עברית
‘Out of the dark- gloomy foundations of the Cosmic mysteries, will come forth the figure of Christ'.
The Abyss and the Event of the Threshold
From Chapter 5
The Three Meetings: Christ, Michael, Anthroposophia
‘Out of the dark- gloomy foundations of the Cosmic mysteries, will come forth the figure of Christ Jesus, which will draw near to us and give us the strength and force in which we shall then live. The Christ will guide us, standing beside us as a brother, so that our hearts and souls may be strong enough to grow up to the necessary level of the tasks awaiting humanity in its further development.’ (Lecture of 6 February 1917, GA 175).
The combination of the Michaelic Yoga and the Pauline method, on which the Platonic-Aristotelian essence exchange in based, forms the bridge that leads from The Philosophy of Freedom to the modern Christ experience. It became the starting point and foundation of the entire knowledge drama of the Second Coming. But before we describe some aspects of the knowledge drama, we must explicate its starting point. The starting point is characterized by the fact that the given meeting with the etheric Christ lifts man to the etheric body and world and offers him a seed of the ‘I’ of Christ. Man finds himself in this situation and event as a given grace, and the Christ provides the forces that support our etheric existence and imaginative perception, as long as the meeting lasts. But when the experience is over, we do not return to ordinary consciousness, but neither can we hold onto the given imaginative consciousness. We find ourselves in a special situation, in-between ordinary and supersensible consciousness, that we call ‘the abyss and the event of the threshold’. And this situation and event is our new spiritual homeland, in which our new spiritual existence is grounded. We understand that the spiritual world has left us wholly free to marshal our spiritual forces, to build a conscious and voluntary bridge to the Christ in the etheric world by means of modern spiritual science or to decide to return to ordinary physical consciousness in the physical world, without pursuing this possibility further.
This abyss is therefore the place through which the etheric Christ appears, speaks, and acts, in the first meeting, as a graceful gift of his new revelation; and it is the same abyss through which we must pass, to meet him again in the voluntarily achieved second meeting, rising out of it to face him, as he faced us in the first meeting. As Rudolf Steiner says, ‘if we take the trouble to learn to think the thoughts of Spiritual Science and make the mental effort necessary for an understanding of the Cosmic secrets taught by Spiritual Science, then, out of the dark gloomy [düster] foundations of the Cosmic mysteries, will come forth the figure of Christ Jesus, which will draw near to us and give us the strength and force in which we shall then live. The Christ will guide us, standing beside us as a brother, so that our hearts and souls may be strong enough to grow up to the necessary level of the tasks awaiting humanity in its further development. Let us then try to acquire Spiritual Science, not as a mere doctrine but as a language, and then wait till we can find in that language, the questions which we may venture to put to the Christ. He will answer; yes, indeed, He will answer! Plentiful indeed will be the soul-forces, the soul-strengthening, the soul-impulses, which the student will carry away with him from the grey spiritual depths through which humanity in its evolution is now passing, if he is able to receive instructions from Christ Himself; for, in the near future He will give them to those who seek’.
When we individualize and recapitulate the given modern Christ experience through spiritual science, the spiritual being of spiritual science is felt to be, at first, a stern Guardian of the Threshold. Later, we learn that this being is Michael. His invisible being and activity stimulates us to prove to ourselves that we can prepare to cross the Threshold to meet the etheric Christ in the etheric world for the second time, in free spiritual activity. The clear distinction between the given meeting with the Christ and the meeting through the path of the knowledge drama of the Second Coming, is based on the fact that Michael firmly rejects all half-baked and premature advances, and constantly points back to the free spiritual activity of the human ‘I’; he is indicating that the love of freedom—that he so loyally protects—must be gained on the earth below, and that we must come fully equipped with these forces to the Threshold to cross it in a way justified in his eyes. In other words, this means that we must freely decide to give up everything we received as a gift of grace in the first given meeting with the Christ, and freely develop our spiritual forces, in the situation at the abyss and the event on the Threshold. When man experiences this situation, he must never underestimate the power of Lucifer and Ahriman who tempt us to believe that we have developed the gracefully given forces, and that we can use them to cross the Threshold, in a way that sharply contradicts the will of Michael and Christ in the present age.
The given meeting with the Christ is a real supersensible experience. Therefore, its conscious investigation must come to terms with the ordeals and probations of the Threshold because the Threshold’s abyss is the situation and event in which it takes place. If we are to meet the Christ again in the etheric world through the knowledge drama, we must make ourselves familiar with this abyss. The conscious way to the second meeting with the Christ must lead us through this abyss, and we must experience the abyss consciously. What took place unconsciously in the past century for all humanity, must be individualized and consciously recapitulated by the pupils of Michael since the end of the twentieth century. It is the only possible preparation for the true and healthy crossing of the Threshold. ‘Before the middle of this century has passed, the Christ must be seen. But before that, all that remains of the old must be driven into nullity, the clouds must gather. The human being must find his full freedom out of nullity and the new perception must be born out of this nullity. The human being must find his whole strength out of the nothingness. It is but the desire of spiritual science to prepare him for it. This is something of which one may not say that it desires to, but that it must desire to!’. We must desire this most undesirable ‘birth out of nullity’, and the enthusiasm required to kindle in the etheric heart the flame of this courage, can only be given by the etheric Christ in the present age, if we approach the mysteries of His Second Coming with the strength of Michael.
This is the above-mentioned ‘grey spiritual depths through which humanity in its evolution is now passing... the dark-gloomy foundations of the Cosmic mysteries’, out of which the Christ appears, speaks, and acts. And the fully conscious second meeting with him is only possible, if we can pass through this abyss voluntarily, and go out into the etheric world to meet him, as he came forward to meet us in the first meeting. What Michael insists on most sternly is that at the Threshold of the spiritual world, man will wholly change his experience and understanding concerning the nature of cognition. Man must learn to experience that all his abstract conceptual knowledge gained on earth and stored in his brain is not only something completely external to his real being but is a major obstacle to achieve wakeful spiritual consciousness. What we know, and above all how we know things in the physical world, puts us to sleep at the Threshold. And we must develop this wakefulness over many years of intensive struggles with our stubborn intellectual habits, inclinations, and instincts, that we bring with us from the physical world.
Let us hold firmly to what man experiences at the abyss and event of the Threshold. He finds himself in a situation, in which, on the one hand, the excarnation from the physical and etheric bodies is already accomplished, but on the other, the spiritual birth of the soul and spirit forces has not yet been fully realized. Man feels that he does not truly exist spiritually, that he dies perpetually and falls asleep on the Threshold, so long as he has not resolutely annihilated all earthly contents and forms of knowledge. Man must struggle to reach the point where he can actively become this nothingness and make it into the deliberately actualized nothingness of his being. Then he experiences that everything belonging to the soul life on earth becomes an unbearable burden, fettering the dormant wings of the soul and hindering their unfolding. He feels that all earthly soul contents lull him to sleep and cause him to lose his spirit light and consciousness in this darkness. He must find the strength and courage to voluntarily die to his earthly cognition before he can be born again in the light of spiritual knowledge shining from the other side of the Threshold. In other words, what takes place by itself after physical death, the liberation from the three bodies, the death of earthly consciousness and the birth of spirit consciousness, must be accomplished consciously, through our own conscious activity. This is the quintessence of the ordeal in the abyss and the event of the Threshold.
The spiritual activity developed in this abyss must therefore be based on ‘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 be brought to us out of the cosmos’. This confidence is the only thing that one is allowed to carry in one’s ‘I’ from the given Christ experience, that the true Ego—Christ’s given Ego—will come to meet him ‘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’...