The Centenary of the Christmas Foundation Conference as Reversed Cultus

The Centenary of the Christmas Foundation Conference as Reversed Cultus

From a Lecture by Yeshayahu Ben-Aharon in the Global School of Spiritual Science

Saturday, 20 May 2023

Dear friends,

We really have an opportunity in this year and in all future years, to experience the event of the Christmas Foundation Conference as an eternally living and happening event, through which the formation and laying of the foundation stone happens again and again, as breathing, eating and speaking. That when we do it, it is happening, when we form the stone, it is formed now, when we lay it in our hearts and let its forces stream into our active hands and feet, it is happening in that very moment. When we create the harmony of brotherly and sisterly love between us, it is happening in this very moment. This must be felt like a reality because this is something that one can lift up.

Lifting up means you have an energy that you can really offer as a real substance to the gods. You must have created something greater than yourself that overflows your limited bounds, springs over your narrow self that flows over and upwards to the gods, so they can breathe it in and say, in a godly manner: Hmm, this is such sweet nourishment and its scent is so pure. With this, we can work further. They will say: these people make a difference, they have created something that we need to help humanity move on, and we will transform it, spiritualize it further, and return it to them in a new form. And we will say: Oh, we feel that something is returning now from above.

But how can you feel something is returning to you if you have not offered something before?

This gesture of lifting up, this offering, is the first step of the fully modern reversed cultus, the future form of all communication between the mortals and immortals. We offer the foundation stone of love, the love between us, our holy enthusiasm, our sacred feelings, our reverence, devotion and gratitude. When you lift this up, it constitutes real spiritual substance. You feel it when you carry it in your spirit hands and lift it upward as you feel a physical offering; you feel it in your heart when you lift it up. It’s real, it is not an idea, it is not an ideal - it was an idea, it was an ideal, but now it is a spiritual deed. You feel it in your bodies, in your soul, you feel it in your etheric hands, when you lift it up, it is absolutely substantial because it is embodied in your etheric body, and it is not an abstract concept in your dead head.

If in real life you offer your friend a piece of chocolate, and he takes it from your hand, you would feel this fact as a physical experience. You notice the difference because something happened to your hand. You had a piece of chocolate, it had a certain weight, you offered it, for a fraction of a moment the giving hands touched the receiving hands and there was contact! Now it is gone, it was taken by the other being. Spiritually it is not so different: you should feel you have offered some real substance to the gods, though because they are so conservative, it is better you offer them their accustomed nectar as ambrosia of love, and not chocolate. When you bring it up, you should feel, however so gently, the moment of gentle spiritual touch of hands, the transmission from your etheric heart and hands to their etheric hands and hearts. And then you should feel that this is taken from you, that this is accepted. It is a real process, a totally realistic-spiritual offering, that must be experienced, with all of its delicacy, as an absolutely real exchange between etheric human hands and godly hands, between etheric human hearts and divine hearts. And this offering, if it is really experienced, will lead to the second step: you will experience what happens to your offer when the gods consume it.

We should develop this sensitivity of offering because after you gave your friend the piece of chocolate, and he took it, he now eats it.  And you feel, first of all, well, I had it in my hand, now I don’t have anything in my hand. Oh, the hand was heavy, now it is lighter. But now, OMG, he is eating my chocolate, I would love to experience with him what he experiences while he is consuming what used to be my chocolate. I feel I am one with my chocolate and with him, while he eats it. And then I experience what he experiences when he eats it, his enjoyment and satisfaction, pleasure and joy, and I experience that the chocolate is transformed, indeed, trans-substantiated in his mouth and belly. The same thing you should do with the gods to whom you offer your love and gratitude. You should feel how you unite with them as they receive and digest it, transform and transubstantiate it into higher, spiritualized substance. This leads you to feel them, to join them in their being and becoming, you begin to communicate and commune with them and a communion is established in this way between men and gods, mortals and immortals, after a break that lasted some 1500 years.

This is truly a real process of the future cosmic cultus and spiritual communion of humanity, about which Rudolf Steiner spoke in the last lecture on Sylvester eve of 1922, when the fire of sacrifice was already smoldering between the walls of the first Goetheanum. This is what he meant in 1923 in his lectures about the reversed cultus. This is what he expected from the new anthroposophical society that he personally founded and formed in the Christmas Foundation Conference.

Now, when the offering has been received by the gods, and they accomplished the transubstantiation of the offer, and we experienced the communal communion with them, something else is happening. After reading the gospel, in the first stage of the cultus - the Foundation Stone Meditation - and offering its transformed forces to the gods, and after they have assimilated and transubstantiated it, and we united with them, communed with them, the bridge between men and gods was completed. The gods took our offer in, digested and transformed it, and they live with it now, and we live with them together in communion that bridges the abyss between the spiritual and physical worlds. Now comes the culmination of the new cosmic cultus and spiritual communion of humanity. When we live like that in spiritual communion with them, we become aware that they want to reciprocate the offering and give something back to us. They give us back what they have transformed and spiritualized, and carried into the cosmos. They let it flow back to us. Our friend, in other words, comes back after consuming our chocolate, and because he liked it so much, he also wants to bring us a gift.

When he brings you a gift to reciprocate yours, you certainly would hope that he won’t just give you the same piece of chocolate that you gave him. You would naturally expect for some added value to have been created in the generous former transaction! You would expect that he would give you something more, perhaps a whole bonbonniere, in return. Well, while with humans we may be disappointed in this regard sometimes - and disappoint our friends as well - with the gods it is different, they have higher give-and-take standards. When you hold commerce with the gods, you can count on the universal law of spiritual added value, or the event of spiritual multiplication that says, that in spiritual life, offering, transubstantiation and communion always add spiritual value to the exchanged produces. The gods always create the added value, a positive growth and development of any given angelic or human productive labor, because giving and receiving is the most natural spiritual breathing of the gods, that's how they grow and cultivate the cosmos and each other. What we give and is taken up by the gods, they always return to us much greater than what we gave to them. They are gods, after all! They took what we gave and worked with it further in the cosmos, developed it further and gave it back to us in a new form. We should feel this entire process because this is the reality of the reversed cultus, and the Christmas Foundation Conference should have been - and still must become - such reversed cultus.

We should feel the giving, the offering, we should feel the transmutation, we should feel the communion, we should feel how we receive the graceful gift of the gods. This should become more and more a leading process like a breathing, exhalation and inhalation with the gods. Thus, humans will begin again to live with the gods as we did in the blessed old time.

In those days, we knew that, as Heraclitus of Ephesus used to say: ‘Immortals are mortal, mortals immortal, [the immortals] living the death of mortals, [the mortals] dying the life of the Immortals’. This reciprocal communion will be established again between humanity and the gods. It is coming again in a wholly new way.

This is the meaning of the new Mysteries founded by Michael through Rudolf Steiner. We breathe out what we have created and breathe in the grace of the gods. We breathe it out, we don’t want to keep it to ourselves, we want to breathe it out and share it with the gods, simply because the added value and surplus of our love and devotion, gratitude and reverence to each other in the community fills the chalice beyond the brim, spills over, it is too full to be contained in our physical bodies, hearts and minds. What do you lift up? We lift up the consecrated human being, the threefold human-cosmic being that we become, when we transform ourselves as we form the threefold foundation stone of love, and unite with our comrades in brotherhood.

We lift up the modern, reversed, Menschenweihehandlung, the Act of Consecration of Man, which is, as we already mentioned in the past, the esoteric name for the Christmas Foundation Conference. This cosmic cultus and spiritual communion of humanity is the center and foundation of the new Mysteries, which we will be founding again and again in this life, each day-and night- because in each one of us,

Man will grasp this threefoldness and he will recognize himself as an individually free human being within the reigning work of the gods in the cosmos, as a cosmic human being, an individual human being within the cosmic human being, working for the future of the universe as an individual human being within the cosmic human being.

You lift up your individual human being within the cosmic human being, formed from your best creative thoughts, feelings and deeds, your enthusiasm, reverence and gratitude, praising God that karma has graced you with such divine-human blessing, that you live now on earth and can become an active co-creative partner with the gods, in the greatest ever transformation of the humanity and the earth.

So, whenever we have a truly fruitful meeting in the school, also in the practice groups, let us not finish our meeting without bringing it to a sacred, joyful culmination, with a conscious act of offering; we should always offer what we have created and harvested, and breathe it out to the gods. We should imagine this offering as a real process, as a real reversed cultus. We worked so hard, we have created and harvested so much real spiritual substance, we feel the substance, it is vibrating, it is breathing among us, it is really alive and kicking right here. Let us lift it up now, bring it to the gods. And then wait peacefully a moment or two in reverential mood, with open hearts and expectant spirits! And sense with our higher feelers what descends from above, and receive it gratefully back into our hearts.

When this is experienced, we are drawing closer to the most intimate heart of the new Mysteries of Michael. This must be experienced - and it will be experienced - when each person synchronizes her etheric heart with the etheric heart of the whole community, as the school meditation shows us, and an etheric community heart is formed, through which the etheric Christ, as universal I AM, embodies himself in our midst. Then it will happen! Then we will experience this mystery. But it can only be experienced if we have that strength and energy, perseverance and a holy enthusiasm necessary in order to transform intellectualism into spirituality, and they have become an embodied spiritual habit in our etheric hearts and bodies, which, after all, belongs to the present age. If this spiritual habit is firmly formed, we will experience this give-and-take with the gods as direct experience of Michael, which I described in The Three Meetings. We have created the etheric bridge of spiritual memory and continuity of consciousness, we have become the bridge, and the etheric body and heart of the community lifts upwards to Michael, the new human-cosmic being, that

works from below upwards, stretches out its hands as it were from below upwards to grasp the hands of Michael stretching down from above. It is then that the bridge can be created between man and the Gods.

Naturally, it doesn’t have to be sensed in the same moment, maybe it will be felt at the beginning of the next meeting, or next year; it will definitely be felt in the next incarnation!

But we want to develop this human-cosmic multilogue, this future cosmic cultus and spiritual communion in this life because without this, the age of Michael will not have begun.