‘Believe in the Resurrection of Ideas!’

‘Believe in the Resurrection of Ideas!’

From the Third lecture, 14 February 2019:

The Universal Language of Michael and the Being of Rudolf Steiner- The Mystery of the Etheric Body of Rudolf Steiner

THE TWILIGHT AND RESURRECTION OF HUMANITY

THE HISTORY OF THE MICHAELIC MOVEMENT SINCE THE DEATH OF RUDOLF STEINER

AN ESOTERIC STUDY

Not the worshiping of finished historical forms and contents, but the devotion and activation of  the living, growing, etheric potential, can resurrect the work of past masters and teachers of humanity, and make it alive in the present time. This is Michael’s admonition that resounds perpetually in this age: ‘Dare to be free and dedicate your devotion, love, enthsusiasm and joy, to resurrect the dead past through the living present, to receive the future spiritual stream of the 21st century!’

Let us take this question into our deepest meditations in this remark-

able year 2019, and ask ourselves: What does it really mean that one

will be enlightened by this etheric body, so that ‘the Christ Himself

will be able, from the end of the twentieth century on, to work through

the etheric body of Rudolf Steiner among his pupils’? It means that

the etheric Christ can work through the whole etheric body of Rudolf

Steiner, and those parts of this body that remained potential, are as

essential for this as the actualized parts, and in a certain respect, are

also more essential. The used parts provide the eternal foundations of

spiritual science for the new age of Michael. They were actualized and

spiritualized on the earth and we continue to strengthen them by dedi-

cating to them our free and creative work with Rudolf Steiner’s earthly

life as a whole. But how do you work with that part of this etheric body

that was not actualized by Rudolf Steiner in his physical life? This can

only happen as a result of the dedication, devotion and energy that

you invest not only in his finished and complete earthly work, but if you

open his finished work in your heart and connect it with his unfinished,

incomplete, potential, future orientated, supersensible life and work. This

is the fundamental difference between our work and the work done by

the most loyal anthroposophists, that consecrated only Rudolf Stein-

er’s finished work. But such loyalty to what was finished in the past

is one-sided, and easily becomes reversed into its exact opposite, and

while we believe that we serve the true impulse of Anthroposophy, in

reality we are working strongly against it.

But how can we do this? What is the secret potion that we must make

and assimilate, to make this possible? In this question is found the quin-

tessence of the above described loyalty to creative freedom in the age of

Michael, that is part of Christ’s new life stream: ‘Believe in the resurrection

of ideas!’ as Rudolf Steiner exclaimed in the key year 1917, when he spoke

for the first time about the fact that since 1909 the Christ could be expe-

rienced in a totally new way, and that in the future—after 1933—He will

become visible to more and more people. If we experience the fact that the

resurrection is a real force working in the aura of the Earth, he says, then

Goethe’s etheric body doesn’t stay as it was when he died, because all his

thinking continues to evolve in the etheric world, especially the so many

unfinished ideas and half conceived creations that characterized his creative genius:

This spiritual atmosphere that surrounds us today did not

as yet exist in the men of antiquity. The etheric body, as you know, is sepa-

rated from the soul after death as a kind of second corpse, but through the

Christ Impulse that informs us since the Mystery of Golgotha, the etheric

body is now preserved to some extent; it is not completely dissolved. If

we believe—and I use the word belief in the sense which I defined in an

earlier lecture—that Goethe is “risen” in an etheric body and if we begin

to meditate upon him, then his concepts and ideas become alive in us,

and we describe him not as he was, but as he is today...Remember that the

form in which ideas first arise in us is not their final form. Believe therefore

in the resurrection of ideas! 

Now, can we resurrect in the same way Anthroposophy as a whole?

Yesterday we showed that indeed we can. But we can do so only if we

don’t read these profound truths in order to enjoy reading another ‘excit-

ing item’ appropriated from Rudolf Steiner; we are not interested in

merely representing and repeating what he said in our ordinary thoughts,

feel it in our ordinary feelings, and reverse it into its opposite in our ordi-

nary deeds, but only if we passionately strive to learn from how he did it,

to experience the secrets of his practical spiritual art and craft, knowing

that doing what Rudolf Steiner did is the first step in transforming Anthro-

posophy into a science of resurrection. If this is the case, then the above

described ‘resurrection of ideas’ will become the beginning of a real meet-

ing with the etheric Christ, because Anthroposophy will not be degraded

yet again into a private reversed representation in us, but on the contrary,

it will be transformed, resurrected, and become a living spiritual way to

the Christ Himself:

When we really learn inwardly to speak the language of this spiritual life, the

result will be that Christ will stand by us and give us the answers Himself.

This is the attitude that our work in Spiritual Science should bring about in

us, as a sentiment, a feeling. Why do we occupy ourselves with Spiritual

Science? It is as though we were learning the vocabulary of the language

through which we approach the Christ.

This can be the only real—resurrected—meaning of the idea, that the ethe-

ric Christ will be able to work among Rudolf Steiner’s pupils beginning at

the end of the last century through his living etheric body! But do we really

believe in the resurrection of Rudolf Steiner’s ideas and impulses or is it a

mere phrase and cliché? If we do, we must demonstrate this in our daily

communal praxis, and all our work in the School of Spiritual Science can

be justified only to the extent that it actually brings about this resurrection

as a real event:

Believe therefore in the resurrection of ideas! Believe this so firmly that you will-

ingly seek union with your forefathers—not with your forefathers to whom

you are linked through ties of blood, but with your spiritual forefathers—

and that you will ultimately find them.... And he who in this way draws

support for his inner life from the past, learns that the past lives on in us, we

experience in ourselves the continuity of the past. And then—it is only a ques-

tion of time—the moment arrives when we are aware of the presence of the Christ.

Everything depends upon our firm faith in the Risen Christ and in the idea of

resurrection, so that we can now say: ‘We are surrounded by a world of spirit

and the resurrection has become a reality within us.’ ...The thoughts that have

newly arisen in me I owe to Christ; they could never have become so vitally alive but

for the incarnation of Christ.

Only in this way can you gain access—and this must be experienced as a

graceful gift—to the whole etheric body of Rudolf Steiner and experience

through it the real revelation of the etheric Christ here and now. And if we

truly experience what Rudolf Steiner said above about meeting the ethe-

ric Christ through actualizing His forces of resurrection, and if we apply

this to every word and deed that Rudolf Steiner ever said and did on the

earth in his physical life—then we will also develop the etheric capacity

to experience the unfinished, incomplete, unused, potentially remaining,

etheric part in his eternally living, active, vibrant etheric body. And you

will discover that this part becomes particularity useful and productive

in your supersensible researches, precisely due to the fact that it remained

potential. As I emphasized in the Foreward to The Spiritual Event of the

20th Century, these etheric forces actually lead us to the work of the

Michaelic school in 1933-45, just as they can lead us today to the presently

active etheric School of Michael.

This means that in order to access this purely spiritual part of the ethe-

ric body of Rudolf Steiner today, you have first of all to demonstrate your

capacity to spiritualize what Rudolf Steiner gave during his physical life,

to such an extent that this content will be transformed, in your life and

practice, to a new spiritual heart, eyes and ears. About this practice it makes

sense to speak only if we speak about concrete spiritual actions and their

results, and not remain only in general concepts. This practice will lead you

to experience your sleep differently. Your dreaming state will become more

clear and conscious, and the spiritualized results of this work will begin to

appear among your dreams. You will recognize the connection between the

spiritual work you accomplish in your waking state, and what happens in

your conscious dreams. This will be the first step.

Furthermore, you will notice the following: What the spiritual world is

doing in the night with the contents of this kind of anthroposophical prac-

tice during the day, returns to us in the morning—or during the day—as

an enlightening insight. We can feel truly enlightened by new thoughts,

connections and insights, that we know are related to questions and rid-

dles with which we are working in our daily consciousness. This enlight-

enment is an outcome of the transformed and resurrected materials we

are giving to the spiritual world when we go to sleep. But this means also

that what we receive back can only be based on these contents, expand-

ing and deepening them often in unexpected, novel ways, yet it is also

limited by them. This night enlightenment can only give us new insights

about the already given contents of Anthroposophy, but cannot offer us

entirely new contents, because it can only use what we bring with us from

our study of what was physically given by Rudolf Steiner until 1925. And

this is, of course, infinitely rich, so rich in fact, that a tremendous luciferic

temptation may easily overwhelm us, to continue to do only this forever!

But this kind of enlightenment cannot allow the etheric Christ to use the

etheric body of Rudolf Steiner to work directly in our wide awake daily

etheric cognition. For this something else is necessary.

To bring about this direct etheric connection with the etheric Christ

and the spiritual world through the etheric body of Rudolf Steiner, we

must take the next step in our anthroposophical practice, art and craft.

This stage comes about only if you prove that you can overcome death by

means of your own forces. Must it so surprise us, that to experience Rudolf

Steiner’s eternally living etheric body, and join the living Christ through

it, we must demonstrate in spiritual practice that we can use the forces

of resurrection in a wholly individual way? Real spiritual science as the

practical art and craft of cognition and life, is first of all the individuation

of the force of resurrection, and making this into a real organ, member

and faculty of our etheric body, as we showed in Cognitive Yoga. By means

of this etherized faculty of resurrection alone you can overcome the death

forces inherent in ordinary cognition, in ordinary thinking, feeling and

deeds, and develop the very first, most rudimentary stages of etheric per-

ception, cognition and life. Long before you acquire real imaginative fac-

ulties, you will become aware that real life forces are felt and are active in

you and all around you. This will become a real conscious experience not

only in your subjective inner life, where each one can imagine whatever

one will, but will be objectively confirmed in your community life, in the

heart quality of your real relations with life everywhere. Then the basic

conditions, subsidiary exercises and meditations given in Knowledge of the

Higher Worlds will become something entirely different. Everything will

come to life. Everything will appear resurrected. This is one of the most

significant discoveries that one makes, when one resurrects spiritual sci-

ence from its grave of the twentieth century and overcomes the forces of

death in a loyal and systematic way.

Among the new life forces, streams and sensations that one experi-

ences, one also will become conscious, through direct experience, of the

ever-present, vibrant life and activity of the etheric Christ impulse among

1. In the same etheric world, in which Christ’s etheric body is experi-

enced, Rudolf Steiner’s etheric body is also found. Factually, the two

bodies are experienced as most intimately woven together, so that if one

develops this etheric perception by means of the resurrected old Anthro-

posophy—and this is the first part of our task described yesterday—one

will always become aware of this fact, that the two bodies are most inti-

mately interwoven and intertwined together. When one has already come

thus far, one will be able to see and experience the above-mentioned four-

fold composition of Rudolf Steiner’s etheric body, and one will be able to

study it closely.

Then we will also experience that when we resurrect and spiritualize the

old Anthroposophy, and develop this etheric perception and experience,

we will learn how to experience, identify and use, in the etheric world, the

unique forces flowing out of all the four parts of the etheric body of Rudolf

Steiner. Then we learn to experience this body in its totality. Then one sees

that Rudolf Steiner’s death in 1925 was not at all predetermined and that,

in reality, his etheric body was prepared for a lifespan that would have

encompassed ten full seven-year periods, until the age of 70 in the year

1931. But furthermore, it is clearly visible that this part factually extends

beyond this point, and in the same organic consistency includes also the

next two years, until the completion of the human archetypal lifespan

of 72 years, which would have happened in the all-decisive year of the

twentieth century: 1933. I could now see—I didn’t calculate the physical

years and speculate about it—that this archetypal life span of 72 years

was—and still is today—the real time structure of his etheric body and

therefore could have supported his physical life and work until 1933. This

discovery opened the path, as I said, to what became the content of my lit-

tle book, The Spiritual Event of the 20th Century, because after the work on

The New Experience of the Supersensible was completed, it was possible to

experience the intimate connection that exists between the etheric Christ

and the etheric body of Rudolf Steiner.

Let us now look closely at the composition, structure and significance

of this wholly unique etheric body. As we said above, this body is clearly

divided into four main parts…

THE TWILIGHT AND RESURRECTION OF HUMANITY

THE HISTORY OF THE MICHAELIC MOVEMENT SINCE THE DEATH OF RUDOLF STEINER

AN ESOTERIC STUDY