I
The
Event of Christ's Appearance
in the Etheric World
Preparation
for this Event
through the Development of
Etheric Vision
WHEN
someone has concerned himself for a time with the
conception of the world presented by Spiritual Science, and
then allows the various ideas and thoughts and items of knowledge
that he gains from it to work upon him, manifold questions arise, and
he becomes more and more of a spiritual scientist by linking
such questions — which are really questions of feeling, of the
heart, of the character, in short, of life in general — with
spiritual-scientific ideas. The nature of these ideas is such that
they do not only satisfy our theoretical, scientific curiosity but
shed light upon the riddles of life, upon the mysteries of existence,
and they bear fruit in the real sense only when we no longer merely
reflect about and feel their import, value and meaning, but
learn under their influence to look differently at the world around
us. These ideas should warm us inwardly, should become
impulses, forces of heart and soul within us. And this is
increasingly so when the answers received to certain questions give
rise to new questions, when those answers in turn become questions
followed by new answers, and so on. In this way progress is
made both in spiritual knowledge and in the spiritual life.
A fairly long
time will still have to pass before it will be possible to speak of the
more intimate aspects of spiritual life in public lectures, but
within our own Groups the time when this can be done should be coming
nearer and nearer. It is therefore inevitable that new members may be
taken aback or even shocked when they hear certain things; but, after
all, we should make no progress in our work if we could not pass on
to discuss more intimate questions of life on the basis of
spiritual-scientific investigation and knowledge. Therefore —
although misunderstandings may arise in those of you who have been
concerned with the spiritual life for only a comparatively short time
— we will consider certain of these more intimate facts of
spiritual knowledge again to-day.
Without doubt
an earnest question will arise in us when we think about the idea of
reincarnation, of many earth-lives, not merely as an abstract
theory, but when we ponder deeply on the meaning and
implications of this fact of the spiritual life. The significant
answer given by reincarnation will be followed by new questions
and we may ask, for example: If the human being lives many times on
earth, if he returns again and again in new incarnations, what is the
deeper meaning of this? — The usual answer is that by passing
many times through life we ascend higher and higher, experiencing the
results and fruits of earlier earth-lives in later ones, and thus
making progress. But that is still a rather general, abstract answer.
It is only through more exact knowledge of the whole purpose of
earthly life that we are able to fathom the significance of repeated
incarnations.
If a man were
to keep returning to an earth that did not change but remained essentially
the same, there would not really be much to be learnt through
successive incarnations. These incarnations are important because, as
we pass through each of them, we can learn new things, have new
experiences on the earth. Over short periods of time this is not so
clearly perceptible, but if, as Spiritual Science enables us to do,
we survey long periods, it becomes obvious that the epochs of our
earth differ essentially from each other in character, and that we
are continually passing through new experiences. But something else,
too, must be realised — that these changes in the life of the
earth itself must be taken into account. If in a particular
epoch of earthly existence we neglect the opportunity of
experiencing and learning what that epoch has to offer, then,
although we return in a subsequent incarnation, we have missed
something, we have not assimilated what we ought to have
assimilated in the previous epoch. The result is that in the next
epoch we are unable to make proper use of our forces and
faculties.
Speaking still
in a quite general sense, it can be said that in our epoch something is
possible on earth, indeed over almost the whole globe, that was not
possible in the earlier incarnations, for example, of men now living.
Strange as it may seem, there is a certain, indeed a great
significance in this. It is possible in the present
incarnation for certain numbers of people to come to Spiritual
Science; that is, to assimilate the findings of spiritual
investigation which are available in the domain of Spiritual Science
today. The fact that a few human beings come together and
receive the knowledge discovered by spiritual investigation may of
course be regarded as of no importance, but people who hold this view
do not understand the significance of reincarnation, nor that
certain things can be learnt only during one particular
incarnation. If they are not learnt, something has been missed
and will be lacking in the following incarnations.
This above all
must be realised: What we learn to-day in Spiritual Science becomes part of
our soul, and we bring it with us when we descend again into the next
incarnation.
Let us now try
to grasp what this means for the soul. Reference will have to be made
not only to a great deal that will already be known to you from other
lectures and from your own reading, but to many facts of the
spiritual life that are more or less new or still quite
unfamiliar to you. It is necessary first to go back, as often
before, to earlier epochs in the evolution of humanity and of the
earth. We are living now in the fifth epoch following the great
Atlantean catastrophe. This epoch was preceded by the fourth, the
Greco-Latin epoch, when ideas and experiences of paramount importance
of life on earth originated among the Greek and Latin peoples. This
fourth epoch was preceded by the
Chaldean-Babylonian-Assyrian-Egyptian period, this by the original
Persian and this in turn by the ancient Indian. In a still more
distant past we come to the great Atlantean catastrophe by which an
ancient continent extending over the area of the present Atlantic
Ocean was destroyed. This continent of ancient Atlantis was gradually
swept away and the solid earth on which we are now living received
its present configuration. In still earlier epochs preceding the
Atlantean catastrophe, we come to the civilisations and forms
of culture developed on Atlantis by the Atlantean races. And these
conditions were preceded by still earlier ones.
A survey of
what is told by history — it does not, after all, go very far back
— may easily give rise to the belief (although this is quite
unfounded even for shorter periods) that conditions of
existence on our earth were always the same as they are to-day. That
is by no means so, for there have been fundamental changes —
most marked of all in man's life of soul. The souls of those sitting
here to-day were incarnated in bodies belonging to all these epochs
of earth-evolution and they absorbed what it was possible to absorb
in each of them. In each successive incarnation the soul has
developed different faculties. Although during the Greco-Latin epoch
the difference was perhaps not quite as extreme, in the epoch
of ancient Persia and even more so in that of ancient India,
our souls were entirely different from what they are to-day. They
were equipped with faculties of another kind altogether in those
olden times and lived under entirely different conditions. And now,
in order that what follows may be thoroughly understood, we will
visualise as clearly as possible the nature of our souls after the
Atlantean catastrophe, when they were incarnated, let us say, in the
bodies that could have existed on earth only at the time of the
ancient Indian civilisation-epoch. It must not be imagined that
this civilisation was to be found only in India itself — it was
merely that in those days the Indian peoples were of prime
importance. The forms of civilisation differed all over the
earth, but they bore the stamp of the instructions given for
the ancient Indians by the Leaders of humanity.
When thinking
of the nature of our souls in that epoch it must be realised at once that
knowledge of the kind possessed by men of the modern age was then
quite impossible. There was as yet no consciousness of the self, no
ego-consciousness as clear and distinct as that of today. The
fact that he was an ego hardly entered a man's consciousness. True,
the ego, the “I”, was already within man as a power, a
force, but knowledge of the ego is not the same thing as the power or
activity. Human beings lacked the inwardness belonging to their
nature to-day, but instead of it they possessed faculties of quite
another kind — faculties we have often referred to as those of
ancient, shadowy clairvoyance.
When we study
the human soul during waking life in those times we find that it
did not really feel itself as an ego; an individual man felt himself
to be a member of his race or tribe, of his folk. In the sense that
the hand is a limb or member of the body, the single “I”
or ego stood for the whole community of the racial stock and the
folk. Man did not feel himself to be an individual “I” as
he does to-day; he experienced the ego as the folk-ego, the
tribal ego. During the day he did not really know that he was a man
in the real sense. But when evening came and he went to sleep, his
consciousness was not completely darkened, as it is to-day; the soul
was able, during sleep, to be aware of spiritual facts —
for example, of spiritual facts and happenings in its environment of
which the dream to-day is a mere shadow, in most cases no longer
representing their full reality. Men had such perceptions at that
time and they knew: There is indeed a spiritual world. The spiritual
world was a reality to them, not as the result of logical reasoning,
not through anything needing proof, but because every night, even if
in dim, dreamlike consciousness, they were actually within the
spiritual world. But that was not the essential. As well as sleeping
and waking life, there were also intermediate states during which man
was neither completely asleep nor completely awake. In those states,
ego-consciousness was diminished even more than by day, but on the
other hand the perception of spiritual happenings, the dreamlike
clairvoyance, was essentially stronger than at other times
during the night. Thus there were intermediate states in which
men had, it is true, no ego-consciousness, but were clairvoyant. In
such states a man was as if transported, entirely unaware of his
separate identity. He did not know: “I am a man”. But he
knew with certainty: “I am a member of a spiritual world,
and I know that it is a reality for I behold it.” Such were the
experiences of human souls in the days of ancient India. And in the
Atlantean epoch this consciousness, this life in the spiritual
world, was even clearer; indeed very, very much clearer ... We
therefore look back to an age when our souls were endowed with a dim,
dreamlike clairvoyance which has faded away by degrees in the course
of the evolution of mankind.
If our souls had
remained at the stage of this ancient clairvoyance, we could not have
acquired the individual ego-consciousness that is ours today;
it would not have been possible for us to realise: We are men. We
were obliged so to speak, to exchange our consciousness of the
spiritual world for ego-consciousness,
“I”-consciousness. In the future we shall have both at
the same time; we shall all attain that state in which clairvoyance
functions in the fullest sense while ego-consciousness is maintained
intact — as can only occur to-day in one who has trodden the
path of Initiation. In the future it will again be possible for
everyone to gaze into the spiritual world and yet to feel himself a
man, an ego.
Picture to
yourselves once more what has taken place. The soul has passed from
incarnation to incarnation; once it was clairvoyant, then later
on the consciousness of becoming an ego grew clearer and clearer and
it was increasingly possible for the soul to form its own
judgments. As long as a man still has clairvoyant vision of the
spiritual world and does not feel himself to be an ego, he cannot
form judgments or reason with the intellect. The latter faculty
developed steadily but with every succeeding incarnation the
old clairvoyance faded. The states in which man was able to gaze into
the spiritual world became rarer; he penetrated more and more deeply
into the physical plane, developed logical thinking and felt himself
to be an ego.
We can therefore
say that in very ancient times man was a spiritual being, for he lived in
direct intercourse with other spiritual beings as their companion; he
felt his kinship with beings to whom he can no longer look up to-day
with normal senses. As well as the world immediately surrounding us
there are, as we know, still other worlds, peopled by other spiritual
beings. With his normal consciousness to-day man cannot see into
these worlds, but in earlier times he lived in them, both during the
night-consciousness of sleep and in the intermediate state of which
we spoke. He lived within these worlds, in communion with these other
beings. Normally, this is no longer possible for him to-day. He was,
as it were, cast out of his home — the spiritual world —
and with every new incarnation became more firmly established in this
earthly world.
In the
sanctuaries for the cultivation of the spiritual life, in domains of
learning and in the sciences where such things were still known, account
was taken of the fact that man had incarnated in these different epochs
of earth-evolution. Men looked back to a very ancient epoch before the
Atlantean catastrophe, when human beings lived in direct communion
with the Gods or spiritual Beings, and when their inner life of
feeling and sentient experience was naturally quite different. You
can well imagine that this was so in an epoch when the soul was fully
aware of being able to look up to the higher Beings, knowing itself
to be a member of that higher world. In considering these facts we
will remind ourselves that we can learn to speak and think today if
we grow up among human beings, for such faculties can be acquired
only through contact with men. If a child were to be put on some
lonely island to-day and grew up without having any contact with
human beings, he would not develop the faculties of thinking and
speaking.
This shows that
the evolution of any being is to some extent dependent upon the species
of beings among whom it grows up and lives. That this has an effect
upon evolution can be observed in the case of animals. It is well
known that if dogs are removed from conditions where they are in
contact with human beings to places where they have no such contact,
they forget how to bark: as a rule the descendants of such dogs
cannot bark at all. Something does, then, depend upon the kind
of beings among which a being grows up. You can therefore imagine
that for the same souls to live among modern men on the physical
plane is a different matter from having lived at an earlier time
among spiritual Beings in a spiritual world into which normal vision
to-day does not penetrate. The impulses man developed when living
among men and those he developed when living among Gods were quite
different.
Higher knowledge
has always recognised these things, has always looked back to that
ancient time when men were in direct contact with divine-spiritual
Beings. And the effect of this contact was that the soul felt itself
a member of the divine-spiritual world. But this also
engendered impulses and forces in the soul that were still of a
divine-spiritual nature — divine-spiritual in quite another
sense from that which applies to the forces of the soul to-day. When
the soul felt itself a member of the higher world, there spoke out of
this soul a will that also sprang from the divine-spiritual world
— a will of which it might rightly be said that it was
inspired, because the soul was living among Gods.
Higher
knowledge speaks of this age when man was still united with the
divine-spiritual Beings as the Golden Age, or Krita Yuga. It
is an age of great antiquity, the most important period of which
actually preceded the Atlantean catastrophe. Then came an age when
men no longer felt their connection with the divine-spiritual world
as strongly as during Krita Yuga, when :they no longer felt that
their impulses were determined by their life with the Gods, when
their vision of the spirit and the soul was already clouded.
Nevertheless, there still remained in them a memory of their life
with the spiritual Beings and the Gods.
This memory
was particularly distinct in ancient India. It was very easy in
those days to speak about spiritual things; one could have
directed men's attention to the outer, physically perceptible
world and yet regard it as maya or illusion, because men had not been
having these physical perceptions for so very long. So it was in
ancient India. Souls then living no longer beheld the Gods
themselves, but they still beheld spiritual facts and
happenings and spiritual Beings of lower ranks. Only a comparatively
small number of men were still able to behold the sublime spiritual
Beings, and even for these men the former living communion with the
Gods was already much less intense. The will-impulses from the
divine-spiritual world had already disappeared. Nevertheless, a
glimpse into spiritual facts and happenings was still possible, at
all events in certain states of consciousness: in sleep and in those
intermediate states to which reference has been made.
The most
important facts of this spiritual world, however, which in earlier times
had been experienced as immediate reality, were now there in the form of
a kind of knowledge of truth, as something that the soul still knew
with certainty but which was now operative only in the form of
knowledge, as a truth. Men still lived in the spiritual world, but in
this later age the realisation of its existence was not as strong as
it had formerly been. This period is called the Silver Age, or
Treta Yuga.
Then came the
epoch of those incarnations when man's vision was more and more shut off
from the spiritual world, when his whole nature was directed to the outer
sense-world and firmly consolidated in that world; inner
ego-consciousness, consciousness of manhood, became more and more
definite and distinct. This is the Bronze Age, or Dvapara
Yuga. Man's knowledge of the spiritual world was no longer as
sublime or direct as in earlier times, but something at least had
remained in humanity. It was as if in men of the present day
who have reached a certain age there were to remain something of the
jubilance of youth ... this is past and over but it has been
experienced and known and a man can speak of it as something with
which he is familiar. Thus the souls of that age were still in some
degree familiar with experiences leading to the spiritual
worlds. That is the essential characteristic of Dvapara
Yuga.
But then came
another age, an age when even this degree of familiarity with the spiritual
world ceased, when the doors of the spiritual world closed. Men's
vision was more and more confined to the outer material world and to
the intellect which elaborates the sense-impressions, so that the
only remaining possibility was to reflect about the spiritual world
— which is the most unsatisfactory way of acquiring knowledge
of it. What men now actually knew from their own experience was the
material-physical world. If they desired to know something about the
spiritual world, this was possible only through reflection. It is the
age when man was most lacking in spirituality and therefore
established himself firmly in the material world. This was necessary
in order that he might be able by degrees to develop consciousness of
self to its highest point, for only through the sturdy
resistance of the outer world could man learn to
distinguish himself from the world and experience himself as an
individual. This age is called Kali Yuga, or the Dark
Age.
I emphasise
that these designations — Krita Yuga, for example — can also
be applied to longer epochs, for before the Golden Age man
experienced and participated in still higher worlds; hence all
those earlier ages could be embraced by this name. But if, so to
speak, demands are kept moderate and one is satisfied with the range
of spiritual experience described, the periods can be divided in the
way indicated. Definite time periods can be given for all such
epochs. True, evolution progresses slowly and by degrees, but there
are certain boundary-lines of which it can be said that prior to them
such-and-such conditions of life and of consciousness
predominated, and subsequently, others.
Accordingly,
in the sense first spoken of, Kali Yuga began approximately in the year
3101 B.C. Thus we realise that our souls have
appeared repeatedly on the earth in new incarnations, in the course
of which man's vision has been more and more shut off from the
spiritual world and therefore increasingly restricted to the outer
world of the senses. We realise, too, that with every incarnation our
souls enter into new conditions in which there are always new
things to be learnt. What we can achieve in Kali Yuga is to establish
and consolidate our ego-consciousness. This was not previously
possible, for we had first to be endowed with the ego.
If in some
incarnation souls have failed to take in what that particular epoch has
to give, it is very difficult for the loss to be made good in later epochs.
Such souls must wait a long time until the loss can in some respect
be counterbalanced. But no reliance should be placed upon such
a possibility.
We will
therefore picture to ourselves that the result of the doors being
closed against the spiritual world was of fundamental and essential
importance. This was also the epoch of John the Baptist, of
Christ Himself on earth. In that epoch, when 3,100 years of the Dark
Age had already elapsed, a fact of salient importance was that all
human beings ,then living had already been incarnated several times
— once or twice at the very least — in the Dark Age.
Ego-consciousness had been firmly established; memory of the
spiritual world had faded away, and if men did not desire to lose
their connection with the spiritual world entirely, it was essential
for them to learn to experience within the ego the reality of the
spiritual world. The ego must have developed to the stage where it
could be certain — in its inmost core at least — that
there is a spiritual world, and that there are higher spiritual
Beings. The ego must have made itself capable of feeling, of
believing in, the spiritual world.
If in the days
of Christ Jesus someone had voiced the truth in regard to the conditions
then prevailing, he might have said: In earlier times men could
experience the kingdom of heaven while they were outside their ego in
those spiritual distances reached when out of the body. Man had
then to experience the kingdoms of heaven, the kingdoms of the
spiritual world, far away from the ego. This is no longer possible,
for man's nature has changed so greatly that these kingdoms must be
experienced within the ego itself; the kingdoms of heaven have come
so near to man that they work into his very ego. And it was this that
was proclaimed by John the Baptist: The kingdoms of heaven are at
hand! — that is to say, they have drawn near to the ego.
Previously they were outside man, but now they are near and man must
grasp them in the very core of his being, in the ego. And because in
this Dark Age, in Kali Yuga, man could no longer go forth from the
physical into the spiritual world, it was necessary for the Divine
Being, Christ, to come down into the physical world ... Christ's
descent into a man of flesh, into Jesus of Nazareth, was necessary in
order that through beholding the life and deeds of Christ on the
physical plane it might become possible for men to be linked, in the
physical body, with the kingdoms of heaven, with the spiritual
world. And so Christ's sojourn on earth took place during a period in
the middle of Kali Yuga, the Dark Age, when men who were not living
in a state of dull insensibility but understood the nature of the
times could realise: The descent of the God to men is necessary in
order that a lost connection with the spiritual world may be
established once again.
If at that time
no human beings had been able to find a living link with Christ in their
hearts and souls, the connection with the spiritual worlds would have
been gradually lost; the kingdoms of heaven would not have been
received into the egos of men. It might well have happened that if
all human beings living at that crucial point of time had persisted
in remaining in darkness, an event of such momentous
significance would have passed them by unnoticed.
The souls of
men would have withered, gone to waste, decayed. True, even without Christ
they would have continued to incarnate for some time still, but they would
not have been able to implant in the ego the power that would
have enabled them to find the link with the kingdoms of heaven. The
event of the Appearance of Christ on the earth might everywhere have
passed unnoticed — as it did, for example, in Rome. It was
alleged in Rome that a sect of sinful people were living in
some out-of-the-way, sordid alley, that among them was a wicked
spirit calling himself Jesus of Nazareth and inciting them by his
preaching to all kinds of villainous deeds. At a certain period that
was all that was known in Rome of Christ! And you may possibly also
be aware that Tacitus, the great Roman historian, wrote in a
similar vein about a hundred years after the events in
Palestine.
Thus it was
by no means universally realised that something of supreme importance had
taken place: that the Divine Light had shone into the darkness of
earth and that it was now possible for men to be brought safely
through the Kali Yuga. The possibility of further evolution for
humanity was ensured because there were certain souls who understood
what was at stake at that point of time and knew what it signified
that Christ had been upon earth.
If you were
to transfer yourselves in thought to that time, you would realise that
it was quite possible to live without knowing anything at all of the
advent of Christ Jesus on the physical plane — it was quite
possible to live on earth without having any consciousness of this
most momentous event.
Would it not
also be possible to-day for something of infinite importance to take
place without men being aware of it? Might not our
contemporaries fail to have the slightest inkling of the most
important happening in the world at the present time? It might well
be so. For something of supreme importance is taking place, although
it is perceptible only to the eyes of spirit. There is a great deal
of talk about periods of transition; we ourselves are actually living
in a very important one. And its importance lies in the fact
that the Dark Age has run its course and a new age is beginning, when
slowly and by degrees the souls of men will change and new faculties
will be developed.
The fact that
the vast majority of men are entirely unaware of this need not be a cause
of surprise, for it was the same when the Christ Event took place at the
beginning of our era. Kali Yuga came to an end in the year 1899 and
we have now to live on into a new age. What is beginning is slowly
preparing men for new faculties of soul.
The first
indications of these new faculties will be noticeable in isolated souls
comparatively soon now, and they will become more clearly apparent in
the middle of the thirties of this century, approximately in the
period between 1930 and 1940. The years 1933, 1935 and 1937 will be
particularly important. Very special faculties will then reveal
themselves in human beings as natural gifts. Great changes will take
place during this period and biblical prophecies will be
fulfilled. Everything will change for souls who are living on earth
and also for those who are no longer in physical bodies. Whatever
their realm of existence, souls are on the way to possessing entirely
new faculties. Everything is changing — but the happening of
supreme importance in our time is a deeply incisive transformation of
the faculties of the human soul.
Kali Yuga is
over and the souls of men are now beginning to develop new faculties.
These faculties — because this is the purpose of the epoch —
will of themselves draw forth from souls certain powers of
clairvoyance which during Kali Yuga had necessarily to be submerged
in the realm of the unconscious. A number of souls will experience
the strange condition of having ego-consciousness but at the same
time the feeling of living in a world essentially different from the
world known to their ordinary consciousness. The experience will be
shadowy, like a divination, as though an operation had been
performed on one born blind. ... Through what we call esoteric
training these clairvoyant faculties will be attained in a far better
form. But because human beings progress, they will appear in mankind
in their very earliest beginnings, in their most elementary stages,
through the natural process of evolution.
But it might
very easily happen — indeed, far more easily now than at any earlier
time — that men would prove incapable of grasping this event of
such supreme importance for humanity, incapable of realising
that this denotes an actual glimpse into a spiritual world, although
still shadowy and dim. There might, for example, be so much
wickedness, so much materialism on the earth that the majority of men
would show not the slightest understanding, and regard those who have
this clairvoyance as lunatics, shutting them up in asylums together
with those whose minds are obviously deranged. This point of time
might pass men by without leaving a trace, although to-day we too are
letting the call of John the Baptist, the forerunner of Christ, and
of Christ Himself, again resound: A new epoch is at hand when the
souls of men must take a step upward into the kingdoms of
heaven.
The great event
might very easily pass without being understood by men. ... If between the
years 1930 and 1940 the materialists were to say triumphantly: True,
there have been a number of fools but no sign whatever of the
expected great event ... this would not in the least disprove what
has been said. But if the materialists were to win the day and
mankind were to overlook these happenings altogether, it would be a
dire misfortune. Even if men should prove incapable of
perceiving them, great things will come to pass.
One is that it
will be possible for men to acquire the new faculty of perception in the
etheric world — a certain number to begin with, and they will
be followed by more and more others, for mankind will have 2,500
years during which to develop these faculties in greater and greater
perfection. This opportunity must not be missed. If it were, this
would be a tragic misfortune and mankind would then be obliged
to wait until a later epoch in order to retrieve the lost opportunity
and subsequently to develop the new faculty. This faculty will
consist in men being able to see in their environment something of
the etheric world which hitherto they have not normally been
able to see. Man now sees only the human physical body, but then he
will be able to see the etheric body at least as a shadowy picture
and also to perceive the connection between deeper happenings in the
etheric world. He will have pictures and premonitions of happenings
in the spiritual world and find that in three or four days’
time such happenings take place on the physical plane. We will see
certain things in etheric pictures and know that to-morrow or in a
few days’ time this or that will happen.
These faculties
of the human soul will be transformed. And what is associated with this?
The Being we call the Christ was once on earth in the flesh at the
beginning of our era. He will never come again in a physical body,
for that was a unique event and will not be repeated. But He will
come again in an etheric form in the period indicated. Men will learn
to perceive Christ inasmuch as through this etheric sight they
will grow towards Him. He does not now descend as far as the physical
body but only as far as the etheric body; men must therefore grow to
the stage where He can be perceived. For Christ spoke truly when He
said: “I am with you always, even unto the end of the days of
earth.” He is present in our spiritual world ... and those
especially blessed can always see Him in this spiritual, etheric
world.
A man who was
convinced with particular intensity through such perception, was Paul
— in the vision at Damascus. But this etheric sight will
develop in individual human beings as a natural faculty. In days to
come it will be more and more possible for men to experience what
Paul experienced at Damascus.
We are now able
to grasp quite a different aspect of Spiritual Science. We realise that
it is a preparation for the actual event of the new Appearance of
Christ. Christ will appear again inasmuch as with their etheric sight
men will raise themselves to Him. When this is understood,
Spiritual Science is disclosed as the means of preparing men to
recognise the return of Christ, in order that it shall not be their
misfortune to overlook this event but that they shall be mature
enough to grasp the great happening of the Second Coming of Christ.
Men will become capable of seeing etheric bodies and among them, too,
the etheric body of Christ; that is to say, they will grow into a
world where Christ will be revealed to their newly awakened
faculties.
It will then
no longer be necessary to amass all kinds of documentary evidence to prove
the existence of Christ; there will be eye-witnesses of the
presence of the Living Christ, men who will know Him in His etheric
body. And from this experience they will realise that this is
the same Being who at the beginning of our era fulfilled the Mystery
of Golgotha, that He is indeed the Christ. Just as Paul at Damascus
was convinced at the time: This is Christ! ... so there will be men
whose experiences in the etheric world will convince them that in
very truth Christ lives.
The supreme
mystery of the age in which we are living is the Second Coming of Christ
— that is its true nature. But the materialistic mind will in a certain
sense appropriate this event. What has now been said — that all
the data of genuine spiritual knowledge point to this age —
will often be proclaimed in the years immediately ahead. But the
materialistic mind corrupts everything to-day, and what will happen
is that this kind of thinking will be quite incapable of conceiving
that the souls of men must advance to the stage of etheric sight and
therewith to vision of Christ in the etheric body.
Materialistic
thinking will conceive of this event as a descent of Christ in the flesh,
as an incarnation in the flesh. A number of persons in their boundless
arrogance will turn this to their own advantage and announce
themselves to men as the reincarnated Christ. The near future may
therefore bring false Christs, but anthroposophists should be
so fully prepared for the spiritual life that they will not confuse
the return of Christ in a spiritual body, perceptible only to higher
vision, with a return in a physical body of flesh. This will be one
of the most terrible temptations besetting mankind and to lead men
past this temptation will be the :task of those who learn through
Spiritual Science to rise in the true sense to an understanding of
the Spirit, who try not to drag spirit down into matter but to ascend
into the spiritual world themselves. Thus we may speak of the return
of Christ and of the fact that we rise to Christ in the spiritual
world through acquiring the faculty of etheric vision.
Christ is
ever present, but He is in the spiritual world. We can reach Him
when we rise into that world. All anthroposophical teaching should be
transformed within us into an indomitable will not to allow this
event to pass unnoticed but in the time that remains to us gradually
to educate human beings who will be capable of developing these new
faculties and therewith to unite anew with Christ. Otherwise,
before such an opportunity could again arise, humanity would
have to wait for long, long ages ... indeed, until a new incarnation
of the earth. If this event of the return of Christ were to be
overlooked, the vision of Christ in the etheric body would be
restricted to those who are willing to fit themselves for such an
experience through esoteric training. But the really momentous fact
of these faculties being acquired by humanity in general, by all men,
of this great event being understood by means of faculties developing
naturally in all men ... that would be impossible for long, long
ages.
Obviously,
therefore, there is something in our age that justifies the existence
and the work of Spiritual Science in the world. Its aim is not merely to
satisfy theoretical needs or scientific curiosity. To prepare men for
this great event, to prepare them to take their rightful place in the
epoch in which they live and with clarity of understanding and
knowledge to perceive what is actually present but may pass men by
without being brought to fruition — such is the aim of
Spiritual Science.
It will be
of the utmost importance to recognise and understand this event of
Christ's Appearance, for it will be followed by other events. Just as
other happenings preceded the Christ Event in Palestine, so will
those who prophetically foretold His coming follow Him after the time
referred to, after He Himself has become visible to mankind again in
the etheric body. The preparers of His coming will be
recognisable in a new form to men who have experienced
the new Christ Event. Those who lived on earth as Moses, Abraham and
the Prophets will be recognisable once again. And it will be known
that just as Abraham preceded Christ as a preparer, he also takes
over the mission, after Christ's coming, of being a helper in His
work. Thus a man who does not sleep through the event of supreme
importance in the immediate future gladly finds his way into
fellowship with all those who, as the Patriarchs, preceded the Christ
Event; he allies himself with them. The whole choir of those to whose
level we shall thus be able to rise is again revealed. The one who
led mankind downwards to the physical plane appears again after
Christ and leads men upwards again, unites them again with the
spiritual worlds.
[See the following lecture.]
Looking far
back into the past we come .to that point of time in the evolution of
humanity of which we say: from then onwards humanity descends farther
and farther away from the spiritual world into the physical world.
Although the following picture also has its material aspect, it can
nevertheless be used here. In earlier times man was a companion of
spiritual Beings and because his spirit lived in the spiritual world
he was a son of the Gods. But the soul, descending ever more
deeply into bodily incarnation, participated to a constantly
increasing extent in the outer world. The son of the Gods within man
took delight in the daughters of the earth, that is to say in those
souls who were drawn to the physical world. This in turn means:
the human spirit, in earlier times charged through and through with
divine spirituality, sank down into physical materiality, became the
spouse of the brain-bound intellect and by it was entangled in the
web of the physical world of sense. And now the human spirit must
re-ascend along the path by which the descent was once made and
become again a son of the Gods. The human spirit which had become the
son of man would perish in the physical world ifthis son of man were
not to climb upwards again to the Divine Beings, to the light of the
spiritual world, finding delight in times to come in the daughters of
the Gods. It was necessary for the evolution of mankind that the sons
of the Gods should unite with the daughters of men, with the souls
who are fettered to the earth, in order that as the son of man the
human spirit should learn to master the physical plane. But it is
necessary that the human being of the future, the son of man, shall
take delight in the daughters of the Gods, in the divine-spiritual
light of wisdom with which he must unite in order then to grow
upwards again into the world of the Gods.
The will
of man must be fired by the divine wisdom, and the most powerful impulse
for this will be if to those who have truly prepared themselves the
sublime ether-form of Christ Jesus becomes perceptible. To a man in
whom natural clairvoyance has developed this will be like a Second
Coming of Christ Jesus, just as the etheric Christ appeared as a
spiritual Being to Paul. Christ will appear again to men when they
realise that they must use to this end the faculties with which
evolution itself will equip the human soul.
Let us therefore
use Spiritual Science not merely to satisfy our curiosity, but in such a
way that it will make us worthier to fulfil the great tasks and
missions devolving upon the human race.
Answer
given by Dr. Steiner to questions asked in connection with the foregoing
lecture
When light has
been thrown, as it has been today, upon mysteries of a more intimate
kind, let us not treat them as thoughtlessly as certain
subjects are wont to be treated to-day, but realise that
Anthroposophy must be for us something altogether different from a
theory. The teaching has, of course, to be given; for how would it be
possible to rise to thoughts such as have been voiced to-day if they
could not be received in the form of teaching? The essence of this
teaching, however, is that it does not remain as such but is
re-moulded in the soul into qualities of heart and character, into an
entirely different attitude of mind, making different men of us. The
teaching should guide us how to make the right use of our
incarnations so that in the course of them we can develop into
something quite different.
I have tried
not to say a word too much or too little and have therefore given only
fleeting indications of matters of great moment. But What has
been said is of significance not only for the souls who will be
incarnated on the physical plane in the period from 1930 to 1940 but
also for those who will then be in the spiritual world between death
and a new birth; souls work down from the spiritual world into the
world of the living, even though the latter may know nothing of it.
Through the new Christ Event, this communion between souls who are
incarnated here on the physical plane and souls already in the
spiritual world will become an increasingly conscious communion.
Active co-operation between human beings in incarnation and spiritual
beings will then be possible; this should already have been indicated
when it was said that the Prophets appear again among men on the
earth.
You have
therefore to conceive that when these great times arrive in the future
there will be a more conscious mutual co-operation between men in the
physical world and in the spiritual world. This is not possible to-day
because of the absence of a common language. Here in the physical world
the only words men use in their languages designate physical things and
physical conditions. The world in which human beings live between
death and a new birth is quite different from the world immediately
surrounding us, and they speak a different language. The Dead
can take in only what is spoken in the sense of Spiritual Science
— nothing else. Therefore in Anthroposophy we are cultivating
something that will be more and more intelligible to the Dead and we
are speaking also for those who are living between death and a new
birth.
Humanity is
passing into a new era when the strength of the influences from the spiritual
world will steadily increase. The great events of the immediate
future will be perceptible in all worlds. Those, too, who are living
between death and a new birth will have new experiences as the result
of the new Christ Event in the etheric world. But if they made no
preparation in themselves while on earth, they would no more
understand the event than would men incarnated on the earth,
unless these had prepared themselves to respond in the right way. It
is essential for all souls now incarnated — no matter whether
they will then still be in physical incarnation or not — that
.through the assimilation of anthroposophical truths they should
prepare themselves for these important future events. If they fail to
receive into their earthly consciousness what Anthroposophy or
Spiritual Science has to give, they will have to wait for a new
incarnation in order to have the possibility here on earth of
assimilating the corresponding teachings. For there are things
that can be experienced and learnt only on earth.
Hence it is
said that in the spiritual world there is, for example, no possibility of
knowing death — and it was necessary for a God to descend into
the physical world in order that He might die. Knowledge of what the
Mystery of Golgotha is can be acquired in no other world in the way
that is possible in the physical world. We have been led down into
the physical world in order to acquire something that can be acquired
only there. And Christ came down to humanity because it was only in
the physical world that He could reveal to men — could enable
them to experience in the Mystery of Golgotha — something
that, having let its fruits ripen in the spiritual world, carries
those fruits onward. But the seeds must be laid down and spread
abroad in the physical world.
Golden
Age — Krita Yuga — about 20,000 years
Silver Age — Treta Yuga — about 15,000 years
Bronze Age — Dvapara Yuga — about 10,000 years
Dark Age — Kali Yuga — about 5,000 years
Our Age embraces a future 2,500 years
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