Zeige mir deine Wunde

Zeige mir deine Wunde

Spiritual Science in the 21st Century: Transforming evil, meeting the other, and awakening to the global initiation of humanity

An extract from lecture 6 of the lecture collection, Spiritual Science in the 21^st Century: The Working of the Christ in the Apocalyptic Spiritual Conditions of the 20th and 21st Centuries (Utrecht 1997).

To understand the deeper historical context of this lecture, we should note the year it was given: 1997, a year before 1998, in which the two apocalyptic Beasts united their forces: the first that emerged from the abyss in 1933 and the second that joined it in 1998. I described in the lecture the consequences of this union for the transformation of the entire human constitution, and deepened this knowledge in the 7th lecture, The Beast and the Reversal.

Below I post some of the concluding words.

 ‘Where we are today is world kamaloka. This is our civilization. Only people with special grace can begin to do some work here, for to be helpful today, one must have confronted this picture in one’s own individual nature and biography, in the individual struggle to become a human being from the very foundation of a non-human being. To become truly human not from the traditional values of society which still had some humanness about them; for example, it was simply accepted from tradition that man was a human being created in the image of god. This was still there until the middle of the 19th century; everyone knew at some level or another, maybe it was completely unconsciousness, but it was still there — the human being was created in the image of god, through Christ. Today, however, we must look squarely at the other picture, the one that is reversed. We have civilization and we have human beings who are already formed in the image of the anti- Christ. This is reality; it is flesh, blood, soul and spirit. It is already here and must be faced. The struggle must begin in the souls and it must go on, a struggle among human beings.

 As a last word, I will draw your attention to this mutual human world, the social aspect of the empty heart, and say that psychotherapeutic work can really only be done among people, with other people. As a matter of fact, the work itself is a healing process. This is happening and there is the very beginning of a true recognition through knowledge and through healing power, through conscious human healing. It can only be by working together, to see that work with the patient is as self-healing as the healing of another. Education must be such today that our children will begin to be what they should have been long since. The educating of educators, the healing of the healers, the making social of the social — all this is a reversal of the reversal. For we have to reverse this reversal of the I, and nothing can be taken for granted today, absolutely nothing.

There is no human, positive element in us as given inheritance from the past. If we believe that we have great ideas, maybe even anthroposophical ideas that Rudolf Steiner struggled hard to develop, and that we can heal with them today, then we are completely oblivious to what has already been a reality for decades. We are really asleep to the true reality of our work. There is no field where this kind of old anthroposophy can work anymore. It does not work because healing work must today be created out of the newly created human element. There are no other powers and the Christ can only work among human beings who are working socially in this reversed ritual again.

We know that tradition must be transformed and Christianity also needs to be transformed in time. The Christ changes his relationship to humanity a great deal more in our time compared to 20 centuries ago. We probably remember the scenes after the resurrection when he came to visit the disciples. You will remember how one of them could not see the Christ in the spirit. He therefore asked the Christ, ‘Would you please show me your wounds? For to see you, to believe in you, I must touch your wounds.’ And the Christ, always very sensitive to the needs of human beings, went forward and said, ‘Ok, Ok, you don’t believe and you want to see and touch. I am with you, don’t fear.’ And he gave him the hands so he could touch and believe. But then the Christ said, ‘You had to touch in order to see and touch in order to know, but in the future, human beings will have to believe without seeing.’ For the Christ knew quite well that humanity was going into the last two millennia of the darkest part of Kali Yuga, where people would not be able to see but must develop the power of belief. The Christ was thus preparing for the age of belief. He rebuked Thomas and said, ‘Well then, you could not see anymore, so you wanted to see, but the time for seeing is over, now you must believe’.

 Today the Christ is approaching human beings again, in a wholly new way; he is not showing the unbelieving humans His wounds to convince them of His etheric existence, but shows them their wounds: ‘I would like to show you your wounds. I will show you your own wounds, so that I can be the healer of your wounds.’ This is the approach of the Christ today. It is the reversal of the story of Thomas. And He also says, ‘I will transform your wounds so you will be able to see.’ The healing of the wounds in soul, spirit and body today is the source of seeing, of seeing in the spirit the new imaginative faculties are those born from transforming the powers of healing, the new healing, the new working of the wound. And the best way to make it clear is to say it in German. For I have just come from a visit to Munich where I saw some of the greatest works of Joseph Beuys:Zeige mir deine Wunde. You must of course play this great drama yourself, in the way which Beuys did it, not imitate him and make him into another dead idol. The title shows the right direction. It is the word of the Christ, ‘Show me your wounds if you want to see, for the wound is opening the eyes, or opening the heart to new knowledge.’ From compassion to knowing, fm healing the wound to knowledge, everything must now come from the heart. The head powers on their own are already part of the evil principle. Any concept, even the smallest concept that comes from the head, is already part of world kama loka and therefore not only useless, but definitely harmful. It is definitely a power that hides the wound.

I would like to finish with this picture. The wounds of the Christ (but now the wound of the human being which the Christ makes clear) opens up and heals, so that the eyes of the heart can be opened; the heart of seeing and the wound of the beast. On the one hand, the beast with the wound that was miraculously healed, which is the principle of black magic in our time and in the future; and on the other hand, the Christ with his wounds, but the wounds which are now sealed and concealed within the human heart. I would therefore like to suggest this Imaginative picture as a contribution to the development of psychotherapy in our times.

Read the whole lecture in the book Spiritual Science in the 21^st Century