To become worthy of the spirit of our time

From the Preparations for the Centennial of the Christmas Foundation Conference

Lecture of February 18, 2023

This preparation is another opportunity to do what we strive to do all the time, but now we can greatly intensify and enhance it. We strive to bring the whole activity of the community of the school to a new level of intensity and productivity. What a marvellously creative time, a wonderful chance to move on and grow, to become worthy of the spirit of our time, the most creative, universal, freedom loving, socially productive Time Spirit, Michael.

 When we prepare ourselves to celebrate the centenary of the Christmas foundation conference, we face an event, a deed, performed by Rudolf Steiner, and not the printed communication of his spiritual research. Of course, the communications given in a book also  point to his living spiritual work, his investigations of the spiritual world, and his efforts to communicate them in our horribly intellectual time. But in this case, his main work takes place in the spiritual world, and we know nothing about it. We only receive the end results in the form of spiritual knowledge that he choose to communicate. But in the laying of the foundation stone of the new anthroposophical society in the Christmas foundation conference in 1923-4, he did something in the physical world. It is actually a whole event he is performing in the open public space,  a cultic something, mysterious something, forming and then laying a foundation stone. So how should we approach this in the right way? That is the question we should ask ourselves in our preparations, and I also asked the college to guide the meetings of the school in this way to make very clear to ourselves that what we study is not another lecture, it is not a text that contains knowledge about the spiritual world, but a description of a deed. He is doing something, he is forming the stone, he is laying the stone, so it’s something else. He is not communicating knowledge from the spiritual world, he is doing something here and now with us, among people, on earth.

 Now, if you recall, that also when we study the knowledge brought down from the spiritual world, and transformed into written texts, we make a clear distinction between ordinary study, the common intellectual study of anthroposophy, the usual application of our intellect to understand a text, and study as the first step on the spiritual path. The first step requires to wholly transform how we study spiritual science. And from our experience, we have realised, how difficult this first step is.  

 Why is it so difficult? Because it is a given fact that when I study something I am using my intellectual forces. Unless you insist, that in your special case it is not so, that you already have spiritualised your thinking to such an extent, that when you confront the text immediately you overcome and bypass the physical brain. But I don’t think any honest person in our time will say: I don’t start the study with my intellect, but with my spiritualised thinking. Intellect works as physical instinct. We cannot do otherwise. And when we honestly admit this and honestly try to change this, as we do in our school meetings for many years, we realise how stubborn this intellect is, how instinctively entrenched it is in our brain and body, and how it always returns and strikes back, in the moment we believe we have overcome it.  

I am just saying this because the first step in modern esoteric development is the spiritualisation of the intellect in thinking, reading and study. We do not want to meditate without study, to enter the spiritual world with empty hands. We want to bring real substance with us to offer to the gods. But we also do not want to study in the usual intellectual way and offer anthroposophy to Lucifer and Ahriman. We want to transform our intellect as we study, to root it out of its deeply engraved trenches in our brain.

  So please remember, also when we study any book or lecture, we strive to overcome our intellectual understanding and interpretation. We want to transform it, to spiritualise it- but how can we do it? Only in real meditation! This makes it naturally terribly uncomfortable for our intellect, so lazily sitting in his chair, analysing and explaining everything from a safe distance.

 But what do we really try to do in meditation? After all, also when we meditate the starting point is something written, something perceptible, that is also grasped by our intellectual understanding. We have to understand the content of the meditation. We don’t want to meditate on something that we don’t understand. So we have to comprehend it and again our intellect takes it over for itself. But this is only the first step. Then we fire our devotion and love to the truth of the content of the meditation and with our love we transform it into something that we feel with our whole being, in which the whole human being is engaged. We become what we think, feel and will, and it becomes part of us. This is what Lucifer and Ahriman hate most, and our intellect, ruled by them, will strive against it with all its might. And this is good for us because we get stronger in this struggle. But the struggle must be fought though all the way.  

  And as a matter of fact, as we pointed out many times, we cannot change study into the first step of the spiritual training, without making it into a real, honest, heartfelt meditative practice, because we have to make the content of the meditation into part of our entire being. We want to move it from the head to the heart and from the heart to the whole body.  And now, when we read a text that describes the event of the forming and laying of the foundation stone, we are confronted with the text in which Rudolf Steiner is not transmitting knowledge from his research in the super-sensible worlds. He is doing something on earth and while he is doing it, he tell us what he does. He actually tells us: This is what I do! Like someone who is doing any manual work, a carpenter for example, crafting a table and describing what he is doing: I take this wood from here and this kind of wood from there, I cut it this way, and I nail them together and so on. He describes what he is doing. But how do we approach a text that describes a living event, a deed, an action?

 And lo and behold, it is again only a text that we read! Therefore, again, we should overcome our intellectual approach and transform it into a real meditative praxis. It must become a living event in our minds, hearts and bodies. Therefore, in our school meetings and exercise groups through 2023, when we contemplate the living event of the forming and laying of the foundation stone and the foundation stone meditation, we should bear this not only in our minds, but especially in our hearts.

  For example, in the first part of the event in the morning of the 25 of December 1923, Rudolf Steiner describes the threefold human being. We can say this part of the event is more similar to transmitting knowledge about the threefold human being. This is true, in comparison to the next parts, in which it become pure deed. But if we are attentive to the subtle nuances of the first part, we will discern the evolving event in its beginning. It is part of the event, it is also an event. It only seems that he is only describing the threefold human being, but he is doing something that prepares what comes next, and we must find a way to make it present for us. This will be our problem. Even the first part should be transformed, so we understand what he is saying as doing in the context of the whole event.  

 But how do you merge with a real action, a deed, with what Rudolf Steiner calls, ‘the situation and happening’ of a spiritual event? You have to be much more active than with the transformation of any other given content. You should enhance your meditative activity, make it even more active- if I can say it so. But what can this mean to enhance your most active activity? What kind of activity is this?  

 So we have to accomplish a fourfold intensification process when we contemplate this text:

1) we have to read and understand the text and become conscious how we dreadfully intellectualise it.

2) we have to struggle hard to overcome the intellectual understanding and transform it, make it a concern of the heart, as we do with all our meditatively deepened study.

3) then we will more and more grow into the event, will become one with it, feel it from within, be there as it happens. We will cease to be external onlookers and passive bystanders and become active participants.

4) if we attain this experience, we shall perceive that the community of the school of Michael, in the etheric world above and around us, is doing something, communicating, communing with us.

 How do you follow someone walking for example? You can simply perceive and monitor his movements externally, with your senses. But you remain external onlookers. If you want not only to observe but join his activity, you want to experience what he experiences from within his activity. Of course this cannot be done if you remain passive external onlooker. In meditation I am becoming one with the content of my meditation. I am submerged in the mantric verse, I merge with the flower, I become word, color, scent. This I do in my meditations. Now I contemplate an external, physical event, something is happening, Rudolf Steiner is doing something, so I should really try to identify myself with what is happening. But what does is really mean, ‘to identify myself’ with what is happening? How can my self identify with a non-self? Well, here you go! You must leave your self, go out of your self, and become another self, or event. Easily said than done, you may justly retort! Nevertheless, this is true spiritual science in practice, the rest is mere intellectual theorising.

In our school we have called this meditative process also: Entering into the situation and happening of the event at hand. Let us apply this to the situation and happening of the Christmas foundation event.

 This is therefore our goal, dear friends, to become the event of the laying of the foundation stone, to become the foundation stone! Let us try to do it, intensify and deepen our becoming process more and more until the summer. We started this at the beginning of 2023 so we have enough time to do it.