עברית The vitally important good news, that await honestly striving modern people, is that the wine of our spiritual and human endeavors truly growth sweeter and full of new life forces, the more mature we become, and that our creative intuitions and inspirations become ever fresher and younger, our heart growth milder, our imagination more concrete and our moral forces more active and real.
After 42 Years of Spiritual Praxis
The Amfortas-Parsifal Duality and its Healing
Extracts from the first lecture
The Twilight and Resurrection of Humanity
The vitally important good news, that await honestly striving modern people, is that the wine of our spiritual and human endeavors truly growth sweeter and full of new life forces, the more mature we become, and that our creative forces become ever fresher and younger, our heart growth milder, our imagination more concrete and our moral forces more active and real.
If one follows the modern spiritual path with the necessary courage for many decades, the older younger one becomes, the more one overcome the limits of one’s karmic cell, one ventures deeply into the centre of the complexities, paradoxes and reversals of modern life on all levels; one grows into an ever expanding and intensifying spiritual involvement in all spheres of spiritual and external life of the present age of Michael, which demands courageous active participation in the present fight of Michael with Ahriman.
In what follows, I will give an example of the inner aspect of this path, and in the next lecture tomorrow, expand it to the various aspects of our present time as a whole.
As I said above, when I was doing the spiritual research that later was published in my book Cognitive Yoga, I could feel that since my fifty-sixth year, I had at my disposal new and much more intensive, substantial forces of life, coming from the deep source of the Life Spirit. I experienced how these new life forces were stirring up from inside my bodies. Until then I always felt like an outsider, striving to delve into my bodies from outside, and I felt the constant ‘counterblow’ that pushed my efforts away. But now, something changed in a remarkable way. I experienced that when I descended into my bodies with my imaginative cognition, the dead parts in the physical and etheric bodies, and the unconscious soul parts in the Mind Soul, were less hostile than before. As a matter of fact, some parts even began to resonate and respond positively, welcoming me and encouraging me to dig deeper. As described in Cognitive Yoga, in order to be able to use this inner readiness of cooperation on the side of my bodies, I had first to extract and etherize forces not only from the higher external senses of sight, warmth, and hearing, but to add to them forces etherized from smell, taste and touch. And now I had the forces of Life Spirit on my side, as it were, and below this, I could
also feel increasingly something else, that spiritual forces were actually awakened and stirring to life inside the physical body. Later I realized that they come from the highly spiritual and still largely potential being of Spirit Man in me. This continued through the coming years, and as I described in Cognitive Yoga: How a book is born, during 2012 this process reached a certain culmination. This took place when the newly emerging forces of Spirit Man latent in the physical body joined the already awakened and active forces of Life Spirit and Spirit Self in the etheric and astral bodies, and together they allowed me to free my whole etheric body from the forces of death and activate its creative forces. This was first of all available to the forces of my imaginative thinking, and as is the case with my spiritual research, which is founded on pure thinking, this thinking then opened the new path of imaginative perception and cognition that could encompass wholly new etheric vistas.
The Life Spirit is the spirit of immortal life that is active also inside our etheric body. It is part of the macrocosmic, universal spirit of life, the source of all the forces of life that build, nourish and animate the whole universe as well as the archetypes of our three bodies. Furthermore, as Rudolf Steiner shows, Life Spirit is the spirit that carries and nourishes and enlivens our spiritual life as a whole from one incarnation to the next through all eternity. It is the spirit that sustains our whole immortal, eternal biography and life cycles, encompassing our eternal individuality through all earthly lives, holding together and metamorphosing our spiritual life-stream through all our births, deaths and lives in the spiritual worlds between our deaths and rebirths. Experience reveals how persistent spiritual scientific work—aided by the potent life forces streaming from the etheric appearance of the Christ—makes our life forces increasingly more spiritual and immortal and influences all the subtle aspects of our bodies and soul members. It is holistic and it penetrates the whole human being on earth and in the spiritual worlds and guides the transitions between earthly and cosmic spiritual life.
Let me emphasize the fact that the reason that such an etherization and healing of the bodies is possible today is found in the new etheric Christ impulse. People who ignore this new life-giving impulse, would therefore also reject my research, because they don’t understand that what was indeed unthinkable—and undoable—in any other time in human evolution, has become possible since the end of last century, as Rudolf Steiner hoped for. If we take hold of this impulse by means of the spiritual train- ing of anthroposophical spiritual science, and work with it for many years, we let our etheric body be penetrated by this Life Spirit impulse. Then we can experience the fact that the etheric Christ is streaming the forces of His cosmic Life Spirit to the world through His etheric Second Coming. Because His etheric body is only the external form of the appearance of the Christ. This is one of the most important esoteric mysteries of the present age and the real source of the new stream of Michael, that is beginning to flow in the twenty-first century.
Let us remember that the etheric body of each person is of a cosmic origin, gathered from the forces of the etheric world before birth, but it also takes into itself the forces of death before we are born. It becomes mortal to serve the needs of our physical organism and our ordinary soul life. Three days after our death, these death forces cause it to dissolve back into the general cosmic ether. But to the extent that we have spiritualized it during earthly life, not all of it dissolves. That part of our etheric body that we have spiritualized during life by imbuing it with the Christ impulse, through the conscious work we accomplish with our ‘I’ and astral body, remains intact after death and becomes part of what Rudolf Steiner described as the new ‘etheric ring’ or ‘etheric sphere’ that gradually grows around the earth, generated by the sun forces of the resurrected Christ since the Mystery of Golgotha. It is transforming gradually the astral, etheric and physical bodies of the Earth. The same process, only on an individual, microcosmic scale, was described above, in the gradual etherization of the three bodies through the forces of the Spirit Man, Life Spirit and Spirit Self. This etheric ring is the first product of the process of the Earth becoming a sun, and it was built, until the end of last century, from the immortalized, Christ-filled etheric parts of human etheric bodies, gathered and woven together after death to create the ‘etheric ring’ in the etheric world around the Earth. And the same happens in the individual development, to the extent that it is actively influenced by the new etheric Christ impulse. Also, in the indi- vidual etheric body such a new ‘etheric ring’ is created, just as has been created around the Earth in the last 2000 years.
Let us bring before us Rudolf Steiner’s description of the etheric ring, because it has the most important meaning for our work since the end of the last century:
‘So if you will visualize the period in which the event of Golgotha occurred and then compare it with a later period—that is, if you compare a future con- dition of humanity with that which prevailed at the time of the event of Golgotha—you will find that at the time the Christ impulse intervened, the earth of itself had nothing left to infuse into the etheric bodies of men. Sometime later, however, the etheric bodies of those who had found a contact with the Christ impulse were irradiated: men who understood the Christ, absorbed the radiant force that has been in the earth ever since—the earth’s new radi- ance. They have taken the light of Christ into their etheric bodies. The Christ light streams into the etheric bodies of men.
And here we must ask, what takes place, now that there is always something of the Christ light in human etheric bodies? What occurs in that part of the etheric body in which the Christ light has been received? What happens to it after death? What is it, in short, that gradually permeates the etheric body as a result of the Christ impulse? It is the possibility that was given at that time, as an effect of the Christ light, for something new to appear, something living and breathing and immortal, something that can never perish in death. While men on earth are still misled by the illusory image of death, this new factor will nevertheless be rescued from death, will have no part in it.
Ever since that time, then, the human etheric body has held something that is not subject to death, to the death forces of the earth. And this something which does not die with the rest, and which men gradually achieve through the influence of the Christ impulse, now streams back again—out into cosmic space; and in proportion to its intensity in man, it generates a certain force that flows out into cosmic space. And this force will in turn create a sphere around our earth that is in the process of becoming a sun: a sort of spiritual sphere is forming around the earth, composed of the etheric bodies that have come alive. The Christ light radiates from the earth, but there is also a kind of reflection of it that encircles the earth. What is here reflected as the Christ light, appearing as a consequence of the Christ event, this is what Christ called the Holy Spirit. Just as the event of Golgotha provided the first impetus for the earth to become a sun, so it is true that beginning with this event the earth began to be creative, surrounding itself with a spiritual ring which, in turn, will in the future develop into a sort of planet circling the earth’.
This is the reason why I called the new spiritual sun-being of the earth and its etheric ring, the earth and heaven of the ‘earthly-human sun’. But as I said, since the end of the last century—for the first time in human evolution, thanks to the new etheric appearance of the Christ—this spiritualization and immortalization of the etheric body can become conscious and operative, to begin with among a few people, already during our earthly life. What I describe here as part of my spiritual biography is an individualized, microcosmic, replica of this process. What formerly could take place only after death, the weaving together of the immortalized etheric parts in the planetary etheric ring, can take place consciously during earthly life, if we develop the etheric cognitive forces described in Cognitive Yoga. To the extent that we make ourselves younger, over- come the death forces and banish the luciferic-ahrimanic forces from their strongholds in our bodies, to the extent that we heal the wounded Amfortas in us by means of the new forces of Parsifal, the forces of the spiritualized Consciousness Soul, we begin to spiritualize that part of our etheric body which can then, after the years 49-63, unite itself with the forces of Life Spirit, supported on the one side by Spirit Man and on the other side by the forces of Spirit Self.
We can now ask ourselves: what can be achieved by means of such a biographical path, described above, if we remain loyal and devoted to the spirit of Michael, as it expresses itself in the living stream of Anthroposophy in our time, in the course of 42 years—from our twenty-first until our sixty-third year? We can begin to see imaginatively and individualize in our own soul forces and bodies, the mysteries of Christ’s etheric body, which are actually the mysteries of His cosmic Life Spirit. Because we have overcome and healed to some extent the ahrimanic-luciferic forces of death and evil rooted in the dead parts of our bodies and the unconscious parts of our soul, in which the wound of Amfortas was burning so strongly, we can also participate consciously in the twenty-first century in the mystery of Christ’s present resurrection; just as we could participate before in the overcoming of death and the creating of new life forces, and the mystery of the transformation of evil into higher good, which He suffered in the twentieth century…
The Twilight and Resurrection of Humanity
The History of the Michaelic Movement since the Death of Rudolf Steiner