. This means, that we must decide to reincarnate consciously. But to return to the body in full spiritual consciousness, means that we are faced with formidable, indeed, fearful perspective. We realize that we experience consciously what each reincarnating soul in the present age experiences unconsciously before birth, and, in a weakened form, in returning to the body each morning. What is revealed is that the soul is faced with a difficult supersensible-moral decision, whether to incarnate again on earth or not. It is a test and ordeal, that increases in intensity from one decade to the next. The essence of this testing moment consists in this, that to our spiritual preview of the coming life, experienced in the moon sphere, when we formed our etheric body, which was difficult enough, another preview is added, just before physical conception, when we have to unite with the physical body. This is normally a deeply unconscious experience, from which man is still largely protected in ordinary life. But it remains embedded in the soul in the deeply ingrained existential feelings of angst and anxiety. When it is brought to consciousness, it reveals a deeply incisive moment of decision. The soul become aware of the greatly disturbing presence, in the bodies, of the modern metamorphosis of the wound of Amfortas. As we showed above, this wound became noticeable in the human bodies since the last cultural epoch and was based on the ‘more dead than dead’ parts of the body. However, since the end of last century, it becomes spiritually visible to what extend the dominion of a much worse form of evil, extends over the entire earth, and has penetrated and corrupted the entire human constitution, in body, soul and spirit. When this is perceived directly, as a matter of fact, we must say: since the end of last century, the presently available human body- to the extent that it has not been prepared and nourished by the forces of the new Christ impulse- is already to a great extent corrupted and cannot serve as a proper body for healthy and fully humanincarnation. Now when we encounter this fact consciously as part of our spiritual path, we experience it with overwhelming intensity. We realize that first, the human body is no longer simply mortal as it was since ancient times. It has become less then mortal, downgraded to subhuman level. The ancient mortality was used by the gods to serve a justified goal, to help humans return to the spiritual world at death and bring with them their valuable life’s harvest. Through the divinely ordered law of karma, the gods transformed for the good the luciferic and ahrimanic interventions during evolution. In this way, Illness and death were integrated into the justified divinely ordained human density and development. This doesn’t mean, naturally, that the sight of the illness and death bringing forces, is not difficult enough to bear, because these forces are demonic forces. The soul must therefore be already strongly armed already in this respect, when it wishes to enter consciously into the physical body, because it will have to experience these demonic forces face to face. But since the end of the 20th century this problem has been greatly aggravated.
As Rudolf Steiner said, Lucifer and Ahriman were given specific roles in the divine order of the cosmos, and in these limits, they are benefactors of humanity. However, they don’t respect the justified limits allotted to them by the gods and constantly strive to expand the sphere of their activity, and they succeed in doing so, especially when human beings support them. This creates in the etheric and physical bodies, in the region designated by Rudolf Steiner as ‘more dead then dead’, the above described intrusive and illegitimate luciferic-ahrimanic enclaves and strongholds, through which the ‘wound’ is created. The sight of these regions in our body, is difficult to bear, because here one enters directly into a real war zone between the gods and the luciferic-ahrimanic beings, in the middle of which Michael stands. One becomes one with this fight, and experiences its momentarily vacillating, changings fronts, in one’s own incarnated being. But when we perceive to what extent the wound of Amfortas has been metamorphosed to the worst in the last century, we glimpse also what expects us in the form of the far more intense evil forces in the depth of the metabolic-limb-reproductive system. It is here that one comes to a personally devastating, and esoterically speaking, decisive experience and knowledge. And we will not be able to understand the true meaning and significance of the third stage of the knowledge drama of the Second Coming, which takes place in these metabolic depths of the physical body, if we don’t realize the meaning of this experience, and the decisive nature of the moral decision that it entails.
We must therefore place this experience and this knowledge in its real existential context as a lived, human experience. It is the result of a free and individual process of knowledge and can only be based on this individualized foundation of knowledge. In other words, one stands again- but in a more exacting, difficult sense- in the same situation in which one stood at the beginning of the previous two stages of the knowledge drama of the Second Coming. In the first stage, one had to make the first decisive moral decision, to mobilize all the will and heart forces to resurrect human cognition from the ahrimanic grave of the brain, in which modern cognition is dying, and only the new Christ impulse can bring it to resurrection. The second decision was undertaken at the beginning of the second stage. There we had to confront not only the ahrimanic corpse of thinking, but the luciferic forces as well, united with the ahrimanic forces, in the decadent and decaying soul body and soul forces. And we had to come to a similar moral resolution, knowing that this fallen human soul cannot be saved, unless it is resurrected by the power of the new Christ impulse. And now we stand in the same situation in regard to the physical body. This is simply a given fact of supersensible research in the present time. And the decision to return in full consciousness to experience and confront the new state of affairs in the physical body, can only arise from the freest moral intuition, inspiration and imagination, grounded in the moral forces the Imaginative, Inspirative and Intuitive Souls. It cannot be generalized; it must be experienced in all its existential reality in ‘the grave of civilization’, as the true moral ‘situation and event’ of the physical body since the transition from the 20th and 21st centuries. This is also a millennial decision, because this is part of the main spiritual mission of the Michaelic Christ impulse in the coming 3red millennium.
One cannot argue about it with someone how doesn’t share this experience and only want to represent it in his dry and lifelessintellect. One must, nevertheless, knowing full well the nature of such oppositions, remain true to the modern Christ impulse and its Michaelic actualization. If one confronts this situation and event and decides to incarnate and embody the present moral condition of the physical body, one must confront the fact that this body is corrupted beyond repair. And this means, again, to stand consciously at the threefold forking of the path, and take one of the three possible ways. Either one decides to retreat from full reincarnation and remain, to some extent at least, outside this body, which means to ask for Lucifer’s help and succumb to his forces; or being so impressed by the corruption of the human body, one turns to Ahriman, and join the vast global effort to achieve Ahrimanic immortality; or one conceives afree moral intuition and decides to build a new resurrection body to replace it. These are the only real alternatives, if one has reached this junction consciously; one must marshal all the spiritual forces of healing, rejuvenation and resurrection from the three stages of the modern Christ experience, and apply them to build the new resurrection body. But the strongest support to this decision is revealed only after this moral decision has been freely taken. The decision must first be taken as fully free human deed. Then the Christ reveals Himself in ever growing measure and intensity, as the firstborn master builder of the resurrection body, as the second Adam that rises out of the grave of the old Adam, the presently fast decaying human body. And we feel that our free moral decision finds an absolutely firm confirmation and foundation, when we read these words of Rudolf Steiner:
'Just as from the body of Adam the bodies of earth-men are descended, in so far as these men have the body that crumbles away, even so are the spiritual bodies, the Phantoms for all men, descended from that which rose out of the grave. And it is possible to establish a relationship with Christ through which an earthly human being can bring into his otherwise decaying physical body this Phantom which rose out of the grave of Golgotha. It is possible for man to receive into his organism those forces which then rose from the grave, just as through his physical organism at the beginning of the earth evolution, as a consequence of the Luciferic forces, he received the organism of Adam... As physical human being he begins from a single cell; a physical body consists entirely of cells which are all children of the original cell; all cells which compose a human body are traceable to the original cell. Now imagine that, through what we may call a mystical Christological process, man acquires a body quite other than the one he has gradually acquired in his downward evolution. Then think of each of these new bodies as having an intimate connection with the pure Phantom that rose from the grave, somewhat as the human cells of the physical body are connected with the original cell. That is, we must think of the Phantom as multiplying itself, as does the cell which gives rise to the physical body…The Phantom which rose from the grave communicates itself to those who make themselves fitted for it… it signifies literally the rescue of the human Ego'. [1]
Because this ‘mystical Christological process’ is a spiritualized bodily process, it can also be be termed ‘chemical’, in the sense of the Rosicrucian distinction between the mystical and chemical weddings, because it signifies the alchemical transubstantiation andtransmutation of the physical body. The fact that the Phantom ‘signifies literally the rescue of the human Ego’ is the only hope we have of counteracting and overcoming the forces of the Asuras, that strive to tear the Ego to pieces. Only in this way we may hope to fulfil ‘the deeper task of the anthroposophical movement today, to send over to their next incarnation a number of human beings with an ego in which they remember themselves as an individual ego’.[2] This knowledge offers the absolutely needed spiritual support in this stage, and we know that if we actualize the ‘mystical Christological process’ in our body, ‘the Phantom which rose from the grave communicates itself to those who make themselves fitted for it’, will provide the unshakable foundation of hope, and the power of active, unshakable faith, to go forth and fulfil our freely chosen moral decision and task.
[1] Lecture of 11th October 1911 (GA 131). My italics.
[2] Lecture of 4 December 1909 (GA 117).