עברית For the first time in our age one human self stands in a soul relation to another human self stripped of his sheaths. Therefore, we have to meet the human being so that we shall feel him as the world riddle itself, as a living world riddle.
Christ's Appearance Between 'I' and ‘Thou’
The Modern Christ Experience and the Knowledge Drama of the Second Coming
Fourth Volume
The Creation of the Earthly-Human Sun, the New Human Meeting and Michaelic Community
The positive side of this separation and estrangement, which causes such karmic chaos and social destruction, is that there also emerges, for the first time in human history, the burning human longing to create conscious relations between free Egos. This is the most promising future force that must enter more and more into our meetings. ‘Really for the first time in this [modern] age one human self stands in a soul relation to another human self—I would say—stripped of his sheaths [hüllenlos]'. Therefore, 'we have to meet the human being so that we shall feel him as the world riddle itself, as a living world riddle.' And the key to unlock this mystery can be found only in the fully conscious experience of the appearance, words, and deeds of the etheric Christ, perceived between each ‘I’ and ‘Thou’, as the new healer of karma.
From Chapter 2: Christ's Appearance Between 'I' and ‘Thou’
This means that nothing can be done to restore the truth of karma, which is Michael’s strongest will, and ‘the cosmic ray’ will not ‘pours through the anthroposophical movement’, if the etheric Christ is not experienced, recognized and received in full consciousness:
In the next three thousand years the truth that Christ is acting as Karmic Judge will become apparent to a sufficiently large number of people. Christ Himself will be experienced by men as an etheric Form. Like Paul before Damascus, they will know quite intimately that Christ lives… Hence, we have indicated that the Christ, in contradistinction as it were to the suffering Christ on Golgotha, is appearing now as Christ triumphant, Christ the Lord of Karma... In truth, this begins in the twentieth century and will hold good until the end of the earth. It is in our twentieth century that this judgment, this ordering of Karma, begins. [2]
This is the revelation of ‘Christ triumphant, Christ the Lord of Karma’, the fountainhead of the conscious human meeting and community building, described below. It must come to pass in the present century, the second, middle and decisive century of the age of Michael that more and more humans meet the etheric Christ and experience how he executes his new role. ‘As to a judge, as to a lord of Karma, men will look up to the Christ in the succession of incarnations, when they experience their destiny…until they can say to themselves: “…this destiny is allotted to me through that with which I feel myself related in my inmost being. In Karma itself I perceive what is related to my being. My Karma is dear to me because it makes me better and better.”’ [3] However, though this source is available today as never before, and is open to each person who consciously and actively wants to approach it, human beings continue to turn their hearts away from their destiny. This is the heartbreaking cause of the present falling of humanity into the grave of civilization, and indeed it ‘shatters one to pieces’ when we experience it.
The more we observe this phenomenon, nowadays taken as a matter of fact, the more we begin to realize the depth of the abyss of forgetfulness and the intensity of karmic disorder and disconnectedness prevailing between human beings. What is suppressed, we feel, is the common origin of human beings as such, their interconnections to the cosmic whole and their specific karmic obligations. We perceive how the more karmically connected they are and the more intricate is their interweaving with one another in a previous life and in the life between the present birth and the last death, the more they are tempted, unconsciously, to break the karmic bonds of mutual spirit loyalty and brotherhood. This temptation must be brought to consciousness, to be fully overcome. This is one of the most shattering spiritual impressions of our lives: man's self-willed and self-imposed human and karmic blindness. And the clear knowledge that this situation is a necessary by-product of man’s accelerated individuation in the last centuries cannot in the least mitigate the pain caused by this experience.
The positive role of individuation in human evolution, to bring about freedom and personal independence, was repeatedly described by Rudolf Steiner in his lectures on the esoteric aspects of the social question. But if the forces of blood relations, which are now rightly dwindling, are not replaced by conscious human Wahlvervandtschaft, as Goethe called it, of freely chosen affinity, then what results is a mutual lack of interest, the bypassing and ignoring of human beings by each other. This is the cold, Ahrimanic, intellectual destructive force in social life. On the other side, people strive to erase individuation and revive the old blood connections, causing the Luciferic devastation of nationalism and racism. Formerly, in ancient cultural epochs, for example, under the leadership of the Moon god, Jehovah, human beings were instinctively connected by the forces of their common blood, and therefore 'interested' in one another. But this interest was preserved only for the members of the family, tribe, or nation, in the veins of which flowed the same blood. And it was, therefore, not an individualized interest based on freely given love, but an egotistical group interest. Man felt himself attracted to the other person because in the other he felt his collective self, his own blood element, while those who belonged to other blood communities were very often not even considered as human beings at all. And modern man has internalized the group-egoism, which used to be mitigated through religious and social commandments and made it an unlimited personal egoism.
In modern times, this separative antisocial element that once prevailed between tribes and nations has been individualized, making it the cause of the general opposition to all other human beings.[4] The ‘war of all against all’, started at the beginning of the twentieth century, and will continue until it brings the present fifth post-Atlantean age to its end. But during this time, it also serves us as the most positive educational force, which we must use, to learn how to create the new human meeting.
The positive side of this separation and estrangement, which causes such karmic chaos and social destruction, is that there also emerges, for the first time in human history, the burning human longing to create conscious relations between free Egos. This is the most promising future force that must enter more and more into our meetings. ‘Really for the first time in this [modern] age one human self stands in a soul relation to another human self—I would say—stripped of his sheaths [hüllenlos]'.[5] But precisely this nakedness frightens humans tremendously and causes them to attack the other and withdraw from any deeper meeting. Without the development of the new conscious Imaginative perception, both sides of the social abyss become absolutely terrifying riddles—the subjective no less than the objective, ‘I’ no less than ‘thou’. Therefore, 'we have to meet the human being so that we shall feel him as the world riddle itself, as a living world riddle.'[6] And the key to unlock this mystery can be found only in the fully conscious experience of the appearance, words, and deeds of the etheric Christ, perceived between each ‘I’ and ‘Thou’, as the new healer of karma.
[1] Ibid. lecture of 8 August.
[2] Lecture of 14 October 1911 (GA 131).
[3] Lecture of 17 April 1912 (GA 143).
[4] Lectures of 7 and 21 December 1918 (GA 186).
[5] Lecture of 14 October 1922 (GA 217).
[6] Ibid. lecture of 8 August.
The Modern Christ Experience and the Knowledge Drama of the Second Coming
Fourth Volume : The Creation of the Earthly-Human Sun, the New Human Meeting and Michaelic Community