עברית ‘For this reason, I am called Hermes Trismegistus, because I hold three parts of the wisdom of the whole worlds.
That which I had to say about the operation of Sol is completed’.
The Further Spiritualization of the True ‘I’ through the Two Petalled Lotus Flower and Pineal
Before the construction of the first, etheric-cognitive layer of the bridge from head to heart can start, the builder of the bridge must be first built: The threefold true 'I'. The true 'I' is the creative foundation of the entire knowledge drama of the Second Coming, and therefore its formation must be done with greatest care and precision. The below passge gives only a small part of the detailed description, that will be published in the 2nd volume of The Modern Christ Experience and the Knowledge Drama of the Second Coming.
‘For this reason, I am called Hermes Trismegistus, because I hold three parts of the wisdom of the whole worlds.
That which I had to say about the operation of Sol is completed’.
‘In the spiritualization of thinking and perception in the knowledge drama, the actualization of the true ‘I’ is concentrated in the center of highest spiritual intensity between the eyes, where the first center of activity in the etheric body is created. There we established the first solid self-conscious Michaelic stronghold. This is the foundation of the knowledge drama because Ahriman’s forces can control all human intelligence, ‘with the single exception of the part of the human being which in the human forehead takes on a human form’. [1]And in this singular part of the forehead the ‘I’ of pure thinking is formed, and in the middle point of the center between and behind the eyes, we activate this ‘I’ power, and develop its higher aspects. [2] What is absolutely essential is that this concentrated activity of the ‘I’ will be grounded in the fact that ‘pure thinking is the creator of the “I”’. It must be emphasized that the creation of the ‘I’ by pure thinking is a gradual process, and that the true ‘I’ develops its activity and being in many years of practice.
A real increase in the actual, active creative power and spiritual substance of the ‘I’ is experienced, hand in hand with the gradual spiritualization of ordinary cognition. It must be grounded in this gradual spiritualization of ordinary thinking and perception, feeling and will, to guarantee that in each step the true ‘I’ will remain connected to ordinary consciousness. The new supersensible faculties must start with the formation of the Imaginative Soul out of the spiritualized Consciousness Soul, from the formation of ‘head clairvoyance’ to the subsequent formation of heart- and limb clairvoyance in the Inspirative- and Intuitive Souls. Once the formation of the true ‘I’ is activated and awakened as real supersensible experience, it becomes an unforgettable spiritual situation and event; it is experienced as a real spiritual birth, a true novelty in man and in cosmos. It is a new actualization, substantiation, and formation of a new spiritual being, as real as a newborn physical baby. One knows: through this activity the moral-substantial weight of the ‘I’ increases, and with it, ‘man filles himself, in his soul, with substantial content of the Christ being... so that the Christ can work in him’. [3] The experience of this filling with spiritual substance, content, and form, is the process in which the birth and growth of the true ‘I’ is grounded. It is its etheric-soul and spiritual womb and cradle, and the given Christ Ego stands by the newborn true ‘I’ as an all-encompassing example, that we learn to imitate, recapitulate, and individualize, to learn to stand up and walk, speak, and think, until the true ‘I’ gains its first spiritual self-consciousness. [4]
We must repeat this process many times, naturally, until we feel how the perpetual activity of pure thinking brings forth more and more Christed ‘I’ substance, gives birth to a more concentrated and substantial ‘I’ center. The more this activity intensifies, the more we feel that the life streams of etherized blood, that flow from the heart to the pineal gland and unite there with the spiritual streams from the spiritual world, provide the child with ‘the spiritual milk’ as his spiritual nourishment. When the birth of the true ‘I’ in pure thinking has advanced to a certain stage of maturity, we experience how it begins to receive spiritual support and nourishment from the spiritual stream that flows from the pineal. This stream begins to substantiate the activity and formation process of the ‘I’ between the eyes. When this highly dynamic power the etherized blood, that flows from the heart to the pineal, begins to flow from the pineal to the formation of the ‘I’ between the eyes, we feel that the a new spiritual organ two comes to life, as an enhancement and differentiation of the etheric center, formed previously between the eyes. Until this moment, we focused on the formation of the true ‘I’ through pure thinking, between the eyes. But now, we become aware that this formation has another aspect, that is taking place not only between the two physical eyes, but in the middle between two adjacent spiritual organs. The highly potent stream from the pineal- that originates in the heart- causes the activity of the ‘I’ between the physical eyes to expand, and grow, organically, out of its middle self, two arms and hands, on left and right. We notice it, because the ‘I’ begins to experience how the two hands start to awaken and stir, move, and rotate; they begin to oscillate and alternate between cycles of contraction and expansion, outbreathing and inbreathing. When these cycles areintensified as result of continued meditations, we experience that each hand is actually a specific expression of a spiritual movement, that is propelled by a different spiritual organ. Further investigations of this phenomena reveal that both are connected to the two spiritualized and united etherized blood streams. This is our first discovery of what will become, in future developments, the so-called two petalled lotus flower, or chakra, between the eyes. Let us now report in greater detail how this formation is actualized, emphasizing that it grows and develops out the free spiritual activity of pure thinking by the true ‘I’, and is grounded in the etheric center in the head, established by the spiritualization of thinking and perception.
We showed above how the microcosmic, intellectual, etherized stream, that contains the death forces that form our ordinary consciousness, is spiritualized when we spiritualize thinking and perception. We showed how the intensive spiritualization of thinking and perception kindles the spiritual fire that causes the two streams to merge, because it combines death and life as ‘chemical combination’. Through this ‘death in Christ’ the spiritualization of thinking and perception brings about the formation of imaginative cognition. Then the forces of this spiritualized cognition unite in the free etheric heart with the etherized stream of the blood of Christ, and the two streams flow as one stream to the pineal, to receive the macrocosmic-spiritual stream from the spiritual worlds. Through the union the untied microcosmic stream and the macrocosmic stream, the etheric Christ is perceived, and the Ego gift becomes conscious. We demonstrated how this process becomes an individualized faculty, that recapitulates the essence of the second Mystery of Golgotha in each moment of active imaginative cognition. Now we experience how the spiritual power generated by the merging of the microcosmic and macrocosmic streams in the pineal, flows into the formation of the true ‘I’ between the eyes, and how it forms, in and through the activity of the ‘I’, the new spiritual organ between the eyes. The stream that flows from the heart is gathered in the pineal, takes in the higher, macrocosmic spiritual stream from the spiritual worlds, and flows to enhance the activity of the ‘I’ in the center between the eyes.
The complex process occurs when the threefold self-actualizing activity of the true ‘I’, in pure thinking in the etheric center between the eyes, becomes so intense, that it attracts to itself the macrocosmic stream that flows through the pineal. The more the true ‘I’ ‘fires’ its spiritual activity in the spiritualization of thinking and perception, the more it draws to itself the etherized and spiritualized double blood stream from the heart and the macrocosmic stream from the pineal and increases its power. And this power forms the two petals of the two petalled lotus flower. As Rudolf Steiner pointed out, ‘we have two eyes because, if we were inclined to see with only one eye like the Cyclops, we could never develop the I and an idea of the self... This is how we develop a fine idea of the self because we cross the eye axis with our two eyes when aiming... as we cross our hands’, In our praxis, the fact is fully corroborated, that ‘the two material eyes are one in the spiritual. And it sits here behind the bridge of the nose, this one eye, this spiritual one, which becomes the two eyes’. [5] The importance of the formation of the two pedaled lotus flower out of the central spiritual eye, through the free activity of the ’I’ in pure thinking, becomes ever clearer, because the ‘I’ itself is this one, central ‘eye-I’; and the more we understand the function of this organ, the first fully formed chakra, the more we realize that it alone enables the threefold true ‘I’ will to direct and govern the formation process of the entire bridge.
In the present 5th cultural epoch, the mysteries of Hermes of ancient Egypt, from the 3rd cultural epoch, are recapitulated and resurrected through the Christ impulse. And in the above described process of the formation of the threefold true ‘I’, we discover that the essence of this initiation, founded by Hermes Trismegistus, the thrice great Hermes, is resurrected as well; in the innermost, individualized, threefold activity of the free human ‘I’, in which the indwelling ‘I’ of Christ works, this power appear again, but what could only enter human evolution through the still half-conscious Sentient Soul, can presently enter into the free activity of the threefold true ‘I’, active in the self-conscious forces of the Consciousness Soul. Therefore, in the knowledge drama of the Second Coming, Hermes Trismegistus words, are resurrected in the threefold activity of the true ‘I’, in which the sun forces of Christ are consciously individualized. And we indeed hear the proclamation of his newly resurrected revelation, that resounds through the formation process of the threefold true ‘I’.
“For this reason, I am called Hermes Trismegistus, because I hold three
parts of the wisdom of the whole worlds.
That which I had to say about the operation of Sol is completed”. [6]
The time has come to activate and open the ‘threefold third eye’ of the modern Hermes Trismegistus because the spiritualizedconnection to the self-conscious ‘I’ in the physical world is well established, and the individualized connection to the spiritual ‘I’ in the spiritual world is well embodied. As Rudolf Steiner says, in the present fifth cultural epoch, if we spiritualize the Consciousness Soul, ‘we must learn to read in the astral light, what we ourselves wrote there in the older cultural epochs’. [7] In this sense, indeed, ‘the new operation of Sol’ can begin, which today is the Sun of the etheric Christ in his new revelation, and thus the newly opened third eye- revealed as the activated and functioning two petalled lotus flower- becomes the main spiritual organ that let us coordinate in spiritual self-consciousness, all the next steps and stages of the bridge building process. When we concentrate the potent spiritual ‘I’ power, extracted from all our meditations, in the two petalled lotus flower, remarkable experiences take place, that bring the true ‘I’ to ever higher stages of formation.
The first thing that happens is that through its threefold spiritual activity, the true ‘I’ grows its own wheels or wings, or indeed, winged wheels, [8] which it can unfold and infold, open and close, expand and contract, flower-like, rhythmically, according to its own will, becoming itself an harmonious breathing-and pulsing, wave like movement. It becomes indeed an etherized, soul-spiritual flower, and its petals and wheels are living subtle organs, tentacles, and limbs. At a certain moment, we feel that those two-winged petals-wheels also move like two arms and hands of the third eye. We will gradually come to feel the actual motions of the two-petalled lotus flower and will find ourselves in possession of spirit hands that can touch spiritual beings’. [9] What is more, the two-petalled flowering organ begins to radiate life-giving, blessing and healing light, rising like marvelously radiating winged sun. Beside its meaning in many ancient myths, today it represents the indwelling ‘I’ of Christ, the sun being, as the fulfilment of the words of the prophet Malachi ‘unto you who are devoted to my I AM, shall the Sun of righteousness dwell and arise in your “I”, with healing in his wings’.[10] And the sun god in the center, that propels and moves the arms-petals-wheels, the ‘chariot’ in the middle, harnessing the two horses on left and right, is our true ‘I’, perpetually active in actualizing the living spiritual breathing movement, expanding and contracting and constantly intensifying and growing its spiritual being, while the activity of the true ‘I’ continuously draws from the etheric heart the finest streams of etherized blood, to nourish the germinal growth of this marvelous organ. The more we let our ‘I’ exercise this activity, each of the two petals alsobecomes a spiritual ‘eye’, a combination of hand and eye, seeing hand and an active grasping eye, and between the reciprocal activity of both- through the ‘I’ in the center- an expanding field of imaginative vision unfolds, through which we consolidate and expand our ‘intellectual clairvoyance’, and transform it into fully conscious, imaginative faculty of the true ‘I’…
Footnotes
[1] Lecture of 1 August 1924 (GA 237).
[2] Rudolf Steiner described the two petalled lotus flower between the eyes, and the formation of the etheric center in the head by means of its activity, in Knowledge of the Higher Worlds, Chapter 6, Some Results of Initiation. The process reported here was described also, from another point of view, in Cognitive Yoga, chapter 4, Etherization of Sight, and chapter 6, Etherization of Smell.
[3] Lecture of 15 July 1914 (GA 155).
[4] The true ‘I’, as newborn spirit child is called also Spirit Self, as we shall presently describe. In the etheric world, it develops its basic bodily-soul and spiritual faculties as the child does in the first 3 years of life. I described this process from a different point of view in Cognitive Yoga, chapter 9, Early childhood of an etheric individuality.
[5] Lecture of 22 August 1922 (GA 214).
[6] Emerald Table, Tabula Smaragdina, is the hermetic Urtext of alchemy, attributed to Hermes Trismegistus.
[7] Lecture of 13 January 1924, (GA 233a).
[8] Among others, the winged wheel is a symbol associated with Hermes- Mercury, and as a representation of the chariot of Triptolemus.
[9] Meditation given to Edouard Schuré (GA 267, p. 444–445).
[10] Malachi 4:2, My translation.