עברית Clear and precise thinking and sense-perception are the only legitimate gates of entrance into the etheric land of the etheric Christ.
From the beginning of chapter 1: The Spiritualization of Thinking
The Modern Christ Experience and the Knowledge Drama of the Second Coming
Second Volume
The Knowledge Drama of the Second Coming
Part I
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
Chapter 1
The Spiritualization of Thinking
Detailed contents
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.
From the beginning of chapter 1
The forces extracted from the repeated experience of the death and resurrection of the etheric Christ in the second Mystery of Golgotha, are used to spiritualize the newest forces of the Consciousness Soul, given in the present fifth post-Atlantean epoch: Free thinking and sense-perception. With the exact clarity achieved through them, we can proceed to spiritualize the forces of feeling and will and the three bodies. As we showed in Cognitive Yoga and The Three Meetings, the spiritualized forces of thinking and perception construct the first, cognitive-etheric layer of the bridge and constitute its most robust and trustworthy pillars. When the three layers of the bridge of spiritual memory and continuity of consciousness are fully built, in spirit, soul and body, the bridge leads us from the first, given meeting with the etheric Christ, to the second meeting, which we initiate and prepare ourselves.
The knowledge drama of the Second Coming can be divided into three main parts:
- The spiritualization of thinking, or the opening of the gate of thinking;
- The spiritualization of sense-perception, or the opening of the gate of perception;
- The construction of the threefold bridge of spiritual memory and continuity of consciousness over the abyss of life’s annihilation, soul death and spirit-forgetfulness.
A fully modern bridge of spiritual memory and continuity of consciousness can only be built with the soul forces gained through the transformation of thinking and sense-perception. This is the origin of the Michaelic yoga and Paul’s method of investigating and actualizing the modern Christ experience. In this chapter, we demonstrate the results of applying, practically, Rudolf Steiner’s indications, how to spiritualize the Philosophy of Freedom and Goethe's work with sense-perception, and bring the two to an intimate and intensive interpenetration, mutual essence exchange and fertilization. In this way the given meeting with the etheric Christ is thoroughly individualized and become a true modern 'I' experience, in accord with the requirements of the development of the Consciousness Soul.
Rudolf Steiner pointed out that the modern Christ experience must take place ‘in a powerful way, consciously... in a wakeful state, through what the souls strive for out of their "I" nature; the power of the human "I" and the forces of human knowledge should be connected with the Christ-impulse’. Only if such souls will be found, he adds, that can ‘plant the Christ-impulse in the astral body and in the "I"’, only then can what must come about for a future culture arise.[1] And the modern human ‘I’ can develop its fullest self-consciousness and freedom, if its activity is grounded in pure thinking and sense-perception, the two forces that have emerged only recently, in the present fifth post Atlantean cultural epoch, during which the Consciousness Soul develops. For this reason, the truly modern individuation and recapitulation of the first meeting must be based on the opening of the gates of thinking and sense-perception.
When we try to do so, we are immediately confronted by the fact that these two faculties are powerfully bound to the physical body and the external physical world perceived by the senses and analyzed by the intellect. As long as we remain within the physical stage of consciousness, we are entirely separated from the spiritual world, and from the appearance of the etheric Christ in the Second Coming. But we are also conscious of the fact that precisely due to this strict limitation, we can achieve the greatest clarity and exactitude of thinking and perception, which we want to develop as the ideal of the new imaginative cognition. Furthermore, as Rudolf Steiner often emphasized, the limitation of human consciousness to the physical world outside and the inner soul inside, is necessary to develop human freedom and therefore true human love, which would not have been possible without this limitation. [2]
The given meeting with the etheric Christ takes place in the same clarity and freedom, as the most wide-awake experience of thinking and sense-perception in the physical world. Naturally, because we experience this clarity and exactitude in both states of consciousness, in the physical and etheric world, we do not wish to develop our individual supersensible faculties differently. We have two lucid examples of the state of consciousness we want to develop, which prevail in the given experiences in the physical and etheric worlds. In the ordinary clarity of thinking and perception, and in the imaginative perception of the Christ, we find the archetypal examples of what true supersensible perception and cognition must be. And since in this state of consciousness alone can we develop true freedom and love, we feel absolutely no desire to give it up and return to atavistic, nebulous, dreamy clairvoyance, with its confused thinking and lack of freedom. We want to experience the same soul forces, capacities and moral qualities in our volitionally formed spiritual practices and experiences.
Therefore, clear and precise thinking and sense-perception are chosen as the only legitimate gates of entrance into the sought-for land of the etheric Christ. The spiritualization of the forces of pure thinking and sense-perception, constitutes the task of spiritual science in the present age of Michael and through the whole fifth post Atlantean cultural epoch. As Rudolf Steiner emphasized, from many different points of view, ‘our task today is to grasp the occult forces in Manas, the purest element of thought. Perceiving the spiritual in this finest distillate of the brain is the real mission of our time. To make this thought so powerful that it has something of occult power, that is the task given to us in order to be able to fulfill our mission for the future’.[3] And this is, in a nutshell, the first and continuous task of the knowledge drama of the Second Coming, because the bridge that has to lead from the physical world to the etheric and soul worlds, to the second meeting with the etheric Christ, must start from the spiritualization of the force of the brain, in which the nerve-and-sense system is concentrated, and to which ordinary thinking and perception are enslaved.
In other words, the first stage of the development of the new supersensible faculties, must be based on the spiritualization of the brain bound thinking and perception. ‘This will begin in an ever-increasing number of human beings in the course of the twentieth century. Progress will only be made in this direction when men not only develop a heightened intellect for themselves, but also lift it up into the astral world. The human being who has advanced to intellectual clairvoyance in this way can and will approach the etherically visible Christ more and more clearly in the course of the next three thousand years’.[4] This is, therefore, the first task of the knowledge drama of the Second Coming: to develop the faculty of ‘intellectual clairvoyance’ and use it to anchor the bridge in the fundamental spiritualization process of the most physically bound, soul forces of the Consciousness Soul.
In this way, the obstacles and limitations, caused by the cessation of the old forces of clairvoyance, prove to be of the greatest positive value to the development of the new and fully modern intellectual clairvoyance, because in this way, we can spiritualize the clearest and most precise modern physical faculties of self-conscious thinking and perception, from the ground up, without relying on any ancient and atavistic relics of the old clairvoyance. This means that the new supersensible faculties will be developed not from the old atavistic or regressive clairvoyance, wholly ruled today by Lucifer, but from the best modern thinking of natural science and philosophy, developed in recent centuries. And these faculties are transformed into the spiritual scientific faculties of supersensible cognition. ‘We have now reached a stage in human development where the study of spiritual matters must be based on the same foundations as the study of nature was three or four centuries ago. Spiritual science intends to achieve similar things for knowledge of the spirit as Copernicus, Galileo, and Giordano Bruno did for the understanding of physical nature in their own time. Of course, the systematic exploration of the spirit in our age encounters the same kind of resistance and hostility as the study and the concepts of the natural sciences did then. Spiritual science will be assimilated into our culture as slowly and with just as much difficulty as the natural sciences were’.[5] These words are taken in the knowledge drama with utmost seriousness, and the more we try to apply them in our spiritual practice, the more we can ground the new faculties in the best spiritual forces of the Consciousness Soul.
Since we started our spiritual scientific life and work from a given meeting with the etheric Christ, we could also experience, from the beginning, modern consciousness from the perspective of the supersensible world. And from the supersensible point of view, life, soul and spirit are the naturally given reality of the cosmos, while death is the greatest riddle that stands before us. And as we showed above, when we wish to approach the spiritual worlds from the physical world, and meet the Christ again from below upwards, we confront the forces of death that dominate modern consciousness in all their modern enormity. We are confronted directly by death when we begin to experience, on returning from the etheric world, ordinary physical consciousness. As we described in the third chapter of The Three Meetings, [6] this means to create, in full consciousness, the transition from the etheric world to the physical world, from imaginative to physical perception and thinking. Then we must ask ourselves these questions: how is the physical limitation and suppression of supersensible consciousness generated in the first place? Why doesn't man see, hear and participate consciously in the totality of life around him and within him?
These questions, as we shall presently see, are not theoretical questions. They can only be answered out of modern supersensible research that investigates the causes of the limits of ordinary consciousness and cognition, and discovers their spiritual source. This is the required ‘turning of the front towards natural science’, about which Rudolf Steiner spoke and that Goethe pioneered, preparing the ground to the anthroposophical transformation of Aristotelianism and Thomism. This ‘turning of the front towards natural science’, [7] in the modern age, however, means also to confront the ahrimanic forces of death that dominate natural and human sciences, especially since the middle of the 19th century. In the knowledge drama of the Second Coming, therefore, it is a fundamental experience that, in our efforts to spiritualize the modern natural science, we follow ‘a commandment of Christ Jesus himself to overcome natural science; that the Christ Jesus lives among us precisely because of this, and that we realize his mission to overcome natural science when we connect with him’.[8] In other words, the forces given by the ‘I’ gift of Christ can be individualized in full freedom in each act of conscious thinking and sense-perception, if we listen as attentively as we can to His ‘commandment’, that is, if we follow as exactly as we can in the steps of Rudolf Steiner, as he transforms and spiritualizes natural science in the creation of modern spiritual science, and opens for the first time in modern history, a fully conscious portal to the highest and deepest mysteries of human and cosmic existence.
This is the reason why, if we wish to approach the etheric Christ in the right way today, it can only be done through consciously opening the two closed main gates of ordinary consciousness: Thinking and sense-perception. Only then can we create voluntarily the pathway that leads in and out of the physical and etheric worlds, and bridge the abyss between physical, ordinary consciousness and the higher levels of supersensible cognition. This means, therefore, that the spiritual investigation of the limits of consciousness, and their overcoming, is the necessary prerequisite and foundation of the knowledge drama of the Second Coming. But the force that binds human consciousness to the physical brain and world is the power of death, and the power of death is the spiritual power of Ahriman.
[1] Lecture of 17 January 1915 (GA 157).
[2] About the various aspects of the significance of this limitation, see for example, the lectures of 14 August 1920 (GA 199), 27 September 1920 (GA 322), and 22 July 1919 (GA 333).
[3] The Masters of the Past, the Present and the Future. (GA 264). This ‘finest distillate of the brain’ is spiritualized and extracted out of the forces of death that dominate the modern brain and mind, as we saw above, which cause Christ’s death of suffocation in the etheric world.
[4] Lecture of 18 November 1911 (GA 130).
[5] Lecture of 26 June 1914 (GA 154).
[6] The Three Meetings, chapter 3, The Platonic-Aristotelian Essence Exchange at the end of the 20th Century.
[7] Lecture of 24 May 1920 (GA 74). This also illuminates Goethe’s role as a living, presently active spiritual inspiration of spiritual science. In the knowledge drama we experience how his thinking is constantly metamorphose and evolve since his death, in the Christ-permeated etheric sphere of the earth.
[8] Lecture of 15 June1921 (GA 342).