Midday, Midnight, and Cosmic Midnight Sun

Midday, Midnight, and Cosmic Midnight Sun

Activation of the bridge of spiritual memory and continuity of consciousness

From chapter 4 of the Second Volume of The Modern Christ Experience and the Knowledge Drama of the Second Coming: The Construction of the Third, Spiritual-Physical Layer of the Bridge

The 3 Nested Spiritual Memories: the memory of the midday Christ experience becomes the mirror of the midnight work with the Christ, between sleep and waking, and the midnight experience become the mirror reflecting the cosmic midnight hour of existence, between our last death and present birth.

The spiritualization and condensation of the etheric body has significant consequences for many aspects of the development of spiritual cognition. For example, we discovered that after each pentagram meditation, the etheric body becomes especially resilient, consistent, elastic, and flexible and its capacity to reflect spiritual experiences, increases greatly. The formation of the astral-soul layer also brought about that the first etheric layer was spiritualized and developed further and the Michaelic kundalini meditation, has intensified it greatly. The more the etheric body is spiritualized, the more it can mirror the supersensible experiences, with ever greater clarity and exactitude, and the capacities of spiritual memory and continuity of consciousness are greatly enhanced.

 Let me emphasize, to prevent misunderstandings, how long this consolidation process really is. The formation of the etheric, astral and spiritual-physical layers of the bridge encompasses more then 40 years of daily praxis. The reader must bear in mind that we have condensed this decades long process into our present report. Every stage and step, each turn on the path of the knowledge drama, from its beginning in the 80’ of last century, through the first edition published in 1995, has been rehearsed and recapitulated, revised and varied, innumerable times, before we could express it in this form.

 The permanent starting point in the knowledge drama of the Second Coming, in all its stages, is always the wide wakeful, midday modern Damascus event. This event is the archetypal, pivotal, and grounding, midday-sun event of the entire knowledge drama. It is important to realize, as we described in chapter 4 in the first volume, that in this midday event, the light of Christ, the light of our awakened spiritual consciousness, and the spiritual forces active through the external light of the sun, are experienced as one and the same light. Christ is the Sun being who shines and radiates in midday and his ‘I’ in us is the foundation of the bridge of spiritual memory and continuity of consciousness. The Sunlight that illuminates the midday modern Damascus event constitutes, therefore the ‘midday moment’, as Rudolf Steiner designated it.

I am reminded that a great mystic of the Alexandrian school admitted in old age that only a few times in life he had lived those great moments when the soul felt mature, so deepened that the spirit of the infinite was awakened, and that mystical moment occurs when the god is experienced in the breast by man himself. These are midday moments, where the sun of life is at its highest... such midday hours of life, which one must regard as the grace of earthly life’.[1]   

This midday sun Damascus event is this event in the present age of the second coming. It is the foundation of the etheric, astral, and spiritual-physical bridge. But its activation must take place in each time anew.  It must be kindled each time from within, to be perceived outside. When we succeed, through free spiritual scientific activity at this moment, to kindle the fire and light of the indwelling ‘I’ of Christ, then we can re-experience the midday Christ event again. It means that we have succeeded to kindle the fire and light of the original event, letting it light up in spiritual memory and continuity of consciousness.  Then we build the threefold bridge, brick after brick, and recapitulate the threefold appearance, words, and deeds of the etheric Christ, given in the first meeting. Then we rightly feel that we have once more awakened the original experience, and the sunlike, starry spark and lightning fire is kindled in our etheric heart in the moment, ‘when the god is experienced in the breast by man himself’. It is always a newly enkindled midday starry sun event.

    What concerns us presently, is the further spiritualization and preparation of the etheric body, to fulfil its role in the formation of the Phantom. Therefore, we turn our attention to the fact that the spiritualized memory of the midday Christ event comes to imaginative consciousness because it is reflected in the spiritualized etheric body, and the knowledge drama of the Second Coming continues to form and polish this etheric mirror through the years. But then something else happens, which comes to consciousness only gradually. To begin with, we feel content when the memory of the midday Christ event is kindled and reflected in the etheric body in a living way, because this fires the entire knowledge drama of the Second Coming. But with time, we become aware that this memory becomes in turn a mirror of another spiritual event. When we remember the etheric midday appearance of the Christ, this spiritual memory becomes, in itself, a reflecting spiritual mirror of higher spiritual events that we undergo during sleep, in the higher worlds. - Admittedly, it is exceedingly difficult to find the adequate words to describe such processes, and we have no choice, but to use the highly abstract and intellectual language spoken and written today. This ‘second memory’, reflected through the first memory,  remains obscure and vague for many years. But the more the midday Christ experience is individualized and recapitulated in the true ‘I’ in the knowledge drama, and embodied in the astral, etheric, and physical bodies, the more the etheric mirror becomes clearer and brighter, and we realize that the newly enkindled memory of the midday Christ experience has become a mirror of spiritual events experienced during sleep in the spiritual worlds. It is a gradual awakening, a stepwise development, which goes hand with hand with the development of the main stages of the knowledge drama described above.

     In this way, when the newly awakened memory of the original midday meeting with the etheric Christ lights us as real, living spiritual memory,  what we experience in the astral world during sleep in the nights lights up, reflected in this memory. It is as if, in our awakened starry moment, when the original meeting lights up again, illuminate by our spiritual memory, it directs our gaze to a deeper level of experience, that rises up, so to say, from the unconscious depths of the soul.  At the same time- this is also a very gradual and subtle process- we notice that our dream and dreamless sleep are changing. What happens is that a conscious link begins to form, between the awaked memory of the midday Christ event and something that we feel, and sense, not yet clearly seeing and knowing what it really is, that we experience during sleep. The more the modern Christ experience is individualized in the knowledge drama of the Second Coming, and the midday Christ experience is kindled anew, this bridge is gradually constructed, and our conscious midday Christ experience and the night experiences begin to converse with each other.

As the spiritualized memory of the midday Christ experience became a spiritual mirror reflecting the memory of midnight events, so the memory of the midnight event began to reflect still higher and more deeply hidden spiritual events. A third level of spiritual memory was forming itself, inside the two others.  It was as if we were awakened from deepest sleep, a far deeper awakening than the previous one, to experience something for which one is hard pressed to find adequate words. It is as if a totally forgotten event strives to emerge into memory, reflected through two other memories; as a world that lights up within other worlds, a deeper submerged layer revealed in the depth of the former layers. [2] I will try to explicate this complex phenomena in the following way.

   When we bring the given midday meeting with the etheric Christ to full consciousness in the knowledge drama, we first remember - spiritually- the originally given meeting. The first given meeting is reflected anew as living memory in the etheric body, because the etheric body was spiritualized in the knowledge drama. This is the first form of the bridge of spiritualized memory and continuity of consciousness. Then, the awakened memory of the midday Christ experience becomes, in itself, a new higher mirror, due to the further spiritualization of the etheric body, described above. This mirror reflects the midnight spiritual activity. Now, inside this second memory of midnight,  we become aware - through the supersensible night events presented by this memory - of something that emerges from the twilight the covers a still higher world. Remarkably, we realize that the wakeful memory of the night’s events, becomes, in turn, a mirror for higher spiritual events, totally forgotten. These events start, piecemeal wise, to rise to consciousness when the memory of the midnight events becomes a spiritual mirror for the wholly forgotten experiences during deepest, dreamless sleep.  

Footnotes

[1]   Esoteric lesson of 21 January 1909 (GA 265, s. 34). My italics.

[2]   In the film, Inception, Christopher Nolan dramatized a search for the meaning of the interpenetration of multilayered states of consciousness during dream and deep dreamless sleep, based on current psychological knowledge. The spiritual significance of the spiritualized states of sleep, is portrayed here.

Continue reading in chapter 4: The Construction of the Third, Spiritual-Physical Layer of the bride