The Kindling of Spirit Light in the Twinkling of an Eye

The Kindling of Spirit Light in the Twinkling of an Eye

The falling asleep and waking up rhythm is condensed into a single twinkling of an eye, the birth of an inner light in the momentary darkening of the external sun light.

From the second volume of The Modern Christ Experience and the Knowledge Drama of the Second Coming  (Forthcoming 2023-4).

This section is taken from the first chapter: The Spiritualization of Thinking.

 Above we described how the separation of the three soul forces is accomplished in the astral body. With prolonged meditative exercises, it also causes a deeper division of the forces of the etheric body. This happens in the same point in the etheric body, in which the two streams of time are separated consciously, and the stream of living future time experienced consciously, alongside the stream of dead past time. In daily life, both streams are unconsciously intermingled and mixed, to form the vortex of ordinary consciousness, in which the stream of time past dominates. As we saw, at this etheric point we divide them consciously, hold them apart, and space their life- and time difference out. We let the future stream take the lead, as in ordinary consciousness the stream of past time is our leader. In the etheric body, this division stops the unconscious formation of ordinary consciousness and brings about instead the formation of imaginative cognition. This becomes eventually such an ingrained power in the etheric body, that we can experience it during wakeful daily life. We can actualize and experience this division in each twinkling of an eye. In ordinary consciousness we don’t experience that in each moment in which we close our physical eyes and shut out the instreaming physical light, a remarkable inner awakening is taking place. In imaginative perception this event is experienced as the birth of an inner light in the momentary darkening of the external sun light. This happens in eachmoment in which we physically close our eyes; in this unnoticed, unconscious fraction of a second, a ‘night’ or ‘death’ event is woven imperceptibly into the continuous ‘day’ of ordinary consciousness. It is a real, rapid excarnation moment, in which our astral body and Ego detach themselves ever so slightly, from the etheric and physical bodies. If we have accomplished the spiritualization of thinking described previously, then in the moment if which night falls down, a flashing spiritual light will shake us, and we wake up spiritually. We overcome the illusion of the physical continuity of daily consciousness and hold the two poles of this event - the day and night, the physical and supersensible -  wide apart.  It is a real, miniature recapitulation of what happens when we fall asleep at night and wake up the next morning. Thus we enter consciously into what otherwise divides our consciousness into two unbridged parts, into day and night. We begin to experience spiritual falling asleep and waking up in each blinking of an eye.

 Now the falling asleep and waking up rhythm is condensed into a single twinkling of an eye, and in this night, we experience how a flash of light illuminates our sleep, and an imaginative perception takes place, similar to the state of wakeful dream consciousness. If we remember that in the etheric body time is spaced out as duration, we will not be totally shocked to realize that we can truly ‘take our time’ consciously also in a fraction of a minute, and we let the spiritual world inspire us, before we return to ordinary consciousness, when we let our eyelids open again.

  But what do we imaginatively perceive during the midday flash of this nightly illumination? We experience, first, that the light of the external, midday sun darkens. This is in all reality a sunset and falling asleep event. Then we experience the lighting up of the gentle shimmering that announces the sunrise of the midnight sun, and we experience what Novalis experienced in his conscious moment of near death experience, as a naturally given initiatory experience, on Sophie’s grave, reported in the Hymns of the Night. But what was a given initiatory experience in Novalis’ case must be transformed into a voluntary, free process. He says that in this moment, ‘aside I turn to the holy, unspeakable, mysterious Night’. This truly happens when we close our physical eyes after thinking has been duly spiritualized.  In this stage of the knowledge drama, it is absolutely true to say that ‘afar lies the world, sunk in a deep grave; waste and lonely is its place’, in so far as we experience in this moment how our dead physical cognition sinks into the deep grave of the brain; but then the spirit light of the night breaks through the grave into our soul as lightning, and awakens the light of the sun of the night in us. ‘Dost thou also take a pleasure in us, dark Night? What holdest thou under thy mantle, that with hidden power affects my soul?... Thou upliftest the heavy-laden wings of the soul’. This becomes an intensely real, miniaturized, singularized awakening event in the midst of the most mundane, external ordinary consciousness, a momentary death and resurrection event of cognition, through the light of spiritual vision, flashing through the suddenly shaking and opening grave of daily consciousness.

 There, all of a sudden, the heavy stone of the grave of the brain, in which the corpse of dead thinking lies, is lifted; the brain- and consciousness grave opens in the twinkling of an eye, between each closing and opening of an eyelid, and the spirit of ‘resurrected direct Christ consciousness’ appears as the new etheric light of the earth.  In each act of spiritualized thinking, the mental, dead corpse of past thinking pulverizes and disappears into the abyss of the earth, opened on Great Friday night, and the resurrected light being of Imaginative cognition rises up on Easter Sunday morning. The second etheric Mystery of Golgotha becomes an individualized, miniaturized, event in each twinkling of an eye. And we weave in full consciousness the living light of the night with the dying light of the passing day, the light of the spiritual sun with the dying light of the external physical sun. Then and there we experience how Novalis’ gentle spirit draws near so intimately, and stands by us, and we realize what he experienced when he exclaimed enthusiastically during the resurrection of his soul at Sophie’s grave: ‘More heavenly than those glittering stars we hold the eternal eyes which the Night hath opened within us’.

     When we gain this experience voluntarily, through modern spiritual scientific development, it is a sign that the power of the messenger of the gods, Mercury-Raphael, has begun to guide our steps into the spiritual worlds, because - as shall be described below in greater detail - ‘in the Staff of Mercury we have a symbol of man's development through the experiences of day and night and the advance made by the Ego’. Then ’the wonderful glowing light of Mercury illumines this spiritual night-sky. The planet Mercury actually rises in this night that has been wooed into the day’. When we have found him, we can be sure that we have found the right path of modern spiritual science, which leads to the spiritual world with the full clarity achieved in daily consciousness. ‘We have absolute need for him, otherwise confusion will set in. We must first of all find this Being in the spiritual world, the Being whom we know for certain belongs to Mercury... We no longer need to stumble along undefined paths like the sleep-walker, but we can be led by the hand of Mercury, the messenger of the Gods, along the clearly defined paths that lead into the spiritual world’.  Then we truly experience and see with ‘the eternal eyes of the night’ how the seemingly solid and continued stream of daily consciousness, falls apart and breaks down, in each eyeblink interval of flashing night light, into two distinct time streams and beings, which embody imaginatively, the divided stream of time, as Castor and Pollux, and appear as exact half-time brothers or twins, mortal and immortal. They appear in each and every moment in which we spiritualize ordinary consciousness into the first form of supersensible Imaginative consciousness.