עברית Lecture to the Global School of Spiritual Science, 18 November 2023
The Magical Stone of Love
Lecture to the Global School of Spiritual Science
18 November 2023
Thank you, dear friends for the fine introduction to the work tonight. You will recall our last talk where I described Rudolf Steiner’s world changing deed in the Christmas foundation conference. I said that if we want to understand what he did, we must place it in the light of his life as a whole, as an expression of his development, on the basis of the whole achievement of his life. He was building modern spiritual science, step by step, organically, methodically, scientifically, for 21 years, from 1902 to 1923, and after the 3 bodies were formed, at least inwardly (externally, as far as the anthroposophical society is concerned, they were never formed), he could proceed to demonstrate the birth process of the true Self of this being. About this I also spoke in The Twilight and Resurrection of Humanity when I described the being of Rudolf Steiner and his postmortem life. Therefore, if we look at what he accomplished in the Christmas foundation conference and answer the question what really took place there, what really happened, we must come to the conclusion that we shared in our last talk. We came to the conclusion that in the formation and laying of the Foundation Stone, Rudolf Steiner actually performed, and publicly demonstrated, the fruit of his own attainment, his own initiation, the summary of his entire spiritual path in his last incarnation a century ago: The free actualization and fulfilment of the threefold cosmic human being, which is the goal of the entire evolution of humanity. You will recall that we asked: who is this threefold cosmic-human being whose cosmic-human formation he demonstrates? And we answered that it cannot be Christ Jesus because the Christ is a divine being, that became human, but as divine being he became human. The Christ, the sublime Sun being, Aura Mazda, united himself with a human being, Jesus. Jesus became divine spiritual being as the Christ became human being. And this composite divine-human, human-divine being, is the eternal spiritual archetype of the evolution of humanity from Alpha to Omega.
Now Rudolf Steiner was the first free man who individualized the spiritual essence of this being, became one with him, actualized him in his human spirit, soul and body, in the course of his development. And this is the being whose being and becoming he described in the formation process of the Foundation Stone and summarized in the foundation stone meditation. This he hoped that his companions will take actively into their loving hearts, pulsating in brotherhood with each other, to carry in a totally new way the new anthroposophical impulse into the world. He said that if this event will be taken in this way into human hearts and deeds, it will be a beginning of a Welten-Zeitenwende-Anfang.
So, as a matter of fact we have to say, from the moment of the Christmas foundation conference the whole anthroposophical spiritual path that is given in the basic books of Anthroposophy Knowledge of the higher worlds, Occult science and in other writings, could have also been transformed. Not of course in a sense that what was given before becomes irrelevant, because in spiritual development this is never the case. True spiritual development is not so that when you move on you disconnect yourself from the beginning. In any organic growth the tree that grows upwards, a plant that grows and flourishes not only remain connected to the roots, but also deepens and expands them the higher it grows. Without the deepening and extension of the roots everything that will grow upwards will have no foundation and will die out. This is what Rudolf Steiner tried to do when shortly after the Christmas foundation conference he opened again in a wholly new form the esoteric school, closed down since the beginning of the first World-War. He wanted to develop this new spiritual path on the foundation of the Foundation stone formed and hopefully grounded in the Christmas foundation conference in the hearts of the pupils of this school, based on the organic spiritual development of the roots, trunk and branches, accomplished in the last 21 years from the beginning of the century.
If you review this development in this light, you will realize that Rudolf Steiner was beginning to recreate the whole anthroposophical spiritual path anew from the very foundations of what took place in the Christmas foundation conference. When he started the lessons of the esoteric class in February 1924 he said it again and again that this is a beginning of the foundation of the school of Michael on the earth. Because the free deed of Rudolf Steiner in the Christmas foundation conference was accepted by Michael, he answered it by his decision to found his school through Rudolf Steiner. This is something entirely new, that in this form never happened before in human history. It happened in the old Mysteries, but such free cooperation between humans and the gods was naturally not possible before the age of the Consciousness Soul. This was a positive answer of Michael to the sacrificial deed of Rudolf Steiner that decided to form, lead and become a member in a human society. Michael said: Yes, this free moral deed is acceptable to me! And my reply to your decision and deed is my decision and deed, to found my school on earth as an attempt to begin the new Mysteries in my present age. This applies also to the 82 lectures about karma that Rudolf Steiner gave from the summer until the fall, including the lectures about the karma of the Michaelic movement and the school of Michael. About these highest mysteries of Michael nothing was said before the Christmas foundation conference. Rudolf Steiner said that he knew them since the end of the 19th century, but could not yet speak about it. After the Christmas foundation conference was accepted by Michael, he could begin to speak about it.
Now, if you review Rudolf Steiner’s life as a whole, and the 21 years of the development of Anthroposophy from 1902 until 1923, you have the ‘I’ birth in the Christmas foundation conference which is culmination of the past, its end, and the totally new possibility to start future anthroposophy- that was never realized. In our previous talks, we described the birth of this ‘I’ as the birth of ‘the human being Anthroposophia’, the threefold cosmic human being, conceived and actualized by Rudolf Steiner.
And then this culmination becomes a seed and foundation for a wholly new potential future development. Suddenly we hear the deeply moving, indeed, shocking, communication, that Anthroposophy comes from the heavenly school of Michael that took place in the sun-sphere from the 15th until the 19th century. Suddenly we hear about the different spiritual streams to which Anthroposophists belong according to their karma. And then we are told the esoteric school that is founded again is founded and directly by Michael himself through Rudolf Steiner. And then Rudolf Steiner gives the last lecture in Michaelmas 1924 and we don’t see him again in the external world for half a year until he dies in March 30, 1925. 1924 was indescribably intense, infinitely creative, testamentary culmination of the life and work of Rudolf Steiner. We cannot really find words to describe what he did in this last year of his life, it is simply so superhuman and yet so human at the same time. What he accomplished in 1924 is really beyond all possibility to describe when you go into the details. And you could see the immense stream of inspiration that is now flowing, the flood gates of the new age of Michael, as it should have been, and could have developed through the entire 20th century until the possible culmination at its end, have been flung wide open- for shortest 9 months.
I have heard from several of our members, that said that working with the Christmas foundation conference, with the formation process and laying of the foundation stone, its connection to the Spiritual Event of the 20thcentury and the new Christ-Michael impulse, transformed their understanding and experience of what the new Anthroposophy is all about. And this is really the most important experience that we can hope for. This is the foundation of the new stage of the work that is now developing.
Again I am saying it, and I will say it repeatedly: the newest stage of development, should encourage us always to return to the foundations, to the basic books and exercises, the enthusiasm of developing devotion to truth and true self-knowledge, and everything contained in the first chapters of Knowledge of the higher worlds, with which we worked for many years. We should always feel the need to go back there and depend our devotion and reverence, enthusiasm and creativity, in practicing the basic preparatory exercises and meditations, because the more we actualize the advanced stages the more we must feel that we must deepen the roots and consolidate the trunk, like a plant, that should not grow too fast, too high and become too thin and lose the connection to the earth, and will not receive enough nourishment from the ground, forgetting its rich human origins and fruitful work on the earth.
When you create in this way this living and prospering spiritual organism in yourself and in the community of the school, you would certainly feel: Anthroposophy has become a living being in me and in us, the foundation stone has become a living being in my heart and in the meetings I have with my companions, as the first Goetheanum and its spiritualization in fire did previously. If we continue to work with the physical and spiritualized Goetheanum and not only in the centenary of its burning, and continue with the same intensity as we did in 2022, it will continue to live and will also grow, in the coming years. All centenaries must not become isolated events written in the calendar, finished and done when the dates are over. They must become from that moment streams and flows of becoming, resurrection and unlimited source of new creative life. You will recall the words of the soul of Helmuth von Moltke to his wife Eliza through Rudolf Steiner, communicated on January 13 in 1924: There you are sitting in the Goetheanum! But wait, wait a minute! Was she not sitting in the Schreinerei during the Christmas foundation conference? But the soul of Helmuth is saying: There you are sitting in the Goetheanum. And Rudolf Steiner is transmitting this statement, and I don’t think we should assume that both Helmuth von Moltke and Rudolf Steiner are wrong. So from the spiritual world the Goetheanum is right there and she is sitting there. Indeed, the spiritualized Goetheanum is there, also today it is there! Because it is a living spiritual being that was not destroyed, and through its further spiritualization in the Spiritual Event of the 20th century, it has truly become ‘the house of the word’, cosmically, globally speaking, in which the etheric Christ is dwelling and working, and through which the new inspiration of Michael is working today.
And in the same way the resurrected and transformed spirit of the Christmas foundation conference is there. It went through all the transformations about which we spoke recently, in the last 100 years, serving as the spiritual foundation stone of the Spiritual Event of the 20th century in the etheric world, during the most crucial apocalyptic years of the last century.
All this dear friends is so totally new, so future-oriented that we have to feel that whenever we contemplate this event, the Christmas foundation conference, the burning of the first Goetheanum, every word that Rudolf Steiner said through 1924, everything he wrote from his sickbed until his death, all this he carried with him into the etheric world and into the world changing apocalyptic events of the 30’-50’. There his entire previous life and all his creations are transformed in Ragnarök’s Weltenbrand, and in the deepest tragedy of humanity, are resurrected in a tremendous renewal of his future forces. Recall what he said about the Christmas foundation conference in 1924: This is also for me a beginning of a totally new life! He said: I am in an age that people are retiring and am starting something totally new instead!. In the agricultural conference in Koberwitz in June 1924 he said: people describe me in two opposite ways. When I came here one of the older members greeted me as the father of the anthroposophical movement, and then one of the youngsters said that the young people think I am the youngest of them all. So am I the oldest father of the movement or the youngest? Obviously he was both, but he wanted to emphasize his becoming younger. He was becoming younger because he was beginning to directly communicate and actualize the Michaelic impulse, that he waited for all his life. He waited for this, he hoped that this would be possible and now that it was possible, his pupils would not take it! He can bring Michael's best inspiration down to the earth, he can bring the school of Michael down to the earth. He waited for this really a long time. How long he waited for this! Where do you want to start the counting from? From the beginning of the school of Michael in the 15th century, some 500 years ago? But you know about the very important decision in this regard in the spiritual world before his reincarnation at the beginning of the 13thcentury, and the great battle in the spiritual world in the 9th century. About the time of the Mystery of Golgotha he said: we were with Michael in the sun sphere looking downward, seeing the Christ coming down to the earth. We decided, he says, that from that moment, when we saw the Christ coming down to earht from the sun-sphere, to dedicate all our future lives to realize Michael’s will to serve this impulse on earth. Therefore, he was waiting some 2.000 years for this moment- and more. And now he could do it, but then what he waited the longest for he could only begin and had to stop it after the shortest time. What a remarkable karma. Imagine this, that you can finally do the thing that you waited ages to accomplish, only in the very last moment of your persent life, and then when you were just beginning to plant the seed in the hard ground of human hearts, it was rejected, and you couldn’t continue to work on the earth, and had to take it with you, and face very soon the most horrific catastrophe in human evolution.
I spoke about this in detail in the second and third lectures of the Twilight and Resurrection of Humanity. In the third lecture I spoke about the etheric body of Rudolf Steiner and its development after death, and I emphasized from various points of view this unfinished, unrealized potential life-forces that remained in his life-body. I also wrote about it in the preface to the second printing of my first little book, The Spiritual Event of the 20th Century, in 1996. In 1923 Rudolf Steiner was 62 and began the 10th seven year period of his life. From these seven years he could fulfil only 9 full months, and 5 more in bed. 6 years remained unfulified. As we when we grasp what he gave in the first year of the seven, during the 9 months of 1924, we can imagine what the other 6 years could have brought about, because these years contained the highest productive spiritual forces, that flow directly from the spiritual world, directly from Michael. This is another aspect of the fact that Rudolf Steiner’s actual spiritual being and his mission is future-oriented. You will also recall that in the karma lectures, which in this respect started in the evening lectures during the Christmas foundation conference, he chose to illustrate human history in the light of Anthroposophy through the repeated earthly lives of two souls, historically known as Aristotle, the founder of earthly human thinking, and his pupil Alexander, the creator of the universal Hellenistic culture. And he showed that in their incarnations in the third millennium before Christ they lived as Enkidu or Eabani and Gilgamesh. Now this Enkidu is described as a very new, young, being, coming from the sky, living in nature with the animals. This being is very young soul, and if this is not his first incarnation altogether, he certainly did not have many incarnations before. Gilgamesh had more incarnations, he was an older soul, and could introduce him to the culture of his time. Therefore, it is possible to think that this being incarnated for the first time on the earth only some short 5 thousand years before the Christmas foundation conference. You can see why he is such a young soul, totally future-oriented, positive and creative, why he is working so intensively with the forces of Michael for the future of humanity and why his connection to the Christ is thoroughly a Michaelic-Sun connection. All his work comes directly from the sun impulse, from the Michaelic impulse, from the Christ as cosmic Sun being. And he faced the impossible task, trying to help all those old souls to grow younger and take into their young becoming hearts the youngest spiritual impulse ever given on earth, the Christmas foundation conference and the esoteric school of Michael.
Ask yourself, then, do you grow younger in the global school of spiritual science, described in The Twilight and Resurrection of Humanity? The formation of the foundation stone and its laying in your etheric hearts, will accomplish this, but only if we do it in the spirit of devotion and reverence, love and brotherhood, connecting intimately our hearts with the hearts of our sisters and brothers. If you feel you become younger and Anthroposophia becomes younger and more productive in you, you are on the right track and you will not feel as old and tired, intellectual all-knowing anthroposophist, but young, inquisitive, asking, searching, wondering, children of the spirit, and tremendously enthusiastic about the fact that you are becoming, in you 50’, 60’ and 70’, beginners, that stand at the beginning of the beginning of the coming future impulses, immensely enthusiastic about becoming the preparers of the preparers. You will feel like children again in your most mature age. A child is joyfully creative, curious, innovative, exploring everything with new eyes and heart and limbs, interested in each butterfly and bird that he sees, if he is not perchance already hooked to the screen of his tablet... If he is not, he is very creative, totally engaged in everything that is happening to him, and he is also human and relate to others in a truly loving and trusting manner, which is the only entry card to the true school of Michael.
Remember what was said about that sacred stone through history. It will give you all the spiritual, soul and life-giving nourishment that you need. You will never need anything else if you drink the soma and elixir from the chalice of life everlasting, that also will heal all your unnecessary illnesses and wounds, because this stone heals everything. And above all: it will give you the forces of healing love, to open your etheric heart to your fellow travelers, many of whom you killed and tortured in previous incarnations, many of them killed and tortured you as well, and ‘end this night, if it be your will’, as Leonard would say, namely, if it be your will to be so kind and willing to heal this old karma, not repeat its miseries again and again. It is a wonderful magic stone, this stone of love, the quintessence of Christ’s essence, formed and laid in the earth by the first human being to individualize the fulness of the being of Christ as a free human being. But between us and the activation of the magical healing forces of this stone, there stands one big IF, namely, you can only receive the forces of love from the stone of love, if you first transform your ego and give true love, based on true freedom, to your comrades and selflessly work to heal your sick human relationships. This is an absolute spiritual condition, and it doesn’t matter how much you delude yourself about it, in reality, it will never work, as the last century has demonstrated.
Only in this sense we can say that each one of us should bring to the Christmas centenary event his and her individualized foundation stone. Test your etheric hearts and listen carefully to your spirit conscience before you come. This is what we need from our dear school members, that each one bring his and her offer of brotherly and sisterly love, connecting herself to all other hearts in true spiritual bond. Each one will bring his and her stone, and together all the stones will form the temple of the earthly-human Sun, that Christ forms today. We are the temple, and it will only be resurrected if we are resurrected, as true community. It will rise if each one of us will become in this way a representative of humanity. Think about it: When you come to the centenary event of the Christmas foundation conference, this is how they - the gods- will look at you. When they look at you, you want to embody the new humanity and earth, with all the best forces of your soul, heart and body. You want to be a representative of this part of humanity because you know they are waiting 100 years for this miracle to happen.
Do we want simply to repeat the century long divine disappointment after such a terrible century? Do we want to be the cause of another bitter disappointment of the gods? Do we really want to write in our last words, in 2044, as Marie Steiner did in 1944, few years before her death, that ‘we were called but not chosen, we were incapable of responding to the call’, and therefore we factually killed Rudolf Steiner, because ‘our [unresolved, unhealed] human karma and that of the Society burst upon him in the Christmas Foundation Conference… as he suddenly fell seriously ill… struck down as though by a sword aimed at his very life’. Do we want to repeat this killing of the spirit ad infinitum, ad absurdum, because we don’t want to dare to face our ego and each other in love and brotherhood and heal our karma! Do we want to wait again until 2044 to realize this, when it will again be far too late?
I believe that what we really want is to stand humbly upright under this cross and say: We hear the present call of Michael, we understand it and we act upon it, knowing full well what courage is required to face and transform our miserable mortality, mutual betrayals, failures and weaknesses, and do it with ‘that strength and energy, perseverance and a holy enthusiasm’, as Rudolf Steiner said, creative joy and love for each other, humanity and earth. Very simple indeed! ‘A condition of complete simplicity, costing not less than everything’, as T.S Eliot rightly observed. We, ordinary humans, are the living, love giving foundation stones, that embody the ‘human being Anthroposophia’, and we build together this humble temple, formed by mortals that in this age must perform this immortal task. And then everything will be possible, it will become a new beginning for our work, leading us faithfully into the coming challenging years and decades. A real transformation, metamorphosis of our work will begin, because we formed a new foundation stone, a new start on which we can build in the coming years.
And then, think about this too: if the noble gods will offer us in their grace some more years to work together in this way, if karma will be so graceful that we will have some more years to prepare for the preparers, to form and lay this foundation deep enough in the free etheric hearts of some people, if we will not continue to deny each other and our mutual karmic healing, we will make that seemingly small, really huge, step forward that was not yet taken in human evolution. If karma will allow us to do this, than we will have some more years to accomplish what Rudolf Steiner’s pupils did not allow him to do 100 years ago. Then we will break this eternal negative loop, that brought down all spiritual streams in the past, because without exception, the pupils of all the founders of religions and occult streams, reversing their intentions to their opposites; then we will be able to start for the first time a positive spiritual stream, that develops, grows and bears more fruits with time, that attains its best results in future, not in the past.
As you may recall, we investigated Rudolf Steiner’s etheric body and discovered that his death was indeed premature. His life-potential, preserved in his etheric body after his death, shows this very clearly. If you observe it, there is no way that you will come to believe, that the time of his death had anything to do with his karma. It is not written there at all. You know, the time of our death, the year and day, hour and moment of our death, is marked deeply in our etheric body. This is the reason why we die in an absolutely specific time, and not in another, because this is what we decided and arranged before our birth, in the spiritual world, as part of our self-chosen karma. But if you investigate Rudolf Steiner’s etheric body, you don’t find it there! I searched this very carefully for years, and lo, there is no karmic death entry in his etheric body, dated March 30th, 1925, is not there, he was not supposed to die at all at this time. He could live on ever so happily and complete the 10th seven-year-period of his life, attain his 70th year of life in the year 1931. And then he could certainly have the possibility to live at least two more years, attain his 72 year of life in the more decisive year of the 20th century, in 1933! This possibility is definitely marked in his etheric body, it is absolutely there. I described it already in the preface to the second printing of The Spiritual Event of the 20th Century in 1996, and in greater detail in The Twilight and Resurrection of Humanity. If his pupils would have not rejected so vehemently the new Michaelic impulse that he gave in the Christmas foundation conference, Rudolf Steiner would have continued to work, supported by the creative community of mutually empowering comrades. He would have developed much further the Christmas conference impulse, the new karma impulse, the esoteric school impulse until 1933, ready to confront for all humanity the decisive historical moment when the first apocalyptic Beast rose from the abyss and the Christ appeared. I described this from various points of view in the lectures contained in my new book, The Time is at Hand!- Ahrimanic and Michaelic Immortality and the Apocalypse of the Age of Michael, (Temple Lodge, Spring 2024), published in October in German in Ereignis Verlag.
Dear friends, I am just indicating this positive possibility, another of those big IFs that characterize the age of human freedom. Let us imagine that we shall receive the graceful blessing of karma and would be able to work together ten more years, until 2033. If this will be granted, we will be able to celebrate the totally einmalig, non-recurring, singular, exceptional, event, in the evolution of humanity, in which the centennial of the beginning of the etheric second coming in 1933 falls together with the completion of 2000 years cycle since the Mystery of Golgotha. The convergence and mutual enhancement of the two streams that make up the wholeness of the Christ impulse, the first and second Mysteries of Golgotha, will fall together. The first Mystery of Golgotha took place in the physical world in the year 33, and the second Mystery of Golgotha began in the etheric world in 1933. This is a very special moment, and we shall speak about its esoteric and universal human significance in the coming years. But this dependes on the same big IFs, the weakest link in the human chain, our extremely slow and retarded development of freedom and love. IF the forces of mutual healing and love in the community of the school will have prospered and increased sufficiently, IF the reversed cultus will have lifted us together to the perception of the etheric world, and IF we will become much more awake and alert, aware and perceptive, in ten years from now, then in 2033 we will be able to grasp the significance of the flowing together of the spiritual forces of the two Mysteries of Golgotha. In this highly creative moment, the greatest intensity and productivity of the Christ impulse can be actualized. Then humanity will be able to face and utilize the spiritual event of the 21st century in the physical world, in the real time of its happening, not only in the etheric world, as we did in 1933-1945, while the earth was devasted by human evil.
Consider this: the final centenary that we can celebrate of the past life of Rudolf Steiner, will be the centenary of his death, in March 30, 2025. After this, we ran out of centenary events! Therefore, we will be eagerly looking forward to this cosmic event of 2033. Let us pray that our karma will allow us to continue to build, in the coming 10 years until 2033, peacefully, in the midst of increasingly tumultuous times, the foundations of the foundations, the preparations of the preparations, that we could develop in the last two decades, organically, step by step, positively snowballing upwards, becoming younger and younger with each year and decade. This will be a greatest blessing to our miserable humanity because this could not happen hundred years ago. If this will happen we will be able to fulfil our present earthly task, about which we spoke in our last meeting: to become the loyal preparers of the preparers of the second major Michaelic intervention in human evolution. This will steel the foundation of the bridge between the worlds. It must be strong enough for the coming generations to build upon, continue safely its construction, until the Michaelic impulse can cross it to descend from the etheric world to earth for the second time in the present age of Michael.
In this spirit, dear friends, let us prepare ourselves and come to Forum 3 in Stuttgart in Christmas and celebrate this event as a new beginning of our work and a new Welten-Zeitenwende-Anfang for humanity.