עברית The new human meeting as the real training for spiritual perception and the modern Christ experience
How Do We Attain True Spiritual Perception?
The new human meeting as the real training for spiritual perception and the modern Christ experience
Excerpts from a Lecture at the Global School of Spiritual Science
18 April 2026
You would recall that we always insisted on the following: only if we meet the other person as real spiritual being, transforming our consciousness in this process, we may have the right to claim that we attained real spiritual experience. Otherwise, we may have all the theoretical knowledge about the higher worlds and speculate about it in our ordinary thinking and fantasies, which is so prevalent, but we will never come to any real experience of spiritual reality. The human meeting is the only true, testable, objective process, where we learn to perceive spiritual beings and spiritual reality. This is not taking place in my inner life, where I can easily fool myself with all my personal fantasies about ‘spiritual things’, but happens between me and another person, in the community as a whole, where things are tested and learned in real soul-spiritual praxis, and understood accordingly with sound judgment and clear thinking.
When we strive to meet the whole human being, not only those parts that we like, or the parts that we reject, that wo don’t like, as we do in ordinary life today, but when we go beyond our sympathies and antipathies, biases and prejudgments, can we overcome the ordinary ignoring and denying of his and her spiritual, divine, essence. Only then the true being of the other can be experienced. Only then we can also be justified to feel, that I can see not just the ordinary you but the Christ in you. I can feel the Christ in you because the Christ always perceives us as whole human beings. He perceives the real whole human being. We perceive only parts. But when we try to perceive the deeper, radiant, soul-spiritual being of the other human being, He's always on our side, and His help is very close. He stands by us because that's the way He experiences all existence and all beings, and all humans, all the time. And He tries inwardly to help us perceive ourselves and other people in this way. And He is helping us, whenever we try to do it in our meeting with someone else and in our meetings with ourselves as well. And when we meet each other in this way, and also if we meet ourselves in this way, the Christ there in our midst, helping, supporting, guiding, giving tips, and stimulating. He's always very active. That's the nature of this being. He's very active all the time. He doesn't take many holidays and days of rest. The more active He is, the happier He is.
So, he's always there to support and help us, and we just have to learn, as Rudolf Steiner said, to understand His language. Because we don't have to do anything special to make him appear or do something special. He’s always special. It's not our job to make Him appear or be there, because He is always, already, there. Even when—I often say it—even when we invite Him to come, which is well meant and very nice, with all our heartfelt hospitality, we should know that it's the other way around from His perspective. He invites us and awaits us to join Him. We spoke about it often previously. A friend has already invited you to his home, you can say, from before the beginning of the earth, before all creation begun, and what do you do? you invite him to your home instead of accepting his perennial invitation, and then you may seat there waiting, not understanding why he doesn’t come...
His invitation is eternally open, but we have to accept it freely and actively. Which means to hear the language, understand the language, and grasp what it means. And of course, here are the blockages on the way, those that we project. Because we naturally imagine how this meeting should be. We have our mental images, and we project them on everything we think, feel and do. We would usually project images taken from daily life onto spiritual things. We imagine spiritual things to be more or less similar to the physical sense perceptible things that we know. Perhaps we don't expect or imagine spiritual beings to appear like tables and chairs. however, even in a more subtle way, we cannot do otherwise. We simply have our representations of everything, and automatically, instinctively, when we think about an angel, immediately there is a physically based image in my consciousness. And I'm not saying we can avoid this that easily. But we can learn not to believe in our representations; to put all our existential convictions, judgements and beliefs in clammer, as Husserl did in developing his phenomenological method. In other words, to begin with we will not be able to separate thinking from representations and words, this demands some further spiritual development, but if we practice a little honest self-knowledge, we can become conscious that we created this representation, it’s our personal creation. We can see the representation that we created and not charge it with the power of existential belief; we can suspend our reality judgment based on this naïve, instinctive, belief that representations represent the true being of anything. And therefore, As The Philosophy of Freedom teaches us, to begin with, all our representations are subjective, doesn’t matter if we represent a table or angel. And that's the first step to move closer to experience what a table or angel really are: first to make this essential difference between our representations and the real Ding an Sich. (I described this process quite concretely in the second chapter of Cognitive Yoga, The Composition of Ordinary Cognition).
This holds true to all beings, incarnated or not, and also to the Christ. When we say the name ‘Christ,’ we immediately have so many representations of the Christ from what we learn, from what we study, from history, from art, from our own fantasies, and so on. They are there; we should learn to recognize them consciously and not overlook them. We should not deny this fact and remain in the standpoint of naïve realism. We cannot say, to begin with- unless I proved it otherwise through inner training- that I can think about the Christ and not imagine anything. This is not possible in ordinary daily thinking. We name and represent something, and then, of course, a mental image comes automatically without our volition. It's already there long before we become conscious that we did it, I formed it when I learned to speak and think in the first 3 years of my life, long before my adult consciousness was developed. Therefore, most of the time we remain unconscious of this fact. This is the reason why we practiced The Philosophy of Freedom for many years at the beginning of our school, because it’s the best way to overcome the naïve realistic belief in our representations, and distinguish pure thinking from representations and words.
What we can learn is to be aware of the mental images and don't believe that our images represent reality. Then we begin to experience- not in mere theory- that ‘this is my personally fabricated image of reality, and that reality must be very different from my personal image.’ And this opens a space for going deeper into the spiritual essence of the other being.
And this we do with each other in our human meetings as well. This is my image of you, which I created according to what I know about you from our previous meetings, and that’s what I see now. Even if I meet you for the first time, I have already created so many images regarding your appearance, the way you walk, speak, what other people told me about you, and so forth and so on. So, when I want to experience the deeper being of another person, I must be aware of my representation and reactions concerning him and her in my thinking, feelings, my will, desires and wishes, put them aside, and go deeper, asking seriously with my whole soul, ‘who are you in reality’?- transforming the known and habitual image of the other into the mysterious riddle, opening a path that may lead me to experience the wonderful cosmic, spiritual, divine being, that he and she really is.
You would recall that we always insisted on the following: only if we meet the other person as real spiritual being, transforming our consciousness in this process, we may have the right to claim that we attained real spiritual experience. Otherwise, we may have all the theoretical knowledge about the higher worlds and speculate about it in our ordinary thinking and fantasies, which is so prevalent, but we will never come to any real experience of spiritual reality. The human meeting is the only true, testable, objective process, where we learn to perceive spiritual beings and spiritual reality. This is not taking place in my inner life, where I can easily fool myself with all my personal fantasies about ‘spiritual things’, but happens between me and another person, in the community as a whole, where things are tested and learned in real soul-spiritual praxis, and understood accordingly with sound judgment and clear thinking.
This also means that when we want to listen inwardly to hear the speech and understand the language of the Christ, we have to be aware that it's not at all what we imagine it to be. It's rather very different because this is a spiritual voice, speech and language. It speaks in spiritual language, and this is not the same as our physical language. For example, it speaks within us, not from outside. We conveniently expect a spiritual being to speak to us from outside as physical human beings do. Naturally, we would expect to hear it from outside through our physical ears. But spiritual beings speak from within, not from outside. They speak in our thinking, in our feeling, and in our will from within.
In this way we get closer to attain this inner peace, tranquillity, inner calm, and inner listening to the spiritual voice that speaks. Because, as I say, this voice is so gentle, so intimate, it's so subtle that we simply don't hear it in the inner clutter and chatter of our soul and the bombardment of external impressions. It's not that it is not speaking; it’s speaking all the time, but we don't hear it because we are busy with our own internal and external noises. But the spirit voice is the voice of pure thinking, that flow into our soul in silence, not the voice of noise, as the prophet Elijah realized on Mount Horeb, already in the 9th century BC. So, when we quiet ourselves, we learn to hear this very subtle voice that is always speaking in our etheric hearts. We just don't hear it, because we don’t listen rightly.
Let us make this even clearer. When I meet the spiritual being of another human being, it's the opposite of the physical meeting. Physically, he stands before me, and we are separated by the space between us. Spiritually, he is within me, and I am within him. In fact, we don’t need to embrace each other physically, and we don’t need to merge into a single bodily entity, because we are already united. We just have to pay attention to the fact that when we meet, spiritually you are already in me and I am in you, and our souls- as Doctor says- passe over to each other between us. The bodies stand apart, the souls are dynamically exchanged, and the spirits are already united. You can say that this is the reality of all non-incorporated, non-incarnated souls, but it's also the reality of the incarnated souls and spirits in the spiritual reality of the physical world.
Because, again, let me repeat this, the spiritual world is here now. We live in a spiritual world here now, also when we live in our bodies. It's not only after death and in sleep that we are outside our bodies. It’s not enough just to remember theoretically Rudolf Steiner’s fundamental knowledge about the human constitution, we must apply it in our daily life. He says that only one third of our soul-spirit being is really incarnated in the physical body, and the other two thirds are not. Only our ordinary, wide awake, and conscious thinking and sense-perception, are bound to the brain; the real content of our feelings is only half incarnated, and therefore only half-conscious, and the real spiritual substance and power of the will is not incarnated at all, but only touches the body from outside, so to say, and therefore remains wholly unconscious. We must embody this knowledge in our soul life and etheric hearts, only then it will become reality for us, not mere theory. This means, dear friends, that as I speak at this moment to you, two thirds of my real soul-spiritual being are also outside my physical body and the same applies to you. My spiritual being lives in you and your being lives in me here and now, and only our brain-bound thoughts and sense-perceptions separate us. We are just not conscious of this, because the part of us that is always in the spiritual world, also between birth and death, from waking up to sleep, is unconscious for us. But we don’t have to leave our physical bodies, spatially speaking, take a spaceship with an alien, and go to another galaxy to meet spiritual beings and each other. We are united spiritually with each other, right here and now, all the time.
This is really the deeper element and the deeper level of the meeting with each other and with all spiritual beings, as well as with the etheric Christ in the etheric world, nearest to us. And I believe that what we hear from our meetings in the school demonstrates that we move in the right direction, because through our repeated exercises and deepening meetings with one another, this becomes more conscious among us. From one meeting to the next, you can feel that it is becoming more real, and we hear this from our school members as they report from the meetings, and it is becoming increasingly real, and it will become more and more real with more practice. And as permanent beginners, we must be happy because this is a good beginning, a solid beginning. Let's continue this and develop it in the coming years.