עברית 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/
The First Meeting with the Lesser Guardian on the Threshold 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
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.
Rudolf Steiner, Lecture of 8 January 1918 (GA 180).
From Chapter 1: The Spiritualization of Thinking
The First Meeting with the Lesser Guardian on the Threshold of Thinking
So far we have indicated the zone of the first, etheric, abyss and threshold into which man enters as a result of raising the given meeting with the etheric Christ into voluntarily created imaginative cognition. This abyss is intimately close to man's daily life: it exists 'right behind' his ordinary thinking and the mirror of memory. As we showed, when he begins to turn his attention to thinking's creative, hidden source, man enters this abyss consciously and voluntarily opens the gate of thinking to the living spirit. But at this threshold's abyss, the presence of the still largely hidden Guardian of the Thresholdis nevertheless felt strongly, as we encounter his forces for the first time directly. From now on, he will continue to surface and reveal himself, the more we progress on the spiritual path. The longer and deeper our struggle to gain spiritual knowledge confronts what can be rightly called, ‘the cliffs of thinking's abyss and time’s annihilation’, the more the Lesser Guardian is provoked and rises from the depths, to test us and block our path if we are not ready. And precisely this struggle, if carried out persistently, becomes the source of inner strength, if one permeates one’s whole being with the experience of the etheric Christ, that from the end of the twentieth century, stands by us in our most intimate struggles to gain spiritual knowledge. Then one can enter fearlessly into the depths of the drama of knowledge, and individualize, in his free spiritual activity, the spiritual forces of Christ, Michael and Anthroposophia. And if we are armed with their forces, the Guardian becomes ever more friendly and inviting.
Modern humanity has been passing the threshold, unconsciously, since the end of the 19th century, rejecting the knowledge about it given by spiritual science. Therefore, it has disastrously remained unconscious of this fact, being already far on the other side, and these threshold ordeals, catastrophes and tragedies have become the daily experience of millions of people. And these experiences will lead humanity and the earth to their doom, if they remain unconscious, or to their resurrection, if they are experienced courageously in full consciousness.
Let us describe this situation as clearly as we can with ordinary words: if modern humanity insists on remaining unconscious, and continues to advance far beyond the threshold, forcefully ignoring the warnings of the Guardian, then humanity must, invariably, ‘lose its mind’, that we already experience in all fields of knowledge and life today.Because man’s most secure foundation of thinking self-consciousness, the great Cartesian illusion, 'I think therefore I am', is falling apart, and no true spiritual knowledge is replacing it, the fall into the inhuman abyss can only be accelerated with each decade and year. This anchorage of rationality that supported man with some justification from the 17th to the 19th centuries, has been, since the end of the 19th century and the beginning of the 20th century, necessarily and irredeemably shattered.
The losing of this ‘single vision and Newton's sleep', as William Blake rightly designated it [1], leads man to the present extreme luciferic and ahrimanic aberrations. The result is, that he either 1) rebounds back in ahrimanically inspired fear upon his convenient and secure daily consciousness or materialistic scientific and philosophical convictions, determined never again to approach thinking's end, or 2) he is tempted into the other extreme, namely, to deny thinking, self-consciousness and objectivity altogether, in which case he becomes a luciferic mystic and visionary, sceptic, or both.[2] But the same crisis may also lead to another, more promising possibility, as indicated above: man can learn to live, move and have his being at the limit of thinking, over the abyss of consciousness, and in the actual birth, death, and rebirth process of ordinary and supersensible self-consciousness. It means in other words that the liberated forces of thinking,feeling and willing must build a new soul- and spirit home in the ‘no man’s land’ between the poles of the dividing, annihilating and self-individuating higher self. As Rudolf Steiner showed, this is the experience of the border zone of the threshold of the spiritual world, where the centripetal forces of the cold head and the centrifugal forces of warmth, working through the limbs, are constantly colliding, and which can only be cosmically harmonized through the rhythmical system, in which the Christ impulse works. [3]
To establish oneself firmly at this point of extreme instability means to anchor self-consciousness in its singularity. Real spiritualization of thinking and sense-perception is only possible here. At this zero point of rationality, [4] which is neither its logical negation nor affirmation but rather its conscious for-mation, man must ground the knowledge drama of the Second Coming on firm foundations. This entry requires a courageous delving into the abyss of the structure, dis-structure and re-structure of self-consciousness. [5]
In other words, this means that what was until now in the hands of the ancient lunar teachers of young humanity and their messengers, is transferred today into the conscious spirit hands of man himself. He must become increasingly ready to take full cognitive, moral and existential responsibility for the creation, consolidation and preservation of his self-conscious spiritual self and clear spirit sight in the living stream of world-man becoming of the universe. Rudolf Steiner described this process in his own spiritual development. He had to struggle in the time of his activity within the Theosophical Society with the old Moon teachers who would not accept the new Ego-directed and controlled spiritual-scientific research.[6] In overcoming this obstacle, he repeated, recapitulated and individualized the tremendous cosmic fight between Jehovah and Lucifer over the control of the emancipation and individuation process of human consciousness.[7] After he overcame Lucifer in this way, Rudolf Steiner could turn all his forces to the struggle with Ahriman, the god of the present materialistic civilization, which takes place not in the Moon-sphere above, but in the earthly, Ahrimanic Moon-sphere below, under the Earth.
The further steps in the spiritualization of thinking, shortly to be described, can only be based on what we recognized above: that what we call 'thinking' in our modern intellectual science, philosophy and general culture is but its devitalized shadow and corpse, on which we awaken to full, clear-cut physical self-consciousness. Only in this devitalized inner soul atmosphere, can modern man consolidate a world picture and an identity that separates and thereby protects him from the powerful reality of the spiritual world, in which, at the present stage of human evolution, he would be overwhelmed and submerged in continuous unconscious sleep. And only because our mental pictures and concepts are mere picture- shadows, devoid of living content, can we be truly free and active in them; we wake up out of our spiritual sleep in the thin air of the abstracted and lifeless representations of the real, and exercise our independent volition with their help.[8] But this preliminary stage of the knowledge drama can only become real soul experience if it is practiced; theoretical ‘knowledge’ about it can certainly entertain our intellectual desires and curiosities, but in this way, we will never begin to experience spiritual science as reality. To experience spiritual science as reality, we must first of all experience what really happens ‘when one enlivens one's thinking with active soul life’. [9] Contrary to the desire to immediately enjoy ‘living thinking’ as it is often called, which leads thinking in a luciferic direction, in the real spiritual scientific practice of thinking, precisely when we begin to enliven it - not merely think about it - ‘one realizes for the first time that thought is just a left-over and recognizes it as the remains of something that has died’. This is therefore the first true experience of living thinking: the living experience of the fact that ordinary thinking is a dead corpse, described above.
Let us concentrate our attention on this decisive moment in the knowledge drama, to experience its absolutely singular situation and event: when we truly enliven ordinary thinking, what happens is not that it simply becomes, as many would wish to believe, ‘more and more alive’. On the contrary, we become aware for the first time, how dead our ordinary thinking really is. That is, the first supersensible, imaginative experience, is the living, which means conscious,experience of the death of thinking; we experience the fact that it was alive before birth and has died in our earthly body and consciousness. Exactly at this crucially important moment, the knowledge drama builds its first firm foundation, when the ‘grammar of knowledge’, the result of the dead corpse of thinking, is experienced and recognized for what it really is. ‘Ordinary thinking is dead, a mere corpse of the soul, and one has to become aware of it as such, through enlivening it with one's own soul life and getting to know this corpse of abstract thinking in its new aliveness’. And this is the reason why precisely in this first Threshold situation and event, we build the firm etheric-imaginative observatory, laboratory, and testing ground, for the research and development of the more advanced stages of the knowledge drama of the Second Coming.
[1] William Blake, Letter to Thomas Butt, 22 November 1802. (Quoted in Geoffrey Keynes (ed.) The Letters of William Blake, 1956)
[2] About the mysticism of feeling and will, see the Philosophy of Freedom Chapter 8 (GA 4). On modern physics and its complementary mirror picture in eastern mysticism, portrayed in Fritjof Capra's The Tao of Physics, and its many offsprings, see Von Menschenrätsel, last chapter. (GA 20).
[3] Lectures of 28 and 29 August 1920 (GA 199).
[4] 'Where man is zero', as Schiller finely observes in the 21st letter of his Letters on the Aesthetic Education of Man.
[5] About such a necessary reversal of the activity and meaning of thinking during the crossing of the threshold, compare, for example, the answering of the question about Marx's materialistic conception of history, given by Rudolf Steiner at the end of the lecture at Zurich on 7 November 1917 (GA 73); one should pay close attention to the location and date of this lecture!
[6] Lecture of 20 August 1924 (GA 243).
[7] Lecture of 13 June 1906 (GA 94).
[8] This process is also described in the lecture of 4 April 1921 (GA 76).
[9] Lecture of 6th February 1923 (GA 257). And the following quotations.