עברית When we say: Yes we know this already, we must immediately translate this statement to reveal its living truth, which is death: I am dead as my knowledge is, and my knowledge is as dead as me.
How to Work with Foundation Stone Meditation
Lecture in Global School of Spiritual Science
25 March 2023, Part I
These lectures are given as part of the spiritual work in the global school of spiritual science, and any opinion and judgment about them must be based on a thorough aquinatance with this work, as presented, among others, in the book, The Twilight and Resurrection of Humanity.
The head knows everything, and everything it knows is dead, familiar, the same old same: ‘Ah, I know you already from yesterday, you are the same guy!’ When we say: Yes we know this already, we must immediately translate this statement to reveal its living truth, which is death: I am dead as my knowledge is, and my knowledge is as dead as me.
Dear School Friends,
I wish to thank our dear college friends for leading the work tonight in such a fine way, inviting us to continue our work in good spirit and Stimmung and the necessary feeling. And that is how we should develop it from Easter to the Midsummer, gradually, slowly, making sure above all that we develop the right feelings, the right Stimmung and mood of soul, which are absolutely required to the work of the school of Michael. It is all about fostering the proper soul atmosphere between us, based on loyalty to our resolution to develop the warm, devoted, enthusiastic feelings for this work. You might say that this is not new, that we spoke about it before. We certainly did! But what is ‘old’ and ‘new’ really? In the sun rising today old or new? My head says: It is the same sun as yesterday, and indeed, there is nothing new under this sun, which means- inside this lifeless head! To experience the power ‘that makes everything new’ in each moment, means to overcome the terribly intellectual thinking, feeling and willing of the head. The head knows everything, and everything it knows is dead, familiar, the same old same: ‘Ah, I know you already from yesterday, you are the same guy!’ When we say: Yes we know this already, we must immediately translate this statement to reveal its living truth, which is death: I am dead as my knowledge is, and my knowledge is as dead as me. Naturally, the practice of this transformation is developing gradually, it is not happening overnight. Therefore, let us continue to deepen the mood and the Stimmung of the soul in the right way, which is an absolute precondition to any work in the movement, community and school Michael.
When we start our meetings we therefore make sure that we first of all create this mood. And when we fall out of the mood, let us notice this pretty soon and return to it. If you feel that you started a meeting in the right mood of devotion and reverence and gratitude, but then somehow with the reading and discussions you were sucked in by your head, do not waste the whole meeting in intellectual reflections. Notice it pretty fast, save time and say: Hey, stop right here, I think we are controlled by our dead heads again! Let us return to the heart and study from the heart, read from the heart, think from the heart, contemplate from the heart, act from the heart, and notice the difference between the feeling of working and living from the heart and dying in the head.
I would imagine that by now we can be pretty effective in this, nevertheless, we must be on guard all the time because the head is a fast beast, rapid, instinctive, it takes over your soul in no time and you do not notice it at all. It is always there lurking behind each thought, feeling and impulse of will, to take over and bind your soul to its death forces, and it does this all the more strongly, especially when we believe that we are so spiritual and beyond intellectualism! These people are often the most intellectualized because they think they are over it. It is a tricky trap, a sneaky devil, you know that. You must develop and practice this soul awareness, mindfulness, Geist Besinnen, in your heart, that lets an alarming red light flash up the moment you veered into the head and begun to explain, analyze, interpret, speculate, committing the seven deadly intellectual sins and asking for more. Because once I know something in my head I already lost its real being. This is the beginning of the adventurous knowledge drama that we call abstractly, intellectually: ‘The modern path of spiritual development’.
Therefore, first of all, let us continue to work in this manner and transform everything we study and do, and above all our relations with each other, into a real spiritual event in which we are active and creative participants. The human-cosmic cultus of forming and laying of the foundation stone on December 25th, 1923, in the Christmas foundation conference, must become the heart of it all, the ‘event of all events’ of the past century. This is an event, happening, a remarkable, mysterious scientific, artistic and cultic deed. It is not so difficult to recognize the steps of the happening because Rudolf Steiner reports what he is doing step by step and you easily notice it and can peacefully write it down: Now he is doing this, now he is doing that. He describes the development of the formative process of the stone while doing it. And then he arrives at a crucial moment that we contemplated today, when he says: At this moment let us do this! And he is doing this, and now again he says: In this moment I do this, and then he does another remarkable thing like bringing together the forces of the spiritual heights, circumference and depths, the holy spirit, the son and the father, as a celebrated magician of old!
As I said, we are not going to ‘explain’ and ‘interpret’ the spiritual and esoteric meanings of what he accomplished in the Christmas foundation conference. In our meetings we are not explaining anything, we want to experience the living process as it occurs. Indeed, we can hardly miss the fact that something is happening, that a deed, an action is taking place. Now our goal is to become one with it, to merge with what is happening, to become active participants in what is happening. And naturally between the meetings we study the various interpretations that people wrote about it in anthroposophical books. We will have learned a great deal about the meaning of what took place, but we do not even mention this in our meetings. If you catch yourself trying to explain something from what you have read, that is, from your dead head, well, be so loving to yourself, do not judge yourself, but be kind to yourself and to your comrades when they do it, and just sound the alarm: The red-head sign lights up, its intellectualizing all over again, and awaken again the right soul feeling. But again, do not waste too much time on losing your heart and falling back on you intellectual explanations. If your friend is doing that, you can gently and lovingly stop him and say: You are so learned, you read so much, you are a great student of Anthroposophy. I would love to hear more from you about what you studied. Can we do it after the meeting? Can we have a study-group, to study what they say about the Christmas conference? And then you study ever so eagerly and assiduously, enrich your soul with profound treasures of wisdom, and before you enter the sacred portal that lead to the next meeting in the school, you erase it from your head, let it sink down into your body, and let it work from there as creative living force; and when the meeting has started, you have already forgotten all of it. This is the pure, virginal, soul mood that must prevail for any spiritual event to occur.
We want to merge with the event. We want in the event to tell us what is happening, not to tell the event what we read about it in any book, profound and deep as the explanation may be. What we studied has sunk deep into our hearts and limbs, it was digested and assimilated by our subconscious life, carried up and spiritualized by the hierarchies during the nights in-between our last and present meeting; it will come up spontaneously, not as concepts but as living forces, to enliven our coming together. We want that the event will tell us what did happen, what is happening now, not tell the event what we remember in our intellect from we read about it. This is simply spiritual science in praxis, not in theory; it applies to any event, small or big, with any being and process, it make any ordinary event, with small ‘e’ to real spiritual Event, written with capital ‘E’, as I showed in the first lecture in my book, Spiritual Science in the 21st Century. It is the key to true spiritual perception and cognition in the modern sense.