Death, the Father, is the seed of life, the Son. Eternal life in the Holy Spirit

   

Ex Deo Nascimur     In Christo Morimur     Per Spiritum Sanctum Reviviscimus

The Gospel of John and Its Relation to the Other Gospels

Lecture 13 of 14

Rudolf Steiner, Kassel

July 6, 1909

Yesterday we contemplated the significance that the Mystery of Golgotha has for human evolution on our Earth. But as every event in the world is connected through literally endless interrelationships with the evolution of the whole cosmos, we will fully understand the Mystery of Golgotha in its true essentiality only by throwing light on its cosmic significance as well.

We already know that the Being we designate the Christ Being descended to our Earth from supra-terrestrial regions and that It was seen in Its descent, so to speak: in ancient Persia by means of the clairvoyant faculty of Zarathustra It was perceived in the Sun, then by Moses in the burning bush and in the fire on Sinai, and finally by those who experienced the Christ event, in the presence of the Christ in the body of Jesus of Nazareth.

We know further that the events of this Earth, and particularly the evolution of mankind, are related to our solar system; for we have shown that the development of humanity, in the form it has actually taken, could never have come about had not a cosmic body, in which our present Sun and  Moon were still united with the Earth, cast out first the Sun and later the Moon, thereby establishing for the Earth a sort of position of equilibrium between Sun and Moon. Because man could not keep pace with the rapid development of the beings who sought the Sun as their field of action, the Earth had to be separated from the Sun; and because a continued union of Earth and Moon would have entailed a rapid hardening, an ossification, for mankind, the Moon, together with its substances and beings, had to be cast out as well. This made it possible for humanity to develop in the right way. But we learned yesterday that a certain remnant of this tendency to rigidity has nevertheless remained; and it would have sufficed to lead mankind into a state of corruption at the end of our Earth evolution had the Christ impulse not come. These considerations will give us an insight into our whole evolution.

At one time, then, Sun, Moon, and Earth constituted a single cosmic body. Then the Sun split off, leaving only Earth and Moon united. Finally our present Moon withdrew, and the Earth remained as the scene of human evolution. This occurred in the old Lemurian time, the period preceding the so-called Atlantean age which we have already discussed from various points of view. From that time forth, from the Atlantean into our own time, the Earth has developed in such a way that the Sun and the Moon forces have acted from without. Let us now consider the further progress of Earth development up to the entry of the Christ impulse, and let us concentrate on a quite definite moment of our Earth development: the moment in which the Cross was raised on Golgotha and the blood flowed from the wounds of Christ Jesus. Let us focus our attention on this moment in the evolution of our Earth.

Up to this point all that mankind had experienced had been determined by the entry, into the inner being of man, of the combined powers of the Luciferic and Ahrimanic beings; and we have seen that as a consequence of this intrusion man became amalgamated with the outer world in maya, or illusion: Ahriman prevented the outer world from manifesting itself in its true form, making it appear like a world consisting only of matter and solid substance — as though no spirit underlay all matter. For a long time, therefore — and this is still the case today regarding many factors in Earth development — the human being was placed in a state brought about by error, because he receives from his environment only the material sense impressions which he then elaborates in his conceptions. So by reason of this influence of Ahriman, or Mephistopheles, he has a false picture of the outer world and forms illusory and erroneous conceptions of the spiritual world.

But all spirit is bound up with physical effects, and we have seen what physical effects accompanied this distortion of outward perception. We have seen that, as a consequence of the Luciferic and Ahrimanic influences, human blood became ever less fitted to provide the faculty of seeing the outer world in its true light: a steady aggravation of illusion was bound up with the blood's deterioration, with the dissolution of blood as it had been in the age of consanguinity, with the dispersion and killing off of blood by commingling it. No longer could men consult the old wisdom they had once possessed as a legacy, a wisdom that told them: It is an error to believe that the outer world is nothing but matter; for if you consult the remnants of the old wisdom you inherited, these will tell you that a spiritual world underlies the physical world.

But these remnants kept dwindling, with the result that man became ever more dependent upon the physical world in regard to his entire soul life and his knowledge. That is what transformed all his physical impressions into delusions and deceptions; and had it not been for the intervention of the Christ influence he would ultimately have lost his whole heritage of ancient wisdom by being gradually reduced to complete dependence upon the outer sense world and its impressions. He would have forgotten the existence of a spiritual world — that is what would inevitably have occurred: he would have become blind to the spiritual world.

It is now incumbent upon us to consider in all its gravity a truth such as this: the danger of man falling into ever greater delusion and error concerning the outer world. It is not a simple matter to do this — to contemplate in all its implications and its seriousness such a fact as man's lapse into error regarding the outer impressions of the sense world. Try to understand what it means to recognize as maya, as delusion, all external impressions of the senses as they confront us in the physical sense world. We are asked to learn that phenomena and impressions, as they exist in the sense world and as they impress us, are false; and that we must learn to see their true form behind the external impressions they give.

There is one event to which it is especially difficult, as a rule, to apply the truth, to say to oneself: The form in which it confronts me in the outer world is untrue, is illusion — maya. Can you think what event I have in mind? It is death. As a result of the sort of impressions we have described, our comprehension has come to grasp only external physical events; and for this reason death, when faced in the physical world, bears certain attributes that render it impossible of contemplation other than from the standpoint of the outer physical world. Death is a phenomenon concerning which mankind has inevitably become entangled in particularly erroneous and fatal views; and the inference we must draw from this is that the form in which death presents itself is but maya — a delusion.

Before our eyes in the outer physical world a great variety of phenomena present themselves. There are the stars that intersperse cosmic space, yonder, the mountains, the plants, the animals; here is the world of our minerals, and here, too, we have man, together with all the facts we can gather by means of sense observation. And if we enquire into the origin of these phenomena, of this outer physical-sensible world which appears to us as a world of matter, we must answer, Their origin is in spirit: spirit underlies our physical-sensible world. Then, were we to seek the primordial form of spirit from which springs all that is physical and of the senses, we could not regard it as other than the basis of all being. In Christian esotericism this is the aspect of divinity known as the Father principle. It underlies everything that is creature. So what exactly is it that was hidden from man when all things became obscured by maya, or illusion? It was the divine Father principle. Instead of the mirage of the senses, man should see everywhere and in all things the divine Father principle, of which all things and he himself are a part. The Father principle, then, does not appear in its true form. Because of the decline in human faculties, of which we have spoken, we see the Father principle veiled by delusion, by maya.

What do we find woven into this great delusion? Among all the phenomena we perceive, one stands out as essentially fundamental: death. Therefore we should tell ourselves that the outer objects confronting our senses are in reality the Father principle, are expressions of the divine-spiritual Father element. And since death is interwoven in the totality of the sense world, it is something that pertains to the divine-spiritual Father principle. Owing to the nature of man's development the divine Father principle has become obscured for him by many a veil, and ultimately by the veil of death. What must man seek? The Father, the cosmic Father; and just as he must learn to think of every object as being in truth the Father, so he must come to feel that death, too, is the Father. And why does a false picture of the Father appear to us in the physical sense world? Why is it distorted into the grotesque image appearing to us so deceptively as death? Because the Lucifer-Ahriman principle has been infused into every phase of our life.

What was needed, therefore, to disabuse man of this false, deceptive view of death and to provide  a true conception of it was enlightenment arrived at by means of the facts in the case. Something had to occur whereby he could learn that what he had known about death, what he had felt about it — everything he had been impelled to do as a result of his conception of death — was untrue. An event had to take place which would show him the true aspect of death: its false form must be obliterated and its true one set forth. To substitute, through His deed, the true aspect of death for the false one, that was Christ's mission on earth.

It was owing to the interference of Lucifer-Ahriman in human evolution that death became the distorted image of the Father. Death was the consequence, the effect, of the influence of Lucifer-Ahriman. So what had to be done by Him Who would rid the world of this false face of death? Never could human life be released from this distorted form of death had not its source been removed — Lucifer-Ahriman. But that is something no earthly being could have accomplished. An earthly being can extinguish, within Earth development, anything brought about by earthly beings themselves, but not the Luciferic-Ahrimanic influence. This could be driven out only by a being that had not been on the Earth but out in cosmic space when Lucifer-Ahriman intervened, a being that came to Earth at a time when Lucifer-Ahriman had already fully entered the human body.

Now, this being did come to Earth and removed Lucifer-Ahriman, as we have seen, at exactly the right moment — eliminated the cause of all that had brought death into the world. This deed called for a being having nothing whatever to do with any causes of death among men. It had to be a being in no way connected with any cause of human death — that is, with anything brought about by Lucifer and later by Ahriman, with any individual human deeds done under the Lucifer-Ahriman influence — in short, with anything whereby men became guilty, fell a prey to evil. For the death of a being affected by any of these causes would have been justified. Only an undeserved death, undertaken by one without guilt — an utterly innocent death — could extinguish all guilty death.

An innocent being, accordingly, had to suffer death, wed death, submit to death; and by so doing He infused into human life those forces which will gradually create knowledge concerning the true aspect of death; that is, the realization that death as it appears in the sense world is not truth — that on the contrary, this death had to occur to provide for life in the spiritual world; that precisely this death forms, in fact, the basis of that life.

Thus the innocent death on Golgotha furnished the proof, which will gradually be comprehended by humanity, that death is the ever-living Father. And once we have achieved the right view of death, once we have learned from the event of Golgotha that external dying is of no importance, that in the body of Jesus of Nazareth there dwelt the Christ with Whom we can unite; once we have realized what Christ achieved, even though we see the image of death hung on the Cross, in rendering death a mere external event, that His life in the etheric body was the same before death as it was after this death, and that therefore this death cannot touch life — once we have understood that here is a death incapable of extinguishing life but is, rather, itself life, then the Christ on the Cross becomes the eternal emblem of the truth that death is in reality the giver of life. The plant comes forth from the seed: death is not the destroyer of life, but its seed. It has been sown in our physical sense world in order that the latter may not fall away from life, but may be raised into life. The refutation of death had to be furnished on the Cross by a contradictory death, by a death that was innocent.

We must now enquire what, exactly, was brought about by this event. From the previous lectures we know that as the fourth principle of his being man has an ego, and that as this develops, the blood is its outer physical instrument. Blood is the expression of the ego, hence with its steady deterioration the ego fell to an ever increasing extent into error, into maya, or illusion. Hence, also, man is indebted for the growing power of his ego to the circumstance that he is provided with blood. But this ego, in turn, he owes in its spiritual aspect to the fact of his having learned to distinguish himself from the spiritual world, of his having become an individuality. This capacity could not have been bestowed upon him otherwise than by temporarily cutting off his view of the spiritual world; and the agency that effected this was precisely death. Had man always known that death is the seed of life he would not have achieved independence for his ego, for he would have remained linked with the spiritual world. As it was, however, death appeared, gave him the illusion of being separated from the spiritual world, and so trained his ego to independence.

This ego principle, however, grew more and more independent: it exaggerated its independence, strained it past a certain point; and this condition could be counteracted only by the withdrawal of the force which had caused it. Hence the factor which would have induced exaggerated egotism, which would have fostered not merely the ego principle, egoism, but egotism — this factor had to be driven out. And this was accomplished in such a way that in the future it can be more and more eradicated from the individual egos as well: it was accomplished when death came on the Cross of Golgotha and the blood flowed from the wounds. In the blood flowing from Christ's wounds we have the factual symbol of the excessive egotism in the human ego. Just as blood is the expression of the ego, so the blood that flowed on Golgotha is the expression of excess in the human ego. Had not the blood flowed on Golgotha, man would have become spiritually hardened in his egotism and would have been doomed to the fate we described yesterday. But the blood that flowed on Golgotha gave an impetus for the gradual disappearance of the force that makes an egotist of the ego.

But every physical event has its spiritual counterpart, and as the blood flowed from the wounds on Golgotha there occurred a corresponding spiritual event: at this moment it happened for the first time that rays streamed forth from the Earth into cosmic space, where formerly there had been none. We must visualize, then, as created at this moment, rays streaming from the Earth into cosmic space. Darker and darker had the Earth become with the passing of time — up to the event on Golgotha. Now the blood flows on Golgotha — and the Earth begins to radiate light.

If in pre-Christian time some clairvoyant being had been able to observe the Earth from a distant cosmic body he would have seen the Earth's aura gradually fading out, and darkest immediately preceding the event on Golgotha. Then, however, he would have seen it shine forth in new colors. The deed on Golgotha suffused the Earth with an astral light that will gradually become an etheric and then a physical light. Every being in the world continues to evolve. What is today the Sun was first a planet; and just as the old Saturn became a Sun, so our Earth, now a planet, will gradually develop into a Sun. The first impetus in this direction was given when the blood flowed from the wounds of our Redeemer on Golgotha. The Earth began to shine — for the time being astrally, visible only to the seer; but in the future the astral light will become physical light and the Earth will be a luminous body, a Sun body.

I have explained repeatedly that no new cosmic body comes into being through the agglomeration of physical matter, but through the creation, by a spiritual being, of a new spiritual center, a new sphere of activity. The formation of a cosmic body begins in spirit. Every physical cosmic body was first spirit. What our Earth will ultimately become consists at present of the astral aspect of its aura which began to ray forth from the Earth at the time we are here considering: that is the first nucleus of the future Sun-Earth. But what a man of that time would have perceived with his misleading senses is a phantom: that has no truth, it dissolves, it ceases to be; and the farther the Earth moves toward its Sun state, the more will this maya be consumed and perish in the fire of the Sun. But through having been suffused at that time with a new force, through the newly created possibility for the Earth to become a Sun, it became possible as well for this same force to permeate man. This was the first impulse toward what I described yesterday: the radiating of the Christ force into the etheric human body; and thanks to the streaming in of this astral force it could start absorbing new vitality such as it will need in the distant future.

So if you will visualize the period in which the event of Golgotha occurred and then compare it with a later period — that is, if you compare a future condition of humanity with that which prevailed at the time of the event of Golgotha — you will find that at the time the Christ impulse intervened, the Earth of itself had nothing left to infuse into the etheric bodies of men. Some time later, however, the etheric bodies of those who had found a contact with the Christ impulse were irradiated: men who understood the Christ absorbed the radiant force that has been in the Earth ever since — the Earth's new radiance. They have taken the light of Christ into their etheric bodies. The Christ light streams into the etheric bodies of men.

And here we must ask, What takes place, now that there is always something of the Christ light in  human etheric bodies? What occurs in that part of the etheric body in which the Christ light has been received? What happens to it after death? What is it, in short, that gradually permeates the etheric body as a result of the Christ impulse? It is the possibility that was given at that time, as an effect of the Christ light, for something new to appear, something living and breathing and immortal, something that can never perish in death. While men on Earth are still misled by the illusory image of death, this new factor will nevertheless be rescued from death, will have no part in it.

Ever since that time, then, the human etheric body has held something that is not subject to death, to the death forces of the Earth. And this something which does not die with the rest, and which men gradually achieve through the influence of the Christ impulse, now streams back again — out into cosmic space; and in proportion to its intensity in man it generates a certain force that flows out into cosmic space. And this force will in turn create a sphere around our Earth that is in the process of becoming a Sun: a sort of spiritual sphere is forming around the Earth, composed of the etheric bodies that have come alive. The Christ light radiates from the Earth, but there is also a kind of reflection of it that encircles the Earth. What is here reflected as the Christ light, appearing as a consequence of the Christ event, this is what Christ called the Holy Spirit. Just as the event of Golgotha provided the first impetus for the Earth to become a Sun, so it is true that beginning with this event the Earth began to be creative, surrounding itself with a spiritual ring which, in turn, will in the future develop into a sort of planet circling the Earth.

Thus a momentous process that commenced with the event of Golgotha has since been unfolding in the cosmos. When the Cross was raised on Golgotha and the blood flowed from the wounds of Christ Jesus, a new cosmic center was created. We were present when that occurred: we were present as human beings, whether in a physical body or outside this physical life between birth and death. That is the way new worlds come into being; and we must comprehend that while we behold the dying Christ we stand in the presence of the genesis of a new Sun.

Christ espouses death, which on Earth had become the characteristic expression of the Father Spirit. Christ goes to the Father and unites with His manifestation, death — and the image of death is seen to be false, for death becomes the seed of a new Sun in the universe. If we feel this event, if we can sense this unmasking of death and realize that the death on the Cross becomes the seed from which a new Sun will germinate, then we shall understand why mankind on Earth must have felt and conceived of it as the supreme transition in human evolution.

There was once a time when men still possessed a vague, dim clairvoyance. They lived in a spiritual element; and as they looked back upon their lives — from their thirtieth to their twentieth year, from the twentieth to the tenth, and so on back to their birth — they knew that they had come to this birth from divine-spiritual heights. For them birth was not a beginning: as spiritual beings they saw not only their birth but their death as well, and they knew that something of spirit dwelt within them which this death could not touch. Birth and death in their present meaning did not exist as yet: they came later, and they acquired their untrue, deceptive form in the outer image of the Father. Death became the characteristic feature of this external aspect of the Father.

Then men, in contemplating death, saw it apparently destroying life, and death became more and more an image representing the contrast to life. Though life brought a large measure of suffering, death was considered the greatest suffering of all. What view of death must have been held by one who saw Earth events from without, saw how these Earth events were reflected in humanity before the appearance of the Christ? If he had descended from divine-spiritual heights as a higher being with  views differing from those of men, he would have been constrained, in contemplating mankind, to speak as Buddha spoke. This Buddha had come forth from his royal palace where he had been reared, and where he had seen only what elevates life. Now, however, as he came forth, he saw a suffering human being, then an aged man, and finally even a dead man. These experiences wrung from him the utterance: “Sickness is suffering, old age is suffering, death is suffering.” That is indeed the way it was felt by men; and in these words the common feeling burst forth from the great soul of Buddha.

Then Christ appeared. And then, after the lapse of another six hundred years — just as six hundred had passed between Buddha and Christ — there were those who understood, when envisioning the Cross and the dead Man upon it, that what hung upon the Cross was the symbol of that seed from which springs forth life in abundance. They had learned to sense the true nature of death. Christ espoused death, entered this death that had become the characteristic expression of the Father, united with this death; and from the union of Christ Jesus and death sprang the inception of a new life Sun. It is a false picture that shows death as synonymous with suffering: it is maya, illusion. Death, if permitted to approach us as it did Christ, is in reality the germ of life; and in the course of future ages men will come to recognize this. What men will contribute to a new Sun and a new planetary system will be proportionate to what they receive of the Christ impulse and then give of themselves in sacrifice, thus steadily adding to the radiance of the Sun of life.

Here the objection might be raised, So says spiritual science; but how can you reconcile a cosmology of that sort with the Gospel?— Christ enlightened those who were His disciples; and in order to prepare them for the most comprehensive revelations He employed the method that is indispensable if the loftiest truths are to be adequately understood: He spoke to His disciples in parables or, as it is worded in the German Bible, in “proverbs” (Sprichwörter) — that is, in transcriptions and parables. Then came the time when the disciples, having steadily matured, believed themselves able to receive the truth without its being clothed in proverbs; and the moment arrives in which Christ Jesus is prepared to talk to His apostles without proverbs, without parables. The apostles craved to hear the name, the significant name, for the sake of which He had come into the world.

Hitherto have ye asked nothing in my name: ask, and ye shall receive, that your joy may be full. These things have I spoken unto you in parables: but the time cometh, when I shall no more speak unto you in parables, but shall shew you plainly of the father.

Try to feel the moment approaching in which He would speak to His disciples of the Father.

At that day ye shall ask in my name: and I say not unto you, that I will pray to the Father for you:

For the Father Himself loveth you, because ye have loved me, and have believed that I came out from God. I came forth from the Father ...

He had, of course, come forth from the Father's true form, not from the deceptive image.

I came forth from the Father, and am come into the world: again, I leave the world, and go to the Father.

Now it dawns upon the disciples, whose understanding had ripened, that the world as it surrounds them is the expression of the Father, and that what is most significant precisely where the outer world is most densely shrouded in maya, in illusion, is equally the expression of the Father: that Death is the name for the Father. That is what came to them in a flash of comprehension. Only, the passage must be read aright.

His disciples said unto him, Lo, now speakest thou plainly, and speakest no parable. Now are we sure that thou knowest all things, and needest not that any man should ask thee: by this we believe that thou camest forth from God.

Jesus answered them, Now ye believe. [1]

Behold, the hour cometh, yea, is now come, that ye shall be scattered, every man to his own, and shall leave me alone: and yet I am not alone, because the Father is with me.

These things have I spoken unto you, that in me ye might have peace. In the world ye shall have tribulation: but be of good cheer; I have overcome the world.

Did the disciples know whither He was about to depart? Yes, from now on they knew that He would go to meet death, to wed death. — And now read again what He said to them after they had learned the meaning of the words: “I came forth from death”— that is, from death in its true form, the life-Father — “and am come into the world: again, I leave the world, and go to the Father.” And to this the disciples replied: “Now are we sure that thou knowest all things, and needest not that any man should ask thee: by this we believe that thou camest forth from God.”

Now the disciples knew that the true form of death is founded in the divine Father Spirit; that death as it is seen and felt by men is a deceptive phenomenon, an error. Thus Christ reveals to His disciples the name of death behind which is hidden the fount of transcendent life. Never would the new life-sun have come into being had not death entered the world and been overcome by Christ. Death, therefore, when contemplated in its true form, is the Father; and Christ came into the world because a false reflection of this Father had arisen in the aspect of death. Christ came to create the true form, a true image of the living Father-God. The Son is the issue of the Father, and His mission was to reveal  the true form of the Father. Verily, the Father sent His Son into the world that the true nature of the Father be made manifest: life eternal, veiled behind temporal death.

All this is not only the cosmology of spiritual science. It is what is needed to extract the full, profound import from the Gospel of St. John. He who wrote that Gospel thereby established, so to speak, the loftiest truths of which he could say to himself that in these mankind would find sustenance for all future time. And in proportion as mankind learns to understand and practice these truths it will attain to a new wisdom and will grow into the spiritual world in a new way. But as this will come about only by degrees, it was necessary that in the meantime the guides of Christian development should provide for the creation of what may be called auxiliary books to function side by side with the Gospel of St. John, books not intended only for the most willing and understanding — such as is the John Gospel, meant as a legacy of Christ for all eternity — but suitable for the immediate present.

Thus there appeared in the first place a book from which people of the first Christian centuries could learn, in the measure of their understanding, the essence of what they needed to comprehend the Christ event. Even here, of course, there were but few in proportion to the whole of mankind who could glean from this auxiliary book the exact nature of what it contained for them. This first book of its kind, not intended for the innermost circle but still for the chosen ones, was the Gospel of St. Mark. This Gospel embodies precisely those features that held an intimate appeal, so to speak, for a certain type of understanding then prevalent (we shall come back to this). Then it gradually became less intelligible, human comprehension turning more in the direction of seeing most clearly the full force of Christ in its inner value for the soul and in a certain contempt for the outer physical world.

Next followed a period in which men were imbued with the feeling: 'Worthless are all temporal goods; true riches are found only in the properly developed inner self of man.' This was also the time in which, for example, Johannes Tauler wrote his book Von armen Leben Kristi (The Pitious Life of Christ): the time in which the Gospel of St. Luke was the one best understood. Luke, a disciple of Paul, was one of those who gave Paul's own gospel a form adapted to the time, stressing the “pitious life” of Jesus of Nazareth, born in a stable among poor shepherds. We recognize das arme Leben Kristi as mirroring the account in the Luke Gospel, a second subsidiary book for the further development of humanity.

In our time there will be those who can best learn what they are able to understand, as it accords with our age, from the Gospel of St. Matthew. People of our period, though perhaps referring less frequently to the name “Matthew,” will nevertheless select more and more what corresponds with the Matthew Gospel. The time will come when people will point out that it is impossible to understand the supersensible events that took place at the Baptism in the Jordan, as we have described them. That is an understanding which will come to many only in the future. We are approaching an epoch in which He Who, in the thirtieth year of His Life, received the Christ into Himself, will be increasingly thought of as“the simple man of Nazareth” — even by theological research.

Those who feel this way about it, those to whom the simple man of Nazareth is of supreme importance and who attach less significance to the Christ than to the lofty initiate — those, in short, who want Jesus of Nazareth — will feel the Matthew Gospel to be preeminently significant, at least in its import. A materialistically thinking age can say: We open the Matthew Gospel and find a genealogic record, a table of heredity that shows us the ancestors of Jesus of Nazareth chronologically. It runs from Abraham down through three times fourteen generations to Joseph; and we are told that Abraham begat Isaac, Isaac begat Jacob, and so on and so forth. It runs to Joseph and Jesus of Nazareth; and the reason this is stated is to make quite clear the possibility of tracing back to Abraham the physical line of heredity of that body into which Jesus of Nazareth, as an individual, had been born. Leave out Joseph, and the whole table becomes meaningless. To speak of a supersensible birth in the face of this table robs the latter of every vestige of sense; for why should the writer of the Matthew Gospel take the trouble to trace a line of ancestry through three times fourteen generations if he intended to follow this by saying that in respect of the physical flesh Jesus of Nazareth was not descended from Joseph? The only way in which the Gospel of St. Matthew can be understood is by stressing the fact that through Joseph the individuality of Jesus of Nazareth was born into a body which had actually descended from Abraham. The purpose of this table was to emphasize the impossibility of omitting Joseph, within the meaning of the Matthew Gospel; and it follows that neither can Joseph be ignored by those who fail to understand the supersensible birth in the sense of the Baptism in the Jordan.

But the Matthew Gospel was originally written in a community which placed the greatest value not upon Christ, but upon the individuality that stood before men in the person of Jesus of Nazareth, the initiate. Underlying the Matthew Gospel was the initiate wisdom known to the Ebionite Gnostics, and this Gospel is based upon a document from that source as its model. Prime importance was placed on the initiate, Jesus of Nazareth; and all else connected with the matter becomes far clearer still by reason of its being embodied in the Ebionite gospel. But this is precisely what makes possible a certain approach to the Matthew Gospel — one which is not exactly demanded by it, for actually it is not implied, but which can be read into it: The Gospel of St. Matthew may be interpreted as implying that we are not dealing here with a supersensible birth. On the other hand, what is presented in the Matthew Gospel may be regarded as the symbol of a God — one who is simply called a God, one who, as a God, is really only a human being — even though this was not what Matthew meant. But those who nowadays base their standpoint upon Matthew — and they will do so more and more — will interpret the matter in that way.

In order that no man wishing to approach the Christ may be denied the opportunity of doing so, the Matthew Gospel provides for those who are unable to rise from Jesus to Christ: it is a rung in the ladder which they can ascend to Jesus of Nazareth. The mission of spiritual science, however, is to guide men upward to an understanding of the Gospel of Gospels, the Gospel of St. John. Every other Gospel should be regarded as complementary to it. In the John Gospel are to be found the reasons for the existence of the others, and we shall understand these aright only by studying them on the basis of the John Gospel.

A study of the Gospel of St. John will lead to a comprehensive understanding of what took place on Golgotha; to an understanding of the Mystery by means of which death, in the untrue form it had assumed in human evolution, was refuted. And men will further learn to grasp the fact that through the deed of Golgotha not only was it revealed to human cognition that death is in reality the source of life, but man was provided with an attitude toward death which permitted him to infuse more and more life into his own being, until ultimately it will become wholly alive — that is, until he will be able to rise from all death, until he has overcome death. That is what was revealed to Paul when he saw the living Christ on the road to Damascus — when he knew: Christ liveth — as he gazed with his newly found clairvoyance into what constituted the environment of the Earth. As an Old Testament initiate he knew that until then the Earth had lacked a certain light, but now he saw that light in it; hence the Christ was present; hence also, He Who had hung on the Cross was the Christ in Jesus of Nazareth.

Thus there came to Paul, on the road to Damascus, an understanding of what had taken place on Golgotha.

Related post:
https://martyrion.blogspot.com/2019/12/the-holy-spirit-eternal-life.html

Source: The Rudolf Steiner Archive

http://wn.rsarchive.org/GA/GA0112/19090706p02.html

“yes I said yes I will Yes”

 

At-one-ment

Washed in the Blood of the Lamb are We

Awash in a Sonburst Sea

You—Love—and I—Love—and Love Divine:

We are the Trinity

You—Love—and I—We are One-Two-Three

Twining Eternally

Two—Yes—and One—Yes—and also Three:

One Dual Trinity

Radiant Calvary

Ultimate Mystery

Rudolf Steiner:  "Intuition is a result of will exercises. In that way man learns to see into what is otherwise always concealed in waking life; he learns to look into the mysteries of the human will. The human will is a mystery even for waking life; it is revealed partly by inspiration, but only intuition finally unveils it. Paradoxical as it may sound, once man has succeeded in perceiving the true nature of his own will he also has insight into the divine spiritual world. In the head organization the spiritual world is contained only in physical metamorphosis; not much of the spiritual world as such can be discovered there. The human head is actually the least spiritual part of man. But the remaining physical organization contains the unchanged soul life the way it was when man dwelt in pre-earthly life without physical and etheric bodies. In this soul life that lives concealed in the will, man is wholly spirit even between birth and death. Through intuition one can now discern the nature of this spirit. The spirit that is unveiled to intuition as the element that underlies the will appears to this perception as the reservoir for everything a person has undergone during earth life in the form of intellectual activities of the mind and soul-initiatives, as moral inclinations and impulses in the soul. As I have already indicated from another standpoint, this is revealed as the younger part of the soul, the part that remains in an embryonic state in our present earth life and is at the beginning of its development. If we look at this part of the soul, we behold something in man's inner being that heads toward death in order to be actually born only at death, just as the soul in pre-earthly existence approaches earth life in order to be born into it through conception and birth. Beneath our will lives the soul embryo which reveals its embryonic life when intuitive perception beholds its true nature. We can tell by its nature how it is born to a new spiritual life at death, just as we can tell by the appearance of the human soul in pre-earthly life that it enters earthly existence through birth. In order to gain insight into physical existence, it is therefore our concern to become acquainted — to begin with in supersensible existence — with the soul being that underlies the will."

“yes I said yes I will Yes”

Source: The Rudolf Steiner Archive

September 13, 1922

Our Holy Spirit leads an embryonic existence between birth and death, and is only born with our death

 

Rudolf Steiner:  "Intuition is a result of will exercises. In that way man learns to see into what is otherwise always concealed in waking life; he learns to look into the mysteries of the human will. The human will is a mystery even for waking life; it is revealed partly by inspiration, but only intuition finally unveils it. Paradoxical as it may sound, once man has succeeded in perceiving the true nature of his own will he also has insight into the divine spiritual world. In the head organization the spiritual world is contained only in physical metamorphosis; not much of the spiritual world as such can be discovered there. The human head is actually the least spiritual part of man. But the remaining physical organization contains the unchanged soul life the way it was when man dwelt in pre-earthly life without physical and etheric bodies. In this soul life that lives concealed in the will, man is wholly spirit even between birth and death. Through intuition one can now discern the nature of this spirit. The spirit that is unveiled to intuition as the element that underlies the will appears to this perception as the reservoir for everything a person has undergone during earth life in the form of intellectual activities of the mind and soul-initiatives, as moral inclinations and impulses in the soul. As I have already indicated from another standpoint, this is revealed as the younger part of the soul, the part that remains in an embryonic state in our present earth life and is at the beginning of its development. If we look at this part of the soul, we behold something in man's inner being that heads toward death in order to be actually born only at death, just as the soul in pre-earthly existence approaches earth life in order to be born into it through conception and birth. Beneath our will lives the soul embryo which reveals its embryonic life when intuitive perception beholds its true nature. We can tell by its nature how it is born to a new spiritual life at death, just as we can tell by the appearance of the human soul in pre-earthly life that it enters earthly existence through birth. In order to gain insight into physical existence, it is therefore our concern to become acquainted — to begin with in supersensible existence — with the soul being that underlies the will."

Continued:

"yes I said yes I will Yes"

The Holy Spirit

Source: The Rudolf Steiner Archive

September 13, 1922

Solving the Riddle of Death : Christian Philosophy

     

Philosophy, Cosmology, and Religion

"The French Course" ~ Lecture 8 of 10

Rudolf Steiner, Dornach, Switzerland

September 13, 1922

Since I plan to describe the problem of human death and the soul's immortality in relation to the Christ and Christianity's development, it will be necessary today for me to throw light once again from a different viewpoint on some of the topics I have already presented here.

When we look at the two conditions of waking and sleeping that alternate in daily human life, we find that during sleep, in regard to ordinary consciousness, man's sense perception is suspended and that what he experiences in his soul life as thinking, feeling and willing is also extinguished. Everything that we as human beings sum up as our “self” when we are awake is actually extinguished.

All that is here extinguished will now be rekindled bit by bit through imagination, inspiration and intuition. Meditation must first deal with ordinary thinking in order to produce imaginative thinking. I have described how thoughts are employed so that through meditating imaginative perception is attained. Particularly concerning the problem of death, it is necessary to clarify still further what is experienced on the path of initiation knowledge, for only then does it become clear what kind of a relationship man acquires in regard to his physical body and his soul-spiritual being when death occurs.

When thinking is used in meditation in the manner I have described it, the first experience of a person is that he actually cannot think for a while as he feels himself with his whole soul to be outside the physical organization. To a degree, thinking is, as it were, for a short time forgotten. It takes a certain amount of courage, inner energy, and also a certain presence of mind to experience this moment with full awareness. But then, as he awakens to renewed awareness, he notices that he experiences a much stronger activity of thought in his soul than he has had earlier. Thinking begins again.

Man progresses in the following way. To start he has his ordinary consciousness — I emphasize that ordinary consciousness is retained during genuine imagination — , then he must find his way into the other form of consciousness, and back again. While the ordinary, earthly view of things is naturally preserved as far as ordinary consciousness is concerned, in this other state of mind that man can enter he loses the capacity, so to speak, to produce thoughts. A stronger activity of thought sets in, however, as meditation is continued; a more pronounced, inner thought experience is acquired. In ordinary consciousness the thoughts that are experienced have to do mostly with the outer sense world and memories. Also, there are dim thoughts that arise out of any number of emotional experiences. Now, in this higher state of consciousness, man possesses a thinking with which he can call up into awareness in active thoughts the course of his own life from birth to the present moment in the manner I have described. This, however, has to do with a deeper layer of the course of man's life. I have already mentioned that they are not the memories a person also has in ordinary consciousness; these are on a deeper level. Man actually sees into an etheric process that builds up, saturates and penetrates, indeed, has always penetrated, the physical organization. Everything that has occurred since birth in the physical body as growth was produced in it — how the separate organs were plastically formed, how our capacities of thinking, feeling, and willing were drawn out of the depths of the bodily organization, everything connected with organic life that is otherwise hidden from consciousness — all of this shoots up in the form of active, inwardly experienced, substantial thoughts. In a certain sense man passes from ordinary thinking across an abyss to a thinking that experiences its own etheric body.

In developing imaginative thinking in this way, strict attention must be paid to what escapes you during the moments when you are within this imaginative thinking. The first thing you actually lose are your memories. You have the memories in ordinary consciousness, but alongside this ordinary consciousness, the other imaginative consciousness develops. In it, no memories exist. I ask you to clarify this to yourselves through the following explanation. When you recall anything as in all experiences of ordinary consciousness, you actually live in the present. You perceive what confronts you at the present moment and you think thoughts about it, and if you remember something of the past you nevertheless have before you in your mind a picture in the present moment that merely points to the past. Hence, ordinary consciousness experiences the present. Imaginative consciousness experiences its own life's course in such a way that the individual stages are surveyed all at once as if the things existing in time were spread out in space. Just as you experience one thing alongside another simultaneously in sense perception, so you now experience your own past on earth, all at once. Time becomes like space. The events you have lived through in your thirtieth, eighteenth, tenth, seventh or fifth year stand before the soul side by side.

In this way the experiences of imaginative consciousness differ from those of ordinary consciousness. Ordinary consciousness lives in the present, for the past it only has its memories. Imaginative consciousness experiences different times but in such a way that these time periods appear simultaneously before the soul. I said that recollections, the memory thoughts, slip away first. This is really the case. In imaginative consciousness man does not possess a memory or recollections, faculties that in his ordinary consciousness are a great help to him in life. It goes without saying that the capacity of memory in his normal human nature remains as it was because the ordinary human being remains unchanged alongside the new faculty. But man cannot remember his newly acquired imaginative experience of the ordinary course of his life. Let us assume that at a given moment a person experiences his life's course in imaginative consciousness. If in three days he wants to relive it again, he will not be able to recall what he has experienced today. He must repeat the same efforts that led him to experience the course of his life. Again, he must do the exercises that lead to this experience. Just as a real, physical object cannot actually be present in your memory — you have to walk over again to where it is located — so what you now experience, namely your etheric body, cannot simply be called up by memory, for it is a living reality. It has to be summoned anew again and again.

This is something that disappoints many people who do such soul exercises. They set about doing them and achieve and see something. They assume that they can retain this view, that they can call it up again any time in memory. They are unable to do this and are disillusioned. The efforts have to be renewed each time in order to produce the experiences inwardly again. Let me give an example. Assume that a person gives a lecture, basing his talk on the new science of meditation. He lectures in such a way that he has not turned everything into abstract ideas but rather speaks out of living perception. He therefore cannot prepare himself by memorizing what he has in mind. Matters pertaining to the physical world can be memorized but not those relating to imaginative consciousness, for they always have to be produced anew. A person can indeed prepare himself, but this preparation is a kind of exercise. It is like acquiring a skill through practice. Earnest, constant meditation and practice help you to bring forth what you want from the supersensible world. But it must be produced in the present moment, it must arise instantly, if it is to come out of the spiritual world in truly alive form. It then contains the immediate echo of the spiritual in its formulation, its expression. Forgive me if I mention something personal here. I have perhaps spoken already thirty or forty times about one subject. It makes it no easier for me to speak on it for the thirtieth time. It is just as hard as it was the first time, for it is always the same process again. As a basis for producing such material a person needs composure and quiet so that the subject can arise out of a calm soul. Perhaps it is unnecessary, but to make myself clear I might add that in this regard an audience that expects a person to lecture on some aspect of the spiritual world is often really cruel to him — naturally the present audience is always excepted. It may be acceptable in a professorial lecture but not in a spiritual one that any number of persons come up prior to a lecture and ask all kinds of questions without considering at all that in the next moment facts from the spiritual world are to be brought forth.

In this way I have sought to describe to you the subjective experience of one who has imaginative consciousness. Because a person knows within his own mind how this active, living thinking comes to the surface, which now has as its content his own life's course, he also understands the nature of ordinary thinking. From the vantage point of imaginative consciousness he can now look back on ordinary thinking and arrive at the realization that in itself it has no reality at all. Actually, everyone lives in imagination. He does so unconsciously, carrying this substantial thinking within himself. But because he has not strengthened his soul forces sufficiently, his soul is too weak to lift into consciousness what is within him. When he wants to think, therefore, he always takes hold of his physical body. That becomes for him the basis of ordinary consciousness. But what actually happens there?

Because this inner activity — which even in ordinary consciousness is unconscious imagination — turns to the physical organism, it slips right into it. This unconscious imagination of which man knows nothing, which remains unconscious until it lights up in imaginative knowledge as active thinking, slips in ordinary consciousness into the physical organism and makes use of it. Then, as imaginative consciousness, which does not know what it is since it remains unconscious, it is reflected in the form of inner mirror-reflections. These, then, are the ordinary thoughts. They have as little reality as mirrored reflections have in relation to the objects standing before a mirror. Something is reflected back to us from our physical body, and these are the thoughts that arise in ordinary consciousness, merely mirror images. He who experiences these thoughts, therefore, experiences nothing substantial. There is no strength, no life in these thoughts of ordinary consciousness. At the moment, however, when active thinking sets in through imagination there is substance in thinking. In every imaginative thought there is substance and energy. You know that with this imaginative thinking you live within a force like the one that brought you from the state of childhood to that of a grown human being.

When a person works his way through to imaginative thinking, he actually passes to begin with from ordinary, physical reality to etheric reality. But in doing so he now receives the first insight into the physical body. He sees it as a reflecting apparatus that throws the thoughts back to the human being. Along with this, man begins to approach the problem of death, for it is not until his physical body becomes for him an external object that he can consider the problem of death. If man actually still exists as a being after death, he is quite certainly not present in his physical body. If, therefore, he wants to solve the problem of death while he is alive, he must have his physical body outside himself and view it as objectively as is the case, relatively speaking, when the body is beside or outside the human entity in death.

This characterizes the first step toward solving the problem of death. In the second part of today's lecture we shall discuss what else is required.

---

On the basis of a perception such as I have described to you, man is really in a position to judge how the soul-spiritual in the human being relates to the corporeal-physical. Not until he can objectively survey the physical organization, the etheric body and the soul-spiritual by means of the imaginative as well as the subsequent methods of super-sensible cognition, can he perceive how the two parts conduct themselves in the various stages of life. It is therefore of immense importance to bear in mind that in the super-sensible perception of which I am speaking here man retains the ordinary consciousness he possesses in everyday, waking life alongside all the other perceptual experiences. Already in imaginative consciousness, when he confronts something of his past life — for instance, the manner in which certain traits appeared in connection with the processes of growth when he was still a child of nine or ten, how moral tendencies, etc., arose — he perceives all this because he has before him the unity of the physical and soul nature at age nine or ten. He observes what took place then in the organism. But at the same time, he must retain his everyday consciousness. This means that he must now have this view of the ninth or tenth year of his life which reveals something that otherwise remains entirely unconscious; on the other hand, at his own discretion, he must be able to bring to mind instantaneously the memories that he has in ordinary consciousness, which carry him back in the normal way to his ninth or tenth year. Man must always be able to compare the one with the other, the higher with the ordinary consciousness. In the same way that he usually passes from one thought to another he must pass back and forth between an experience in imaginative consciousness and one in ordinary consciousness.

This characteristic of the higher consciousness referred to here is especially important. Those people who judge anthroposophical research only from the outside frequently believe that what appears as imagination can be dismissed like the hallucinations of some visionary. But you must become aware of the radical distinction that exists between true imagination and a vision. A vision certainly conveys a pictorial content also, but man is completely bound up in his vision. While the vision goes on, his consciousness has transformed itself into it and he cannot go back and forth at will from the vision to his ordinary consciousness. In contrast, a person who experiences imaginative consciousness has not transformed his ordinary consciousness into a vision, he has enriched it with imagination. He has added what he already possesses in ordinary consciousness to what he has attained in imagination. A person with imaginative consciousness therefore firmly rejects the common visionary experience, but he can also discern the visionary's predicament in life. For, whoever has achieved the heights of perception indicated here can observe in detail how a soul is inwardly active, in what way it employs the physical organism so that the body can reflect the thoughts back to it.

The person experiencing imagination and inspiration is familiar with the soul's relationship to the physical body in normal consciousness. He therefore can also form a judgement about a visionary. In the case of a visionary the soul has not become free of the body. The person who possesses imaginative consciousness knows what it means for the soul to be free of the physical body, for he has actually lifted the soul out of the body and has driven it into activity. When he observes a visionary, however, he sees that such a person's soul is submerged more within the physical body than is the case when it perceives the outer world with ordinary consciousness.

This is the difference between a person who has imaginative consciousness and the visionary. The visionary immerses himself more deeply into his body's functions than one does in ordinary life, while in imagination man actually emerges out of the physical organization. But at the same time, the ordinary soul content in the physical organism is consciously retained. If the vital significance of this difference is not recognized, if imagination is not kept under rigorous control by ordinary thinking which is retained side by side with imagination, the latter will always be confused with visionary activity that has no accompanying control, for there a man simply descends further into his physical body, and what appears to him as his vision is perhaps only a passing indisposition of his liver or stomach which was already present in ordinary life, but into which he has now submerged himself.

On the other hand, the imaginations of a person with imaginative consciousness have nothing to do with his bodily organs. He consciously looks into a part of his soul of which he was previously unaware. Imaginative consciousness therefore does not lead away from ordinary consciousness to something visionary, as some people believe. Rather, the schooling, the exercises for cultivating imaginative consciousness are a precise antidote for all uncontrollable, visionary elements. You do not develop in the direction of visions but in the opposite direction. The goal is to become free of the physical organization, and, in addition, to be able to utilize the soul in imagination, to start with the etheric organism, in order to arrive at a substantial, real thinking. In ordinary life, the physical body represents substantiality and what you possess in addition to it are mirror images in thinking that have no substance, no real, inner activity. It is precisely the contrast between the supersensible insights referred to here, and the visionary life, that makes it abundantly clear what is meant here by imagination, inspiration, and intuition in the higher consciousness.

Again, you see how you can gradually learn to comprehend the relationship of the soul-spiritual to the physical bodily nature by means of such perception. You realize that visionary activity can arise when someone's soul descends more deeply into the physical body during earthly life. But you can also understand what it implies to be outside your physical body, and what the soul experience is like at a time when you are outside your body. By means of this psychic-spiritual experience outside the body you sense and experience in advance how you must live when you no longer have a physical body. This means that the problem of death is solved within physical earth existence, for you must be able to live in a condition in which you will find yourself one day when you no longer possess your physical body. I ask you to understand that it is my aim to show how the problem of death can be approached and characterized with the greatest discernment, for this problem is nowadays dealt with so often in an amateurish fashion. But I want to make it clear that, above all in anthroposophical research, all the circumspection in thinking that could be demanded is indeed used to consider this problem. For this reason, I have not hesitated to formulate today's lecture in a more exact way so as to have a good basis for comprehending the problem of death. More concerning this will follow in the third part of today's considerations.

If we acquire a view of man's soul-spiritual constitution on the one side and his physical-bodily organization on the other, then when we rise to imaginative, inspirational perception, and so on, we can survey the relationship that exists between the two — as I said earlier — in any given situation of man's life. Several days ago, I described how, in descending from the soul-spiritual world, man works on the creation of his own physical organization, how it then falls away from him and how he finds it again in another way through conception and birth. I described furthermore how the problem of birth appears when it is viewed from the standpoint of pre-earthly existence. Now, let us look more into earthly existence, as it is placed between the events of birth and death, for if we want to arrive gradually at an understanding of death, we must be able to link death to birth or conception by means of earthly life.

Particularly, when we observe the way the soul-spiritual in pre-earthly existence relates to what a man bears as physical body in earthly life, we can arrive at the realization that one part of the soul-spiritual — a part that man also possesses in pre-earthly existence — is completely transformed due to conception and birth. While it is still present in pre-earthly life, it now actually disappears; it is the part out of which thinking has developed. It is there in pre-earthly life but disappears as a soul-spiritual element the moment man arrives on the earth. Traces of it remain in the infant, but gradually this part of soul-spiritual life disappears entirely. What has happened to it?

The part that here disappears has been transformed into the life and form of the human head organization. Now understand this correctly: It is entirely wrong to believe that the whole soul-spiritual configuration of man exists as such in pre-earthly life and then, on earth, it receives a kind of house by means of the body into which it enters and lives. It is quite wrong to think in this way about that part of the soul I now referred to above. That part fades and disappears; it is transformed into a really physical material thing, namely our head organization. The life and form of our head organization is a physical metamorphosis of a soul-spiritual element of our pre-earthly existence. Look at your head organization. I do not mean now merely the head that falls off when one is beheaded, but the head with its whole inner content, with all the nerves running into it, and the blood circulation insofar as it is cerebral blood circulation. All this is a result of the transformation of a part of man's pre-earthly sojourn. This part of pre-earthly soul life disappears into the head organization. As a result of the fact that our head organization represents a real metamorphosis of what we possess in our pre-earthly life, and because we behold in the human head a true physical replica of our pre-earthly existence, this head is a real mirror for reflecting thoughts. This has come about because the head has formed and enlivened itself as a physical organism out of the experienced thoughts of the pre-earthly life. This way it is a mirror for the thoughts we form by means of all the sense perceptions.

By contrast — I might say, on the other side of the soul's life — another part of the soul emerges that passes in man through conception and birth and does not transform itself into the physical corporeality but comes only into loose contact with man's metabolic and limb systems. It is that part of the soul life that is ordinarily experienced in its reflections, as will. Compare the will with the conceptual life, with thinking. As human beings we are always fully conscious in the life of thoughts when we are awake. Indeed, “awake” actually means “living in thoughts.” It is not so with the will. Take the simplest act of will, the raising of an arm or hand. How much of this are you fully conscious of? In waking consciousness, you first have the idea: I will raise my hand. — Then something happens that runs its course in the depths of your bodily organization. You may experience all kinds of undefined feelings, shreds of emotions and the like, but what you next experience clearly and in full wakefulness is the result: The arm is raised — you can see it. Ordinary consciousness is as unaware of what takes place in the depths of the organism in the actual sphere of the will between the resolve to do something and the accomplished action as it remains unconscious of events during sleep. We are awake in our thought life; in our actual life of will we sleep even when we are awake.

This partial life of sleep that becomes evident in our will is therefore a sleep that also permeates our waking condition. We are always asleep in one part of our soul even when we are awake, namely, in that part where the will is rooted. Now this is the part of the soul that is not transformed into the physical organization at the time it undergoes human conception and birth. One part of the soul reappears in the physical world after birth as man's head organization. The metabolic- and limb-system, on the other hand, is not a direct replica of that other part of the soul; it is born out of the physical world. The will-segment of the soul has linked itself with it in a loose way; for this reason, the metabolic-and limb-system does not mirror what the soul experiences. This is why man is asleep in his will and also in relation to his metabolic- and limb-system even when he is awake. When this part of the soul is observed by supersensible perception in its relationship to the physical organization, it bears a strong similarity to the relationship of the ego and astral body, the whole soul, to the entire physical organization during sleep. Indeed, man is a much more complicated being than is usually believed. There are certain descriptions of the supersensible which simply state: When a person is awake, his soul-spiritual nature is within his physical-etheric organization, when he sleeps it is outside. But the matter is not as simple as this; at most, one can speak in this way of the head organization, but not of the rest of man's corporeality. For in regard to this remaining organization, a part of the soul sleeps even when the human being is awake.

This part of the soul's life that is asleep and arises from the dark depths of man's organization only in certain mental images is brought into view the moment a person attains to intuition, for, as I have shown, intuition is a result of will exercises. In that way man learns to see into what is otherwise always concealed in waking life; he learns to look into the mysteries of the human will. The human will is a mystery even for waking life; it is revealed partly by inspiration, but only intuition finally unveils it. Paradoxical as it may sound, once man has succeeded in perceiving the true nature of his own will he also has insight into the divine spiritual world. In the head organization the spiritual world is contained only in physical metamorphosis; not much of the spiritual world as such can be discovered there. The human head is actually the least spiritual part of man. But the remaining physical organization contains the unchanged soul life the way it was when man dwelt in pre-earthly life without physical and etheric bodies. In this soul life that lives concealed in the will, man is wholly spirit even between birth and death. Through intuition one can now discern the nature of this spirit.

The spirit that is unveiled to intuition as the element that underlies the will appears to this perception as the reservoir for everything a person has undergone during earth life in the form of intellectual activities of the mind and soul-initiatives, as moral inclinations and impulses in the soul. As I have already indicated from another standpoint, this is revealed as the younger part of the soul, the part that remains in an embryonic state in our present earth life and is at the beginning of its development. If we look at this part of the soul, we behold something in man's inner being that heads toward death in order to be actually born only at death, just as the soul in pre-earthly existence approaches earth life in order to be born into it through conception and birth. Beneath our will lives the soul embryo which reveals its embryonic life when intuitive perception beholds its true nature. We can tell by its nature how it is born to a new spiritual life at death, just as we can tell by the appearance of the human soul in pre-earthly life that it enters earthly existence through birth.

In order to gain insight into physical existence, it is therefore our concern to become acquainted — to begin with in supersensible existence — with the soul being that underlies the will. I shall conclude these observations in the last, the fourth part, and they will lead us tomorrow to a summation of the problem of death in relation with the questions concerning the Christ.

Through higher perception man gains a view of the evolution of his eternal being through pre-earthly existence, earth life, and the life after death. Now, however, to unprejudiced observation a mighty riddle arises. It arises when we see how ego consciousness is acquired. From yesterday's lecture you may have surmised that ego consciousness is dependent upon the physical organization, for it originates only at that point in the course of human earth development when man in ordinary consciousness can utilize nothing else besides his physical organism. Particularly here, imaginative, inspired, and intuitive knowledge make it abundantly clear that we as human beings attain our ego consciousness initially in the physical world between birth and death and that the attainment of this ego consciousness is linked to the use of the physical body. The body, however, is taken from us at death.

To a higher perception such as I described again today, the eternal nature of the soul life that was experienced by earth humanity prior to the development of ego consciousness can only appear as a soul life that passes from pre-earthly through earthly to post-earthly existence — in other words, through repeated earth lives. Concerning what man acquires as ego consciousness, however, we can say with absolute certainty: You attained it through the use of your physical body; indeed, only in the course of humanity's evolution — at the time when the Mystery of Golgotha entered human evolution — did you learn to make use of your physical body in such a way that ego consciousness lit up within you.

It is therefore equally certain that inasmuch as we gain ego consciousness by means of the physical body we must fear that we shall lose it at death. This is one of the problems of death. Even if the eternal part of our being in thought, feeling, and will has revealed itself to us and we behold it in its metamorphosis as the element appearing only as a mirror image in thinking — actually it is the vanished soul life that has been transformed into the head organization — even if we see in the will the shadow of what leads an embryonic soul life in the rest of the physical organization and will only come to birth at death, even if we are able to look clearly into the soul life in this regard, we are still bound to become fearful. Indeed, we do not become afraid because of an insignificant emotional attitude, but because of our insight when we face the question: What do we manage to retain of the physical organism beyond death, for the physical body decays after death? If we have gained our ego consciousness by means of the body, then the scientifically justified fear arises: How do we carry our ego consciousness through death?

Only the Mystery of Golgotha can answer this question. Man could never carry his ego consciousness beyond death unless this ego consciousness, having developed in the physical body, unites with the Christ Who holds and supports it when it would otherwise melt away from the human soul along with the physical body. Ego consciousness has been attained by means of the physical body. In death, along with the physical body, it would leave the soul, if it were not bound up with the Christ Being in the sense of Paul's words, “Not I but the Christ in me,” — for the Christ takes our ego and carries it through death.

In the following lecture I will describe in detail how this takes place and I will show how the Christ is that Being Who makes it possible for us to preserve our ego consciousness and carry it through the portal of death.

Only anthroposophical research as meant here reveals the whole significance that the Christ event has for human life. After all, the significance of such insight already begins in the case of ordinary philosophy! Ordinary philosophy is only awakened to an inner life and gains a perception concerning itself when it can be nourished by imaginative knowledge. Think of what I said at the beginning of my lecture. When we advance through meditation to imaginative perception we cross over an abyss, as it were. Our thinking ceases, a state of non-thinking exists between ordinary thinking and the active, life-filled thinking of imagination. Several philosophers have experienced this non-thinking — for instance, Augustine and Descartes — but they were unable to interpret it correctly. They spoke of the doubt that arises at the start of philosophical thinking. This doubt that Augustine and Descartes spoke about is only the reflection, brought into ordinary consciousness, of this condition of non-thinking that man finds himself in between ordinary thinking and imaginative thinking. Since neither Augustine nor Descartes had submerged their souls into this actual non-thinking, they did not come to the true experience, only the reflection, of what a person experiences when his thinking, particularly the thoughts of memory, ceases between ordinary and imaginative thinking. The doubt of Augustine and Descartes is only the reflected image in ordinary consciousness of this experience that does not appear until the transition into imaginative consciousness. Thus, when we observe it in the light of imaginative philosophy, we can correctly interpret what appears vaguely in the mere philosophy of ideas.

Likewise, we have seen how a person confronts the course of his life as a unity and how, to a perception that enables him to be consciously alive in his ether body, events that run their course in time are seen to stand side by side. Through this insight, events that ordinarily occur one after the other are seen side by side like you normally see the objects in space. Bergson, for example, felt this when he formulated his idea of “duration.” This idea of duration plays a prominent role in his philosophy, but because of the manner in which he conceived it, it is only an inkling of the truth. The truth is the imaginative view of time as simultaneity. Bergson only arrived at the abstract feeling that if he entered more deeply into the matter, he could now, in the present, reach beyond this world and experience duration as such. But since Bergson would not approach a form of anthroposophical perception, he again arrived only at a reflected image of what a person experiences with imaginative perception in regard to time as simultaneity. He called this elusive element, experienced as a reflected image, duration, durée. It plays a prominent role in Bergson's philosophy.

Regardless of which aspect of philosophy you focus upon, it becomes evident that philosophy will only attain substance and life when this substance is grasped in the way it was done today. I have already indicated that cosmology and religious knowledge also gain substance in this way, and I will elaborate on the matter further in regard to the questions about the Christ in the next few days. I will show that for man today all higher perception leads basically to an appeal by his own being to the Mystery of Golgotha. And when man's will aspires to reach the Mystery of Golgotha and, once again, the Christ Being enters man's consciousness in His complete, supersensible reality, then modern supersensible perception will lead by means of a spiritual philosophy and cosmology to a firm foundation not only of supersensible life in general but of a spiritual Christianity.

Related: https://martyrion.blogspot.com/2022/11/rudolf-steiners-outline-for-lecture-8.html

Source: The Rudolf Steiner Archive

September 13, 1922. GA 215