עברית 'No age has been so favourable to spirituality as this fifth epoch. Courage must only be found to drive the money-changers out of the Temple. Courage must be found to confront with the real, abstractions and things estranged from reality, to set against them full reality and therewith the spiritual reality'. (Lecture of 8 January 1918, GA 180).
The Modern Christ Experience and the Knowledge Drama of the Second Coming
Second Volume
The Knowledge Drama of the Second Coming
Part I
From the Introduction:
The Second Mystery of Golgotha
In this fifth post-Atlantean age man has the greatest possibility of making himself spiritual. No age has been so favourable to spirituality as this fifth epoch. Courage must only be found to drive the money-changers out of the Temple. Courage must be found to confront with the real, abstractions and things estranged from reality, to set against them full reality and therewith the spiritual reality. (Lecture of 8 January 1918, GA 180).
The transition from the given to the acquired meeting with the etheric Christ in the knowledge drama begins with a shocking experience. When we begin to orient ourselves, from the purely human point of view, towards the etheric Christ, we are confronted by a mighty reversal. As the Christ gave us His being as a free gift of grace, when we look back to Him, after we come back to our earthly selves, and wish to freely recapitulate the meeting, we are overwhelmed by a feeling of deepest shame, caused by the discovery that, being now back in our body on earth, we are actually powerfully resisting Him. Against all our best aspirations, hopes and yearnings, we are confronted in our own soul, with forces that fight against the etheric Christ, from whom we gracefully received all the spiritual gifts, described in the previous volume. Despite ourselves, even if we try to use all the forces received in the given meeting, we realize that our incarnated, earthly soul, strongly opposes His being and is doing everything to suppress His future becoming in our hearts. We must confess that this was a totally unexpected event. We could have never anticipated this dire reaction. Needless to say, as long as we are enveloped by the graceful light and love that the etheric Christ offered in the first meeting, this reaction would be utterly impossible. But once we are fully awake and active in our earthly ego, soul, and body, we experience this aggressive opposition and rejection as an instinctive power that vehemently fights against the Christ.
Positively grasped, this experience is also the cause of a most productive self-knowledge, which purifies one’s soul from all the possible arrogant beliefs, which may have given man the illusion that the given meeting had anything to do with his merit. He stands naked before himself, as Paul did, when he exclaimed, ‘O wretched man that I am!’ [1]and knows that it was a freely given divine grace and that what he is in himself alone, as an earthly man, and what he has made of himself by means of his own forces, reveals itself now in sobering self-knowledge. This self-knowledge reveals an exact threefold reversal of the threefold grace, received in the first given meeting. ‘The first is that a man as he is in his physical incarnation doesn't want to recognize the spirit — he denies it; secondly, he wants to run away from the spirit and is really afraid of it; and thirdly he doesn't love the spirit at the bottom of his soul — he really hates it. A man doesn't really love the spirit at all… A man really loves Lucifer and Ahriman’.[2] Theoretically, if man simply reads these words, he may be perhaps moved, emotionally speaking, in the ordinary soul sense. However, these words have devastating power, when they express a real experience, all the more so, when this experience arises in the soul after the graceful meeting with the etheric Christ. When one wishes to begin the path to construct the bridge that leads to the Christ voluntarily, it seems like man is confronted by insurmountable barriers, because man must come to terms with the fact that despite himself, he strongly opposes the given Christ forces and presence in himself.And if he is absolutely honest, as Paul was, he would from that moment dedicate all his forces to overcome these obstacles and transform himself, to be able to stand upright, in the light of the grace he received.
This is the first discovery that we make, as we begin the the knowledge drama of the Second Coming. This means that the first stage of the knowledge drama requires us to confront face to face the forces of opposition and reversalthat rises from the depths of our body and soul. We are then led to experience what the etheric Christ undergoes in the human soul. As his appearance, words and deeds showed us, how his forces resurrect our consciousness, heal our soul and spiritualize our body, now we must experience how, in our ordinary soul life, he perpetually goes through an etheric death. We feel that we must join him in his passion if we want to meet him again voluntarily. This means, that in order to construct the first part of the bridge of spiritual memory and continuity of consciousness, that leads back to the etheric Christ, this confrontation must first be fully actualized.
Rudolf Steiner designated this process as ‘the second Mystery of Golgotha’, from which the ‘direct Christ consciousness’ should come about in our time. The second Mystery of Golgotha is the always present, active, starting point of the whole knowledge drama of the Second Coming. As we showed in The Three Meetings, when the etheric Christ appears, speaks, and acts in and through the human spirit, soul and body, he does so out of ‘the dark-gloomy abyss’ of ‘world mysteries’.[3] In this dark-gloomy abyss the mysteries of the modern Christ experience take place. But this abyss is in the human soul and heart. We have experienced His etheric death and resurrection in the human soul in the given meeting, but the forces that overcame His death in our soul were not ours, but His. It was a gift of grace given by the etheric Christ, to show us, what we can do in the future out of our free cognitive and moral forces. But now, in the knowledge drama, we must do it ourselves. We must enter into this dark abyss of His mysteries, with open spiritual eyes and hearts and hope that ‘direct Christ consciousness’ will emerge from this darkness. But the cause of this darkens- so we know now- is found in our own souls. When we follow Him into the etheric world, where he undergoes His etheric crucifixion, we realize what is our part in the Second Mystery of Golgotha.
This black sphere brought to the spiritual world with the dying souls of the nineteenth century, was taken by the Christ, in accordance with the Manichaean principle, into his being, in order to transform it. It caused, for the angelic being in which the Christ has revealed Himself since the Mystery of Golgotha, ‘the death by suffocation’. This sacrifice of Christ in the nineteenth century is comparable to the sacrifice on the physical plane in the Mystery of Golgotha and can be termed the second crucifixion of Christ on the etheric plane. This spiritual suffocation and death that caused the annihilation of consciousness of an angelic being, is a recapitulation of the Mystery of Golgotha in the worlds immediately above our own... the dying of Christ’s consciousness in the angelic sphere in the nineteenth century, will lead to the resurrection of direct Christ consciousness in the earthly sphere. [4]
At the end of the last century we experienced that since 1933, when ‘the resurrection of direct Christ consciousness in the earthly sphere’, should have started, it was forcefully suppressed. And the question was stirring in our soul, beginning with the Christ experience in 1975, becoming more urgent the nearer we approached the end of the century: will this resurrection of direct Christ consciousness find a place on earth before the century ends? To answer this question, we had, first of all, to confront the forces in our soul that produce the ‘black sphere’ of materialism’ and cause ‘the death by suffocation’ of the Christ since the 19th century and with increasing intensity through the whole 20th century. And then, we had to also experience the suppression of the resurrection of His direct consciousness in humanity since 1933. The tragedy of humanity in the 20th century consisted in this, that no human souls were found on earth that could have overcome the suppression of this resurrection. It could not take place on earth, but only in the etheric world since 1933-1945, and was discovered at the end of the 80 and beginning of the 90’, as described in The Spiritual Event of the 20th Century and The Twilight and Resurrection of Humanity.
At the end of last century, we had to struggle with the forces that create, in our thoughts, ‘the black sphere of materialism’, that cause - in us - the ‘death of suffocation’ and dying and banishment of the Christ from the spiritual world. We strove to bring about in the human soul on earth what was previously possible only in the spiritual world: the resurrection of direct Christ consciousness. This task could naturally not be solved by mere thinking about it, nor by the feelings aroused by these thoughts; a spiritual-practical method had to be developed, to actualize this experience voluntarily. One must become what the second Mystery of Golgotha signifies. This mystery takes place in the human soul and heart, but humans suppress it; we wanted to bring it to full consciousness and actualize it as a practical spiritual activity, becoming co-carriers of the cross of Christ, which we constantly create in our ahrimanic thinking.
In our searches for a meditative practice to develop the supersensible faculties to investigate the second Mystery of Golgotha, the rose cross meditation from the book, Occult Science, proved most fruitful. Let us therefore briefly indicate how this meditation was adapted and applied. We continued to deepen and intensify it in each new stage of the knowledge drama and its significance for the more advanced stages of the knowledge drama is described below…
[1] Romans 7:24.
[2] Esoteric Lesson 8 June 1913 (GA 266).
[3] Lecture of 6 February 1917 (GA 175).
[4] Lecture of 2 May 1913 (GA 152).
The Modern Christ Experience and the Knowledge Drama of the Second Coming
Second Volume
The Knowledge Drama of the Second Coming
Part I
In this fifth post-Atlantean age he has the greatest possibility of making himself spiritual. No age has been so favourable to spirituality as this fifth epoch. Courage must only be found to drive the money-changers out of the Temple. Courage must be found to confront with the real, abstractions and things estranged from reality, to set against them full reality and therewith the spiritual reality. (Lecture of 8 January 1918, GA 180).
Contents
Preface
Introduction: The Second Mystery of Golgotha
Chapter 1 The Spiritualization of Thinking
Chapter 2 The Spiritualization of Sense-Perception
Chapter 3 The Preparation of the Construction of the Bridge of Spiritual Memory and continuity of consciousness
Chapter 4 The Construction of the First Etheric-Cognitive Layer of the Bridge
Chapter 5 The Construction of Second Astral-Soul Layer of the Bridge
Detailed Contents
Introduction
The Second Mystery of Golgotha
Second Mystery of Golgotha that takes place in the etheric world and human soul, is the starting point and foundation of the knowledge drama of the Second Coming; Rose-cross meditation from Occult Science becomes an experience of the death of the Etheric Christ in the ‘black sphere of materialism’ created by our ahrimanic thinking; Christ’s death and resurrection in the human soul creates supersensible self-consciousness and individuation of His ‘I’.
Chapter 1
The Spiritualization of Thinking
Spiritualization of thinking confronts and overcomes modern ahrimanic thinking; Resurrected from the grave of the brain, thinking returns to cosmic life; Separation of past and future time streams and thinking, feeling and will; Deepening of the meditative practice of Occult Science with the exercises to attain Inspiration and Intuition; Liberated being of will, guides us into the mysteries of birth and death, past and future life; Resurrected etheric Christ appears from the ‘dark-gloomy world abyss’ when feeling is liberated as well.
Chapter 2
The Spiritualization of Sense-Perception
In the Michaelic Yoga, the spiritualization of thinking is followed by the spiritualization of sense-perception; Oblivion stream of Lethe experienced atthe threshold of perception; New Mysteries of Hades and Persephone revealed on the other side of this threshold; Further development of Imagination through the meditative exercises of Knowledge of the Higher Worlds; Experience of etheric Christ in the etheric world through spiritualized perception, reveals the etheric ring around the sun-becoming-earth; Man becomes a creative partner of the Christ in the creation of the earthly-human Sun.
Chapter 3
The Preparation for the construction of the bridge
Construction of the bridge prepared by weaving the forces of spiritualized thinking and perception, which augment each other; Spiritualization of the etherization of the blood and the etheric body; Formation of spiritual memory on which the bridge of spiritual memory and continuity of consciousness is founded; Specific esoteric practice prepares the etheric and physical brains to reflect conscious supersensible experiences.
Chapter 4
The Construction of the First Etheric-Cognitive Layer of the Bridge
Builder of the bridge, the true ‘I’, actualized by the activity of spiritualized thinking; Development of two petaled lotus flower between the eyes; Merging the forces flowing between the two petaled lotus flower and the higher self in the pineal; First formation of Spirit Self; Deeper confrontation with Ahriman in his workshop in the modern brain; Construction of the first etheric-cognitive layer of the bridge from the head, through the larynx, to the heart; Battle with luciferic-ahrimanic forces in the heart and the sacrifice of the Green Snake.
Chapter 5
The Construction of Second Astral-Soul Layer of the Bridge
Second layer of the bridge is founded on the etheric and astral heart organs; Meditative praxis of Knowledge of the Higher Worlds and Occult Scienceenhanced by the general main exercise; Formative spiritual forces of the I AM, It thinks, She feels and He wills; Formation of sixteen, twelve, ten and six petaled lotus flowers in the larynx, heart, solar plexus and abdomen; Separated soul forces united with their cosmic archetypes create the sixfold soul-spiritual composition in the astral world; Ensuing fierce battle with the Doppelgänger; Transformation of man into a human-cosmic riddle and existential question; Meeting Christ through the higher self in the spiritual world offers a cosmic-human answer; Return to etheric body recapitulates the cosmic experiences in the etheric world; Reentry into the physical body demands a decisive moral decision, facing the new force of evil emerging from below.