The Imaginative ‘Shape of Things to Come’

The Imaginative ‘Shape of Things to Come’

The Resurrection of Platonism in the Modern Dionysian Mysteries

From Chapter 5: The Abyss and the Event of the Threshold

The Three Meetings: Christ, Michael and Anthroposophia.

 It is a new, future-orientated memory, a will-like imaginative pro-vision of the true spiritual being of the ‘I’, the coming Spirit Self; this imaginative perception of future life after death constitutes the inversion and resurrection of the old Platonic notion of knowledge as remembrance of the life before birth. We begin to see spiritually in the present ‘the shape of things to come’, as the old Platonists saw the shadow images of the dying spirit light of the past; we can now see the living future, the incoming spiritual stream of becoming.

 In modern times, as Rudolf Steiner repeatedly emphasized, when the pre-earthly life of cosmic thinking becomes the dead corpse of physical thinking, buried in the brain-grave of modern civilization, it is the foremost task of spiritual science to unite with the etheric Christ and resurrect it out of this grave; to actualize the future imaginative seeing, and resurrect the wholly exhausted pre-earthly life of the past, in the living present.

 With the future time stream, we constantly resurrects the past, unite day and night, life and death, sleep and waking, and make of the earthly and spiritual selves one true Self; it unites physical self-consciousness with spiritual consciousness, to form a fully ‘bridged’ spiritual self-consciousness, that lives and works in both worlds, with full consciousness and knowledge of the physical life while in the spiritual world and of the spiritual world while living in the physical world.

 A closer investigation of the act of knowledge in its totality, from both sides of the Threshold, reveals that whenever the ‘I’ resurrects and passes on its way backward from the future to the past through a mental picture, it lights up and radiates with an intense illumination it did not have before. Why does the ‘I’, as a real spirit being, light up in this passing-through? Because this backward passing through is a self-recollection—or self-remembering—of the real ‘I’ to itself from the vast periphery of its dismembered and scattered universal existence. While in ordinary consciousness the results of the acts of knowledge crystallize into finished mental forms, below the threshold of this consciousness the real ‘l’ inverts this crystallization constantly, spiritualizes and extracts the spirit essence from each dying mental picture; but in each and every brain-bound and engraved representation, feeling, desire and will impulse, the dismembered fragments of the universal spirit of the spiritual ‘I’ are buried, and through the resurrection of each and every soul fragment, dead self-consciousness is also resurrected, as an individualized Dionysus and Osiris. Ordinary self-consciousness meets and unites itself with its spiritual self, which, unhindered by man’s representations, comes to meet it through every sense-perception. But every representation leaves an enduring dead and darkening trace in the living light of man and the world. It is this opaque shadowy trace-residue that originally divides the universal whole human- world being into seemingly two wholly disconnected, unrecog- nized halves: into an inner thinking, feeling, willing ‘self’ and an externally perceived ‘world’. Now the two halves of our whole human-world ‘I’ meet each other and merge for the first time in full self-consciousness, creating a wholly new state of supersensible, imaginative, self-consciousness, which is Christ’s gift to humanity, given through Michael, in the age of the Consciousness Soul.

This primordial world-self wholeness would remain unconscious to itself if it could not come to meet itself first as a divided contra- diction, made of two disconnected halves of inner self and external world; it is this separation alone that can consolidate and ignite a separate state of self-consciousness in the forming of each devi- talized mental picture. But now the time for turning of Platonism on its head has fully commenced. This happens when the power of separation and individuation itself is resurrected. The power used to separate the human being from the world, is transformed, through Christ’s etheric appearance, words and deeds, into the very power that connects man in full self-consciousness with the cosmos. It is thanks to Rudolf Steiner’s redemptive deed, that the self-conscious cognitive forces of pure thinking and sense-perception, generated in the earthly act of knowledge, can become an eternal power of the individualized, Christ given ‘I’ of each person. Cognition has been resurrected and consecrated in this ‘spiritual communion of humanity’, when Rudolf Steiner actualized it for the first time in human evolution:

 What I wrote in 1888 in the second volume of my edition of Goethe’s scientific writings is permeated with such views: When this thinking of the idea grows strong enough, then it merges with the fundamental existence of the world; what is at work without enters into the spirit of man: he becomes one with objective reality at its highest potency. Becoming aware of the idea within reality is the true communion of man.

 Exactly a century later, in the 1980s and 1990s, one could individ- ualize this sacred communion, thanks to the power flowing from the ‘I’ of the etheric Christ. This takes place, as we shall see below, in the knowledge drama of the Second Coming, when the ordinary process of cognition is consciously inverted and redirected to dissolve and enliven the dying and darkening residues of ordinary consciousness that enabled its coming into being in the first place. Then these future orientated, inverted cognitive forces allow the wholeness of the real spiritual ‘l’ to come together, recollected, and remembered, in an enhanced, rhythmical human-world, world- human breathing of supersensible knowledge.

This, therefore, is the reason why, when the ‘I’ transforms and resurrects each dying-darkening mental picture into a livingly shining imagination, it lights up stronger than before. It is the spir- itual power of the Green Snake, pictured in Goethe’s fairy tale as the Green Snake and the Beautiful Lily, that gathers and assimilates the scattered fragments of gold—the remnants of the old forces of Michael’s cosmic intelligence that fell from the Sun—from earthly rocks and crevices. While it takes them in and resurrects them by means of the power of the new earthly-human sun, its inner transparent brilliance grows stronger and brighter. With every assimilated and resurrected dead representation, the dynamic unrepresented force-nature of the Green Snake—which is the real ‘I’—warms and lights up, the more it gathers in its scattered dis- membered universal being from the periphery of sense-perception. In this manner the real ‘I’ forms the new etheric body that bridges the abyss of the Threshold. The act of knowledge perceived thus from both sides of the Threshold, means the liberation and resurrec- tion of the sense—and brain-bound, dead and frozen formative forces of ordinary cognition. But in these ahrimanized formative forces the universal human-world ‘l’—like the primeval Dionysus and Osiris—is torn to pieces, dismembered, scattered, and buried; therefore, when these are spiritualized and gathered, by the new Isis, as we shall see below, to the new sun-heart of living wholeness, it is the ‘I’ itself that experiences itself resurrected into the full future self-consciousness of its world-human nature.

The Three Meetings: Christ, Michael and Anthroposophia