The Formation of the Etheric Ring of the Earthly-Human Sun

The Formation of the Etheric Ring of the Earthly-Human Sun

The Modern Christ Experience and the Knowledge Drama of the Second Coming

Second Volume: The Knowledge Drama of the Second Coming, Part I

From Chapter 2: The Spiritualization of Sense-Perception

The knowledge drama is also the foundation of the creative drama of the Second Coming. It is man and world changing creative activity, whose significance radiates far and wide through man into the universe.

   It is important to emphasize at this stage that the knowledge drama is also the foundation of the creative drama of the Second Coming. Real spiritual knowledge actualized in spiritual praxis, is not merely subjective and inner activity. It is man and world changing creative activity, whose significance radiates far and wide through man into the universe. It constitutes a substantial contribution to the future formation not only of the earth but of the spiritual worlds. Man’s creative role in the universe is revealed in the practical actualization of spiritual science. And this becomes clear when we observe what happens to the new etheric forces created in the spiritualization of thinking and perception. In this spiritualization, we use the indwelling force of the Christ, to overcome death and resurrect part of our etheric body. And this spiritualized part of the etheric body extends outwardly and merges with the external etheric world. When we observe this process, we realize that ‘since that time [the Mystery of Golgotha] there has been given to the human etheric body the possibility that, as a result of Christ's light, something new appears, something living and breathing and immortal, something that can never suffer death’.

 As we showed in the introduction, the second Mystery of Golgotha occurs not in the external physical world, as the first Mystery of Golgotha, but in the etheric world and in the human spirit, soul, and bodies. When we recapitulate and individualize it, we create these immortalized forces in the etheric body, ‘which do not die with the rest’, and we experience that this immortal part of the etheric body, ‘streams back out into cosmic space, where it builds, according to its strength in man, a sphere around the Earth that is in the process of becoming a Sun’. And we become conscious that we partake in this creative etheric building process, not only after death, but in the present life in the physical world. When we overcome the forces of death, resurrect and spiritualize thinking and perception, we develop not only etheric and imaginative consciousness but also produce new etheric substance; this substance is a new moral-spiritual substance, made of ‘love in its spiritual form’.

 We experience that in the etheric body and etheric world, acquiring supersensible knowledge is a creative spiritual process, the creation of etheric, life-giving substance, in the same cognitive, morally productive spiritual activity. And through this productive activity of supersensible knowledge, we perceive what we create, create what we perceive, and see how our etheric body is being woven together with a ‘spiritual sphere that builds itself around the Earth composed of the enlivened etheric bodies’. (Lecture of 6 July 1909, GA 112).

 The fact that creative spiritual knowledge and creative spiritual life have the same source in human activity, makes spiritual science into art, craft, and cultus. In the new Michaelic Mysteries, we learn that all aspects of human knowing and becoming, which create the Michaelic culture and social life of the future, originate from the same spiritual-etheric source, the Christ in His present revelation.

     And this is the reason why the modern Christ experience, described in chapter 4 of the first volume, and the knowledge drama of the Second Coming, described here, make us into active and creative participants in the building of the etheric earthly-human sun, because ‘with the Christ in ourselves... we enliven all light on the Earth around, carry life into the dead light and have ourselves an enlivening effect on the light’. This new earthly-human sun is the external manifestation and actualization, indeed, a living extension, of man’s creative spiritual cognition, which immortalizes forces of his etheric body. In these immortal etheric forces, the power extracted from the two Mysteries of Golgotha becomes, for the first time in human evolution, a fully conscious individual cognitive-moral-creative power, because ‘only that etheric body which has been built up from within is a living body, that stays eternally. This is the etheric body... that does not dissolve after death... The etheric body which man has built up from within will never be lost again... Christianity contains the secret of how man can gradually develop himself towards the resurrection of the etheric body’. (Lecture of 5 June 1905, GA 93).

 And this resurrected, immortal part of the etheric body, is also the foundation of the bridge of spiritual memory and continuity of consciousness.

    Without advancing in the spiritualization of perception to conscious perception and actualization of Christ’s etheric crucifixion and resurrection, man cannot, in our time, achieve spiritual scientific imaginative cognition. He can naturally and easily become a visionary clairvoyant, and have visionary supersensible experiences, but this would have only personal, subjective significance.  And what is more, he would have entirely missed the objective meaning of Christ's etheric resurrection in the planetary sphere of creative love, life and light, woven out of Christ-permeated and spiritualized thinking and perception that livingly crystallize around the fiery core of the new earthly-human Sun.

 This is the new stage of human maturity and dignity, possible only since the beginning of the present Michaelic age. When man individualizes Christ’s death and resurrection and transforms it into the living death and conscious resurrection of human consciousness and being, he co-creates in the formation of the foundation stone of the present age of Michaelic. Only in this way can we construct the Michael-Christ bridge of spiritual memory and continuity of consciousness over the abyss of ‘the greatest disharmony ever to exist in the being of man', which continuously annihilates our life, kills the soul, and destroys the interrelationships between the spiritual and the physical worlds.

The Modern Christ Experience and the Knowledge Drama of the Second Coming

Second Volume: The Knowledge Drama of the Second Coming, Part I