עברית How to Work with Foundation Stone Meditation III
Human Soul, Hear the Mighty Call of Michael!
How to Work with Foundation Stone Meditation III
Lecture in Global School of Spiritual Science
25 March 2023, Part III
This is the third part of the lecture delivered in the global school of spiritual science. Any opinion and judgment about its content must be based on a thorough aquinatance with this work, as presented, among others, in my books, The Twilight and Resurrection of Humanity, Cognitive Yoga, and The Spiritual Event of the 20th Century.
Now, dear friends, as we pointed out above, we want to spiritualize the dead text in which the living event of forming and laying of the foundation stone and the foundation stone meditation is written down. We seek the path that will allow us to experience them as real events, not just to read about them, interpret them, connect this and that with what Rudolf Steiner said here and there. If we do not want to take this well-trodden traditional path, we must strongly challenge ourselves. We must choose the thorny path of resurrecting Anthroposophy from its grave.
To do this, we must not forget the obvious fact - but those obvious facts are the most forgotten - that again we have a dead text before us. Oh my god, there is no running away in this incarnation from those books and texts. That is already a lost game. Our only comfort is that if we transform our intellect in this life then in our next incarnation it might already be different. Oh, we pray every day-and-night for the coming time, in which we will not have to write and read books any more. But let us not indulge in future nostalgia now. Oh, do you remember those ancient, blessed times when books were not yet there? But no, we are not going to indulge now in nostalgia for the past either. We stay in the present, in between the two spiritual ages.
The cosmic intelligence was given to us by Michael, it becomes earthly, brainy, ahrimanic, in us. We must work intensively to redeem it in our hearts and return it to Michael, who wishes to live with the Christ in our hearts, as we showed in The Three Meetings. Thanks God, we should add, that the Doctor wrote so many books and gave so many lectures, and thanks Marie Steiner who edited and published the Gesamtausgabe of his writings in four hundred and more volumes!
Nevertheless, this paradox and contradiction stands there as hard reality, it cannot simply be done away with, it must be acknowledged, confronted, experienced and transformed: this hundredfold immense printed tome of the Gesamtausgabe, that we thankfully possess, is at the same time also the most formidable obstacle on our way to realize the urgent spiritual task of the second century of the age of Michael.
Having realized this fact, in the spirit of truthfulness and courage, we may approach the foundation stone meditation in the right way.
First, we must strive to open our heart in devotion and reverence to perceive the mighty cosmic-telluric call of Michael with which each of the three parts of the Foundation Stone opens. If we let it resound, it will be experienced as if the seventh apocalyptic trumpet of the last judgment is calling on the human soul to awaken from her daily sleep:
Menschenseele!, Soul of man!
If you have prepared the proper mood of reverence, devotion and gratitude, described also in my little essay, What is Meditation? and you enter into the sacred space of the meditation in this way, you will experience a mighty jerk of awakening when you hear this mighty call. You must feel as if you are awakening from the deep sleep, that we call ‘ordinary consciousness’.
Then you will experience: I have a living soul and never knew this! You feel addressed, stimulated, energized, in your innermost soul; now you are right there, wakeful, alert, ready to follow Michael’s call. And you follow the text not from outside as onlooker, but you feel: ‘It is about me, my soul is called upon to wake up, now it wakes up, it becomes alert and present.’ And if you experience the real being of the soul, not the intellectual representation of the concept of the soul, you will experience it through your entire body, activating and vitalizing you from head to toe. Then you do not think about the soul, you are inwardly doing what the soul does, you become what the soul is doing, what the soul is experiencing.
First we are told that the soul is living in the metabolic-limb-system of the body that carries it through the world space into the ocean of the spirit. But when you meditate this you must become this process; you must plunge into your metabolic-limb-system and let it lead you into the spirit ocean. Say to yourself: ‘In each minute of my wakeful hours I do this unconsciously. I let my limbs carry me into the world of space of the vast spiritual ocean around me. I just don’t know it.’ Now we should do it consciously, inwardly, spiritually, in full awareness of the factual process of the metabolic-limb-system in action. But the will forces activated in the meditation should be much more intensive then the will forces we use in physical walking. In physical walking, the deeply unconscious will forces, kindled in metabolism, generate the warmth and fire that propels our limbs into movement, and we know nothing about it in our lofty empty heads. In the meditation, we fire the inner soul activity through the will and feel this fire process consciously and therefore much more intensively. You are bringing to consciousness the firing process that we kindle and exert when we walk around, talk and dance. This is the first stage of the meditation that in the next parts is repeated in the rhythmical system of heart-and-lungs and in the nerves-senses-system in the head, in connection with their corresponding cosmic spirit.
And now comes the next great moment. You are summoned by Michael to practice the first of the three main spiritual activities: Practice spirit recalling in depths of soul…! Now, undoubtedly, this is a call for active, energetic practice. The former entry into the metabolic-limb-system and the experience of moving in spiritual space was the first intensive practice. The soul activated the spiritual metabolic-limb forces of the body and moved into the spiritual ocean of cosmic being. Now the soul is called to do spiritual work in the soul itself: Practice spirit recalling! Practice spirit minding! Practice spirit beholding! Thus you actualize the activity of spiritual recalling, about which we have spoken often in the past, and will not enlarge upon now. When spirit recalling becomes awake, active, and creative, it leads you to the next higher level. Now the center of your activity is moved to the self, the ‘I’, and you experience how through the creating will forces of the cosmos, your ‘I’ is born out of the ‘I’ of God.
Well, here you are entering the deep waters of the spirit ocean, until you experience how your ‘I’ is born out of God’s ‘I’. In the second and third parts you will experience how your ‘I’ unites with God’s ‘I’ through the deeds of world’s becoming, and how the spiritual light of the world offers your ’I’ the gift of freedom. These are all deeds that you must actualize inwardly, these are all real spiritual activities, that must be experienced in peaceful, balanced, intensive inner soul actions.
In this stage, we should add, after the spiritual activity of recalling, minding and seeing is accomplished, we enter the spiritual world itself. The meditation becomes real supersensible experience. This of course will take some time, but if one peacefully and lovingly continues to meditate, sooner or later it will happen. But remember: the preparation is the essence of the achievement, and each step ‘towards’ the goal is a goal in itself and must be experienced with the greatest enthusiasm and devotion. The forces of the seed that contains the highest culmination of the meditation must be experienced from the very beginning.
And then, to crown it all, the last part of the meditation takes you to purely spiritual-cosmic realms and events, and now God Father himself is experienced through the metabolic-limb system and the beings of the first hierarchy. The Son God is experienced through the rhythmic system and the second hierarchy. The Spirit God is experienced through the head and the third hierarchy. The divine trinity is working on and through you, it forms you; it is acting and creating with the entire ninefold organism of the heavenly hierarchies, culminating in the ultimate threefold Rosicrucian mantra: ‘From God we are born. In Christ we die. In the Holy Spirit we are resurrected.’
These three cosmic-human activities and events summarize in one threefold action the entire meditation. It must be experienced in stillness of thought, in harmony of feeling, and in peace of will. It contains everything in a divine nutshell. You need no more than this threefold magic formula, to actualize the whole meditation. It is its seed, ripened in the fruit of the meditation in its completion, the full flowering of the whole threefold human-cosmic threefoldness of body, soul and spirit, with the spiritual world, the three hierarchies, and the divine trinity. And from this seed you start the meditation again from the beginning on a higher level of the spiral.
And what leads you to the beginning, back to earth? Now the action goes through the elemental beings that hear the cosmic-telluric call of Michael and take it in. How do they hear it? Through the four great spirits of the universe, from the East, West, North and South. And then the call returns to the human soul, on which it called at the beginning. If you truly did the meditation you will hear the seventh trumpet resounding mightily again: ‘Menschenseele!’ Now it speaks thus: ‘May humans hear it! Menschen mögen es hören!’ It is coming back to the earthly embodied human being. The whole cycle is completed. Humans should now prove that they have heard the call and actualize it in inner and external spirit deeds.
And this is what we try to do in the meditation. And if you have truly done it in this way in the meditation, you will return the meditation to its true origin in the living formation and laying of the foundation stone. You weave it into the sacred cultus of the Christmas foundation conference, from which it was taken and separated; and if you do that, you will actualize the forces extracted from the formation and cultic laying of the foundation stone, that you planted in your heart, in your whole body, soul and spirit, and turn to your comrades to create the new Michaelic community and implement it in external social life.
If we learn to meditate in this way, and this is the true way of meditating, gradually we will grow into this experience, and sooner or later the time will come in which you will feel that you are immensely blessed and rewarded. You will be awakened and startled: The whole meditation becomes in you and in your Michaelic community one process of becoming and creation, the formation of the cosmic human being and its human community. And you know now that you will be striving to become and create this cosmic human being and this Michaelic community in all coming ages until the end of the evolution of humanity on earth. The meditation becomes for you an experience of the mysteries of active divine performance, a demonstration of the creative formation of this mysterious being, which is the true cosmic human being, in your spiritualized body, soul and spirit, woven by all the hierarchies through the divine trinity. And through it you find the way to the sacred, earnest, festive meeting with the etheric Christ in his second coming. And only then, the deeper esoteric meaning of the centenary of the Christmas conference begins to dawn in your heart.
Then naturally your love to all human beings will increase in the same measure because you experienced, not merely thought about it theoretically in your dead head, but in your whole body, soul and spirit, in your free etheric heart, that this is the magical foundation stone of love on which the true Michaelic movement, community and school was founded in the 20th century, the first century of the age of Michael, is founded today in the 21st century, the second century of his present age, and will be founded again when the time will come, when the reincarnation of the main impulse of Michael will be realized, which is our task to prepare now. And you will open yourself enthusiastically to receive its present and future revelations.